Roadside Crosses - Book Review

Between ‘online’ and the real-line


Vaishnavi Jayakumar

First Published : 25 Oct 2009 10:22:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 25 Oct 2009 12:06:09 AM IST

It’s only when you turn page 397 and stare at a list of acknowledgements that you can allow yourself to relax, knowing you’ve truly reached the end of a Jeffery Deaver book. His trademark roller-coaster ride plot, with converging parallels and heart-thudding twists, keeps the reader in a constantly humming state of suspense.

Maybe that’s why (with the exception of The Bone Collector) his books, though eminently suitable for film adaptation, are yet to make the transition to Hollywood blockbusters — there are only that many vivid, heart-thudding triple whammies one can take! Things are never what they seem with Deaver’s 5 Ds of deviation, distraction, diversion, disturbance and disinformation.

As Deaver himself seems to be journalist, folk-musician, author and lawyer — all rolled in one, it’s no wonder his books span a range of exotic subjects (be it magic, civil history or clocks!). While earlier The Blue Nowhere delved into the cult-like world of hacking and social engineering, The Broken Window obliquely touched on the world’s currently hot doomsday (OMG!- Google’s taking over the world!) scenario — data mining. Having once tasted cyber-thriller themed crime a la Deaver, the urban tribe clamouring for another tantalising “fix” of crime with a liberal dose of cyber-tech has finally been placated with Deaver’s latest book, Roadside Crosses.

With Deaver probably struggling to find the right kind of knot for the charismatic crime-fighting duo Rhyme-Sachs’ perpetually problematic private life Roadside Crosses sees the return of Kinesics (body language in plain English) expert — Kathryn (yawn) Dance. A human lie-detector armed with nothing more than “predator specs” and the Myers Brigg personality type indicator to identify High Machiavellians and Manipulators, Dance is an unfortunately anaemic substitute for the gifted, paraplegic forensic expert Lincoln Rhyme and model-turned cop protege Amelia Sachs.

To compensate for the lack of Rhyme’s mass spectrometer, high-tech gizmos and overall charisma, Deaver sinks his teeth satisfyingly into the synthetic world of gaming, social networking and blogs. The words of New York Times’ Richard Bernstein at the start of the book, set the tone for what is to follow... “What the Internet and its cult of anonymity do is to provide a blanket sort of immunity for anybody who wants to say anything about anybody else, and it would be difficult in this sense to think of a more morally deformed exploitation of the concept of free speech.”

The post-Matrix, post-Columbine years have opened up multiple worlds and realities... quantum, alternate, parallel, virtual, and “real”. In Roadside Crosses, Deaver examines “the blurring of the line between the synthetic world — the online life — and the real world”. A self-important member of the Monteroy community sees a roadside memorial to two young women who never made it home from their graduation party and muses aloud on highway safety and maintenance on his blog The Chilton Report.”

This simple observation about a fatal accident in which all he does is question whether the road was safely maintained, jumps from highway safety — then moves on to government finances and then to the kid who was driving, even though he apparently didn’t do anything wrong. The posters get more and more agitated as they attack him and finally the blog turns into a barroom brawl among the posters themselves.”

Thus explaineth tech guru-cum-potential romantic interest Boling to Dance, when he is drawn into the attempted murder inquiry of a giddy young girl who has a miraculous reprieve from death — by her worst possible nightmare. On discovering that victims are being tracked online and their deaths planned according to their phobias — (conveniently provided information for the n00b serial killer in Facebook-style discussions!) Boling disgustedly bursts out, “We give away too much information about ourselves online — way too much.”

And so, a citizen crusader’s blog post on an accidental driving death explodes tangentially into a frenzied witch-hunt of comments, IMs, gossip, innuendo and allegations. And when outspoken young girls start disappearing it doesn’t take the trigger-happy grapevine long to speculate and zero in on the suspect.

A teenager, happiest in his gaming world, is “different” in the real world, and is dubbed “weird” in the online world — the obvious candidate to be tarred and feathered. As mob outrage grows in the gossamer spiders web-disguised-as-candy-floss world of social networking, cyber-vigilantism leaches into cyber-bullying; and flame-war fuelled hormones seep and spill over into the Real World with devastating consequences.

