The G6 of Literature

In tune with my literary listings, I now plan to explore the other end of the spectrum, the best of them all, at least according to me. One might agree with me or not, if one doesn't I'll probably like you even more because I can have an interesting debate on the topic and also, "I'M RIGHT, YOU'RE WRONG, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH!!!"
So, here are a few authors who I think are one of the best at what they do best.

1. William Shakespeare: Although many a high school student has fervently wished upon this gentleman a great deal of ills, he remains the king of playwrights, for nearly half a millennium, a no mean feat. William Shakespeare had this uncanny knack of telling stories that had a bit of everything in it, and as far as documentation of thereof is concerned, he seems to be the first one to do so. His plays are beautifully crafted masterpieces, his characters as living and breathing as you and me. After all, who can forget Shylock or Hamlet or Lady Macbeth? He always portrayed society as it was, be it the vehemently anti-semitic Venice and it's bourgeois or the wavering illiterate masses of the Roman Republic. He was a master of human psychology; his characters responded to real situations like real people, with raw and fundamental emotions acting as their only impetus. It was this fundamental soup of human emotions that make his characters timeless. Anthony would have done the same thing if Caesar was assassinated in the 21st century. Lady Macbeth would have goaded her husband into such heinous crimes at any point in history because they responded to basic emotions that never change. His plots may be simple enough to be portrayed on a stage, but one must notice that complexity of his plots do not arise from grandiose settings or vast arrays of characters, but play out as intense battles inside every character of his. Apart from these, his language is probably the apogee of Early Modern English, his puns and metaphors ring in our ears to this day.
2. Charles Dickens: Another master storyteller, he weaves magic with his words. An astute observer, he brings to life his characters based on real-life experiences, whose realism gets poignantly reflected in his works. He was a brooding recluse, whose only effective channel of communication was his ink stained pen and coarse paper. Known for bringing to life cities and countries with mere adjectives, he is probably most famous for his smoggy London and the East End. His works reflect his sense of strong Christian morality, and in the process help bring about a keener understanding of the poor and downtrodden in an era where only the lofty aristocrats and wealthy industrialists occupied the popular imagination. There is beauty in every word of his, his stories crafted to perfection and the words flow as eloquently as the sound of a babbling brook. His characters, again, have endured the onslaught of time upon our imaginations, with Oliver Twist and Philip Pirrip tenaciously gripping a part of our hearts reserved for such masterful machinations.
3. Agatha Christie: She is the undisputed queen of crime. Her lovable Poirot is the grandfather I never had, clumsily endearing, but keen as flint. He is all I hold dear in a character, he is vain, but lovably so, he's a genius at what he does best and is simply adorable. Miss Marple, on the other hand is a quaint Englishwoman, a complete antithesis of Poirot's flamboyance. She is the stolid and respectable spinster with a mind sharper than her knitting needle. Both characters, with a host of others that come and go are a deep treatise on human nature. They are subtle, crafty and purely ingenious, nearly as much as their creator herself. Her plots are shrouded in thick mystery, opening up in slices invisible to the naked eye, until the end when one realises that the clues were pointing in a direction that was glaringly obvious in retrospect. Her books are the best source of dopamine induced highs.
4. PG Wodehouse: You can't say his name without giggling a little. He makes everything funny, so much so that when one reads his books, one must keep first aid handy enough lest one cracks one's ribs. Delightfully hilarious, his books transport the reader to an entirely different world; a world of corrosive aunts, bumbling uncles, crafty fiancées and the hapless protagonist who knows he's a bit of an ass but hopes you wouldn't mind. His world is a cosy retreat from the day-to-day drudgery, a freshly mown lawn with drops of softly scented dew shimmering on a spring morning in the midst of the desert of real life. His characters, though formulaic, are delightfully lovable, the most endearing caricature of human society yet. His plot twists and narrative leaves the reader gasping for air, before which the next line comes along with a funnier anecdote or simile. His language and writing style is an asset to English itself, trapping all his good humour and zest for life within a few pages. If one hasn't read Wodehouse, one hasn't led a happy life.
5. JRR Tolkien: The indubitable lord of fantasy, Tolkien has brought incalculable happiness to bespectacled nerds and dragon lovers across the world's basements. He is the father of imagination, weaving whole new worlds as complex and complete as our own with a mere stroke of his pen. The level of detail and authenticity he brings about in his narrative is simply mindboggling, the little poems he inserts in between, more than adorable. Even though his characters are idealised exaggerations, his work has the epic quality only found in mythical texts, a feat not easy to achieve. His plot is gripping and intense, the words that describe them being as heated and fiery as the bowels of Mordor. As I always say, a passage written in good English when read out loud makes my mouth water, brings a fullness to the tongue, and The Lord of the Rings makes me drool incessantly.
6. Mark Twain: As I have come to notice, he is the only American in this list. Mark Twain, unlike the others on this list, consciously made an effort to write for a simpler man. His books had no lofty pretensions, no flowery indulgences with the finer aspects of the language, just merely a narrative, a simple but colourful narrative, but with equally powerful characters. Who can forget Tom Sawyer or Aunt Polly? He captured the essence of the simple life in America, he brought about a shift in the paradigm, wherein literature now appealed to a poorer section of society, not because he pandered to their baser sensibilities, but was because here was an author who portrayed a world even they understood. His work had an innocence and a childlike quality about them that made them intensely lovable. They were a genuine expression of his interpretation of American society, a world of simple people, hard-working and upright.

