Review: README.txt by Chelsea Manning

Readme.txt

I remember back in the days when Bradley Manning had become famous for outing secrets of the abuse of power by powers that be. However, some time later, it was Chelsea Manning who was being named. In those days, I had no idea of trans issues and was sort of confused that why is Bradley being called Chelsea and what’s with this ‘transition’? How can a man transition into a woman by growing long hair? Identities are complex and had no idea about transitioning and other related topics.

Nevertheless, README.txt is an important chronicle of how Bradley grows up in a broken household, struggles to find a footing in life, and often disdains authority. His experiences of longing for belonging and growing up in a conservative America and then experiencing homelessness are touching and makes one understand the struggles he had to go through. Somehow he ends up joining the U.S. Forces after walking into their recruitment camp. But his struggles don’t end there. He tells you how, as a trans person, he constantly faced harrassment. He was good with computers from a very young age, and that’s what propelled him to be in Intelligence in Iraq. However, the journey wasn’t as straightforward.

The interesting bits of the story for most readers would be where he starts uploading classified war material onto Wikileaks, including the infamous Collateral Damage video from Iraq. He writes about the lax information security practices which exist, like the ability to copy data just by plugging in a USB, or writing data to DVDs which could just be carried over to one’s personal barracks. He was however outed as someone who was uploading these secrets by Adrian Lamo, the disgraced hacker who was contacted by Bradley to garner support and advice for making these acts of the U.S. in Iraq more visible to the world. Lamo told the agencies about this and Bradley was arrested. Bradley’s arrest is painful to read to put it mildly. He writes about this cage in Kuwait where he is put in solitary.

After years of struggle and intentional bureaucratic wrangling, he is sentenced. However, Obama, the same guy who doubled down on dissenters and leakers, pardons Bradley (now Chelsea), probably in an effort to burnish his own image, apparently fearful how he would be remembered. Chelsea however is not bereft of biases against Trump and conservatives. He clubs his own sufferings and then goes on an unintelligent tirade that all minorities of colour, gender, religion are being persecuted.

It’s an important book to be read to understand how authoritarian U.S. works when something doesn’t suit it.

Review: The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Divider

It has become fashionable to criticize Trump and get away with it. Most of the book covers about Trump (and Putin and Xi / China) have a blazing red or blood red cover. This one, for a change, has a more classy white with a sliver of black. This book is hefty, and will take a good amount of time for one to cover, because it is so detailed as to literally have statements in double-quotes on almost every page.

When Trump won in 2016, I was quite happy and still sort of support him because he was an outsider in the sense of being a non-politician. Politicians have milked the system for too long for their own benefits, and hence an outsider, an entrepreneur at that, was a good thing. Of course Trump has an abrasive personality and he did not tone it down when he became the most powerful man on earth. I first saw Trump in the Apprentice show back in 2000s. I loved his style and his signature line “you are fired”. I remember reading in New Yorker in 2015 how paid actors were asked to appear at a Trump rally and the author was sort of happy that they (or whoever) had exposed it. Am sure New Yorker was stunned at the election results.

The book covers the entire period of Trump in White House and does manage to show that there was lot of infighting and chaos behind the scenes. To top it, Trump’s habit of tweeting to the world and then his team getting to know of his decision did not help one bit. But he surely did take lot of strong decisions and rankled up the leftist ecosystem who had led the country astray with their stupid policies. The most powerful nation cannot stop illegal immigrants from crossing over the border? Trump promised the wall, but of course could not complete it because of obvious lack of support in the House.

However, the focus of this book and its authors (they wrote for NYT itself should be a clear indicator) is to show that Trump and his White House never did even one thing correctly. No wonder I don’t take these kinds of books too seriously lest they cloud my thinking. Obama and his administration lied about how Osama bin Laden was killed and then even supplanted their fake theory in Zero Dark Thirty. Whereas Trump got Baghdadi and Soleimani killed, yet never got any credit in NYT or WaPo. Am not getting into the merits or demerits of killing Soleimani, but just bringing forth the point that when you read only NYT and WaPo, you will never read one thing positive about Trump or Republicans. That Trump ordered the pull out from Afghanistan did not merit praise, that he did not start any new military operations anywhere did not merit praise, that he cornered China did not merit praise, that he did as best as could to combat Covid pandemic and the economic fallout did not merit praise.

So with that in mind, you should definitely read this book for understanding how Trump operated and his antics upset many leaders like Merkel and Trudeau.

Review: Sandworm by Andy Greenberg

Sandworm

I was chatting on some group chat on Yahoo messenger around 2000 / 2001. Then some argument ensued and one person (probably a guy) started sending some messages like ‘this port accessed’, ‘that port accessed’ in an attempt to scare me away and move out of that room. I having no idea of what those things meant, restarted my computer without bothering to rejoin that group chat. Then I heard about Stuxnet in 2010 / 2011 and how the Iranian centrifuges were destroyed. Andy’s book is quite entralling if you restrict yourself to the technical details and the jaw-dropping skills the hacker community has honed over decades. I use the word ‘community’ with a pinch of salt because how would club a Iranian hacker with an American hacker? The book talks about Stuxnet, WannaCry, Petya, notPetya and few others. My own experience, of having absolutely no work in 2014 when working for a big film studio which was hacked due to a controversial movie, gives me a smile.

However, that’s where the good part of this book ends. Andy is a typical leftist woke-type American who says Trump had so little understanding of computers that he never bothered to issue a critique of Russian ‘interference’ in U.S. elections of 2016. However, this theory is so unworthy that any person believing in the narrative of these leftist wokes deserves to be jailed. The political bias of the baldhead author is clear. I wish the author had stuck to writing on the stories of the hacking operations rather than ignoring the lack of skills of Obama when it came to computers. That’s the problem with all these publishers and authors nowadays. They have hijacked the complete narrative by taking over major publishers, news channels, magazines, blogs, and whatever else you can name.

