your thoughts and ideals can only be as rich as the language you think in
just read…
bleak house, charles dickens, 1853 – a satirical take on the english legal system that is built in its entirity only to satisfy its own interests, this book is still relevant in most of the british colonies which inherited the british judicial system. a horde of distinct characters that stand up and contrast each other in their behaviour, class, ways, means and even language bring the plot to life and keep the reader interested with the various sub-plots centered around the main theme of rot that eats away into the defendants’ souls as they wait for justice from the big wheel of the establishment that sucks them dry. with plot, relevance and characters so rich, the 1000 pages (my biggest book) were not a big hurdle to surpass. dickens kneads, spins, knots and swirls the english language as he sees fit. oh the humour, did i mention the humour? with a title like ‘bleak house’, i was surprised how witty most of the first half was. 9.5/10
norwegeian wood, haruki murakami, 1987 – this is a straight-up fiction sans the usual surrealism and fantasy of murakami. the usual themes of loss, isolation, romance, revolution, friendships are adequately represented while death is a central theme that acts as a catalyst for character transformation through out the book. the cover of the book and also the movie poster present it as a romantic piece of work, which while being true, does not do justice to the other themes. there is more romance with the concept of loss in this book than there is romance between people. one of my biggest problems with this book and with murakami in general is that his characters dont feel unique either between books or even within the same book. this works to his advantage in a surreal fiction but in something straight-forward as this, its a major letdown. 7.8/10
foma gordeyev, maxim gorky, 1899 – read this in tamil. i found the translation poor and the book a major letdown because of that. sometimes i wonder if tamil as a language is meant for expressing philosophical thoughts and ideas. the story in itself was ok but thats hardly what you are looking for in reading russian fiction from its golden period. 5.0/10
1Q84, haruki murakami, 2011 – this is the dreamy, surreal, seemingly pointless murakami i’ve grown to love from the wind-up bird chronicle. after finishing the 1000 pages, you still feel famished to devour more of this world, this world of the two moons. 9.0/10
dandelion wine, ray bradbury, 1957 – this is the kind of book i have always wanted to write. the author captures the essense of growing up, contemplating the meaning of life as a 10 year old, of grandma’s feasts, of summer lawns, apple trees, new tennis shoes, of ice-creams and soda fountains, fireflies, of the lovable quirky neighbours and of their death and lives. each day of summer is bottled up like wine from the dandelions in the yard. nothing is left when the summer is over but a batch of bottles in the cellar, one for each day of summer, each numbered, seemingly alike but distinct like snow flakes. 8.9/10
katha upanishad, 5th century bce – death and rot has been a central theme in all the books i read this time, so what better way to finish it off than with a dialogue with yama, the god of death. the translation by s. radhakrishnan is fabulous and provides possible references of these scriptures in buddhism and also of other famous works that came much later. i was surprised to learn that the chariot allegory of senses as the horses, the intellect as the driver and the mind as the reins and the self as the passenger has been used by plato as well. it feels a little repetetive in english probably because we read it as a prose but in sanskrit it was perhaps intended as poetry. lovely read but pick up a good translation – 8.5/10
i could see the world through this glass. this clear glass that once showed me others is now coated and all it mirrors now is me.
desire, for hire, would tire a shire – joyce
remembered this line from finnegan’s wake randomly today and couldn’t stop smiling
everything is magic when reason takes a backseat
when she asked him who do you write these for, he told her these were written for the bin. these snippets were to belong to one coherent tale but what coherence can there be when his life itself lacked it. so here they are, like floating shreds of torn sheets, devoid of all relevance. if the bits were coalesced they would still lack cohesion for such is life.
