Idle reflection - Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick

I was thinking how Travis Kalanick founded what is now (circa 2017) the most valuable startup in the world, but couldn't see fast enough that his personal sexist behavior would end up getting him chucked out of his life's work. Mark Zuckerberg on the other hand strikes me as a guy who has a superhuman capacity to see and ward off an oncoming crisis. (My understanding of him is based primarily on what I read in the news, and that wonderful movie "The Social Network". So my logic is dependent on the accuracy of the movie in capturing Mark's personality, even if not getting all the facts correct). In the movie Zuckerberg is so conscious of crises. When Eduardo Saverin cuts off the payment to the servers hosting Facebook, Zuckerberg goes ballistic (and perhaps that's when he decided to dump Saverin). And at the end when Sean Parker causes another crisis. The movie doesn't show how Zuckerberg resolves the crisis, but clearly he does, since FB is around and thriving. My sense is that its not just external crises. Internally too Zuckerberg is adept at reinventing himself. He started off with the bad-boy antics at Harvard and his early days in the Valley where he humiliates a VC egged on by Sean Parker. Today's he's a model corporate executive atleast to public knowledge. And its not just a facade.

Angkor photos

Just a few 

Tips on visiting Angkor: http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/07/my-travel-guide-to-angkor.html

My article on Solapur

I wrote an article for the Six Degrees  News website. Six Degrees is an international development news website that focusses on grassroots reports. My article was about a government programme called Jal Yukt Shivar in Maharashtra. Here it is:  

http://www.sixdegreesnews.org/drought-management-successes-in-solapur-india/

I’m excited about having done this. I’ve not been officially ‘published’ for a while now, if at all, though I guess there were opportunities at Arghyam that I’ve passed up due to other work. Six Degrees is founded by a friend, Binayak Das, so it didn’t require pitching from my side, and I didn’t get paid for it. 

Whatever I do (if I do anything at all!) in the next phase of my life, I hope writing will be a part of it. This blog has been a source of great fulfilment but time to grow beyond it. And it would be good to be able to generate some income from writing. 

I learnt some practicalities about journalism on the trip. One was the difficulty of really evaluating the success of a programme or initiative from a visit. Though I have a background in the water sector, I’m a generalist and not technically trained, so it was hard to really gauge. And for a large scale programme like this, unless you visit lots of locations, you can’t conclude anything with any degree of confidence. Your ideas about this will be appreciated. 

Anyway, on the visit to Solapur in Maharashtra, based on which I wrote the article, I had the opportunity to meet the current District Collector. It happened quite easily, after a couple of phone calls, which was quite surprising. At Arghyam, it was really painful getting meetings with IAS officers. He was a very cordial and a nice person. However the really interesting bit was about the previous Collector, Tukaram Munde. He really seems to be a larger-than-life person who managed to achieve spectacular results. I have some sense of administration from work at Arghyam, and this chap in my opinion is off the charts. The District Collector (or Commissioner as he is called in some districts) has a really difficult job. There’s just too much stuff, too many subjects to work on. There are around 30 government departments/programmes that he is the head for. The DC of Sholapur told me there are literally hundreds of committees that he  chairs. Then there is the lack of good quality and quantity of HR to work with, including corrupt people. And unlike the private sector, you can't fire people easily. There are many restrictions and rules to getting work done, much less flexibility than in the private sector. There is the political system to be managed, which could be quite formidable. And in the first place, many of the programmes are ill-designed and ‘dead-on-arrival’. So I’d say, as far as serious impact is concerned, the DC is also for the most part, ‘dead-on-arrival’. However, Mr. Mundhe somehow managed to crack the system and actually get it to deliver. For the life of me, I cannot visualise how he did it. He is now head of Navi Mumbai district and making waves there too. A man to watch (and you can watch some of his exploits by searching on the web). 

Back to the trip again. There is a ‘power’ element in the field trip portion of visits like these , the government staff down the line from the DC are very deferential. At the same time I also got the sense that they thought I did not understand the stuff, and were patronising. I also find it tiring to meet a large number of people in a short span - my comfort level certainly is in meeting fewer people and developing stronger connections with them. 