I would read this book for the mayhem various cyberhacking operations have caused, but wouldn’t trust this author and this book even for a second when they just go on and on with blaming Russia / GRU / Putin without any evidence whatsover, except rudimentary statements like ‘the coding patterns matched’ and the ‘design looked similar’. I would rather stomp on this book and trash it in the bin for the political naivety and amateurish conclusions in this book.

Review: Saeed – An Actor’s Journey

Saeed’s autobiography

Saeed’s energy was infectious. As an actor, he brought life to the scenes he enacted, full of verve and curiosity. Some of his roles which I remember unforgettably were in Shatranj ke Khiladi and My Beautiful Laundrette. There was a childish zeal in him which even the dullest of the scenes exciting.

The book starts from, well, the beginning, as he writes, “I suppose I should begin my memoirs right from the very beginning. I was born on a Sunday, on 8th January, in a Muslim feudal state in the north-west province of Punjab called Maler Kotla”. Surprisingly, he leaves out the year 1929. His father was a doctor, and his mother a homemaker. Quite a privileged life he did lead in his childhood due to the stature of his father’s profession. And, as he rightly mentions, he was a ‘brown sahib’ in India, sometimes more British than the British. His years in United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) and attending various schools shaped his affinity towards English language. And his Muslim upbringing helped him in honing his skills in Urdu / Hindustani.

He later joined the All India Radio in Delhi and got the Fulbright scholarship to attend a drama school in America. The book is full of characters, names, places, and events. It doesn’t feel boring for a bit and engages the reader as if he is conversing with him/her. He writes about the various intimate affairs he had with countless women and establishes his reputation as a ladies’ man. His divorce with Madhur, “M” as he calls her, and separation with his children are few of the tragic chapters of his life.

Though as much as he was successful in India, UK, and America, he still did face lot of racist behaviour. His struggles to make ends meet with no regular income, and taking odd jobs like a bartender, or even a bureaucrat, highlight the unpredictability of the creative fields. He recounts his experiences of having met / worked with lot of giants like Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery, Sanjeev Kumar, Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor and many others.

An entertaining book to say the least. Saeed Jaffrey passed away in 2015 of old age.

 

Review: The Oil Kings by Andrew Scott Cooper

The Oil Kings

“I like him, I like him and I like the country. And some of those other bastards out there I don’t like, right?“ – President Richard Nixon, 1971

“Nothing could provoke more reaction in us than this threatening tone from certain circles and their paternalistic attitude.“ – The Shah, 1976

The above two quotes from this book fleetingly summarize the complexities of what lies in its 400 odd pages

Since lot of years I have been reading books on politics of Middle East (I prefer it calling West Asia though). And consider myself decently aware of a great deal of geopolitics there. That was till I read this book. A lot of my straight laced understanding was washed away. Reading this was like falling off the bed while dreaming of paradise. I thought I understood national interests well. Now I understand them better!

I probably had read its review in Frontline magazine, or would have seen in it in a Crossword store. And from the description found it interesting. And it talked about topics I had not read much about. So ordered it from Flipkart and started reading it in a train journey back home but couldn’t read further at that point as other books took over it. And, strangely, didn’t find the first chapter very interesting or appealing. Maybe it’s got to do with the style of writing. Started reading this book a few weeks earlier and finished it in 5 days. And it is a hell of a book.

It’s full of startling revelations. United States of America was scratching the back of Iran to supply weapons to Pakistan during the India-Pakistan war of 1971, which resulted in East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh. That Nixon administration had rigged a defense deal in favor of Grumman so that it doesn’t go bankrupt. And that the Shah of Iran was asked to choose Grumman as the supplier for F-14’s. That’s Foreign Service for you. I was humbled to read about so many different facets of what goes behind highest level talks of statesmen. South Vietnam at one point of time had become the possessor of world’s fourth largest air force fleet and that lot of it had come from Iran – through back door channeling by the United States.

The book covers the era from 1969 to 1977. And it revolves around a dozen or so of individuals and their power play in the realms of politics. It has got lot of quotes from interviews and declassified documents. So for someone who is not accustomed to detailed analysis this may appear as repetitive. These quotes unfailingly are followed by the author’s explanation and comments. This makes it much easier to understand and correlate a lot complicated things spoken by diplomats. Makes for a good reading to get a hold of how Kissinger was being seen as behind the doors president during the term of Gerald Ford by Iran. And also covers, though not with a considerable depth, the beginnings of Iran’s nuclear power plants brokered with the Eisenhower administration for university research, and the roots of Iran’s nuclear capability which has garnered much media attention in recent times. Henry Kissinger comes out as a smart yet cunning diplomat. This makes me want to read his trilogy: The White House Years, Years of Upheaval and Years of Renewal. It will happen in the near future, for sure. One statement by the author that underlines the beginnings of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which hasn’t been covered in this book, but the roots growing out of the economic collapse are obvious) is: Luck was in short supply in Iran in the late 1970s.

I would recommend this book only to those who have read at least a couple of books on politics of Middle East written by historians, for they usually follow and chronicle events in a sequential manner, unlike journalists who oscillate between different eras and events. The book’s language is simple and easy to understand. Though most of this book is sequential, at a couple of places it does go back and forth. To conclude, this book can be treated as a primer on oil-politik in a world which is getting hungrier – for energy.

As a follow up for anyone who reads this book, a couple of reads on Iranian Revolution would make for a good understanding of its political scenario. I had read Guests of the Ayatollah back in 2007, but will definitely have to peruse at least one good read by a historian to add to my own appreciation of this complex slimy web.