he could never see the finish line and made it a habit to run himself tired and always had to be told he had won as he was face down and fainting
open your mouth and speak they say, i know a man who would disagree. he was once asked to open his mouth wide by his dentist and it got stuck. he has had his mouth wide open since, with his tongue sticking out and a nice white cavity-less set of teeth exposed for all to see wherever he went. the good thing about it though is that no one can say open your mouth and speak to him as it would be redundant
like oil and water but ought to be oil on canvas
…
you hear prejudice, you know where it comes from and you say nothing. you hear bigotry, you see it is to stir a reaction and is not precisely meant to be so, you say nothing. you sniff jealousy, you isolate its source, you dont feel the need to react. you pin random acts of violence, radical viewpoints, staunch beliefs to upbringing, misinformation, misleading and the gaps in well-being. to you all vices have a reason and the reason never eludes you, for reasoning is your forte.
of feudal systems, communism, capitalism, you see it, you see why it is, you have nothing better to install in its place. you see the pitfalls in your own methods. you realize these vices are an integral part of ‘progress’ if there can be any. you can only do one thing. let things be. so many conflicting things to be said that its better to be saying nothing at all. is this the real holier than thou way or is this being in denial and calling yourself an existentialist?
at grandma’s place
saw one big swarm of locusts rise from the thicket late last evening. they emerged at almost a few thousands per second and kept doing so for about 30 mins. the sound of their wings brushing the bushes as they rose sounded like the pitter-patter of rain on leaves. the sky in twilight with a full moon in the corner was filled for as high as one could see. the swarm over the village resembled angry bees from a disturbed town-sized beehive. grandpa says they signify the end of rains. when i grew up as a kid here, i remember a tribe which has since gone extinct that used to eat locusts (apparantly common in several cultures). the rice grains have been dipped overnight in a tank of water. by tonight they will germinate and tomorrow they will be sown. until then there is a book to read and all india radio for company. am listening to the shortwave radio and deluding myself to have gone back in time.
of aliens discovering our remains, when we are extinct
“And when they found our shadows
Grouped around the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry no feelings left
This species has amused itself to death”
its easier to move in fiction where facts aren’t suffocating
am not here to tell anyone how to live their lives. how can i, when i myself dont have a clue how to live mine. you think you have a clue? please keep it to yourself and go mumbling ‘my precious’ because that’s exactly what it might do to you. a last cry of ‘precious’ perhaps beckons you as you fall over the abyss. i did not ask your advice, now dont ask for mine. i dont think morals are for morons, so please dont think morons are ones that dont have morals and call me one.
idea for a kindle accessory
while the kindle is a good device to own, i have my reasons to have not bought one for myself yet. i like the feel of holding a book, the texture and smell of paper,the character of the book, the covers, the way each one weighs different and how the typeset varies between books and prints. that said, there are somethings that a kindle offers which i totally love. the dictionary integration is pretty awesome. how often do you find yourself wanting to look up a word while reading? the ability to annotate in terms of highlighting, bookmarking and taking notes is something which is nice on the kindle and the recent ones also have the ability to share them with other users on the net.
to fill the gap for users like me that dont want to own the kindle but would like some of the kindle features, it might make sense if there was an accessory which worked like handheld OCR device (preferably in the shape of a highlighter pen) that has a small screen for the dictionary function. if this device can also allow highlighting text for sharing on a computer via wifi or usb (i have often wanted to quote from a book but have had to type the whole thing down), it would be very nifty.
amazon seems to have launched a social network for kindle users for recommending books, sharing notes, discuss books etc., a device such as this will only improve their user base.