I wonder where Jalyukt Shivar is going. There seem to be many issues with the scheme, much more so in other districts. But it also seems to have huge potential from the Solapur experience. This programme seems to have the tantalising potential to be the ‘Holy Grail’ for water security in drought-affected districts. But many a slip between the cup and the lip. At the same time some other large scale success stories are emerging from other districts like Dewas in Madhya Pradesh. Is there a trend here ? In the past, it was always about NGO models and touting them, but there were very few examples of successes at scale. Are we entering a tipping point where we get more and and more successes at scale. I fervently hope so. 

An interesting side point is that Solapur district has 2 products with the GI (Geographical Indication) tag, Maldandi jowar and Sangoli pomogranate. Here is a full list of GI tagged products in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Geographical_Indications_in_India 

It seems this idea is taking off in India.

Some more photos from the trip below:

Check dams storing water

Compartment bunds under construction

Dry open wells that are now recharged with water

A farm pond

Local farmer

Temple fatigue

Angkor Wat, Cambodia

I have a problem. (Well, I have many, but here's one)

I’m a bit of ‘culture vulture’. Visited lots of museums around the world. And lots of temples and cultural monuments. But more and more I’ve been feeling a sort of fatigue. For example, a single great painting has so many nuances and is worth spending a lot of time on, to get to understand. So what to do when there are thousands or hundreds of thousands of these ? Same with temples. The amount of work and mastery that went into the sculpture or architectural immensity of any of the the great cultural sites (World Heritage sites for example) is staggering. After the initial ‘wow’ feeling there is a feeling of being overwhelmed in front of such immensity. How do you engage with such a structure ? 

At the opposite end, there is also the feeling of ‘what’s the point of all this’ . Who were they trying to impress ? Build ever larger and more elaborate structures to what end ?

For some reason I get this feeling only for the ancients. I’ve not felt it in New York for example, which is also about architectural immensity, of a living sort. 

Critique, analysis, feedback, comments requested. 

Travel notes from Ajanta and Ellora

Given the difficulty of getting there and the amount of walking between caves and the repetitiveness, some might find visiting Ajanta and Ellora to be more trouble than its worth. 

I spent only a day and covered both Ajanta and Ellora in that day, so I can’t write from a perspective of someone who’s visited the place in detail. Nevertheless, some observations.

Ajanta is located in an extremely scenic location. That’s one of the high points about it, that the tourist writing doesn’t capture.  The ‘zoomed-out’ view of the entire ensemble of caves is also spectacular, see photo. In some ways this ‘macro’ view of Ajanta is more satisfying than the micro. 

Ajanta was a retreat for Buddhist monks in the winter months. The purpose of most of the caves were housing for the monks, called viiharas.  Each dwelling had steps down the hillside to the river at the bottom. I find all this very evocative. I think the government should be make a nice film recreating what life would have been like when the caves were occupied, monks chanting, studying, arguing philosophy, maybe playing politics. Would make the caves really come to life 

Ajanta is famous for the paintings, but these are disappointing in reality. They are small, most of the photos in textbooks and tourist guides are closeups. They are also damaged. Most of the painting is also in large elaborate complex canvases, and it all blurs together after the first few. Like Indian dance, much of it is scenes from important stories and epics. You would miss all that if you don’t take a guide. Even if you do take a guide, it might get boring anyway, unless you know the stories well and have some attachment to them. Nevertheless, the paintings are very nice, and if you can be relaxed and cool about it, you could spend a memorable day, wandering slowly through all the caves. 

The sculpture and carvings are also gorgeous, but there’s such a profusion of it you don’t know what to do with it beyond a point. This is a problem I have with all the great monuments. I know I can’t create even a tiny fraction of what they did and after a while the sheer scale of the artistic accomplishment becomes too much and gets you down. Would be interested if other people have similar reactions.

There are 29 caves so it gets repetitive after a while. Read the guidebook carefully and pick and choose the ones you want to spend time on. 

I didn’t spend that much time at Ellora, and mostly visited the Kailasa or Kailasanatha temple. While the rest of the structures at Ellora are caves, this is an exception, its a proper temple.The scale of this and the grandeur (this same stuff again!) is amazing. The entire temple, as you may know carved out of the hillside by digging and hammering and excavation and whatnot, it was not constructed as most buildings are. The photo shows the rock face surrounding the temple. 

Going through the Archeological Society of India’s Ellora guide, I see that I missed quite a lot. Some spectacular sculptures and Jain and Brahmanical caves (Ajanta is only a Buddhist site). 

