I’ve become very incoherent in the way that I read. In the last few days, I have approximately 5 books on the go flitting from one book to another as I drift from context to context in the search for their message. I don’t get to the end of one book before I start a new one.

The books range from public international law, artificial computer intelligence, the history of astronomy and psychology. At the moment, I’m reading  Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter, Treaty Interpretation by Richard Gardiner, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, The Sun Kings: The Unexpected Tragedy of Richard Carrington and the Tale of How Modern Astronomy Began by Stuart Clar and The Norton Psychology Reader by Glenn Marcus.

In two respects I find this list symptomatic of my current malaise with reading and books. I have become obsessed with non-fiction. Books are a means to acquire information and to flesh out my understanding of the world. I’m starting to feel acutely that I have little understanding of the context of myself and my world. There is so much history, so much reality that underpins the way the world works and I’m desperately cramming to try and fill in the gaps. I grab these books, distill their messages down into a simple list of propositions and try and internalise their analytic framework or message and graft those on to my world view as appropriate.

I find it saddening that there isn’t a fiction book on the list. The last fiction book I read was the The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. That book I bought on a whim, read with real delight and then I never repeated the experience. The only other fiction that I’ve been indulging in is Hercule Poirot mysteries, which is an indulgence I try and save for tough days. I used to get fiction from the library, but nowadays I find it hard to find time. That means I rack up large fines which tend to compromise part of the point and purpose of a library.  

This weird imbalance worries me. There is something about the power of books and the power of stories that I need to keep me sane.

There are two ways to approach any issue, and two mind sets when an issue is identified – problems people and solutions people. These reflect different characters and different approaches to the world. They represent alternatives and we get to choose which alternative we make ours.

Problem people can identify what has gone wrong. When the issue is identified problem people focuses tightly on blame. They can see the exact point where the task went wrong and why. They are quick to identify who is to blame for failure. That doesn’t mean that they will identify publicly who is responsible for a failure, but they do have a clear idea where the buck stops.

Solutions people see as clearly as problems people what has gone wrong. However, they’re focused on the task and the process, and they quickly turn the conversation and the focus of the group away from the problem and towards solutions. Often when a solutions person first identifies a problem, they will  propose 2 – 3 solutions straight away. They don’t hide problems until they have a solution, or wait for the best moment to unveil the solution, but rather  they are solutions to create discussions about what to do next. 

I’m a problems person at heart. Like all traits it works so smoothly that it takes you a while to cotton on to its implications. But being a problems person is to abandon a process halfway. I’m starting to learn that taking control of how we see the world is the only power we really have. Viewing the world as a solutions person turns the focus of a problem away from its existence and towards its negative effects. It turns the focus of the debate towards diminishing those effects.

John Perkins’ “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”  reads somewhere between spy thriller and banality – and it’s this odd combination which makes his claims believable. In any event Perkins insists that the book is factual.

The story is simple. During much of the Cold War, from 1971 onwards, John Perkins was an Economic Hitman or EHM.

The job description of an EHM is to facilitate exploitation of  the developing world – to ensure that countries take on debt levels  that they would never repay. A burden so high that countries  struggle to meet the interest payments, let alone pay down the principle. Their people – and more importantly (for the EHM) their resources – become  tied down to a cycle of destitution; sold as slaves, oil, timber and minerals to the big American conglomerates, resources to be reprocessed into expensive finished goods and sold to the world.

To create this global serfdom, an EHM creates a fantasy, an economic miracle, that justifies incurring the debt. The fantasy is seductively simple. You invest in essential infrastructure – the bigger the better (for the American engineering and construction firms hired to build them). The new projects will boost GDP (Perkins mentions how he predicted an electricity book of 17% growth year on year for 10 years in Java, Indonesia in 1971). The boom will see a fat increase in government revenue. The new revenue will pay down the debt quickly and the government will come out of it having got its new state of the art infrastructure for ‘free’.

Of course none of these forecast fantasies account for corruption, popular riots, natural disasters, governments being overthrown (or just encouraged to fail) or war.

One especially intriguing aspect is Perkins’ insistence that the job of EHM’s is, for the most part, not part of a global conspiracy. There are no shadowy cabals in the background, cynically conspiring to control the world. Rather it is a product of the “corporatocracy” – where the purely self interested profit motive of private corporations and individuals become the driving force of national and international policy. This motivation is not malicious; rather it is a myopic perspective that does not look at the ‘big’ picture beyond the profits and benefits of the individual and the employer.

