There's something about Murakami

There has been quite some time since I was actually moved by a writer and his writings. The last may be Mitch Albon who after a stellar debut as "Tuesdays with Morrie" turned out to be a tad too disappointing. I have been reading Murakami these days, and there is something about him that has got me hooked. Maybe it has something to do with the genre, fantasy or magic realism as purists may prefer calling, but this fantasy in my opinion is not about fairy tales. I first read Murakami a year and a half back when "kafka on the shore" was talk of the town. The book had had a strong impression on me even then but it was only when I read "Blind Willow Sleeping Woman" that it got me into the thinking mode. I picked up "After Dark" after this and finished it in one go. His heroes are not sterotyped, they are non-conformists, high on culture, and neither naive nor cynical.

Murakami is an exprience to be savoured

Frank Miller is God

But say hello to Sarnath Banerjee.

..and did you hear about Samit Basu?

A Few Good Movies

The Departed

"I don't wanna be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me."

Whoa! What a movie. The movie leaves you simply breathless. I haven't seen a more revetting crime-thriller. A close-to-three-hours movie and you don't blink your eyes even once. The undercover cop, the mole in the police force, and the bloody gangster - all thrown at your face in one go. Expectedly, in keeping with the Sorcesese's penchant for making violent movies, this one is packed to the hilt with not only gory, bloody scenes, but so much profanity (even a Hindi gaali! which comfortably goes un-beeped by our censorwallahs..talk of India going global :) ) that after an hour or so of this one just stops getting shocked.DicapRio, Damon and Nicholson surpass all their previous performances.The movie has surprises in store at every turn, and certainly some at the end. If one has to sum it up – it's fast, it's slick (and sick!) and it's scary. It may not be a crime classic, but it's certainly one of the best crime movies I have ever seen.

Syriana

The four concurrent stories make it for a little recondite viewing. Neverthless, the common thread of corruption and power realted to the oil industry makes the subject all the more interesting. There is a jobless Pakistani who joins a fundamentalist goup in the end , an energy analyst , a CIA agant who is caught in his own web of deceipt and a lawyer who end up being his law firm's scapegoat . All starts and ends at an oil field and as you a leave the theatre the movie leaves you feeling blue . George Clooney is par excellence. Gaghan , the director, succeeds in driving home the message . Based on a book See No Evil.

A visit to home and a chance to catch up with movies i cannot squeeze onto my busy weekends. :)

The Motorcycle Diaries

I had read the book and eagerly wanted to watch the movie. For the uninitiated, the movie is in Spanish and has sub-titles in English which do fair enough justice to the movie. Different people had different view after reading Che's journey across the Latin continent. Some viewed it as the background that had set the breeding - ground for a bloodless revolution, the others about how he cared about the upliftmemt of the lepers and how their improvished state moved him enough to take up their cause. I viewed it , above all, as a story of two friends whose lives run parallel for a while and I was glad to see the way the movie ended; Alberto saying good-bye to Ernesto and how the epilogue in the end tell one Alberto gave up everything in the end to join his friend , Che in his revolution, later. The movie is a must-see.

Yun Hota to Kya Hota

Never before have I seen a Hindi movie where so many stories run tangentially with one another and get integrated in the end and the one common event that comes in at the climax simply leaves you gaping at your face! The cherished dream to make it to Uncle Sam's land, the land of aplenty falls flat at the face of many a characters in the end. A masterpiece from Naseeruddin Shah.

Upcoming movie reccos:

Stranger than Fiction
Eragon

Good reads lately:

The Search
Aruthur & George
Staying on

And I just became wiser, more mature( supposedly) and a year older.

October Redux

Kiran creates hullabaloo in the Booker-Land and there are talks of Arundhati finally working on her next novel. Read reviews here, here and this one by Pankaj Mishra.

Pamuk wins the Big One and India, is the apple of world's eye at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Darwin gets e-booked [ I loved his picture with the lap on his lap] and Monica Ali talks of Malgudi Days.

Also, "Elementary, my dear Watson" is not a Doyle's coinage and writers talk on Writing here[requires subscription].

Wiki may get forked into Citizendium [I hate when people accuse Jimmy Wales of being anti-credentialist]..and I am hooked on to the Amazon Wire.