Literary Plague

There are books in which every page one reads, is a work of masterful art. Very few books fall into that category, and are rightfully called classics. They will live forever in our hearts; their characters shall always remain relevant in today’s world, no matter how old they are in their conception. A fewer authors can call their books their crowning achievements, feathers in their hats in a field where people frequently get reprimanded for inflicting such rot upon humanity. There are many authors in the latter; I’ll gladly name a few of them:

1. Chetan Bhagat: He and his semi-autobiographical ‘stories’ with a narrative so colourless and plain, reading it’ll remind you of a ten-year-old’s account of his or her weekend. Like many people who try ever so hard, we have a writer whose language is as half-baked as his plot and characters. If they were inspired from real life, he would’ve led a really one-dimensional life where all his acquaintances would’ve been caricatures of over-simplified stereotypes. I assume he operates under the presumption that his works must be accessible to the ‘common man’. Unfortunately, he seems to end up writing for the complete imbecile. Real works that make no flamboyant pretence are what are accessible to the common man. RK Narayan wrote for the common man, Chetan Baghat spews filth upon the sanctity of the written word.
2. Christopher Paolini: Classic plagiarism is what this gentleman, no, amateur adolescent, in every sense of the term, is capable of. I used to hate The Chronicles of Narnia, for it seemed a cheap bootleg of The Lord of the Rings, but no, a new kid’s in town, quite literally. Shamelessly lifting characters and plot elements from Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, and even Harry Potter, this pseudo Norse myth styled disaster only succeeds in disappointing the poor reader. I lumbered through the first book because I opened it, woe is me, and I gave up on humanity when I saw the second book adorning a shelf in the local bookshop.
3. Sydney Sheldon: I know, quite controversial, but yes, in the most affirmative of tones, he’s the father of cheap, Hollywood styled banality in literature. Every story of his features an extremely good-looking, perfect-in-everyway protagonist who, for some reason, gets entangled in something big, and with every chapter, the crisis gets bigger and bigger until it all diffuses in the end making it the king of all anticlimaxes; and there’d be a meaningless love story thrown somewhere in between for the sake of it, while it wouldn’t make sense at all, in terms of its relevance to the plot. His books are well-written scripts for tasteless soap-operas, not works of literature. Hackneyed cliff-hangers and loud explosions must remain only in Michael Bay’s movies intended to kill the viewer, not in a book. “Mainstream Hollywood” is the bottom-line of all his books; while it fails to entertain as a movie, it does even more so, as a book.
4. Dan Brown: He is the master of the familiar. Five books into his career, every single one of his books is similar to its predecessor in more ways than one. I wonder how many people appreciate his books now, for they just contain different conspiracy theories, different locations, similar characters who only differ in their names, but the same story. The format in which the story unravels itself is also the same, something which is bound to test every reader’s patience. While old wine in a new bottle is desirable, his books are not. While he might be interested in sighting lofty castles that do not exist amidst the clouds, the rest of us are more earnest and have no patience for the modern Don Quixote, only not very lovable but equally dense. Frankly, no one gives a damn about how ugly people danced naked every full moon standing in buckets filled with sushi hundreds of years ago.
5. Stephanie Meyer: No words can describe the injustice she has wrought upon humanity by force-feeding her tosh about vampires making Bram Stoker puke in his grave. I’m sure Hell has a special place for the publisher who cleared this drivel for publication. Mere fodder for over-weight middle aged women too ugly to find a husband, this is not literature; it is an insidious crime to have written this load of baloney. The reason this series of books is so repulsive is ubiquitous, but I shall elucidate anyway. The central theme has a colourless and nondescript protagonist, a character any reader can identify oneself with because the character has no personality of her own. Added to this is a boy, so freakishly handsome in every way, one would think he has issues related to self-esteem for falling for our main character in the first place. Wait, that’s not enough, the final nail on the coffin was making this man a vampire. The tale then reaches new levels of absurdity when it panders to baser emotions of every black-sheep of literature, letting real readers bite dust. Twilight is not a vampire novel; it is a cheesy romantic story begging to be used as toilet paper, masquerading as a fantasy novel to trick the hapless reader into untold misery. If one calls oneself a twilight fan, one has either been paid huge amounts of money to say so, or one is a complete idiot.