Boling’s “MMORPG, Leetspeak and Web 2.0 Blargon for Dummies” tutorial for Kathryn Dance makes a delightful aside to the main storyline as does the only multidimensional part of Dance’s world — her uneasy relationship with her mother. The Master of the Twist in the Tail hasn’t lost his touch... Roadside Crosses is a ripping good read to keep you sated — till the next Lincoln Rhyme!

— Vaishnavi is a disability rights activist based in Chennai. jayakumar.vaishnavi@gmail.com

On the question from Dr. Anbu...(and the somewhat unexpected answer)

A rather striking hoarding ad for Tulir went like this...

November 19 isn't Child Sexual Abuse Awareness Day.

EVERY DAY IS.

Might seem a little like stating the obvious, but there's no doubt that the message hits you with a thud.

A cynical journalist friend once muttered that the increasing numbers of International Day for Some Worthy Cause or the Other threatened newspaper real estate for...well, REAL news. I don't think he meant the World Tuba Day/International Moment of Laughter Day variety fuelled by imaginative greeting card manufacturers.

It's more on the 'lest we forget' vein...why the month of May has seen World Press Freedom Day and World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. The Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Non-Self-Governing Territories is ongoing and International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers is coming up.

All ironically, against the backdrop of the 'situation' in Sri Lanka!

So, it was with a touch of skepticism that I fielded Dr. Anbu's query shortly before he went on air on the occasion of World Schizophrenia Day. Why is May 24th, specifically, World Schizophrenia Day? What's the origin...some long gone psychiatrist's birthday?

How does it matter... I thought, after telling the good psychiatrist that I was nowhere near Google, the God of all answers. Aren't these 'Days' picked at random, in any case? Who cares, anyway...these things are getting meaningless except for those who are affected...

It's fortunate that the quizzing gene I was born with, has not been completely subdued. Because it took me a good 30 minutes coaxing an answer out of an unusually tight-lipped Google.

And here's what I found...

Schizophrenia Awareness Day occurs annually on May 24 - the day which psychiatric patients were unshackled from the walls of the Bicetre Asylum in Paris in 1793.

Dr. Phillipe Pinel, appointed chief physician at the facility that year, ordered this action in response to his assessment of "treatment" conditions. To many, it marks the beginning of humane treatment for the mentally ill. Yet, despite today's effective therapies, many afflicted with schizophrenia and related disorders remain confined by societal misperceptions, fear and ignorance. This special observance helps to raise public awareness about schizophrenia.

It was only then that I remembered one man's battle for Erwadi's forgotten, and how much is left undone after Shahul's untimely death.

May 24th is now, at least for me, no longer just Schizophrenia Day. It's Wake up!-Don't get thick skinned!-Shut up or DO something-Eliminate Selective Amnesia Day.

How many more Erwadis will it take? Do these special days ever get dispensed with because they've served their use? Perhaps, when memories can be satisfactorily put to rest - with good conscience.

Till then, centuries after Pinel's act of liberation, all things humanity has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Of Booby Traps and Honey Pots

VISIT TNHEALTH.ORG, GET VIRUS FREE!

First the country was invaded by the sea route, leaving testosterone-pumped citizens pawing at the ground and ready to charge. Terror attacks have the advantage of surprise, some others have the advantage of an insidious subtlety. One in the virtual world has penetrated a government website — not quite a hijack, but a hack. To add to the growing list of “wares”, be it adware, spyware or malware, is a term called badware — and some unsuspecting legitimate-but-compromised websites play host to malicious software to breach your computer’s defences. Insinuating itself into a website’s code, the virus lays out the welcome mat and waits, like a typhoid-Mary sleeper mole, for gullible visitors.

Google tnhealth.org and you're informed that “this site may harm your computer”.Brushing the warning off as overly cautious you forge ahead with your trusty sidekicks AVG Antivirus and Windows Defender, only to discover another Google page informing you helpfully: “this site is badware”.