A likely story indeed!

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested."

And there are some more which are meant to be quoted. Though it is difficult to choose some from the entire pantheon there are some which have left an indelible mark.

I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is 'Who in the world am I?' Ah, that's the great puzzle!
~Alice in Wonderland


If I found a job, a project, and idea or a person I wanted -- I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them -- just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept.
~The Fountainhead

To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I'.
~The Fountainhead

Summer Read Guides

This one is from the Business Standard.

And this one is from The Independent.

The "MUST" list

Work again had put me off blogging for some time.I travelled East last month, the entire
IIT-Kgp thing turned out to be a big dampener but then had a lot of fun.Coffee in Communit Bengal..and the Joshi-man.I think of Joshi and I don't stop laughing till my stomach aches.I missed seeing Cal with the other guys as I had my journey back from Kgp itself.

MUST-haves for the season:

The OUTLOOK TRAVELLER's fifth anniversary issue.The issue stocks in some breath-taking photographs from Raghu Rai and the ilk and some invigorating articles from the likes of Pankaj Mishra, Dalrymple et al.There is also an interesting piece on the Select Book Shop of Bangalore which to say the least is paradise for an incorrigible bookworm like me. The origins of this malady are clouded in my brain by the ravages of time but the intensity with which it envelops me amazes me to no end. It was Groucho Marx who once wistfully remarked, “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read”.That pretty much sums up all there is to say about man’s two best friends.There I go again, so I must stop here.

Read this on the Select Book Shop from The Hindu.

Digit, the computer magazine is also celebrating it's fifth anninversary and has packed classics like Charlie Chaplin's The Kid and Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much with a host of the regular paraphernalia.A good deal to say the least.

Also, Google is discovering Shakespeare in a new light.Check this out.Here comes, Google Shakespeare. And that brings me to the just gone-by Caferati, which was great fun.

Also check out, the just concluded Hay-on-wye Festival.

MUST-sees for the season:

Also watched Amelie and Lock , Stock and two Smoking Barrels.Hera Pheri's sequel is a complete rip-off of the latter.

And I am really looking forward to Suhasini Manirathnam's Reading between the Lines on Tuesday.

I am hooked on to YouTube these days and l leave you with this funny video from the site.

Happy Birthday Tagore!!

I stand mesmerized,
wondering how you sing
your notes hold the world spellbound -
the light of your music
lights up my universe.







(song 22 of Bengali Gitanjali, song 3 in the English.)

Travel.No Lonely Planet.

The best travel tales are...

The Penguin book of Indian Journeys

This brings together travel peices by the best. From Mark Tully's journey to Kumbh at Allahabad to R K Narayan's leisurely tour of Karnataka. The anthology brings together interesting travel tales from Vikram Seth to Khushwant singh and many others take you to places as familiar or remote as Jaipur and Ladakh.

Maximum City:Bombay Lost and found

Suketu does not call this city Mumbai.

This doesn't strictly fall into the category of travelogues but takes on Mumbai by interviewing dominant personalities of Mumbai. The book moves smoothly from the remote chawls of Mumbai to tours of Bollywood studios and stars an entir pantheon of politicans , bar-dancers, gangsters and even an engineer who gave up his lucrative career to become a poet.

Long Way Round:Chasing shadows across the world

If you are an ardent biker you will love this book though, even otherwise you will. Actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel the world around on their bikes.The book hilarious at times is a description of their take on the different cultures of the world they come across as they bike around. The book is full of pictures and maps.The journey has also been canned into a TV series and is aired on Discovery T&L on Sunday nights.

The Age of Kali:Indian Travels & Encounters

This is Dalrymple's take on the issues affecting the subcontinent.The Age of Kali symbolises dark times of lawless violence and political corruption.The book is dark as the theme suggests and includes his encounters with the LTTE in Sri Lanka and politicans in Bihar as he travles the sub-continent.

Road Fever

This one is for all adventure travel freaks.The exuberent and author of many-a-travel-books, Tim Cahill drives in a car from one end of the world to the other.The book concentrates more on the Americas and also details on the preaparation plans made by him for achieving this Guiness feat. On the hindsight, the book lacks in pictures and maps.

