You can always go back home

Woman on the wrong bus lost for 25 years

A woman who boarded the wrong bus on an attempted shopping trip from Thailand to Malaysia has returned home after 25 years. Jaeyana Beuraheng told her eight children she accidentally boarded a bus bound for Bangkok instead of Malaysia, and once there she boarded a second incorrect bus because she could not read or speak Thai or English, The Times of London reported Wednesday.

Beuraheng, who speaks only the Yawi dialect used by Muslims in southern Thailand, said the noise and traffic of the big city confused and disoriented her, leading her to board the second wrong bus to Chiang Mai, near the border with Burma. The woman said she spent five years begging on the street in the city and was often mistaken for a member of a hill tribe because of her dark skin tone. She was arrested in 1987 on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant and was sent to a social services hostel when authorities were unable to determine her origins. However, last month, three students from her home village arrived at the hostel for training, and they were able to communicate with Beuraheng and help her find her way home.

No walking while on Ipod!

I am all for smoking bans and ban on cell phones while driving and maybe even trans-fat bans in resteraunts... but isn't this taking policing to new dismal levels... anyways, no more swaying to music as you walk around in NYC, it seems..

New York may ban gadgets while crossing street

New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine. New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed "watch out" to no avail.

Ro-oo ya Has-oo

Or in other words, I cannot make up my mind if I should rejoice at the amazing new find of a rare species or cry at the loss of an amazing creature...

Rarely seen 'living fossil' shark caught off Tokyo

A goblin shark -- a rarely seen species often called a "living fossil" -- was caught alive in Tokyo Bay but died after being put on display, an aquarium said. The grey, long-nosed shark was caught in fishermen's nets around 150 to 200 metres (500 to 650 feet) deep. It was discovered by officials of the Tokyo Sea Life Park when they took a boat with local fishermen on January 25.

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Related links: A piranha seems tame compared to the Candiru (via.) Also, see an ocean sun-fish and a rare shark captured on film, and a not--so--lucky giant squid. Also, be amazed by the bio-diversity in Antartica.

Brevity, the soul of wit

This is how people break up in today's e-world...

I decided to never look at his MySpace page again.

This was posted by someone called Serena at Onesentence.org, where writers try to pack a wallop in a single sentence. Most fail...a few succeed.

My only contribution at the site to date was:

Life began to unravel into a jaded routine of inconsequential moments as soon as he stopped believing in himself.

Also see the following websites which live up to the idiom 'Brevity is the soul of wit'

Ten Word Review . One Word . One Sentence . Two Sentences . 100 Words . 400 words

India Literature - Books

I wanted to see the movie Parzania when I was in India last week after hearing/some really good things about it... no melodrama... no taking sides... just the narrating of one family's tale of grief and horror during the infamous Gujarat riots. Instead, I chose to go for the typical Bollywood melodrama of Guru...(ok.. ok..a Mani Ratnam movie is not typical Bollywood fare but the movie still was disappointing due to its over-stated melodrama.) More about Guru some other time.. but the reason I have chosen to come out of blog-hibernation is to write about a few recent books by Indian authors.

First up is a novel, Fireproof, by Raj Kamal Jha, who apparently is a mechanical engineer from IIT, who went on to do his Master's in journalism from USC and then worked for Indian Express in India. The book deals with the Gujrarat riots of 2002 and has been reviewed by somone I consider to be one of India's up-and-coming journalists, Chandrahas Choudhury. Chandrahas, who blogs at Middle Stage, has reviewed the book for The Observer. He had also blogged about the book earlier. Go read the post - some amazing stuff and insights abound!

In my opinion, Chandrahas and Jai Arjun are well-read and know quality reading when they see it. So..if Chandrahas says this is good stuff ... it must be good. So, here are two more recommendation gleaned from posts at the Middle Stage.

The first comes via an interview he conducted with Samrat Upadhyay, whose book of short stories The Royal Ghosts reviewed by Chandrahas for the Los Angeles Times and which Chandrahas wrote is was "among the two or three best books I’ve read in 2006."