A little peeved at Google playing parental control-freak, you click compulsively at the next tantalising link — and then voila, Google and Stopbadware.org finally spit out the bad news: 15 pages of tnhealth.org resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent — a total of 17 scripting exploits, 16 exploits and 2 trojans! The malicious software is hosted on 4 domains including loskut.cn, whitebiz.cn, and 79.135.187.0 with loskut.cn functioning as intermediary for distributing malware to visitors of this site.

For those who experienced Google’s glitch a couple of days back, this is no human error, it’s more like human terror — because your friendly browser delivers the final salvo — successful infection resulted in an average of six new processes on the target machine.

Translation from hackerspeak: the gobbledygook above means that in a virtual world security breach, access to the Tamil Nadu health portal has been denied as it has been flagged by StopBadware.org — the consumer-oriented global powerhouse run by Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute.

Worse still, to carry on in the spybioterror vein — a Chinese website is acting as an intermediary double agent.

While China is notorious for cyber-censorship, the paradox is that it hosts over 50 per cent of malicious software spreading sites globally — numbering a whopping 2,00,000 in mid 2008.

On one side we have a country that created the world’s first PC virus (Brain, created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi Brothers, operating out of Lahore) and on the other side a neighbour equivalent of a land shark with virus goondas running amok. While this is normally no more than the nerd equivalent of muscle flexing, resulting in cyber-graffiti website defacements, the implications of information theft loom in a decade of website hacks as diverse as Indian Army, BARC, Indian embassy (Spain), SBI, IIT Kanpur, Airtel and AvSoft — a company peddling the anti-virus software SmartCop.

While some hacks can be explained as ‘Mafiaboy’ wannabes pushing boundaries, others have more disturbing implications of data theft or access to manipulation of sensitive information (as in the MEA hack hop-trail which led to China.) Cyber-and-otherwise citizens of India — be prepared. When it comes to safety and privacy, buying peace of mind is a better investment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to disinfect my computer!

Book review - P.D. James bestselling 'The Private Patient'

Delight of the old familiar

14 Nov 2008 New Indian Express

The year is 2008. The New Arrivals’ shelf at your average lending library seems entirely occupied by a legion of bloodthirsty crime-writers and their stomach churning offerings. Well not entirely! One determined successor to Agatha Christie’s legacy still holds out against the invaders of the classic whodunit. We can come up for air with P D James’ 18th novel, The Private Patient.

Here is the familiar formula of the Golden Age of crime fiction – the shared clues, the plot a variation of the ‘locked room puzzle whodunit’ with the usual unlikely mix of suspects and their unravelling motives of a threatened social respectability or security. The secluded English country house comes alive with James’ eye for art and architectural design and is enhanced by her typical motifs of a richly evocative atmosphere (imagine Hardy’s Wessex, the Dorset Jurassic coast and a standing stone circle tainted by a witch-burning) and the looming presence of church as both sanctuary and scene of crime.

Adam Dalgliesh is back – a welcome throwback to the gentleman detective. Endowed with the universally popular tall dark good looks, mandatory intelligence, education and culture, this otherwise flat, cardboard cutout character is redeemed by P D James with facets of poetry writing, Jaguar driving and significant romantic punch with his tragic personal background! - (a parson’s son, he lost his mother when young, and his wife and newborn son in childbirth). Fans will finally see in ‘The Private Patient’, the end of previous romantic cliffhangers, with the marriage of this eminently eligible bachelor to Emma Laversham, who first appeared in ‘Death in Holy Orders’!

It’s not surprising that the author who created the first definitive female detective in Cordelia Grey is at her best describing her female victims. Be it Sally Jupp (’Cover her face’), Venetia Aldridge (’A Certain Justice’) or in this case Rhoda Gradwyn – James expertly brings to life tough,intriguing women who even if not particularly likeable, arouse a respectful understanding, however grudging.