Logistics: 

Ajanta and Ellora are in different directions from Aurangabad. Ajanta is significantly farther away. You can try to go and come back from Ajanta in a single day but it would be tiring. There is a very agreeable MSTDC resort very close to Ajanta, at Fardapur. Some photos at: http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/08/a-new-kind-of-hotel-ii.html There are other hotels in Fardapur too. Staying there overnight might be better. Bus connectivity from Ajanta to Fardapur is quite good, though the bus station at Aurangabad is pretty dirty and bus signages are in Marathi. Its about a 3.5 hour trip by bus. Ellora is a very doable full day trip from Aurangabad, though food options are not great. There’s good bus connectivity from Aurangabad to Ellora, the bus drops you right at the caves. 

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can go directly from Ajanta to Ellora by taking a bus towards Aurangabad and then switching to a shared auto at Phulambri

Important tips! 1.) Carry a torch with you. Its dark in the caves and the torch will help you see the sights better. 2.) You have to remove your footwear outside every cave. So lace shoes are not a good idea. Wear something you can put on and take off easily  

Ajanta - caves carved out of the hillside

Ajanta - gorgeous surroundings. Dem Buddhist monks knew how to do retreats !

The caves are in a gorge-like area, where there is a U-shape in the cliffs and the river beneath

Travelling companions, shared auto, Ajanta to Ellora

Ellora - The awesome Kailasa temple, excavated out of rock face

Ellora - Rock face adjacent to the Kailasa temple

Development Economics

One of the highlights of the MPA course at the Lee Kuan Yew School was the module on Development Economics. I found myself quite often feeling a sense of wonder and exhilaration in the class that I didn’t feel in any other class and that I didn’t expect to feel in a classroom. 

It is hard to pin down where the feeling came from. I think it was the approach and worldview of economics, applied to areas that I was particularly interested in, like education and health. As I got from the course, the approach was to try to get at human behaviour in these situations and figure out what a rational individual would do to maximise their well-being. Then try to capture that in equations and you got a working model of the world. Get data from the real world and see how well things seem to fit. 

For example, in education: the basic way of looking at it is that education is a way to improve your earning capacity. So you invest now in education in order to improve your later earnings. Then it becomes an optimisation problem: how many years of education should you invest in now (and forgoing current earning opportunities too) so that your overall life-earnings are maximised. Then you can start adding complexity to the model: the situation varies from person to person - some people get more out of their education so the returns from education have to be parameterised by a person-specific co-efficient. And then you get into why education increases your earning capacity - could be through direct increase in your capability to create wealth or could be through a ‘signalling’ effect, where the fact that you’ve passed some exams etc. shows that you have some intellectual capacity. And more such stuff.

On the empirical side, many people have looked at how average incomes of large groups of people vary with education. One study in the US arrived at a figure of a 7% increase in earnings for every additional year of schooling. 

In health it works like this: health is something you invest in, in time (with its opportunity cost) and money. It also depreciates on its own every year. Good health lets you earn more, and enjoy leisure more, thereby contributing to your utility/well-being. And there are competing demands on your money other than health - like daily consumption, leisure activities etc. So again its an optimisation problem of how much you invest in it in order to maximise your utility. 

This modelling also, in theory, shows the role of public policy. People do what they do to maximise their personal utility. However there are externalities to health and education and government wants people to have more of them. So government needs to intervene in these equations :-) , in the appropriate way so that people consume more of these goods than they otherwise would. 

We also looked at other things like agriculture and credit markets. For example, the landlord/tenant relationship in agriculture can be of different types: landlord can pay for part of the cost of raising the crop, he could get a fixed amount each crop irrespective of the actual profits, or there could be profit (and loss) sharing arrangements. Its possible to model these and theoretically arrive at conditions where different types of contracts are preferred. There are some nice papers that show that the theory seems to hold in practice. 

Another highlight of the course for me was the paper reproduction exercise. Good academic papers nowadays are accompanied by an upload of the actual data and the software code used to analyse the data. So its possible to reproduce the data analysis done in the paper and see if you get the same results. There are levels of complexity to this:

• you can run exactly the same code using the same data. Of course that’s not too much fun 
• you can fiddle with the code a bit and try to do slightly different things 
• in special cases you could collect the data yourself and reproduce the results from scratch. There’s a celebrated case in academia of a famous papers’ results being proved wrong in this way.  This article nicely describes that : http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22223190 

I chose to do a paper on water that was co-authored by the very well-known economist at J-PAL , Esther Duflo. It was a very fulfilling exercise and I found some minor discrepancies too, which was a big kick. 