Superpower for Dummies

Power is the ability to make other entities do and say as one would want them to do and say. It has taken so many forms and has shifted hands so many times in history, that it is necessary to study the nature of power itself in a geo-political perspective for any nation harbouring ambitions of becoming a superpower.

A superpower is a nation with such overwhelming power, that it can impose it's will upon any part of the globe with the whole world as it's sphere of influence with a few rogue states labelled as pariah states by the international community for the crime of standing up to the reigning superpower. There have been many superpowers in the past, the Spanish Empire, The United Provinces of the Netherlands, Bourbon France, the mighty British Empire, USSR, the list can go on to include Rome, Mongol Empire, Ming China, etc. Ancient superpowers cannot be classified as superpowers per se, because although it's known world was it's dominion, it's power ended there. It did not have the capability to impose itself of a truly global scale until the modern era. The first superpower in it's true sense of the word was arguably the British Empire; it contested for control of all the seas and held a third of the land area under it's control, directly or otherwise and was the first empire upon which the sun truly and literally never set, while the same expression was used for the Spanish and French Empires merely as a exhortation.

However, there have been long periods in history where no single nation ruled supreme leading to a multipolar world. The inter-war period was one such political climate, where Britain, France, Germany, Russia, USA, Japan and Italy all had their own spheres of influence leading to devastating consequences. The Cold War world was bipolar with the NATO and Warsaw Pacts dominating diplomacy. Superpowers are formed under peculiar political circumstances where one nation held a distinct advantage. While all the history is fascinating in sorts, one must really wonder as to what makes a nation a superpower.

A superpower needs the following :

