I came across a fictional autobiographical account of a Kai Ten ‘driver’ in David Mitchell’s Number 9 Dream. Each paragraph of that account sent a chill down my spine. And to think that someone lived through it…

Wikipedia has more if you have the stomach for it.

As an aside, the Kanji for Kai Ten (the phrase roughly means ‘the turn toward heaven’) is 回天. While I am not sure I can explain 回, it’s quite easy to logically explain the origin of 天. The Kanji for big (huge, enormous) is 大. It is simplification of drawing of a man with his arms outstretched. (How big? This “大” Big). Add a bar or ‘roof’ on top of it and you get Kanji for ‘big-roof’ or (figuratively speaking) sky though it’s used more in the sense of ‘heaven’.

I imagine a mirror between two posters that turns reflections into sketches.

Stick no bills.

Facebook allows your photos to be tagged by others. It’s only a matter of time that they plug in face recognition. iPhoto does it, Picassa does it, I see no reason why Facebook won’t (if it doesn’t already).

So you take a photo, use something like Google Goggles for Facebook, and voilá you have (depending on the user’s privacy settings) details of the person you clicked!

It isn’t called Facebook for nothing.

Sadly the book runs out of things to say around the half way mark. You are thus forced to endure such minutiae as what sort of food the American protagonists fantasize about in a world where farming the old-fashioned way is the only way to put bread on your table. Then there are detailed descriptions of the Celtic Wiccan rituals; and yes, the food consumed there. Repetitive battle scenes where finer points of using longbows, broadswords, bucklers, targes and other medieval weaponry are illuminated all while explaining how difficult it is to fight when operating under the medieval gear of chain mails, hauberks, visors, vambraces and other assorted wearables.

This seems to be a standard strategy of American fantasy authors for beefing up their works to the level of thickness that is deemed respectable for books of this genre. Take notes from history books and encyclopedias and somehow weave the details into the story. I wouldn’t mind it so much if the story kept moving or if I were living on Venus – for a day of mine there would last 200 Earth days. I am probably being harsh here. But then what do you expect from someone who is ploughing through the 10th book of the Jordan’s Wheel of Time series?

I’ll leave you to reflect on this gem here:

Quite often there was something useful in places like that. Not food, of course, but aspirin, sterile bandages, condoms, toilet paper – newspaper left stains, they’d discovered, and twists of grass could leave you itching for days.

Frankly, in a post apocalyptic world, I would have taken to washing (or since we are talking high fantasy here – laving) by now.

Then India won the T20 World Cup in 2007 and ushered IPL in. I watched from a distance again. Sure I was intrigued, even interested in this new phenomena but cricket still remained something you watched at your home. The first IPL opener happened in Bangalore and I watched the opening ceremony from a Barista at Indiranagar (from home to a cafeteria, some progress eh?) and chased the rest of the match on Cricinfo at home. Quite a few matches followed the opener – a good many of them in Bangalore but I never wavered in my home over stadium approach. The second IPL was in South Africa so the question of catching a game live never arose. By this time however, everyone seemed to have watched a match at stadium. Friends; who knew about as much about IPL as Chirs Gayle knows about synthesizing Buckminsterfullerene, had been to at least one IPL match. Even my wife, who doesn’t get too involved with cricketing matters, had somehow managed to tick this one item off her list.

This year I was determined to make amends. But sometimes there is a sea to be waded between being determined about something and actually accomplishing it. What caused me to set sail was my manager’s generous offer of two free corporate tickets to the Bangalore – Rajasthan match. There was also the promise of being able to watch two all-time greats – Anil Kumble and Shane Warne – lead their teams. Some of my fears about crowd management and basic facilities at the stadium had been allayed by this article by George Binoy at Cricinfo. Still, years of inhibitions are not all that easy to let go of. The ship was cruising but it still carried a considerable cargo of scepticism.

1. Gadbadi Hadbadi (Composers: Salim Suleman)
2. Nenjathilae (Composer: Vidyasagar)

I say this because all of this applies to a certain bookshop at Bangalore – Gangarams. I go there to buy stationery (which has happened just once – when we were looking to buy hand-made envelopes to put our wedding cards in) or computer books (which happens quite often). You take the staircase all the way to this huge room on the third floor with rows of tables on which the books are kept with their spines facing up. Only 2-3 tables are relevant for someone looking for computer books. You patiently browse and try to locate what you are looking for – O’Reilly publications get a significant chunk on one table, Manning another, Microsoft Press and Apress take up the remaining significant area. Pragmatic press books make an occasional appearance on, what I call, the O’Reilly table. Chances are you won’t find what you are looking for, so you’d ask one of the ‘helpers’. They’ll give you a significant look and reluctantly amble to that old machine running DOS, look up the book’s coordinates and fetch it for you. It is easy not to be intimidated – because the place somehow has an air about it that reminds you of your college library – complete with curmudgeonly librarians. Within a few visits however, a switch inside you begins to flip. You actually begin to start liking the place! The old-worldly pace, the reluctant but often effective helpers, the portly middle-aged proprietor of the shop telling someone on the phone about having to import a book from Singapore thereby justifying the ludicrous exchange-rate defying price the customer at the other end would need to pay for it. But most of all, you learn that magical incantation which gets you 10% off the book’s price!