The original paper is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4u37kptdcdjrund/%2BDuflo_2012_Happiness%20on%20tap.pdf?dl=0 

My report on the replication is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jcv96iatph8ze9r/Paper%20Reproduction%20Report.docx?dl=0 

Yvonne Jie Chen was the teacher, and her enthusiasm for the material was infectious. 

The course textbook was “Development Economics” by Debraj Ray. Well-written, erudite as hell and an enjoyable read but pretty uphill going for me atleast because of the intellectual level of the subject matter. I finally read less than 10% of the book, but it was still pretty good! 

Notes, Further Reading:
For a compilation of resources on studying public policy in general and at the LKY School, see: http://despoki.blogspot.in/p/studying-public-policy-and.html 

Public art

While the classical vs. modern debate rages on, public art is one of the sites where it plays out in practice. Public art can be quite difficult to do well - you want to appeal to as wide a constituency of people, but serious art is often specialised and becomes inaccessible. 

Singapore seems to do quite well in doing good public art. Changi Airport always has something interesting going on. Below are three other pieces that I really liked:

This brilliant piece recently installed at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. It uses just layers of wire mesh to create a likeness of the man.  The artist must have taken years to build up his competence in doing this

This clever installation at Gardens by the Bay gives the impression of figures that are hanging in the air

This quirky piece at a mall was done as part of some robotics demonstration. Screams 'Japanese aesthetic' to me

See http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/01/many-thoughts-about-art-triggered-by.html for the previous post in the 'art' thread

A new kind of hotel - II

Just as I was posting  http://despoki.blogspot.in/2016/08/a-new-kind-of-hotel.html  , I ran into two nice illustrative examples. 

I stayed at the MSTDC resort/hotel outside the Ajanta caves, at a small town called Faradpur. The hotel almost perfectly captured what I was saying:

1.) Very clean

2.) Local flavour - the room decoration was excellent photos of Maharashtra tourist destinations. So nice decoration while also advertising their stuff 

3.) Beautiful high ceilings 

4.) Pretty decent furniture , mostly wood 

5.) Large clean bathroom, not fancy 

I really enjoyed staying at this place and paid about 1200/- (off peak, without bargaining).

I also stayed at a very nice modern hotel in Sholapur in Maharashtra. It was very new and everything looked fine, but my theory is that it will stop looking quite so fine very quickly. For example they had this nice luxurious bedspread 

but it already had got stained with oil

So now they are stuck with an expensive asset that can't be repaired easily and that they are going to be loath to throw aways, so that is going to piss off every customer who stays in the room in perpetuity.  

Vocational Education in Singapore

I did a term paper (in two installments) on vocational education in India for my course on Social Policy Design last semester. Didn't get a great grade :-( but found it fascinating, and was considering working in that area after graduation.  The link below should show you the papers on Dropbox (let me know if it doesn't). There is a lot of dividends for the country and its people if we get vocational education right.  PM Modi is doing the right thing by placing a lot of emphasis on Skilling India.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/07mha1qkofjmy15/AADQKHcjBXg5S8BJayx7sU8ha?dl=0

In India we have a huge problem with this perception of vocational education as infra-dig so we end up churning out huge quantities of unemployable B.As and B.Scs and B.Coms, while we suffer from a dearth of good technicians, plumbers etc. As as aside,

Singapore has an excellent vocational education system, one of the best in the world. They have an institution called the ITE (Institute of Technical Education), that serves people after 10th grade. They have several polytechnics (Temasek Poly, Ngee Ann Poly, Singapore Poly) that serve people after high school. One of the things that Singapore consciously did was to combat, quite successfully, the feeling that vocational education is a 2nd class or infra-dig option. Rather, it is portrayed as an option for people with different inclinations and different talents that the traditional intellect-based classroom education. They've 'signalled' this, by, among other things, funding their vocational education institutions very well and giving them a lot of facilities.