• An unchallengeable military superiority: The Spanish Armada, The Royal Navy and now, the US navy are all examples of this unparalleled military hegemony. In fact, the US navy today is larger than the the next 13 largest navies combined while the Royal navy in it's heyday packed more firepower than the next two largest navies combined. A navy is the most valuable asset of any superpower. While armies can impose upon the land, a navy is the only force that can control distant parts of the world and keep distant lands under check. This was one of the reasons Russia desperately wanted a warm water port and fought the west for two centuries for at least one such port. This was the same reason Britain and the United States resolutely never let Russia expand southwards. If a nation wishes to project it's power across the globe in a sustainable manner, it needs a large military force, especially a gigantic navy.
• A large treasury: After all, it is money that makes the world go round. A country that wishes to broaden its sphere of influence must have the financial resources to back the efforts. A large military needs a lot of money, a lot of money also brings financial leverage and economic clout over smaller nations. This was the precise reason the Spanish Empire imploded. Spain, a staunchly Catholic nation was adroitly against Shylocking, as it was derisively called, the practice of lending credit at an interest. Without easy credit, the economy got static with galleons full of gold and silver from the New World just sitting in Spain funding only costly wars and futile imperial ambitions. The Thirty Years' war was the spark that blew up the Empire's fortunes, with Bourbon France filling the void, albeit temporarily. It was another nation, surprisingly tiny, but ruthlessly mercantile, that eventually rose to the top: The Netherlands. Wherever there was money to be made, the Dutch were there. Their merchant fleet was the largest in the world, often called the Dutch golden age, with a vast military fleet to secure shipping routes. It became so prosperous that it shadowed much larger empires like Spain and France who made no guise of their antipathy towards this brutally money-minded tiny kingdom. Therefore, as history shows, money is the oil that keeps the wheels of nations moving, money is so important, that a tiny nation can weed it's way to the top with money alone, lots and lots of sweet money.
• A sizeable population: It is not easy to get to the top, it takes a lot of hard work. What is even more difficult is staying there. The Netherlands did rise to the top, but the Dutch were promptly supplanted by a larger version of their nation, a nation equally ruthless in it's economic pursuits, equally mercantile, but larger, Great Britain. What made this even more ironic was that the British were the only ally the Dutch had with an ounce of teeth against enemies like leviathan empires united by a common religion and disdain towards this tiny nation of the Dutch, France and Spain. British ascent was not peaceful, but riddled with constant resentment of Dutch wealth and vice versa. The reason the British came out the winner was because of their sheer size in comparison to the Netherlands. The same can be said for the demise of British hegemony in the world. By 1890, The United States had overtaken Britain as the largest economy in the world, while Germany became the powerhouse of Europe, robbing Britain of its title of "The Workshop of the World". The reason this was achieved was not because of any other factor but size. The German Empire was the most populous state in Europe, after Russia, obviously, and the USA was simply huge. Both these countries ceaselessly performed as factories flooding the world markets while Britain took the back seat in industrial capacity and switched to a service based economy, the world's first post-industrial nation. European hegemony was further strained by the World Wars, two devastating conflicts from which Europe never recovered. However, even if Europe had remained peaceful, it's supremacy was not sustainable, solely because of the reason that there were much larger nations in the world that had simply not realised their potential. It was only a matter of time before they did, which meant that any European nation that held the reigns merely had a fleeting advantage over other nations, something bound to disappear in time. At this point, one might argue that Britain and France had vast empires and thus could industrialise their colonies. However, it must be noted that, imperialism, as a concept is not sustainable. The very fact that the British educated the colonial subjects in the Western school of thought proved to be their undoing. To rule over a set of people, one needs one of these things: authoritarian control, or popular goodwill. The British colonial government had neither, the French were even worse. The very fact that British colonial governance was praised for it's liberalism ( it must be noted that this liberalism is relative to other European powers of the time and must not be compared to current standards of human rights.) proved to unleash nationalist aspirations among the populace because the British did not assimilate the natives into their culture as the French tried to do, believing in the policy of non-interference, especially after 1857. The French, on the other hand tried so hard to assimilate native cultures that the indigenous people resisted the invasion of their culture. Ultimately, both the empires could not sustain themselves. But it must be noted that, unlike other empires that came crashing down, these empires merely faded away, quite gradually. The reason for that was, thankfully, ultimate admission of the fact that these empires were not sustainable. Therefore, for any nation to be sustainable as a superpower, it must have a sufficiently large population that identifies itself as one nation.
• A vast area of fertile land: This one is obvious. Any nation needs a large land area to sustain a sizeable population. More specifically, it requires a large area of arable land with favourable climatic conditions. While agriculture can be the least profitable of all economic activities, it is still, by far the most important and this requires land, a lot of it. A large population needs large quantities of food. One can always import food grains, but to maintain a sustainable superpower status, one needs to produce as well as consume. To produce large amounts of food, one needs large areas of arable land. In fact, land is the only reason Russia became a great power in the first place. It has a moderately substantial population, but the reason for that is that it has unimaginable amounts of land. If one takes up nearly half of the largest continent in the world and more than half of another continent, there are bound to be some people in it. We call them Russians. Russia has vast tracts of extremely fertile land, rich natural resources and vast amounts of unpopulated land to spare. This was the reason that even though Russian industry in the 19th century was non-existent, Russia packed a considerable punch on the world stage, enough to alarm the then most industrialised and powerful nation in the world, Britain, to declare Russia as the nation most likely to challenge British supremacy, even though Russia hardly had a navy, spawning the Great Game of the 19th century. Industrialisation of Russia only rapidly catapulted it to the status of a superpower. Despite the demise of Feudalism, land still plays an important part in the prosperity of any nation. Lack of land is the reason Japan does not reign supreme despite an exceptionally industrious population, which while pushing Japan to the status of the second largest economy, a title it held for forty years, could not do much to further Japanese economic power than what it is today. Therefore, a superpower requires vast swathes of fertile land, a favourable climate and abundant natural resources.
• Popular mindset and ruthless expansionism: No empire can be built through peaceful means. Any change in established political order can only be achieved by forced upheaval of the existing order. As controversial as that sounds, it is sadly true. One cannot name a single superpower that emerged in history after long periods of peace. The Spanish Empire ruthlessly exterminated the native Indian populace, The Netherlands emerged after the Thirty years war and the Eighty years war. The British Empire emerged as a nascent colonial power after the Seven years war, it's hegemony sealed after the Napoleonic wars. Germany was born after the Franco-Prussian war. The United States emerged after the Second World War. Wars make and break nations. Wars are triggered by expansionism. Today, however, expansionism has evolved from the idea of political control to economic influence. Still, a nation has to ceaselessly try and expand it's economic horizons. If a nation wants to be superpower, it has to start behaving like one. Diplomacy is like a poker game, one loses the game if they play it badly even if one has an unbeatable hand. Any nation that has become superpower at some point started getting incorrigibly assertive. For example, even though Britain reigned supreme uncontested on all seas, the United States boldly declared in 1920 that it shall endeavour to build a navy second to none. The boldness of this averment was compounded by the fact that Britain was an ally of the USA, not an enemy. Thirty years later, a wish came true. The US navy surpassed the Royal Navy as the most powerful navy in the world. If the USA had decided that it mustn't expand it's navy at the cost of British goodwill, the scenario would've been extremely different. Apart from this assertive confidence, a nation requires a population that is productive and ingenious. The reason the industrial revolution first took place in Britain and no where else was because of a strong Protestant work ethic compounded by a benevolent social institution welcome to change. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed was because it's society was becoming stagnant after half a century of political repression, reflecting on economic stagnation. For any nation to be a superpower, it needs a dynamic populace welcome to change and an innovative workforce willing to try new things.
• Liberty and Democracy: Finally, any nation aspiring to be a superpower must have a liberal government institution in place. Tight repression and strict regulation stifles innovation, the heart of any superpower. To maintain the popular dynamic and ingenuity, one needs a liberal government granting certain fundamental rights to it's citizens, and independent and impartial judiciary and an firm and insurmountable democratic tradition. The reason Britain outgrew it's continental neighbours was because of it's benevolent rule. The reason Soviet Russia collapsed even after having all the ingredients for a superpower was because of an authoritarian regime that stifled it's populace. The reason the USA lived on and will do so for the foreseeable future is because of democracy.