I found this book both horrific and intriguing. Horrific because of the sheer callous nature with which Perkins operated, and with which pointless short term profit  triumphed again and again when it was clear that the long term harm was irremediable. Perkins is clearly a smart fellow, and his ability to rationalise his actions, even when he could intuit how wrong they were and still continue with them speaks vividly about a darker side of the human psyche.

Intriguing because I recognise the part of Perkins’ viewpoint that inhabits my world. I can see that myopia in what is done by lawyers and the legal profession. After all we’re more interested in getting the deal done instead of the ethical, environmental and moral implications. As the author himself observes in a throw away sentence – there was a lot of moral comfort derived for people by being told what they were doing was strictly legal, especially when they knew it was immoral.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman is a pretty sobering book – one that will never let you view a newspaper or history book quite the same way again. It may even be, in that rare class, one of those books that will not allow you to live your life the same way again. It’s a fantastic eye opener.

TVB’s blatant pandering to the Motherland for National Day was rather obvious. I hope for their sake it will be appreciated across the border.

It certainly blew to shreds my last bit of belief that there was credible news to be had from our local TV stations. It was amusing how sincerely devoted to the 60th Anniversary Extravaganza they tried to appear.

Of course there were the superlatives, the 100,000 people taking part, the intercontinental nuclear missiles and unmanned observation drones being trucked past by the ton, the synchronised sloganeering of 80,000 youths turning and signing in unison.

Except that you notice that there are no people involved. There are no cheering crowds at the side. There is no sign of particular popular involvement at all.  There are a couple of obvious insiders who are looking on (our Chief Executive with his camera poised  looking like a tourist). The interested public are kept miles away, penned in behind fences and not able to see a single aspect of the parade (except the flybys, which TVB tried to spin into a positive).

It stuck me for a moment, and then you start to think why it should be so exclusionary. Then you remember its China and the Communist Party, and they wouldn’t dare let reality mar their utopian fantasy of the Motherland, which still holds true to the vision that Mao forged for it.

If you do listen between the lines of the obvious PR script that TVB’s news anchor is reading that just highlights the dark comedy. Thing’s like how the Chinese government has included all the nationalities of China for the first time (which, of course, has nothing to do at all with race riots in Xinjiang and Tibet).

I suppose you can count on some people to be swept away by nationalist fervour and celebrate away. You could at least try and not make your coverage seem like a perverse farce.

I visited Planet Bohra today, for the first time in a long time, and I feel obliged to put a few words out there about my sense of disappointment.

Planet Bohra has gone wrong.

When it first launched, I blogged about Planet Bohra – how there was something unique in the way it brought together people by religious affiliation. How it created a much broader voice for the daily concerns, lives and realities of mumineen world wide.

My concern all those many months ago was – as one of the very erudite comments on my post expressed it – that things are out of context on Planet Bohra. When you read something on any blog, you have the benefit of knowing something about the author, or learning about the author from other posts or the context in which the post you read is situated. There are many things from which you can learn something about the writer.

Since those words were written that problem has been magnified beyond all reckoning. Planet Bohra now includes feeds from Malumaat, Mumineen.org, ZenInfosys and official Jamaat feeds for a variety of locations (Singapore and Malunga are on the front page at the time of writing). The prodigious Aziz Poonawala manages to hold his own, but even he’s not able to much diminish this monopoly.

These feeds dominate for a variety of reasons. They’re the big centralised news portals that we turn to for news both of Maula and about what is going on in the rest of the world. These centralised resources have a great deal of journalistic pull as centres for the collation of information – and they are great resources. These sites are full of information and pictures of religious events, major religious festivals and visits by the great and good.

I have two reasons for my feeling of disappointment. My first concern as a reader is that Planet Bohra reflects a very narrow slice of the lives – our lives -  as lived. It reflect only a very partial selection – the image of unyielding cookie cutter hierarchical orthodoxy. As if every person spent every day attending religious events, every evening welcoming dignitaries and every night in communal prayer.

In a sense these sites are about the party line and how we’re meant to live. They are focused only – solely – on our public religious lives. What I’m curious about, what I feel is being lost in all the orthodox, is the feeling of the real Bohra pulse. How do we actually live our lives? Where are the things that make each person unique?

There are no voices on those sites talk about the every day things – how rewarding it was to get through Ramadan, how tough it is to keep kids awake entertained during the summer vacation or how curious it is that HSBC has decided to ban a browser that apparently works fine with its i-banking system. It was these voices that I wanted to hear most on Planet Bohra.