just read…
in cold blood, truman capote, 1966 – everything about this was impeccable. the documenting of events, portrayal of the killers, the victims, the people, the law. the way capote distances himself from the events and does a role purely as someone documenting events is what made this so interesting. it is very human in the way minor events of the day of the killing were captured that it makes you a witness to the slayings. 8.5/10
hullaballoo at the guava orchard, kiran desai, 1998 – weak and light. not enough subject matter to fill up a novel. could have and should have been a short story. 6.5/10
perdido street station, china mieville, 2000 – too much fantasy and soft-sci and too less hard-sci for my taste. could have easily been 200 pages lesser. needed a lot of editing to make this tight and interesting. unbelievable imagination though and the writing was top class for a scifi. 7.2/10
the razors edge, somerset maugham, 1944 – maugham is one of my favorite writers and he doesnt let me down in this. not as heavy as of human bondage and not as light in terms of content as cakes and ale but somewhere in between. maugham’s exceptional observational powers of human behavior and his ability to put it down on paper without prejudices made this a breezy read. revived my interest in the upanishads. 8.7/10
the idiot, fyodor dostoevsky, 1868 – i was highly impressed by dostevsky’s crime and punishment and the way in which he could write from the mind of the protagonist the way woolf does. i was a bit let down in the beginning that the style in this was not the same but the ideas and content more than made up for that and proved his versatility as a writer. left me lost in thought for over a month. very few books i rate 10. if this cant get one, none can. 10/10
never let me go, kazuo ishiguro, 2005 – impressed by the remains of the day, i chose this. was not let down but found the book a little too visually hollywood-ish with the fade away while the narrator closes types oscar ending. very very impressive nevertheless. 8.0/10
where is the affordable entertainment?
there were a couple of poor north indian construction/masonry workers in the queue ahead of me. i had no plans of catching a movie. i was pulled in by the hype of mankatha only in terms of the number of ads on sun network channels. the guy ahead had two hundred rupee notes folded in four. he and his friend wanted to watch salman khan’s bodyguard. the woman in the counter said they had to pay 560 for two tickets. they did not understand english and did not have that kind of money to spend on entertainment. they tried to see if there was something cheaper they could afford but there was nothing and they moved away embarassed pretending they received a call. i wished i could pay for them but the thought came much later and i got my tickets and moved away. the movie i saw was intolerable and me and my friend skipped it and got out around the half way stage. i wish i had paid for them so they were entertained before another week of tireless physical labour.
the movie ticket prices have become highly unaffordable with the multiplexes pushing the individual movie screen theaters out of business. where are the 100 Rs. movie tkts?
crime and punishment
they come in twos on bikes with the slick riding frontman and a swift handed pillion rider snatching objects ranging from briefcases, handbags, cellphones from pedestrians and most of all gold jewelry right off the necks of unsuspecting women. the action is completed with such well-oiled smoothness that one hardly recognizes what happened before the motorbike flees the scene leaving a shocked victim stroking the neck devoid of the ornament.
in this instance, the manoeuvre has a glitch, the frontman hit a slippery bit of asphalt after the snatching was done owing to the monsoon rains and the fast spinning wheels slipped with the bike dragging the pillion rider a good 30 feet before trapping him under as the rider fled without a scratch. the trapped robber suffered severe bruises all over his left side and was presumably in severe shock.
it is quite possible that in this case, the victim, a woman in her early 50s realized what happened and screamed earlier than the rider expected and that lead to him panicking leading to the crash. that the incident was carried out with such nerve in broad daylight in a crowded market did not help matters either. a crowd gathered quickly around the bike and thrashed the snatcher with their fists, footwear and kicks. it is impossible for the man to have even recovered from the accident which he survived barely.
he was beaten to a point where he was barely conscious, dragged to the corner in the street and left there without water until the law took over. he was visibly shivering, curled up into a ball and bleeding all over. it is impossible to understand who is the victim and which is the crime when the punishment is out of proportion.
4 am
in the wee hours of the morning
with your head limp on the pillow,
sleepless and face down, pining;
its neither yesterday nor tomorrow,
but the now, that stings like a wasp
why delhi belly gave me a delhi belly
I have to put this down so I make myself clear on why I found this movie ‘ok at best’. The movie was funny in parts, however, it was sprinkled with a whole lot of disgusting potty humor. It made it seem as if, the only way we can have a mature indian audience is by ‘shocking’ them by their definition of shocking which involves using a generous sprinkling of expletives, excessive farting, showing stool samples, hairy butt cracks, toilets in close-up etc. I wonder why a close-up of someone scratching his hairy armpit or picking his nose wasn’t included. if talking about lesbianism, oral sex, infidelity in casual fashion is supposed to make your movie sound ‘hip’ or cliches like shoving a lighted dynamite up someone’s rearside funny, i beg to differ.
