Right now I’m reading this interesting book (facts-wise, not literature-wise) called Eminent Historians: their technology, their line, their fraud by Arun Shourie. I started reading the book with a bias; I’ve admired him since childhood.
The book explains, with full documentary evidence, how “prominent” historians like Romila Thapar and Bipin Chandra have been swindling the nation in the name of compiling historical archives. They have most of the times either not delivered, or have completely twisted the facts if they’ve delivered at all. This is a break in my fiction reading. I’m not enjoying the writing style though.
There’s an interesting thread going on on Alka’s blog regarding freedom of spending your money the way you want it. And here’s a ranter who does nothing but rant. I noticed how sardonically some people reacted to her post, and some of the reactions basically illustrate why our society — as far as India is concerned — is the way it is.
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Found this interesting link at Gangadhar’s films review blog. Ram Gopal Verma has made the Hindi version of Vladimir Nabokov’s classic Lolita. Another interesting fact is that Amitabh Bachchan is playing Professor Humbert Humbert. As an actor he should be able to do justice to the conflict of the character. I’ve always felt his talent has never been exploited by our talentless film-makers. I wish he had worked under someone like Guru Datt.
I plan to read the novel again. When I read it I mostly did so for the "sex" aspect and I wasn’t bothered much about the literature part of it. Now I’ll read it as a literary exercise. I wonder how honest Ramu has been with the subject considering the reservations that plague the Indian mindset when it comes to sex. I’ll’ share my thoughts about the book once I’ve re-read it.
You find this slogan very often hanging on the back sides of trucks and carriage automobiles in India. But here I’m talking about a travel website, OK Tata Bye Bye that invited travel bloggers to participate in a contest where a winner would be awarded Rs. 50,000 so that he or she can travel and then write about the experiences. My sister-in-law Mridula, who is an ardent travel blogger and quite famous in the blogsphere took part in the contest and got selected. I don’t know if it matters in the final selection but people have been going there and voicing their opinions. If you are interested in traveling, do go there and if feel like, drop in a few lines. My vote is obviously for her 
not because I’m related, but she seems to be the only blogger who should get selected.
This is something that everybody knows, but it cannot be repeated enough times that earth’s temperature is rising in leaps and bounds. People who negate this fact are either mental cases, or they are not worried about their children.
Global catastrophes due to the increasing temperatures are not a distant possibility, they are already knocking at our doors. The successive hurricanes in the US and Europe, the melting icecaps at the poles and the shrinking glaciers all over the world, the droughts and famines in Asia and Africa, the insanely altering weather patterns and climatic aberrations, they are all screaming precursors of something really nasty awaiting us due to global warming. The globe will either turn into an oven or a ball of ice. And all this might happen within the next 50 to 100 years.
The companies, organizations and governments partly or fully responsible for the increasing amount of greenhouse gases are the biggest enemies of life on this planet and they should be severely dealt with.
When I was young — at the age of 9-10 when I used to live with my grandparents in Ambala — I think I used to be a good storyteller. Telling stories was a good way of keeping the kids around me, who otherwise would run off to the maidan to play. Even if I went there, after a certain stage I couldn’t play their games.
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Today’s column by M.J. Akbar in The Asian Age echoed the exact sentiments I’ve been experiencing ever since the brouhaha over the World Cup started in our country. Akbar says it was humiliating to see young men performing a “yagna” praying for the victory of the Brazilian team. I wouldn’t go as far as terming it “humiliating” as we can have a favorite team, but it sums up our collective attitude.
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OK, Salman Rushdie seems to have lost his touch. When I was reading The Ground Beneath Her Feet I couldn’t reach the end of it — it was so uninteresting as a story. At least this time I could finish Shalimar the Clown. He still possesses his ingenious style I must admit, and amongst current writers nobody writes the way he does, and this adds a sad dimension to his literary genius. Add to this gems like Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh and you’ll know where I’m coming from. Once you know a writer can do so much better, once you know what he or she is capable of, it is crushing to see his or her slide into the pit of mediocrity. Salman Rushdie has always been my boyhood hero and I still hold him in high regard, but he is certainly not like Dostoyevsky, whom I read no matter how badly he has written.
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According to this article at CNET Microsoft has been losing millions of dollars sorting out cultural, lingual and political blunders. In some versions of Windows 95 it had wrongly shown some parts of Kashmir not belonging to India — it had to recall 200,000 copies of the software. It’s been gaffing in other countries too.
I’m currently reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog. Yes, I finally completed Shalimar the Clown this weekend — I’ll write about it this week.
I’ve just read 15 pages of Yellow Dog so I haven’t got much to say. I’ve been thinking of reading Amis for more than a year. I had no idea what the book was about; randomly selected it. Right now my take is that…well…I wonder why he is such a talked about author. The 15 pages have bored me so far, but I’ll read the whole book and only then I’ll say what I think about him, or about his book. Right now his pondering seems like a collection of incoherent, broken sentences.
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