I find their silence heartbreaking.

My second concern is as a writer. I feel that context, critical context,  so essential when writing about the personal on a religious Planet is now thoroughly in peril.  Sandwiched between akhbar, with not a normal post in sight,  there’s no margin of appreciation for a post that doesn’t strictly reflect the demands of orthodoxy. Its destiny is to be out of place – an unwanted ripple of discontent in a placid lake soon to be swamped by the reassertion of orthodoxy.

This creates a sort of self-censoring feedback. I wonder now if my blog belongs on Planet Bohra – because it makes me believe that to affirm my religious identity is to simultaneously deny my freedom of speech and thought. I wonder if this post ought to be written because it too will appear on Planet Bohra and cause that momentary ripple. During that ripple, perhaps it will be misunderstood, and misinterpreted as a challenge to the orthodoxy. Perhaps others will presume to judge the quality of my faith. Lord knows I don’t need that kind of extra hassle.

A perverse form of self-censorship.

The long term solution to me appears simple. If I’m going to return to my blog – and if I wish to feel free to be myself here– then I need to keep an eye on Planet Bohra. If it must stay as the new beast it has become, then I should remove my blog of its rosters.

For the moment though, I feel disengagement is the easy way out. I like the idea of Planet Bohra, and I like the world it tries to reflect. I would like it to be broader –and to reflect more real people. I don’t believe that’s too much to ask.

I’ve embraced wittering on Twitter with a vengeance. And tweeting on Twitter is fine. The risk is not, as David Cameron so recently said, that too many tweets might make a twat (which is a given for any Tory MP), but that 140 characters is a beguiling limit.

The micro-blogging that Twitter gave birth to reflects the ideal that much can be said in a small burst of text. And that is undeniably true. Powerful ideas are often expressed in simple slogans. Twitters meteoric rise shows how fascinating the idea of strong but frequent updates can be, especially in parts of the world where Internet access  is not safe in big bursts (think China or Iran).

However, I’m not fighting an evil regime, and I have no desire to evade the Great Firewall.

My concern with Twitter is more prosaic. It’s making my ideas dumber. It’s so simple to constrict an idea to the simple idea and to limit it to the (micro) format. The challenge posed by Twitter is to make things simple. By hiding the the idea behind big explanations and fancy acronyms we fail the challenge of communication through Twitters jaundiced eyes.

At the same time I’m drawn to the words of Albert Einstein – that things should be made as simple as they can be but no simpler. I wonder if Twitter has failed me in this, or rather that I have failed my ideas by turning them over to Twitter.

When you start to think in terms of the drafting limit, when take  an idea, and wonder how to compress it into 140 characters, into a caricature of the notion you want to convey you do the idea an injustice. An injustice that you cannot repair because ideas are fleeting, and their impact transient if you decide not to lock them down through expression and the written word.

The question becomes one of balance. What do I do with Twitter that is different from this blog, and what do I do with this blog that is different from what I do with Twitter.

The obvious answer is that this blog is for longer posts. For ideas that deserve expansion. The reply to that is that I don’t know which ideas are deserving until I start expanding them, and if I commit them to Twitter first, they are committed to the world as they are and as they will be. For better or worse, once I commit something to Twitter, I rarely revise the idea in my head.

At the same time I know that the process of writing for me is a process of discovery and balance – and that perhaps things are going too smoothly and too well for me to depend on the outpouring of words that is my outpouring of grief . So in that sense perhaps the answer is to keep my blog for a day when its needed, and to convey happy banal thoughts over Twitter.

If that makes me a Twittering buffoon, so be it.

The word “I” is one of the most commonly used words in the English language. It is a simple word,  that reflects one of the most obvious subjects in human language and human experience. It is absolutely self evident to each of us that the I exists. We are all “I” to ourselves.

As I’ve started to dabble in psychology, first in the online Yale lectures and then reading the many books that I’ve recently grabbed of Amazon, the recurring sub-text of these rudimentary investigations is the curious emptiness of I. If anything, the trend in empirical psychological research as disseminated to the book reading public seems to be that the person who least understands ourselves, our past and our future is ourselves.

Yet this is a proposition that seems to be eminently sound. I know that I’m not my thoughts. It’s a lesson that I’ve discovered personally through a series of personal revelations that have rewritten my world view step by step. I am not my emotions, because these too are mine to control. I am not my past, because what I did has no effect on what I might do, or what I could do. I am not my future, because by definition I cannot be something that does not exist yet because I do exist now. 