How can one not feel for Rhoda, ‘the only child of a frightened and ineffective mother and a drunken father.’ That was how she had defined herself for more than 30 years and how she still defined herself. ‘Trapped in a tense and violent household, she and her parents colluded in their lies and endured their voluntary exile from life. The front room was for special occasions, for family celebrations never held and for visitors who never came, its silence smelling of lavendar furniture polish and stale air, an air so portentous that she never tried to breathe it.’ Her life is irrevocably changed one night, when she speaks up in an attempt to protect her mother and her father in his drunken fury smashes a whisky bottle on her face and she is marked for life.

On her 47th birthday, Rhoda a successful, rapacious investigative journalist and’ stalker of minds, gazes at her face in the mirror. Little knowing that the countdown to her death has been set into motion, she wonders how she will face herself without the scar that has been part of her and shaped her psyche since childhood. Her death is the least violent of the deaths in ‘The Private Patient’, and one can’t help feeling a twinge of regret that despite the trail of destroyed lives she has left in her obsession to uncover truth, she meets her end at her best moment – when she decides to leave her past and its damaging information behind and start a new life.

P D James may be 88 years old – but her 18th novel, ’The Private Patient’, manages to keep up with the times in everything but language (try skimming through words like palimpsest, solipsistic, plangent, limned, colophon and the like without half-wishing you had a dictionary at hand!). The same sex marriage of Emma’s closest friend is described with honesty and sensitivity and wiccans worldwide over will be delighted with the medicine-wheel symbolism of the stone circle.

While Dalgliesh may be limited because his character is set in a time lock, James’ other characters are not found similarly wanting – the self-absorbed cosmetic surgeon whose satisfaction in his long-coveted, prized manor defines him, the fey, toy boy, gold digger haunting cousins who have come into an inheritance - “I like to remind them that I exist”, the same-sex marriage of Emma’s closest friend, the gay junior doctor struggling to explain his reluctance to participate in a gay pride march with his nurse lover - “I don’t see the point of it. If I were heterosexual you wouldn’t expect me to go marching down the high street to proclaim that I was straight. Why do we need to do it? Isn’t the whole point that we have a perfect right to be what we are? We don’t need to justify it or advertise it, or proclaim it to the world. I don’t see why my sexuality should be of interest to anyone except you.”

Rhoda’s isolation in school is echoed elsewhere in the book, in the universal words of everyone labelled different. “I was a grammar school boy, you see, there on a county scholarship. Difficult for you to understand.Things may be different now, although I doubt it. “Not that different. I wasn’t mocked or despised or made to feel different. I never felt I belonged there – and of course, I didn’t. I knew from the first that I had no right to be there, that something in the air of those quads rejected me... I wasnt the only one.”

Words like ‘perambulatory’ may make one wince, but James’ understanding of some situations is timeless. This book’s cliffhanger is true to the foreboding atmosphere - Is this the last we are to hear of Adam Dalgliesh?

jayakumar.vaishnavi@gmail.com

The Real Hero of Dharma

At the end, one is left with two niggling questions. Why, in this anti-hero age, is there no book of Ravan? (Or everyone’s favourite Karna for that matter). The second is, Who is Devdutt Pattanaik? The answer to the latter is far more interesting than all the facets of Ram covered so exhaustively in the book.

Pattanaik is probably no stranger to Future Group employees as their chief belief officer (the retail guru Kishore Biyani shuns orthodox HR in favour of traditional storytelling). Nor to the “management-philosophy-from-ancient-wisdom” neophytes who have abandoned Jesus CEO or Chanakya on Management for a regular dose of management fable in Pattanaik’s ET column.

I much prefer Pattanaik on Ram to centuries-old literary predecessors — from Valmiki to Michael Madhusudan Dutt. It goes without saying therefore that I’m one of those who started off with Amar Chitra Katha’s blue-skinned Ram, graduated to Rajaji’s stodgy (and sometimes spin doctored) prose and thought myself clever for scheduling doctor’s visits while the rest of India watched Ramanand Sagar’s creation to avoid endless delays in dreary waiting rooms. (Didn’t work — ended up glumly watching, along with many other patients in the doctor’s crowded clinic!)