And the second recommendation from Chandrahas is:

Christopher Kremmer's Inhaling the Mahatma, published last month by Harper-Collins, is a very rich, pleasurable account of India in the tumultous nineties. The title refers to the immersion of some of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes in the Ganga in 1997, nearly half a century after his death. Much of the book is about the reverberations of 6 December, 1992 in India, but Kremmer's is not a narrowly political account: returning on more than one occasion to Ayodhya in the decade after the desecration of the Babri Masjid, he also searches for the heterodox, liberal Hinduism obscured by the politics of Hindutva. Reportage is often not too interesting stylistically, but I found Kremmer's book, on a purely sentence-by-sentence level, to be a thing of "beauty and pleasure". Kremmer kindly agreed to answer some questions on his book and on the craft of nonfiction.

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I hold Jai Arjun in even great esteem for his amazing book and movie reviews - there are many other gems at his blog that I could point you to... but considering I myself have not read them, I'll just point you to his blog ... and merely highlight two interviews he recently conducted with Kiran Desai, recent Booker winner for Inheritance of Loss.

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Another interesting out-of-the-box concept in literature for Indian writers.. the graphic novel*.

Sarnath Banerjee came out a few years ago with what is deemed India's first graphic novel - Corridor. He is now back with another graphic novel - The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers, which blends the satirical sketches of the 19th century Bengali writer Kaliprassana Singha with the story of the Wandering Jew, brought up to date in 21st century Calcutta. (found this via Kitabkhana, a great blog by a couple of Indian journalists / writers / literature-enthusiasts)

Another interesting book in the same genre is..

... the short novella, Doppler Effect by Rohit Gupta (also an engineer (chemical) from IIT!), which has been rendered into a comic by Gabriel Greenberg. Earlier, Rohit's Towers of Silence, was also featured in Mid-Day (page seems to be down) as a special comic series.

In Rohit's own words, The Doppler Effect, deals impassionately with the Hindu-Muslim riots of Godhra (Gujarat) and Towers of Silence with the decline of Parsi population in India.

Wow....what imagination! A penchant for toying with words notwithstanding, I surely cannot ever hope to be a (good) writer.... I lack the creative instinct and cannot really tell a good tale either!

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Another book I saw in India that should make an interesting read (I later caught the end of an interview with the author on TV and rued not picking up the book at the store!) is Mira Kamdar's Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World, which "tells the dramatic story of a nation in the midst of redefining itself and our world."

Kamdar has previously authored the book, Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey into her Indian Family's Past, where she traced a memoir of her "family's odyssey from her grandmother's 1908 birth in rural India through her own 1960s childhood in the boomtowns of the American West Coast"
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And last but not least... something interesting that is not related to Indian literature but is still a very interesting development that I just learned about...

In the past, I have read about a blog called Baghdad Burning which became famous on the internet and won quite a few Blog awards in the last few years. The blog is written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman who is known by the name, Riverbend, and provides a day-by-day account of the American siege on Baghdad

Well... little wonder that publishers have jumped in and have published her blog as books - 2 so far! This is the first time I am hearing about entries at a blog being published in book-form.

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq

Au Revoir

I am temporarily suspending all blogging activities and taking a hiatus to focus on some other things in my life. I do not think I had any readers here (except people who may have accidentally passed by here) but if there are some lurkers, rest asssured, I will return to blogging at some point in time. Until then... take it easy, have fun, and be happy.

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for a delectable year ahead! :)

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A year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. - Hal Borland

More new year quotes here, for those so inclined.

2006 in Review

No time for a detailed review of various things that transpired in 2006... but here is a quick compilation of links on various topics of interest.

General Reviews:
Slide Show via IHT
Reuters' Review of 2006

Books & Literature:
NY Times Book Review's list of The 10 Best Books of 2006

Sports:
2006 - The year in sports
Cricket - 2006 Calendar Year Statistics
Ian Chappell, Michael Holding and Tony Greig look back at 2006
Osman Samiuddin reviews the highs and lows of cricket in 2006

Movies:
The best (and worst) films of the year - CNN

A. O. Scott of NY Times picks the Best & the Worst Movie Minutes of 2006

Travel:
NY Times 25 Most E-Mailed Travel Articles of 2006

2006 comes to a nice warm end here in Boston, with record-breaking temperatures in December, which is fine by me though obviously many people who grew up with the idea of a white Christmas were not that happy. The year ended in joy, in happiness, with long-awaited goals reached, with big promotions, or with a touch or whallop of good-luck for some people... and not so well for others.

And before I go, lets remember those who have left us in 2006...

But here's hoping to a great year ahead for everyone for 2007...

HAPPY NEW YEAR and Good tidings to all the readers of this blog (if any!) for 2007!