And then there are books by Bill Bryson and books that do not exactly fall into a category of travelogues but the city the story is set in plays an imprtant role and moves with the story like Khushwant Singh's Delhi and Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics.

And who can forget the magnificent Kerouac's On The Road and Guvera's Motorcycles Diaries.

How Kavya Got In, Got Caught and Got off the Shelf!!

Chicklit Nightmare!! Kavya Vishwanatha's debut has fallen flat on her face. What is worse is the so called euphemesised "internalisation" has led to her books being withdrawn by Penguin across the shelfs here.

We all owe our creative influences to soemone or the other but this kind of hideous plagirism does not stand Kavya in a good position. what is interesting to note is, McCafferty's books which have been "internalised" and Kavya's novel both share the same author. And that also reminds of how once someone had told me how most of the books floating in the market are ghost-written.In fact, there are questions even on how Kavya actually broke into Harvard.

TOI was quick as usual to put the entire scoop on their front page andi remember very well it was TOI again which had borken the story of Kavya's jackpot on their front page again.

What is there to be watched out now is if Little Brown will ensue with its contract to publish Kavya's second book.

The Harvard Crimson was the first to break the news about two weeks back.

There are more interesting takes on this here by Gladwell and here by kitabkhana.

PS:HOMGKGWGL is at number eleven on the Amazon's bestsellers list and at the numero uno position in the Crossoword's bestsellers chart.

Kitab Festival: An afterthought

Not too long ago when Naipaul had won the Nobel, Times of India had an instant poll on how many had read a Naipaul before his getting the Nobel. Interestingly, more than the majority had responded in the negative. I know these instant polls give weird sporadic results but somehow they do dish out some bitter truth that reflects the whims and fancies of the Indian junta.

The just concluded Hindustan Times Kitab Festival is a case in the same effect. The festival brought together an entir jamboree of authors, writers, journalists, columnists to discuss the “effect of South Asian Diaspora on literature in the subcontinent” and claimed to be for everyone. And to add to the glamour quotient they had Goldie Hawn amidst those literatures’ and intelligentsia to give a talk on here recent spiritual memoir.

“It’s non-bureaucratic and open to public.”

The only good thing about Kitab was the fact that it was not a sarkari festival like the Neemrana fest where even the media was just allowed to press an ear to the keyhole. But still why it didn’t had a U R Ananthamurthy or a Mahasweta Devi who would have connected better with the audience is open to question. And this brings us to the more pertinent question of us having read any book in an Indian language other than English. Are these festivals aimed at
fiction-writers-turned-social-commentators “pandering to the West”?

An article in Business Standard eulogises Kitab as, “Kitab allowed authors and readers to meet outside an invisible cordon sanitaria. It made conversations happen.” Another blog confesses how the best conversations happened outside the discussions rooms.

The idea, it seems, has arrived but is yet to take the shape. Another article in Outlook talks about how a hajjar litfests happen in the UK every year yet the most popular of them is the ticket-ed Hay Festival held in a small town on the Welsh border. Just a cursory visit to the website of the festival speaks volumes of how perfectly is the festival marketed and how big a success it is every year even though it is a ticket-ed event. Selling tickets may not be the best idea to make the litfests popular but it has tasted success and has become a trend in the West. And then there are cities like Bangalore where I have observed there is a culture of paying for entertainment and tickets will sell well.

So, let the ink stain the papers and let conversations happen.

Chennai LANDMARK-ed

Before I had set forth on my sojourn to Andamans, we did a brief stay-over at Chennai and a visit to Landmark was undoubtedly, inevitable. And believe me, I made a visit to all their three stores: Nungambukkam, Spencer Plaza and the latest one at the Victorian Chennai Citi Center (it’s so new that you may even smell fresh paint). And no wonder that I spent a fortune there so much so that it is difficult to describe the expression on my mother’s face when I told her of my book – shopping. I even had plans to visit The Fountainhead but cancelled it after this lat minute crisis.

And what did I buy:

American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
Levy’s 30th book, he literally speed-writes and writes interestingly which it has to be when a Frenchman travails America coast to coast. And he did that because The Atlantic Monthly invited him to travel around the country during the election year of 2004 and to reflect on what he saw, in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 classic Democracy in America.