When Chandrababu Naidu visited Singapore recently, he checked out the ITE. These from the ITE website, ite.edu.sg :



His Excellency Mr Nara Chandrababu Naidu (centre in cream shirt), Honourable Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, India, at the Precision Engineering Hub at ITE College Central, where Laser and Tooling Technology training and development for staff and students are carried out. Students gain hands-on experience by working on CNC Laser Cutting Machine, Bending Machine and Turret Punching Machine with the aid of specialised CAD/CAM software, to create a wide array of metallic products ranging from name cards, pens and serviette holders to pendants, lamp shades and wall décor




I visited the ITE too, photos below:

Kilikili

I had a very nice 'Eureka' moment recently. On Rainbow FM (the AIR FM channel?) there was a programme "Folks with Different Strokes" (?). It featured a lady whose child had a mental disability and how she and her husband coped with it and went on to found an NGO "KiliKili", to create playspaces for children with disabilities. The lady was simply fantastic. One could see that she had beautifully come to terms with the difficulty of having and raising a differently-abled child, and there was great spirit and strength and no bitterness whatsoever visible. The host was fantastic too, asking good questions, interjecting when needed, generally sensitive and soft-spoken. From the way the interview went, she seemed to have done a horrific amount of preparation. How wasteful and old-fashioned! To actually do research before going on air. Kudos to this hostess, whose name wasn't mentioned on air. The interviewee was Kavitha Krishnamoorthy and the organisation she co-founded can be found at www.kilikili.org .

The icing on the cake for me was a small personal connection through Chitra Vishwanath of Biome Solutions (www.biome-solutions.com), the redoubtable environmental architect who was mentioned on air as having worked with this group to design playgrounds that are usable by all kinds of children.

So - this was one of the best programmes I've heard on air (both TV and radio) in India. Truly an example of what TV and radio could be at its best. Not that these media should only show inspirational true stories, but the current fare on offer is mostly uninspired without depth or substance. The programme compared well with the best I've heard on radio in the US.

"Folks with different strokes" airs every alternate Saturday between 6 and 8 pm.

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I was delighted to see the following comment on this post from Rashmi Shetty :

Hi VK,
I was directed to your blog by a friend. You sure write well.I am Rashmi Shetty, the hostess of Folks with different strokes. Thank you for the feedback:-)
From the second saturday of May this year, Folks with different strokes has changed to INSPIRE .It is on air from 7p.m- 8p.m every alternate saturday. 
On reading your feedback thought I'd give you the update.
Thanks again.

Rework The World

I went to the Rework the World conference, www.reworktheworld.org in early June, representing Arghyam. The conference was in Leksand, a lakeside resort a few hours north of Stockholm. The conference was a very good experience. The next and last edition of the conference , which is one of a series is going to be held in Alexandria , Egypt in 2012 and I heartily recommend that to any young person, though needless to say, it would be quite expensive.

As luck would have it, my passport was quite close to expiring and I needed to get it renewed. I had a difficult time getting the renewal done ; worth its own blog post!

I flew out of Delhi and back to Delhi which make the overall trip more strenuous.

The event was on youth and social entrepreneurship. It was co-organised by two interesting groups the Yes Foundation (one of whose key people is an Indian American, Poonam Ahluwalia), and the Tallberg Foundation, a wellknown think-tank in Sweden. The trip expenses were sponsored by the organisers which was really nice of them, though I think they were hoping I would play a more active role than I did.

From Stockholm Airport, I drove down to the conference location by car with Thomas Bjelkeman-Petersson of Akvo.org, who's visited us in India a few times. It was a great drive through open sparsely populated countryside. A very welcome break from the crush and the dirt of Bangalore and India which gets to me.

There was a huge amount of infectious energy in the gathering ; so many people, especially youth (1500+), all trying to make the world a better place, all over the world.

Lots of particulars that bear a passing comment but maybe in a later post.

Some videos below:
1.) The Max hamburger chain in Sweden now tracks the carbon footprint of each kind of burger and lets you know !



2.) There was a lot of great music at the event:

Siddhu's latest video

Quote from "Catcher in the Rye"

J.D. Salinger also passed away yesterday. Here are two quotes from Catcher in the Rye:

"She was a pain in the ass but she was very good-looking" (from my memory)

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

More nice quotes: http://www.quotegarden.com/bk-cr.html

Howard Zinn passed away on 27th Jan

Image from Wikipedia


I read a couple of his books including "A Peoples History of the United States". The books were a great way of relooking at history, from the point of view of what was going on with common people rather than with the power holders, hence "Peoples History". They were pretty cool reads and recounted lots of unknown stories of resistance and courage of the common people. He was a pretty cool personally, he followed through on the theoritical understanding of racism as a bad thing, by actually walking the walk at a very early stage when it was difficult to do so and when there were no examples or role models for what could be done. He was a teacher at a school and hung out with the black kids and encouraged them to resist and fight discrimination, stuff like that, and lost job in the process.