For all these things, thoughts, emotions, past experience, future hopes, the “I” stands apart. It is the subject to which these things happen. I think. I feel. I did things. I will do things.

In a sense, this is the ultimate paradox of a brain capable of thinking about itself. How does the machine that is both subject and object come to form any real concrete grip on what it is when it is in this meta-narrative position. When your brain is thinking about itself thinking, or assessing how it is feeling, it is inherently impossible to split where one process ends and another begins.

I know that I’ve not stumbled on a new problem, the problem of whether the mind can be analysed by the mind is as old as Decartesian dualism and as intractable today as it was then.  After all, we have no minds available but our own with which to approach the question. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I’d like to learn the answer.

It is liberating to know that my thoughts, emotions, past and future are not me. I am not bound to any destiny by biological programming or the diktat of things past. I am free to choose my own way, my own thoughts and my own future.

One niche that I find myself occupying often in these quiet economic times is article writer. You would think that’s a good thing, given that I’m addicted to the written word.

The problem is that the kind of article writing I get to do isn’t quite that kind of writing. What kind of writing is it? It’s writing of the ‘law for non-lawyers’ kind.

We do a lot of our marketing to our clients by talking about common problems in the industry, provide the common solutions and suggest proactive steps that they can take to make their businesses run better. In the current climate, there is a marked increase in interest in this kind of material. Taking simple steps  now to manage or mitigate risk tomorrow is something every business is keen to do.

As the person on the bottom of the greasy pole, and a person who has been recognised as having an interest in writing, this task comes to me.

Writing these pieces, I’ve discovered the ‘voice’ that you need  to write these types of pieces. It’s a voice that fits awkwardly with my natural writing voice – a voice that is painful to write within. Smalls sentences, long ideas. Simple ideas that expand to take up a paragraph. Describing the same thing in three ways during a short explanation.

That voice is summed up by the acronym K.I.S.S – keeping it stupid simple.

Urgh. How vile.

I feel like that voice is corrupting my natural voice as it starts to blend in with my way of thinking and approach to writing. As if my thoughts, and expressions are being simplified – the world’s complexity passing beyond the reach of my expression and instead into this obtuse world where all problems are short, sweet and simple and can be cured through a three step process.

Unless your concern falls within the many areas where things can go wrong if they aren’t handled professionally the very first time round. In which case you should, in fact, consult a professional. Your regular contact at the firm would be more than glad to give you some advice on these nasty complicated bits. Or the specialist who ‘wrote’ the piece you’re reading now.

In the Name of Allah, the Mighty, The Merciful

1. By the forenoon (after sun-rise);
2. And by the night when it is still (or darkens);
3. Your Lord  has neither forsaken you nor hated you.
4. And indeed the Hereafter is better for you than the present.
5. And verily, your Lord will give you  so that you shall be well-pleased.
6. Did He not find you an orphan and gave you a refuge?
7. And He found you unaware (and guided you?
8. And He found you poor, and made you rich
9. Therefore, treat not the orphan with oppression,
10. And repulse not the beggar;
11. And proclaim the Grace of your Lord

Today evening the Shabab ul Ediz Zahabi Hong Kong held their annual quran recitation competition. A curious feature of that competition was the repetition of the sura Ad-Duha. After all we have a small field of participants and their are a lot of suras to choose from.

Not that I minded. On the contrary I took the opportunity to pay it extra attention because if it was there twice, I ought to get twice the benefit.

This particular sura has always resonated. There is a soothing and reassuring harmony in its dialectic. It’s a portal to reflect upon my life and pose answers to its questions.

Overwhelmingly I answer these questions with agreement and find myself marvelling at the grace infused in my life

I’m happy with life at the moment.  Time is whizzing by, there’s always something enjoyable to do at work, even if its one or two tasks a day out of the ten that have to be accomplished. It’s work, so I’m not expecting euphoric personal satisfaction.

Overall though, life is good. Life is better than good. It’s somewhere in the neighbourhood of fantastic.

At the same time, I feel depressed because it can’t last. All good things come to an end, and so it is with this good thing. I feel someone is going to come and take it away from me. My happiness will be destroyed.

Part of my brain thinks that this state of mind is the purest insanity. One cannot be happy, cynical and sad all at the same time. But I am.