Review: Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military

Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military by Husain Haqqani
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: A detailed Op-Ed by a former Pakistani ambassador on the history of Pakistan through the lens of military and religion.

Whether you call it confirmational bias or not, Husain Haqqani does provide an interesting insight that resonates with the direction Pakistani leadership has taken since 1947 and as he goes through the political history in the swings between military and civil power centres - the focus on the Pakistani ideology based on the tripod of a common external enemy being India, the one single thread of religion that binds the diverse country and removes the emphasis on regional ethnicities and the ability to leverage foreign funding adds color to the decisions primarily military leadership have undertaken over decades to keep them as kingmakers and power centres internally and in the region. Whilst contrasting personalities have donned the mantle, the way they fall back to this one central theme in changing geo-political scenarios start making sense to some of the current decisions that one also sees.

Husain does a good job of introducing the various main leads in this story, their compulsions and their relationships with the other players and the environment that leads to the various decisions they take. Fundamentally he highlights that military as succour of all of Pakistan's issues and the final word on everything has been a motivating factor in leveraging religion - the only common cause identified when the country was being created anew from the British India and how to balance out other power centres, religion was used to hedge the risk and became a slippery slope that now the country's leadership finds tough to get out of as new power centres have been created that refuse to be held down.

There are lot of facts and timelines in play that gives one a reasonably good history lesson on the journey Pakistan has undergone primarily under military leadership with spurts of military backed civilian leadership upto the time of Musharaf all the way from Ayub Khan and the relationship with India and USA throughout.

Overall, a fine read for someone trying to get a sense of Pakistan's political history and its bearing on their foreign policy.

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Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hooter: A sole astronaut light years away from Earth figuring out how to save humanity

In a wonderful mix of humor, science, wit and physics and inter stellar friendships, this makes for a great read as Grace Ryland wakes up from an induced coma in the middle of space all alone on a spaceship hurtling towards nowhere as he pieces back from selective amnesia his purpose and way forward. After figuring the past and present, his interactions with an alien as they learn to find a common tongue and work towards a common goal around astrophage and how it is killing their respective suns - the whole natural flow of discovery and the scientific mindset being applied to problem solving makes this for an interesting read with the right amount of science, biology and history in the mix along with ample science fiction. Along the lines of his other book the Martian, Project Heil Mary is a colorful read as it races between the dimensions of the past, present and forseeable future.

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Review: Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A sci fi about a dystopian future where the quest of happiness could lead to our downfall

Written in 1931, the book doesn't go too amiss with the foundations of the future in a mind numbing society where we are literally batches of humans literally farmed to perfection who live in a world of instant gratification and pleasure seeking (hmm sounds relatively familiar). The normal moral code of promiscuity, drugs would catch you offguard in today's world and if you lean by today's codes, you'd be what they call a savage in Huxley's book. As people lose individualism, pursuit of intellectual brilliance and ambition for being content and happy are about not shifting the inertia or changing the status quo. There is no drama in the storyline just like the life in the brave new world so did take some dredging through but introduces to new concepts of a dystopia which has been monopolised by George Orwell in common circles.

Neil Postman summarises this book best :

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."

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