I had the opportunity of listening to him talk in Berkeley once. Extremely warm and gentle person, he came across as.

Noam Chomsky spoke warmly about him to the press after his death: "He's made an amazing contribution to American intellectual and moral culture. He's changed the conscience of America in a highly constructive way. I really can't think of anyone I can compare him to in this respect".

Read the Hindu's piece here: http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article96513.ece
On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

His books are well worth a read (and for me a re-read). Unfortuntely I don't have my copy with me.

There's lots of his stuff on YouTube, here's a random one :




Bye "Howie" and thanks.

This year's Padma awards

Today's announcement of the Padma awards gives some scope for criticism:

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, A.R. Rehman, Resul Pookutty: We must be the only country that gives national awards to our people after they get international awards. I guess we give awards to people for having gotten international recognition, not for their work. A thoroughgoing shame. It would be interesting to dig deeper and see how often we are able notice and recognise peoples achievements before they reach international renown. I don't think we do a good job.

Prathap C. Reddy (Apollo Hospitals), C.P.Krishnan Nair (Leela Hotel Group chairman), DLF Chairman Kushal Pal Singh : I find it disturbing to see awards going to successful businesspersons whose where the work done or the business concerned doesn't have any otherwise important or socially relevant features. In the case of Apollo Hospitals and other corporate hospitals there is a definite ambiguity about them - there is a common perception of money-driven practice of medicine. Why award Leela Hotels for running a business of luxury hotels which 99% of the country will never stay at? And how many think DLF got to where it is without underhand dealings ? On the contrary, I find the award to Venu Srinivasan of TVS and current head of CII appropriate. M.S.Banga of Unilever is a bit on the borderline.

Looking through the entire list of awardess, overall, for a poor country like our, perhaps the awards should be more focussed on people who are contributing a bit more directly to national development.




Comments ?

Book review - "Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie"

Penguin Classics has a really innovative marketing program to encourage interest in its books. It sends free books from its range to interested readers who are then asked to review the book and they blog it at www.blogapenguinclassic.co.uk  . Read an explanation of their concept here: http://www.nmaawards.co.uk/2008winners.aspx (click on  "Entertainment: Blog a Penguin Classic")  I stumbled across this on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/penguindia , and they did send me a book to read and review. I just did the review (was not as difficult as I expected), and sent it to them (haven't heard back yet) and here it is:
Update: The "Blog a Classic" program seems to have been discontinued and the link above is no longer working


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Penguin Classic's "Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie (Vetaalapanchavinsati)" by Sivadasa, translated from the Sanskrit and with an introduction by Chandra Rajan is an interesting and educative read. Penguin is to be commended for imaginatively adding value in the design of this book, starting from an excellent translator, to an exhaustive and learned introduction by the same translator and an appendix containing 'bonus' stories.

Many of us (Indians) will have been exposed to these stories in one form or the other earlier. They are alternatively known to us as the tales of King Vikram and the vetaal (betaal). I read these stories (actually not these stories but other stories in the same format!) as part of the "New Tales  of King Vikram and the Vampire" series of the Chandamama magazine, and many others of my generation will fondly remember this. Chandamama did a good job with those stories with questions and answers that honestly probed moral and ethical issues as well as encouraged reasoned thinking, a salutary experience probably for a young mind.

The construct, for those not in the know is as follows: as a consequence of of string of events, King Vikramaditya is set the task of bringing down a corpse hanging from a tree in a cemetery. The corpse is possessed by a genie which then tells King Vikram a story. At the end of the story a question pertinent to the story is asked by the genie. If the king answers the question correctly the corpse/genie flies back to the tree and the cycle starts again (if the king knows the answer but remains silent he will die -- but the reader never gets to know if this is an empty threat as this option is never exercised by the king). "Now tell me O King.." is the genie's inevitable refrain at the end of each story. In this fashion the genie tells 24 stories, asks 24 questions and gets the right answer. The 25th time,  something different happens and leads to the resolution of the story.
The structure then, provides an opportunity for good storytelling, the potential of which is fully realized. The crown jewel in each story of course is the Q&A at the end. We are keen to challenge ourselves to answer the question too and see how we fare in comparison to the king.