movies like snatch and lock, stock from which this borrows a lot like the explosion part, boris the blade xerox russian, the paper bag used as mask etc. were funny not because they were crass. the themes of spoofing 80s b-movies, stylish (not any more) camera angles on stupid goons have all been overdone for more than a decade now, so last thing we want is another decade of these dated themes replicated. 6.5/10
you dont name yourself machete and go carrying around a mallet as your weapon of choice
just read…
too many to review so just rating :-/
one hundred days of solitude, gabriel garciz marquez – 8.3/10
wind in the willows, kenneth grahame – 7.5/10
dune, frank herbert – 8.0/10
hurricane vaij, (?) – 5.0/10
the island of dr. moreau, hg wells – 8.1/10
the remains of the day, kazuo ishiguro – 9.5/10
do android dream of electric sheep, philip k. dick – 8.0/10
a room with a view, em forster – 7.8/10
my name is red, orhan pamuk – 7.4/10
alice in wonderland, lewis caroll – 8.3/10
the remains of the day
a squeezed orange peel, a few leftover crusts and crumbs of bread, an empty teapot and some egg shells on a tray waiting to be cleared; the remains. to me that was essentially the protagonist’s life. a life where nothing was had, which was spent in its entirety clearing someone else’s remains. the dawn of slow realization on a road trip of 6 days in the english countryside where he finds himself, reminiscing the remains, finding what little remains of himself, what remains of his day in the twilight of his life, is very beautifully captured. a breezy read that will make you smile at the excellent character portrayal, warts and all. it reminded me of lynch’s straight story and bergman’s autumn sonata for different reasons, the former since it involves a senior in twilight reminiscence on a road trip to end a decade old feud and the latter for its man and servant loyalty despite all the flaws of the master. i will put this on a similar pedestal to maugham’s ‘of human bondage’. 9.5/10
just read…
far from the madding crowd, thomas hardy (1874) – the bold and beautiful bathsheba everdene, brave and honest gabriel oak, charming and reckless sergeant troy, the mad and obsessed boldwood and the serene and indifferent village of weatherbury will draw you in and keep you there till the last page is turned when you will again return to the din of the metropolis. a bit slow paced and hardy’s style needs a bit of getting used to. 8.0/10
heart of darkness, joseph conrad (1902) – not often that a movie can outshine the experience of reading a book but in this case, apocalypse now which is based on the book was a better experience. i had seen the movie first so maybe it took away the pleasure of visualizing the pages. short and engaging nevertheless. 8.2/10
cakes and ale, somerset maugham (1930) – it was a strange coincidence that this book was partly based on the life of thomas hardy. couldn’t help but delve into the mind of hardy as portrayed by maugham and fiddle to find where his characters for ‘far from the madding crowd’ came up from. this might not be as good as ‘of human bondage’ but it comes pretty close. loved it for its take on lit snobbery and dissections of human behavior in simple and detached observations. a quote from the book — “It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine, unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind” – 8.9/10
to the lighthouse, virginia woolf (1927) – as with mrs. dalloway, i had to read a page and re-read it and ruminate and wonder how it was possible to deliver something that can need all of one’s senses to gather in about 50 words precisely placed and still decry in the same text about how words are a farce and use of language should be banned. you will be left overawed and gaping – 9.5/10
the road, cormac mccarthy (2006) – a lot has been said about how this is earth-shattering and haunting but i found it to be an average apocalyptic tale. the exchanges between the boy and the man were dauntingly repetitive and very similar to stephen king’s gunslinger. there were some passages which were very well written but it lacked substance and subtlety and the excessive usage of the word ‘ash’ was very irksome – 7.0/10
