Maybe…it is only those of us who have no eyes that can see through the lure of maya, and glimpse reality for what it is.
- Kanai, the blind minstrel in Nine Lives, p.246
A few days back, we got William Dalrymple’s well received book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India from our local library.
The book is a collection of nine essays, each covering one life, i.e. the story of one individual.
Each essay addresses a different subject but two common threads run through the Nine Lives:
* The setting of the subject matter – they’re all located in the small towns and villages or what Dalrymple describes as “the places suspended between modernity and tradition.”
* All the essays look at the impact of the frenetic pace of development and change currently underway in India on the different religious traditions.
In Dalrymple’s own words:
Each life is intended to act as a keyhole into the way that each specific religious vocation has been caught and transformed in the vortex of India’s metamorphosis during this rapid period of transition, while revealing the extraordinary persistence of faith and ritual in a fast-changing landscape.
It’s a strange universe some of the ‘Lives” inhabit, practicing what may seem to the average eye to be bizarre customs and rituals.
If bizarre and odd are what turn you on, read the story of Manisha Ma Bhairavi in the The lady Twilight and follow it up with The Song of the Blind Ministrel. Tantric sadhanas, cremation ground rituals, drinking from human skulls, animal sacrifices, unusual sexual practices et al should certainly give you a high.
The late detective novelist Agatha Christie is the most widely read novelist in history, according to the New Yorker, which has an essay on the popular author in the latest issue (August 16 & 23, 2010 p.82-88)
Back in the old days, we read a few dozen Agatha Christie books.
And for the most part, we enjoyed them. The Hercule Poirot series, the Miss Marple books and the other Agatha Christie novels were all easy reads that we could knock off in a couple of hours max.
Some of Christie’s books like Murder on the Oriental Express (Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York and Anthony Perkins) were even made into popular movies adding to her fame.
Describing the authoress as a ‘broad cultural phenomenon,’ Joan Acocella writes in the New Yorker that Agatha Christie’s novels have been translated into 45 languages and sold over 2 billion copies.
Now, isn’t that 2 billion figure more than India’s population or have the desi mosquitoes been breeding more than usual lately? 
For as long as we can remember, we’ve been under the spell of eloquent writers and speakers.
And Bartlett’s was our vade mecum, a book we repeatedly borrowed from our local library.
On good days and on bad days, we dipped into the heavy tome to great delight.
So when we saw favorable reviews of the Yale Book of Quotations a few years ago, we promptly decided to plonk down some $$ for the book.
And not one moment over the last couple of years have we regretted shelling out $50 for this 1,067-page tome.
Politicians, writers, sports figures, movie stars, religious leaders, criminals, freedom-fighters, artists and an endless array of colorful characters enliven these pages with their witty, profound, sad and sometimes, even, silly sayings.
The book is littered with quote-gems.
Here are a few of them:
Henry Miller:
U.S. writer
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
Lord Chesterfield:
On sex
The pleasure is momentary, the position is ridiculous, and the expense is damnable.
Mae West:
Hollywood actress
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?
It’s not the men in my life that counts – it’s the life in my men.
When I’m good, I’m very, very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.
Helen Gurley Brown:
U.S. journalist
Good girls go to heaven – bad girls go everywhere.
John Fortescue:
English judge ca. 1394-ca.1476
I should, indeed, prefer twenty guilty men to escape death through mercy, than one innocent to be condemned unjustly.
Mahatma Gandhi:
We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
Aisha Review – Lost in Translation Piece of Shit
As the Abhay Deol-Big Mouth a.k.a Sonam Kapoor film Aisha is nigh upon us, we picked up Jane Austen’s Emma at our local library yesterday.
Unless you are a complete Bollywoodphobe, you do know that Aisha is an adaptation of Emma, set of course in these current wretched times in India.
Emma is one of only four books by Austen that were published in her lifetime (the others were Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park).
We’ve read a little over a fourth of the 396-page book and find it fairly engaging charming.
As some of you might be aware, Emma is a glimpse of country life as viewed from the vantage-point of the upper class rural gentry in early 19th century England. Needless to say, that is as distorted as the view Isha Ambani gets when she looks out of her family’s gazillion dollar Mumbai home.
In a Bollywood stuffed to the gills with incompetent actresses, it’s hard to think of anyone save Sonam Kapoor or Vidya Balan to essay the role of Emma with some degree of elan, even if it’s a desi version.
We’re wont to think this short passage is a succinct summary of Aisha:
Her father fondly replied, “Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretel things, for whatever you say always comes to pass. Pray do not make any more matches.”
“I promise you to make none for myself, papa: but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world! And after such success you know! [p.12]
While we still have many more pages ahead of us, we must acknowledge the vein of sly, impish humor that courses through the portions we’ve finished.
