Words and Music

If I wanted to be romantic, I’d say recent events and encounters instigated this search for the lovely and the beautiful; on a more mundane level, we’d call it retail therapy. Either way, my hunger was assuaged somewhat on recent jaunts to the stores where, despite this ever-growing list of books to read, I splurged on…

Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir
I had read The Alchemist and found it to be too mystical to be relevant, but I’d wanted this title for some time now, intrigued by the plot of an author whose beloved disappeared, perhaps with another man, and who now has the chance to find out what happened with his lost love. The narrative is poetic, the narrator (so far) is engaging, and the story is tugging me forward through the pages. I do face distractions though because I also added, to my bookpile..

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
Another translated novel in the bookbag, and a book that has been long-read by more literary friends of mine. I’d never had the inclination to pick it up, until now, when a chance encounter with another passage in another book (I do not remember which) brought my feet to this title. “Essential reading for the human race,” so touts the NYT on the back cover, and in the bookstore, my eyebrows shot up. The curiousity’s piqued, and as always, it overcomes reservations.

Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon
I’d read and enjoyed her first, The Lovely Bones, a tale which haunted me long after the last line was over, not because of the horror that lay trapped within her suburban setting, but because of the journey one of the book’s characters went through. It’s sobering, when events shake us and alter the way we look at the world. You cannot get any more sensational a follow-up than I-killed-my-Mother-and-now-let-me-tell-you-why, and the much-quoted opening sentence “When all is said and done, killing my Mother came easily” makes such an enticing bait, I am more than willing to be reeled in.

Carlos Fuentes’s This I Believe
The third translated Latin American novel in the bookbag, this is a collection of essays on subjects that range from Amor to Zurich (in true A to Z manner!) by celebrated Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. I have tasted Amor and am skipping over to Children, Globalisation, Women, Reading, Freedom, Happiness, Education, Jealousy, Reading, Sex and Shakespeare next, though not necessarily in that order. In Amor, Fuentes touches also on politics: ”In political life, it is possible to convince oneself that one is acting out of love for a community, while driving that community into destruction and inspiring hatred from within and without“, before weaving through the more familiar streets of passion, desire and the very necessity (as well as frailty) of love. It’s a rich essay – not one I can digest in one sitting, in fact, so I look forward to lush meals of his thoughts, his words, one morsel at a time.

My search for the beautiful did not end at the bookstore. Music, as they say, has the power to soothe and inspire, too, and a trip to the MPO resulted in two bookings, one of what promises to be a fun day of dance and music (with kids in tow) and another of technical mastery and soaring piano music. Both are in May and June next year but having the tickets in my bag made me happier. This guy’s collection also ended up in my shopping bag – and I regard this as one of the best music purchases I’ve made this year (admittedly, I do not make many).

It was an uplifting trip, a revisit to the world of words and music, and a lyrical reminder, one hopes, of the good the world and its people still has to offer.

Filed under: At the Stores, Books, Music, Personal Note

Women Leaders: Not Hot

So who says the world is not biased against female leaders?

In this Washington Post article, “The label slapped on top women“, the writer contends that female leaders get unfairly labelled as “ruthless”, “conniving” and “mannish”, not because they have to be to elbow their way to the top in a man’s world, but because of ingrained beliefs of the nature of men, women and leadership.

“The roots are in stereotypes about women, men and leaders,” says Alice Eagly, a social psychologist at Northwestern University. “Culturally, women are the nicer sex, and men are more aggressive go-getters. Leaders are generically in our culture more like men than women in the way people think about leaders.“

Experiments show that women vying for leadership roles are automatically assigned two labels. The first is to be seen as nice and warm, but incompetent; the second is to be seen as competent but unpleasant. Women stuck with label A cannot be leaders, because the stereotype of leadership is incompatible with incompetence. Women who become leaders get stuck with label B, because if leadership is unconsciously associated with manliness, cognitive consistency requires female leaders be stripped of the caring qualities normally associated with women.

Judging from the tales of my female-manager friends, I would agree. As a female, women are often expected to be “nice” and “soft”, and when they exercise authority and act in the way male bosses do, they are automatically assigned descriptors such as “over-ambitious” and “ruthless”. Both males and females react with the same prejudice against females in authority positions, the article finds.

In a recent experiment, (New York University organisational psychologist Madeline) Heilman asked a group of volunteers to evaluate two leaders, a man and a woman. She devised two descriptions of executives with roughly similar qualifications.

Without the volunteers’ knowledge, Heilman regularly interchanged the names of the leaders in the descriptions. For each description, half the volunteers thought they were hearing about an executive named James, while the other half heard exactly the same description applied to an executive called Andrea. The volunteers were asked which leader seemed less likeable, and whether they would prefer James or Andrea as a boss. Nearly three-quarters said they thought Andrea was less likeable than James. More than four-fifths chose James as a boss. Women showed the same bias as men: Andrea seemed less likeable merely because she was a female leader.

Heilman’s finding replicates the conclusions of other studies: that the reason people see a highly competent woman as less likeble than a man with precisely the same qualifications is that such women are automatically perceived to have lost their feminine, caring side.

Filed under: Malaysiana, Newsprint, Women, Work & Productivity

Musical Interlude

Exhaustion’s snuffing the muse, and although there’s a lot going on, I’m out of words. So… 

I’ve been hearing this song on the radio lately, and it seems peculiarly appropriate.

Filed under: Personal Note