the wind-up bird chronicle, haruki murakami (1997) - in the context of movies, people get dissatisfied when all ends dont neatly tie up. we do have some directors like lynch or the 60s new wave directors like antonioni or fellini who have done the contrary and gotten away with it. it came up in a discussion regarding movies that if there is a gun in the corner, it simply must fire. for murakami, there can be a gun, a red hat or a baseball bat mentioned over a 100 times in the text for no apparent reason in the end. it is gripping nevertheless mostly because you are expecting things to if not tie up nicely, to at least make sense through symbolism. is it ok to weave unreal characters in unreal plots in the name of just surrealism? ‘the wind-up bird chronicle’ felt like a collection of shorts sticking to a common theme that were then strung up together through the common thread into a coherent yet incoherent single novel. it was still a wonderful surreal patchwork quilt but just not the same as reading kafka that is ripe with symbolism, surrealism and is yet so coherent, philosophical and gripping. 8.0/10
pathinettavadhu atchakkodu (the 18th parallel), asoka mitran (1973?) – my first asoka mitran book. it was a lovely attempt in capturing life as an outsider in hyderabad during the nizam regime. what i loved the most about this was the way the innocence of growing up was captured and the frenzy of the pages describing what the loss of gandhi meant to a young kid. must read if you can read tamil. the first half of the book is extremely humorous. – 8.1/10
the dark tower: the gunslinger, stephen king (1982) – i had always wanted to read the dark tower series because of all the positive reviews and since it combined apocalypse with fantasy (two of my fav genres). this book is just book 1 in a long series that has spanned 3 decades now so i intend to read them all before i can rate it. book 1 lays a lot of groundwork for the fantasy world and builds roland the gunslinger’s character and his pursuit towards the man in black and in turn, the dark tower which is only briefly hinted in this book. 7.8/10
nothing lofty, nor lowly;
neither a crutch, not a pedestal
nothing stirs
late afternoon passing, in mellow contemplation. eyes closed, thoughts swirl, of floating face down in the ocean, without a snorkel, breathing out big bubbles of air, eyes open in the saline murk without goggles, drifting far out with the tide, without bearings. back here, sleepless late afternoon is still in passing, eventless, with no mark to leave. worrywart she calls him.
the old house
dawn on saturday will signal distress, for they were leaving. the furniture was sold, the drapes ripped, closets emptied, decor stripped and living room wrapped and fit snugly in boxes. the rarer plants were moved to plastic containers, the kitchen sat in three big boxes, the invariable collection of inconsequential trash over decades which was no exception to this house, discarded. they had packed every last bit of life the house had in their boxes along with their material possessions. the dog, the children, mr and mrs. k, were all set to leave on this saturday morning, never to come back. the house was breathing its dying breath. it would be one lonely dusk leading to another lonesome dawn. ‘take me with you’, it wanted to say. it wished it were smaller; to be bubble-wrapped and fit in a carton; to be taken away with them, their children and their dog.
of reading murakami
in the context of movies, people get dissatisfied when all ends dont neatly tie up. we do have some directors like lynch or the 60s new wave directors like antonioni or fellini who have done the contrary and gotten away with it. it came up in a discussion regarding movies that if there is a gun in the corner, it simply must fire. for murakami, there can be a gun, a red hat or a baseball bat mentioned over a 100 times in the text for no apparent reason in the end. it is gripping nevertheless mostly because you are expecting things to if not tie up nicely, to atleast make sense through symbolism. is it ok to weave unreal characters in unreal plots in the name of just surrealism? ‘the wind-up bird chronicle’ felt like a collection of shorts sticking to a common theme that were then strung up together through the common thread into a coherent yet incoherent single novel. it was still a wonderful surreal patchwork quilt but just not the same as reading kafka that is ripe with symbolism, surrealism and is yet so coherent, philosophical and gripping.
summer has descended onto our city and there is a hot breeze rustling the wind chimes. it reminds me of a bleak period in the past long forgotten. everything i touched then turned to turd the way it did to gold for king midas. in a world where midas won yet lost, one must lose to win. odd though that i look back on that dreadful summer fondly. if anything had to be learnt, it was that loss/win, summer/winter, happy/sad all come and go to come again. if there is nothing dreadful around, you dig up the dread from the past to be surefooted when it slips. like a nimble boxer shifting his weight around constantly between his feet in alertness and anticipation.
