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Shashi Warrier

Of serial killers and golden oldies

There was a gem of a book in the mail recently -- Mindhunter by John Douglas with Mark Olshaker. Douglas was with the FBI's Investigative Services Unit, offering mainly psychological profiles of serial offenders: rapists and murderers. He is the one who inspired the character Crawford in Thomas Harris' Silence Of The Lambs.

Reading about a science as it develops is always exciting. Douglas might have been in law enforcement, but it's clear from this book that his attitude has always been, in some ways, that of a scientist: he's always worked hard to figure things out. In his book, Douglas traces the history of the FBI's criminal profiling programme, run by the Behavioural Sciences Unit (renamed ISU because Douglas wanted to take the BS out of Behavioral Science) and the uncanny success of the unit in profiling and locating criminals based on their actions at the scene of the crime. This unit was particularly useful in tracking serial criminals -- killers, rapists, etc -- and was accepted as valid legal procedure not long ago.

In between is a sort of professional autobiography, including a case in which he got both a letter of censure and a letter of commendation! The job cost him his health -- he had a near-fatal stroke due to stress and overwork -- and his marriage, but he says it has been worth it.

It's not often that I get two books in the non-fiction category in one month that are worth writing about. This month's other book was Drucker on Asia, a dialogue between management guru Peter Drucker and Japanese tycoon-entrepreneur Isao Nakauchi, who founded one of Japan's largest supermarket chains.

This is a dialogue between two wise old men -- one a thinker and the other a doer -- who, between the two of them manage, in the course of this small, under-200-pages book, to cover a surprising amount of ground on the future of business and management. They cover change, knowledge and so on.

But the best bits are those in which Drucker talks about the extent of change and about the seven experiences that gave him a vision to work for. The basic thing about change, he says, is that it has lengthened the learning process. A couple of hundred years ago, you knew everything you needed to run your business by the time you reached 18. Now, that's not enough. You have to find a way to keep learning.

His way is to pick up a subject -- finance, Japanese history, music, whatever -- and learn about it for three or four years which, while not long enough to give one mastery over a subject, is enough to introduce one to the fundamentals. There's not enough room to list the seven experiences and they're narrated in his autobiography anyway.

One of the things I liked best about this book is that is says nothing about India which, regardless of what we might say in India, is roughly indicative of our true stature in world trade and manufacturing. We have one fortieth of the total land in the world and, on it, one sixtieth the income and one sixth the population of the world. Our population, given our productivity, is more an indication of the size of our national begging bowl than of our influence in world affairs. Would that this were not true, but it is and it's only if we accept it that we can work our way out of this situation.

From Peter Drucker to Charles Dickens is quite a jump, but I happened to reread Nicholas Nickleby. Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story based on the fact that the name of the devil appears thrice in the complete title of this book (Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens: Nick, as the old Nick for Satan, appears twice and then there is Dickens, which is another nickname for him).

It has some devilish characters, of course. The basic plot is not far different from a Hindi movie plot from 20 years ago, but its treatment is much more sensitive than one would imagine. What stands out is Dickens' calibre as a storyteller: his work was so well-appreciated that people waited with bated breath for the next installment of the story when it was serialised.

But it's not only the narration that counts. Dickens wrote in picturesque detail about poverty, without often getting maudlin over it. The poor man is not invariably a saint struggling to survive the depredations of his rich neighbour. Introduced in this book, by the way, are two characters that Wodehouse used often in his incomparable similes: the Cheeryble brothers.

A second classic was The BFG (Big Friendly Giant) by Roald Dahl. Dahl's tale for children covers the abduction of a young girl by a semi-literate giant who collects dreams in bottles and is often guilty of harmless malapropisms and spoonerisms: his favourite spoonerism being Dahl's Chickens for Charles Dickens.

The BFG happens to live not far from nine giants, eight times bigger and a thousand times crueller. The little girl and the BFG, with the aid of the Queen of England and her army and air force, capture the nasty giants and leave them in a pit from which they will never escape. There's a surprise ending which I won't reveal here but it will delight any reader with a large element of the child in his make-up.

Also in was Robin Cook's Contagion. Cook's books (not to be confused with cookbooks) have a recurrent theme: that big business drives medicine, not the Hippocratic oath. He's flogged this horse a bit too much. However, Contagion is far more readable than some earlier ones like Mindbend which, in particular, I found disappointing and overly like a bad science-fiction movie, with the evil businessman putting electrodes into doctors' heads to alter their minds.

Contagion is certainly better than Mindbend, but the repetitiveness of the theme puts one off. I wish Cook would lay off the anti-big-business theme for a while and write on a new theme: he's proved he can.

Illustration: Dominic Xavier