More recently, I’ve been intrigued by Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s The Slaying of Meghnad, Shobhana’s Maya Ravan, Ramchandra Gandhi’s Sita’s Kitchen, Subramania Bharati’s The Horns of the Horse, and am, like countless others eagerly looking forward to Mani Ratnam’s Ravan.

So who is Ram? Take your pick — obedient son, valiant warrior, great king, weak householder, opportunist with elastic morality. Or all of the above? Centuries of creative rewriting of history, in a smokescreen of rules changing along with the propaganda of the day, have resulted in a confusing legacy that cannot be seen in isolation. There is enough fodder in this exhaustively researched book to provide furious, heated debate and inevitably abusive exchanges (especially of the Internet variety-liberally sprinkled with asterisked epithets!). You never know — maybe the Lord God/dutiful king/heroic warrior/marauding Aryan/wimpy husband will regain his rightful place on Google dethroning the lowly computer RAM. (True, some people may call the iPhone the jesusphone, but this hero worship of machines has to be an unhealthy trend).

But I digress. The real hero of the Book of Ram is Devdutt Pattanaik. Deftly steering through a minefield of potential controversy, he presents the various tellings of the Ramayan in its pan-Indian literary lineage. Emerging from familiar grandparent folk-lore are delightful variations on a theme — Sita as Kali, Sita as Ravan’s child, Mandodari the frog princess, Rambha’s curse, Manthara as martyr, Ravana’s dying words and the unfortunate Jai and Vijay — Vishnu’s doorkeepers.

What really makes Pattanaik India’s modern day Aesop is actually outside of the Book of Ram. Soon after the exhilaration of Indian Oscars, Vishnu’s gatekeepers gain stature after Pattanaik’s tribute to India’s Oscars by defining what Jai ho really means by examining two similar words ‘Jai’ and ‘Vijay’ often used interchangeably. In Vijay, there are winners and losers. In Jai, there are no losers, no one is defeated, for one triumphs over oneself.

To a post 26/11 India’s knee-jerk, ominously vigilante sentiments, Pattanaik’s panacea is the tears of Gandhari...a mythological moral message far more relevant today than the Ramayan’s rigid deontological ethic principles. “Dharma is about listening, not speaking; dharma is about giving, not taking; dharma is about helping the helpless; dharma is about affection, not domination. Dharma happens when hungry men share their food. Gandhari’s children died because they refused to share their land. Draupadi’s children died because she could not forgive. So long as we refuse to share, so long as we refuse to forgive, so long as we find excuses to justify our greed, war will happen and heroes will never find peace. Follow dharma and there will be peace in the world. True peace, not peace born by dominating the other. Not forgiving is never the answer. Look what is happening in Israel — an unending spiral of violence because both sides feel they are ‘right’.”

While one might start the Book of Ram with pet peeves and theories about heroes or gods, barely concealing a weakness for the underdog, by the last chapter you can’t help the twinge of pity for Ram who rejected destiny and desire for the far more daunting duty. Sadly, his core ethos as “Maryada Purushottham” is anachronistic today.

It may well be that the “The Ramayan reflects on the problem of the human condition, of how desire and destiny make the world impermanent and tragic. It also offers the solution by showing us how to live a spiritually fulfilled life through responsible conduct.” However, Hindu sacred texts also emphasise, “as a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture that which will serve his purpose.”

With worthy sentiments like Dasaratha’s “so has been the way of my ancestors: give up your life but never your word” becoming harder by the day to live by, we may just have to wait till the next Treta Yug rolls around for this to happen.

No matter how much he extols Ram’s virtues of Dharma against Ravan’s law of the jungle, Pattanaik forgets that humans are also animals (arguably evolved ones). A cynical vote bank could well be justified in dubbing the current Ramraj propaganda a more realistic, accurate Ravanraj.

— The writer is co-founder of The Banyan, free-thinker and a Horton fan. jayakumar.vaishnavi@gmail.com

The true story of why we buy

CIGARETTE SMOKING WARNING ADS

ARE INJURIOUS TO HEALTH!