For our readers belonging to the distaff sex, here are a few pearls of wisdom, courtesy Emma of course:
I lay it as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to ‘Yes,’ she ought to say ‘No’ directly. It is not a state to be safely entered into with doubtful feelings, with half a heart. [p.46]
A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter. [p.47]
Oh! to be sure…it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her. [p.52-53]
Whether we like Aisha or not, it’s fair to say that we find Emma an extremely interesting character.
We hope to complete the book in the coming days and will do an update to this post at the time.
By the way, our Mensaic mind has already guessed the ending although we have a lot of field still left to plow.
Is Emma the most delicious character that Austen wrought up in her rich imagination?
Related Stories:
Aisha Review – Lost in Translation Piece of Shit
The English word rabies is said to derive from the Sanskrit term rabbas meaning to do violence.
Source: Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk P.81
Here’s a short excerpt from Palahniuk’s fine book:
As I understand it, you have two types of rabies. There’s your “dumb” type, where you never go insane and bite anyone. You only curl up in a ball under your bed and die. And there’s the normal kind of rabies, the “furious” type, which 80 percent of folks get. Where you slobber and swear and flail around, smashing everything in your bed-room including your Dolls of the World collection, and calling your father a “dirty, shit-eating, motherfucking, dick-less dickhead…” Well, that’s what kind of rabies our Margot had.
(For SI Blog reader Kreacher)
In an era of 140-character Twitters and 10-paragraph Blogs, reading books has turned out to be a major casualty.
Who gives a f*ck for leisure reading, right?
Verily, a dying tradition.
Particularly, among our desi chutiyas who mistake ogling at pictures of Bollywood starlets’ thighs and tits for reading.
Alas, such are the times we live in.
What’s a Kindle?
Kindle is a compact hardware device sold by Amazon that lets you read eBooks.
Amazon is currently peddling Release 2 of the Kindle (the first version debuted in 2007).
For long, we’d mulled the purchase of a Kindle but never got around to it. Partly, because like cheap desis we felt the price was unjustifiably high.
But with its recent price reduction of the 6-inch version to $189, Amazon effectively made price a non-issue. Amazon also offers a 9.7-inch Kindle for $379 but the 6-inch version is the more popular version.
Kindle vs iPad
Even so, we were tempted by Apple’s iPad tablet device. We went to the Apple store in the mall and played with the iPad at length, drove the sales guy nuts and got all our questions answered.
Folks, we’ve got to tell you this – in sheer sex appeal the 9.7-inch iPad with its virtual keyboard beats the 6-inch Kindle with a regular keyboard by a mile by 100 miles.
Kinda like comparing that worthless twit of an actress Priyanka Chopra to say Jodie Foster or our new inamorata Jennifer Lawrence.
The iPad is backlit, which means you can read it in the dark, and scrolling to the next or previous page is so smooth. A small tap on the right or left of the text is all it takes to go to the next or previous page respectively. Just like on the new iPhone 4.
Also buying books on the iPad is a breeze.
The iPad offers full color display while the Kindle is still restricted to black and white.
Although our interest in the iPad was primarily as an eBook reader we knew we could also use it as a digital media entertainment device to play songs and movies or to even blog on it.
Alas, the iPad is not in stock. Not at Apple Store and not even at Worst Buy oops Best Buy (at least, not the 32GB WiFi-only model).
Keeping in mind the iPad’s non-availability, its higher price point and the significantly larger eBook content for the Kindle (672,000 vs 60,000 for iPad), we decided yesterday to go in for the Kindle.
Kindle eBook Reader
(Image: WSJ)
Smooth Ordering
We ordered our Kindle on the Amazon web site around noon Tuesday selecting the free 2-day delivery option.
Surprise, surprise, the UPS guy delivered our Kindle Wednesday, 24 hours earlier than scheduled. We guess it must have come from the Amazon warehouse located not far from our place.
After fumbling a bit, we opened the box and there it was the white-color Kindle along with a short user manual and a cord to charge the reading device and also to connect it to a PC for download/upload.
The device is slim, light (10.2 oz) and supposed to be able to hold up to 1,500 books. More than adequate for the little time left us.
Unless you are Abhishek Bachchan, it’s easy to figure out the Kindle’s menu and functioning in a few minutes. The key control buttons are positioned on the face of the device except for the power button and headphone socket, which are on the top and the volume control on the right.
We also ordered a case for the Kindle ($25) but we’ve yet to receive it.
Disadvantages
* The biggest negative of the Kindle is that it is not backlit, which means you can’t read it in the dark.
While many have pointed that the iPad is hard to read in the sunlight we don’t think it’s an issue because most books are read indoor, not on the beach where you go to ogle at the bikini babes.
Recent Comments