To a modern reader the stories are amusingly long-winded and digressive. A conversation in the story will normally include a half-a-dozen poems and asides expounding on all manner of topics breathtakingly irrelevant. If we turn things around, perhaps it would seem to those ancients who wrote like this, that modern's mans mind is boringly obsessed with sticking to the point and getting on with the story. In today's world, therefore, it takes a certain kind of mood to sit back, relax and appreciate the storyteller's efforts. But if one does, the rewards are there. There are thoughtprovoking discussions of human nature that resonate even today. This is also an authentic peep back into time to see how Indians of a bygone age lived. I found the actual stories inconsistent in quality but uniformly interesting. The Q&A at the end is also varied, sometimes the question is thought-provoking and the answer is insightful and satisfying, sometimes not so much.

The substantial introductory notes by Chandra Rajan are quite an impressive piece of scholarship. Chandra Rajan obviously cares a great deal (sometimes it seems, too much) about her subject and more generally, ancient Indian literature. This is shown in her dedication of the book to Vyaasa, Vaamiki and Vishnu Sharma, "the three greatest storytellers of all times". She throws much light and useful context on the stories and the King Vikramaditya of history.

"Five and Twenty Tales of the Genie" is a set of stories within a 'framing' story. In fact some of the stories contain a further level of story within. This technique of stories within stories is seen very often in Indian literature (including the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panchatantra), resulting in massive story 'complexes'. The translator also introduces us to the idea of recensions which are different versions of a story or story complex that arise in the course of oral transmission. The bonus stories alluded to  in my first paragraph are stories from a different recension of this book, by Jambalabhatta.

The poetry forms a central part of the enjoyment of this book, so I will excerpt a few here.
Central to the framing story is the attempt by the villain to gain 8 great Siddhas or powers:

To be minute as an atom, or enormous as a mountain,
light as air or heavy as rock; to be invisible at will,
to have all  one's desires fulfilled, to subject others to one's will;
and have lordship of the world.

King Vikramaditya's actions are defended through the following statement of ethics:

Pay a man back in his own coin;
do harm unto him who has done harm to you;
I see no harm in that;
adopt foul means towards an evil man.

Sivadasa makes the following claim for the book:

A simple and straightforward narrative
pleases some learned readers;
some, wiser, delight in the figurative -
irony, ambiguity, metaphors,
while others love a tale filled with flavors
of fine sentiments plentiful and pleasing.
So there's something here to please every palate.

As Rajan says, it is not an unjustified claim by the author of the vetaala tales.

The book is quite frank about sexuality:

Ha! For the enjoyment of a woman!
What can give greater pleasure in this world!
No, not even the Elixir of Life!
All senses, altogether, all at once,
find in it their perfect fulfilment!

At least one tale is disconcerting in its emphatic position that
women are inferior to men:

Woman, and she alone deserves censure
here in this world of ours; not men, never,
for men are directed to, and instructed
in matters of good and evil.

Here is Sivadasa on secrecy:

Even if it be a trifling matter,
if to rulers of the earth it relates,
it should not be uttered, said Brhaspati,
in the open assembly.

Magic spells, medicines, matters of sex,
good works, cracks and flaws in one's house and home;
forbidden foods, slander, vital secrets:
a shrewd man does not broadcast these to the world.

Heard by six ears, a secret breaks;
heard by four ears, it stays secure;
and not even the Creator himself
can get to the bottom of a secret
that is heard by two ears alone.

Climbing right up to the top of a hill,
going in secret to an open terrace;
in deep woods or in some spot desolate:
in such places is a secret disclosed.

An interesting aside from the translator is regarding her choice of the word 'genie' to translate 'vetaala'. She gives a nice description of the word 'vetaala' and explains why she rejected various English words for its translation (including 'vampire' which was often used in the past) in favour of 'genie.

A lot more could be written about the book, but let me stop here in the hope that I have accurately described the book and given some people reason to make a note to read it. This is a book that will not appeal to all. I had mixed feelings about it. But it justifies its selection as a Penguin Classic.