Contemporary history’s best-known ‘fakir’ has landed his latest biographer the fattest kitty in the annals of Indian publishing. Penguin India has offered an advance of Rs 1 crore to bag historian Ram Guha’s two-volume project on Mahatma Gandhi in a quiet but stunning recession-era deal that has wowed the competition and pitched Indian book industry into the global league.
From here.
Well, what more can one say!
In August 1924, the long-suffering Stanislaus Joyce sent a letter of complaint to his brother, James, in which he mentioned his difficulties with Ulysses. “The greater part of it I like,” he wrote, before adding with characteristic bluntness: “I have no humour with episodes which are deliberately farcical… and as episodes grow longer and longer and you try to tell every damn thing you know about anybody that appears or anything that crops up, my patience oozes out.”
from here
I have been meaning to read Ulysses for quite some time now, so much so that the book has been lying on my bookself for the past year and half, but to be true the only thing that brings my enthusiasm down is that Joyce talks about anything to everything there, and often laced with puns, allusions and hidden meanings, so the fear being that I may not be able to understand and appreciate everything.
Well, let’s see, may be this summer.
Well, there’s the surprise, Sharmila Tagore had been added to be the nine and final member of the Jury that will be deciding winner of the Palme d’Or this year. I do have childhood memories of seeing her in Indian movies, but haven’t seen any of her movie in the recent past. I guess I’ll be watching Satyajit Ray’s Appu soon, where she appears as Apu’s wife.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In a candid interview here at The Paris Review, Kazuo Ishiguro talks about his passions, obsessions, music that inspired him, his American dream, his books an all.
Here’s something from the interview.
INTERVIEWER
How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?
ISHIGURO
It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.
INTERVIEWER
As a metaphor for what?
ISHIGURO
Two things. One is a certain kind of emotional frostiness. The English butler has to be terribly reserved and not have any personal reaction to anything that happens around him. It seemed to be a good way of getting into not just Englishness but the universal part of us that is afraid of getting involved emotionally. The other is the butler as an emblem of someone who leaves the big political decisions to somebody else. He says, I’m just going to do my best to serve this person, and by proxy I’ll be contributing to society, but I myself will not make the big decisions. Many of us are in that position, whether we live in democracies or not. Most of us aren’t where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we take pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used well.
This essay: The Awful German Language by Mark Twain throws some light-hearted light upon the difficulties in the language. German language, along with Latin and Russian, is said to be one of the difficult language to master. Since I have already paid my money at the Goethe Center, I guess I will have to live with that and hope that this amusing essay doesn’t becomes too amusing for comfort.
Well, here’s something from the essay:
Now observe the Adjective. Here was a case where simplicity would have been an advantage; therefore, for no other reason, the inventor of this language complicated it all he could. When we wish to speak of our “good friend or friends,” in our enlightened tongue, we stick to the one form and have no trouble or hard feeling about it; but with the German tongue it is different. When a German gets his hands on an adjective, he declines it, and keeps on declining it until the common sense is all declined out of it. It is as bad as Latin. He says, for instance:
Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested. Difficult? — troublesome? — these words cannot describe it. I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
So finally another chapter closes. Lets see what future has in store for me now.
Here few images from National Geographic Photo Contest. More here.
Caged monkeys await their fate at a medical laboratory in Hubei Province, China.
People Winner
Brother and sister in Tibet
Women going through windows
From 1982 to 1987 in the Luwero District, Uganda, more than 100,000 civilians were massacred in an attempt to clear the area of rebels. Because of the enormous number of deaths and the intense fighting, bodies were left to rot in the streets. When peace was brought to the area upon the defeat of President Obote, westerners collected the bones for export. President Museveni ordered a memorial erected in honor of those who’d died. The memorial is a small room where skeletons lie in a 40-foot-deep pit in the town of Nakaseke. Today, Dominica Batakanwa is the caretaker.
Children run in the street in Havana, Cuba.
Jumping mullet in the Seychelles islands
Now here’s a tribe which doesn’t have the concept of numbers or colours in it. People there don’t talk in past tense verb conjugations or even use any words associated with time. Most of the communication is based on what is being experienced at that moment. So much so that, the lack of recursion in their language has now put the widely accepted Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar into question.
Links : Recursion & Human Thought : A Talk With Daniel L. Everett &
Living without Numbers or Time
Cosmologists have put themselves in the shoes of their future counterparts by pondering the consequences of dark energy, an enigmatic force discovered in 1998 that seems to be pulling galaxies apart at a steadily increasing clip. Eventually, this accelerating expansion of space will yank galaxies away from each other faster than light can travel between them, leaving our galaxy and its immediate neighbors isolated in a vast darkness.
JR Minkel talks about how Cosmic expansion may leave the future with no hint of Big Bang at all.
Kurt Vonnegut, the amazingly comic and frequently satirical writer, who wrote against the wars and the mindless human technological pursuits, famous for classics like “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle”, died yesterday at the age of 84.
In the times of Bush we loose an important moralist like Kurt. Sigh.
Here’s NYT ‘s piece on him.
Dr. Wayne S. Fenton was killed this month by a 19-year-old patient suffering from severe psychosis.[ link ]
Now here’s that classical situation again
Suppose there’s a man lying in the gutter, with all his clothes torn, living in an hypothetical world, viewing himself as king but in reality its just an illusion, a plain overextended hallucination which is never going to end.
So what will you do ?
Help him come to come back to the sad reality which won’t help him Or will you let him lying there in his hallucination [1]
Lets come back and take that doctor first. Unarguably he was only trying to help. And there was nothing wrong in his approach, many have been helped and he could have done it again also. But something went wrong which costed him his life.
And what about the patient, was it his fault?
He was mentally ill with no fault of his own. May be left to himself he would have again tried to commit suicide. But here he was being treated, being helped, being done on something, which he doesn’t understands and if he can’t understand it how can we expect him to appreciate it. How can we expect any other life to matter to him when his own doesn’t. And also he never asked for your help?
I guess we all think from the doctor’s perspective, our perspective. But what if death is the ultimate thing, the actual thing that’s too much awesome than life.
What if reason and explanation are diseases and something else something, metaphysical, is the truth, which obviously i can’t understand but the patient does. And since explanation is a disease to him he won’t explain to us.
Lemme cut the crap [2] and come to the actual point.
Should we let this practice go on?
Yes we have to.
On the same lines where we bring a dying patient to the operation table from an accident and the doctor without his consent operates and unfortunately the operation ends unsuccessful.
When we can accept a patient’s death from a doctor’s hand we also have to accept the things other way round.
Indeed it’s unfortunate butwe can’t help it and we have to accept that. And only thing that’s worth being the yardstick in such situations is the intent.
Donno why but this facet of life is quite facinating, i mean we know something is wrong but can’t point out the wrong doer, we can’t even decide who is the wrong doer.
It just reminds me of a line from some book[3] : “..within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repeled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
[1] Any answer to that has always eluded me.
[2] Did I say crap? I guess not.
[3] I guess it was from The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, alas, i never completed it.
Yesterday I came across an article “Coming soon: Mind-reading computers”. It sounded interesting so I went through it but it came out be nothing great but just average. Not something path breaking that I expected. As I reached the end of the article there were some reader ratings given to it. And to my surprise the article had got 9.9 rating out of 10. It kinda irked me. The article should never have even reached 8 rating but it stood at handsome but deeply irritating 9.9.
So I ended up giving it a rating of 1 which quite not to my respite brought its rating to 9.1.
Otherwise may be i would have given it a rating of 7 or 8.
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