Ramiz Alkhishin, the authors alter ego, is a grocer. He has a passion for a life that is as independent as possible from its surroundings. To him the trendy place to be in is the one to avoid, while the traditional road to follow is the one to by-pass.
You may have met him before in his books: Fortune Cookies; Sketches; The Bazaar; The Balcony; The Lobby; The Tango of Gossip; Why Me, The Smiling Owl , Whispering Molecules and The Broken Horoscope.
In his eleventh book, in the series of books dealing with human nature, entitled The Gossiping Numbers, author Raad Chalabi through forty six stand-alone fictional dialogues, addresses the issue of the vulnerability of pure logic to the emotional needs of humans. As with all his earlier books the author provides no answers but only raises questions.
The theme behind The Gossiping numbers is that logic is an irreplaceable tool that guides us onto the path that allows us to reach a desired destination. The problem, as the author sees it, is that a logically-defined path usually gets blocked by our emotional needs. In addition our initially desired destination rarely continues to be so as life presents alternative options.
Numbers are seen by many as the personification of logic. The book reflects on the question as to whether communicated numbers are truly un-emotional as we all like to think or are they, like all else that we interact with, suitably managed by us to meet our desired outcome? The author leaves it to the reader to reflect on the dialogues in the book and reach his or her own conclusions.