Perhaps George W Bush knew a little something about the brain — when asked what Americans could do to contribute in the fearful, unsettled days and weeks after 9/11, he replied with a simple monosyllabic “Shop!” No, this isn’t Martin Lindstrom’s idea of a joke in his definitive work Buy-ology. He agrees with the machinations of George W Bush’s discussed-to-death mind — after all this is the man who won US Presidential re-election by his campaign’s feeding the fear of terrorism post 9/11. “The more stress we’re under in our world, and the more fearful we are, the more we seek out solid foundations. The more we seek out solid foundations, the more we become dependant on dopamine. And the more dopamine surges through our brains, the more we want, well, stuff.” QED says Martin Lindstrom branding guru and neuromarketing pioneer.

In 1966, John Lennons unguarded comment that The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now” caused a huge stir when taken out of context. Beatlemania met death threats and denouncements. It’s taken over four decades for the Pope to forgive this blasphemy.

Controversy aside, the comparison of rock group fans brand of loyalty with God and religion isn’t far from wrong. In Lindstrom’s study with nuns, strong brands (and Beatlemania definitely qualifies) light up the same regions of the brain that religious activities do. Welcome to the world of neuromarketing — a world with its truth and lies which we’ve just begun to understand — where you the person or identity is inconsequential. Because, to use a Houseism, “Everyone Lies”. If you thought you were in control of your actions, you’re wrong — the real boss is your brain which doesn’t lie whereas you do —- maybe unconsciously or unintentionally...but still, you do!

When was the last time you heard something on the lines of “I bought that Louis Vuitton bag because it appealed to my sense of vanity and I want my friends to know I can afford a $500 dollar purse too.” Buy-ology is no paean to retail therapy or a peek into the giddy world of The Confessions of a Shopaholic. The last word on neuromarketing challenges sacred cows of advertising theory with something akin to glee as he sacrifices them on the altar of scientific proof.

Armed with the new tools of marketing — a fMRI (MRI as lie detector) and SSP (EEG on steroids), cutting edge neuroimaging technology uncovers the truths we didn’t even know we were lying about! Blasphemies abound. Throw away your advertising bible and marketing commandments. Lindstrom doesn’t theorise...he proves. Page after page of astounding facts fortified by research studies and the weight of scientific proof make one marvel at the massacre of everything we thought we knew about ourselves as consumers. The book slaughters the sacred cows of advertising dispassionately, ethically and above all irrefutably. So women can rejoice — sex doesn’t really sell — it’s the controversy of pubescent Brooke Shields’ “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” that sends the stocks flying off the shelves — the banned book effect in other words. Nor does beauty of celebrities really sell — the tipping point is in mirror neurons reconciling the emotional “who I wish I could be” with the rationale of identifying with “people like us.”

This book Lindstrom promises “isn’t just for business people, it’s for everyone.” So no need to read up on The Brain for Dummies — its revelations don’t require specialised knowledge or a jargon dictionary to understand. Ad agencies can relax as myths are busted but the profession is not debunked. As Paco Underhill observes in the foreword, the author “believes that advertising is actually a virtuous endeavour, not just a necessary evil.” Selling has to be reinvented and move beyond visual cliches that worked in the past. Neuroimaging provides the tools for understanding why we do what we do.

If Kishore Biyani wants to know why his intuition of consumer behaviour failed him in filmmaking, he needs to start here. Not with memes. If Dr Anbumani Ramadoss really wants to stop people smoking, he needs to stop mourning the defeat of the anti-smoking lobby’s request for a lurid cancer graphic warning on cigarette packets and save the campaign from expensive mistakes that not only don’t work, but defeat the intent and make things worse. Is this the future of advertising as we know it? Sometimes understanding why isn’t the final answer. Sometimes the truth is difficult to accept. Nokia hasn’t changed their irritating ring tone yet. And however disparaging Steve Jobs might be of people selling “coloured water”, even though the truth is out regarding the famous taste tests, the cola wars continue.

— jayakumar.vaishnavi@gmail.com

APPLE & EVE:

WALL-E AND HIS LOVE STORY WITH APPLE