Dies The Fire
DiesTheFire
What would become of our civilization if suddenly, electricity, gunpowder, gasoline and steam engines stopped working? Dies The Fire imagines such a world and forces you to think about how dependent we are today on things that were unimaginable just a few hundred years ago.
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.
iPad vs Kindle vs Wood pulp
This passage I came across recently in Yeats Is Dead, struck a chord:
“I think books are wonderful”, the woman said, evidently bent on conversation. “If they had never been invented and somebody thought of them now, they would be the greatest thing ever. I can’t think of anything that has given so much happiness to humanity. Or could do, except maybe a pill to make us live longer. Books are so simple. No batteries, no wires, no earphones. Absolutely silent, don’t interfere with anything else, you can take them anywhere with you, into bed, into the bath. And they can’t be broken. You can lie on them, sit on them, prop the door or the window sash open with them and you still can’t damage them.”
Add the ability to buy them second hand, and this is precisely why I think books will win. Nothing comes remotely close to the simplicity of a book.
Cricket? Live? Me? It happened - Part I
From the 4th floor balcony of my (old) office at Kasturba Road, you could see Chinnaswamy Stadium. About 5-6 times a year they would turn the stadium lights on. Ususally for a day and night ODI but more often than not for testing. I am talking pre-IPL/pre-T20 days of just three years ago here and I already sound like someone’s grandpa reminiscing about a bygone era. I’d marvel at how bright the floodlights were and how they would make the clouds overhead look luminescent but that 4th floor balcony is about as close as I went to the stadium. Cricket matches were meant to be watched on TV. The unruly scenes I had witnessed at the only rock concert I had attended at Palace Grounds had made me even more wary of crowded places. Why rub shoulders with the hoi polloi when you can watch the cricket in the comfort of your home - a cup of hot tea in one hand, the TV remote in other - looking like a minor Indian deity. In short, I kept my distance - like a sailor who is thankful for a lighthouse but must keep his safe distance from it.
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.
2023-05-20: Updated links to point to https://wwww.espncricinfo.com rather than http://www.cricinfo.com/
That loopy feeling
Loops not notes are the building blocks of modern music. The 19th century composers had their ‘theme and variations’ for days when they were feeling lazy. The modern composer has canned, fast-food loops. Every third song you hear these days gives you that ‘where have I heard it before’ feeling. Here’s a recent ‘déjà vu’ - what do the tracks “Gadbadi Hadbadi” from Rocket Singh and “Nenjathilae” from Pirivom Santhipom have in common? The composers zeroed in on the same loop to begin their song:
- Gadbadi Hadbadi (Composers: Salim Suleman)
- Nenjathilae (Composer: Vidyasagar)
Untitled
We were a snooty lot at St. Stephen’s college. While other colleges had ‘canteens’, we had a Café. One of the first things you encounter there as a vegetarian, are the cutlets. They are served with a small helping of inedibly (or at least that what your taste-buds conclude at the first encounter) sour chutney. Then begins a journey which ends with you liking the chutney so much that you begin to wonder if you should be asking the chef for the recipe. It’s a rite of passage a bit like college life itself. Entering college after more than 12 years in the same school is a bit unnerving. Your first reaction is to want to flee! But then days go by, you begin to soak in the new routine in a new environment and importantly, you make new friends. Then at some point in time, you actually start enjoying college so much that when you look back at those days a few years later, it is not without the touch of a degree of mistiness in the eyes.
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!