Although many nations have ruled the world, each nation that supplanted the existing superpower brought something new to the table. Till Spain came along, empires were restricted to individual regions. Spain broke that shackle to build an empire that stretched across the New World, It brought the concept of naval supremacy into the equation. Any superpower had to have a great navy. The Netherlands later brought trade into the equation, which meant that any nation now vying for the superpower status had to control world trade. Britain brought industrialisation which meant that superpowers now had to be industrialised nations with supreme control over world trade with an insurmountable navy. The United States brought size into consideration which meant that any superpower must have all that Britain had, in addition to a vast population making up a huge economy at home. The next superpower must have all that the USA possessed with something new to offer. It could be India, it could be China, it could be a united Europe, only time can tell.

To be

Befallen on the widen'd flat,
Was the servil sodden rat,
But on the saem did shoote out we,
The roote of our own miserie.
But why were we on this ground put?
With the vulgar bandicoote
If he were not but so as I
If he were not as eye for eye
For this rat doth so plague us free
As doth question burning me
As who I are and so dost he
And why we all so came to be
He may not be as sundry
As methinketh as doth I
Natheless virtue pricketh me
For so dost thee and so dost he
I cannot but compaer so
Humour of mine and all his four
Whithout sembling, holt and heath
Of courages mine and in his sheath
We drew our courses bothe the twain
We drew our virtue on slate plain
Mine with noble chivalrie
His with base debaucherie,
Twixt bothe lay the bold ensigne
Of one's own granden designe
I could choose and so could he
Of what beast or knight one woulden be
T'is not discerned beyond the erth
Of what natures are or of its birthe
For now I am and so is he
Midst Nature's cosmic symphonie