He travels in a typical Kerouac-style and like Tocqueville, whose original mission was to study the American prison system. He chats with Americans of all sorts and writes the postscripts on the contemporary America’s failures.

A theatergoer’s guide to SHAKESPEARE
Long been a desire to watch Shakespeare incarnate on stage, the book serves the purpose well. The sketches the author has drawn make the experience of a performance more enjoyable, and increases the appreciation for the breathtaking scale of Shakespeare's achievement.

A year in Provence
Bought this book to know more about the French culture. A pleasant surprise, the book is a tempting depiction of rural France and all its glorious food, festivals and residents. A Year in Provence is written in monthly chapters and tracks the days in the life of the English author, Peter Mayle, and his wife who have purchased a home in a small village in Provence, France.

The Penguin book of Indian Journeys
Travel memoirs are my latest fixation. This one has got everyone from Seth to Dalrymple and Pankaj Mishra to Arundhati Roy. It examines the petty and the large-hearted, the honest and the hypocritical, the smug, the defeated and the insecure . . .

For Reasons of State
This with a foreword from Roy, includes Chomsky’s articles on the war in Vietnam and the "wider war" in Laos and Cambodia, an extensive dissection of the Pentagon Papers, reflections on the role of force in international affairs. Highly recommended for those who want an education on Vietnam and Chomsky’s political work.

Stories from India
A compendium of Kipling’s very interesting tales set in India. Makes a very exhilarating read and transports you to the, then times.

American Notes
Having read almost all of Dickens, this was a must-buy especially when you realize that some things haven't changed about America. Nevertheless, true or not, is a great book by Dickens. Reading it you get a great sense of the author as well as how he observed the world. His humor really shines through, as does his familiarity.

Finnegan’s Wake
This came as a strong recommendation from here.This was an experimental work by James Joyce. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Joyce’s strange polyglot idiom of puns is intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures.

The Penguin History of ECONOMICS
A core book. A very clear, reliable and readable history of economic thought from the ancient world to the present day. From Homer to Marx to John Stuart Mill, the author shows how to keep your Keynsians from your post-Keynsians and New Keynsians.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
This one was long due especially after this.
Who can forget Audrey Hepburn’s immortal portrayal of Holly Golightly! I won't give away the two major twists in the novel, because I want you to read it, cheer for her, and cry with her, without knowing what will happen.

The LIST..

My best of 2005..

1. The Kite Runner

An intriguing story of two friends set in the times of a political turmoil.Highly recommended by Oprah Book Club and hailed by critics all-over as one of the best books of the year.

2. FREAKONOMICS:The Rogue Economist explains the hidden side of everything

Don't get misled by the title..i know eco is considered to be one of the sexier sciences.The book actually has nothing to do with economics perse other than the writer's credits of being a noted economics Professor in an ivy-league school.The book had concocted of interesting observations from the author and his fellow writer , a NYT journo..though more true to the American context.

3. Two Lives

Seth's magnum-opus was finally out and he was here on a whirlwind tour of the country.However, this tale of his uncle and aunt set in the times of Second World War did not impress me as much as his other bible , A Suitable Boy.

4. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Rowling was back and the cash registers were set ringing again..a darker episode of the Potter saga, turned out to be the most disappointing of all episodes, though perfect for a celluloid-adaption.

5.The World is Flat

This one's from another NYT journo..read it for an interesting and euphemistic re-telling of the Indian IT success story

6.Blink

This one was about "cognitive consciousness"..making snap decisions and thinking without the power of thinking as the book said it.

..and I also read

On the Road

Kerouac's memorable cross-country odyssey..a tribute to the Flower Power movement..voted by the Brit UNCUT as the most important work of the century

Arion and the Dolphin

Seth's libretto..I finally had the chance to lay my hands on it..written in a true Victorian style..an interesting read

The Fountainhead

I have read the book and I re-read it..I just cant think of compiling any favourites' list without including this book.

An Equal Music

"And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell,
where there shall be no cloud, nor sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light, no noise nor silence, but one equal music, no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession,no foes nor friends, but one equal communion and identity, no ends nor beginnings,
but one equal eternity."


~John Donne