So when Shashi Tharoor says he read 365 books in a year, I am impressed. It shows his intellectual horsepower or at least his reading speed, which again is an important thing (because even at that speed, as per google, it will take one person 355,794 years to read all books ever written). But when you read a book or treat yourself to any form of art, for which you are not emotionally or intellectually prepared, through experiences in life and through learning, you would end up reading the lines without reading much between the lines.

This has been my personal experience, and I acknowledge the fact that I have many friends who read through ‘Amsterdam’ and ‘Love in the times of Cholera’ without getting emotionally swayed. Again, at a personal level books like ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’, ‘Love in the time of Cholera’, or Kundera’s ‘Unbearable..” left a deep impression on me, affecting my deliberations for weeks, and I doubt if those revelations would have come to me for good or bad if I’d immersed myself in those books before I’d experience some subtle, sensitive, and at times tiring strains in relationships. I mean, my ability to appreciate tragedy was not inborn, though it gets better over the years. It’s like they say about Frank Sinatra’s voice -- he had a voice which developed over one too many heartbreaks.

Smoking used to be sexy,  it used to be a sign of that creative energy symbolized by Albert Camus and Hemingway and Picasso and Guru Dutt and MT Vasudevan Nair and a thousand other literary geniuses.  Smoking isn’t sexy anymore. Cigarette smokers are outcasts in almost all walks of life. Outcasts in office buildings which ask cigarette smokers to keep twenty five feet from the other office workers who are gonna live a thousand years, outcasts in rental applications which make you lie that you do not smoke so that you have a place to stay, outcasts in the Starbucks of the world which sell that pink colored cake with two icings of cream on it, outcasts in the trains and airplanes where people would rather sleep for fourteen hours than smoke a cigarette, stay awake and do something productive for the world -- because one cigarette shortens your life by seven hours. But the outcasts still light their cigarettes over freshly brewed cups of coffee, stare at the evening skylines, and make those final decisions which can only be made in silent rooms.

Billy Collin’s poem “The Best Cigarette” speaks only to those outcasts, listing out those moments of calm, induced by nicotine, before they make those brilliant decisions. Then he reveals his favorite moment. I could have put this in a more simple way, that’s what the second poem speaks about. As I understand more, I guess I will simplify more. For now, two poems from Billy Collins. And that ladies and gentlemen, brings up the 350th post on Talkies.

The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins

Reading An Anthology Of Chinese Poems Of The Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire The Length And Clarity Of Their Titles -- By Billy Collins

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DspTjoGLUWg

Michael Crichton was my first favourite author. If Great Train Robbery and Eaters of the dead are any indicators, Crichton does period dramas with elan. Pirate Latitudes was discovered as a complete manuscript in his files after his death in 2008.

The Pirate Latitude book trailer on youtube

[bubblecast id=285134]

Levitt and Dubner are back with more questions, some of which we wish we asked, some that you’ll never know where they came from. This one will keep me thinking, now that I’ve done a sem of Applied Micro. From the blurb,

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

* How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
* Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
* How much good do car seats do?
* What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?
* Did TV cause a rise in crime?

Superfreakonomics releases tommorrow Oct 20th, and Crichton is out on Nov 24th. And its probably the best time to buy these books with the hottest pricing wars between Amazon, and (I didn’t see this coming) Walmart. The days WSJ reads

In the latest escalation, Wal-Mart announced last week it was cutting the price of 10 popular books online to $10. When Amazon quickly reciprocated, Wal-Mart dropped its price to $9. After Amazon copied that move too, Wal-Mart cut its price to $8.99.

Michael Crichton was my first favourite authour.

Crichton showed us that science could be so much drama, beating Asimov in his own game.

Crichton reintroduced dinosaurs, now we know that Tryannosaurus Rex is bad, but Velociraptors are even bad.

Talk about creating fear from a handful of dust, Crichton creates fear from a Nano particle.

Crichton married five times. Initially I was shocked to hear that, then I realized that if you have serious talent, you can get away with anything.

Chaos theory! Jurassic Park! Have you read The Great Train Robbery?

Crichton’s novels were fast paced, opinionated – can you believe the reader will have an opinion on genetic research, global warming, nano technology, syphillis after reading Crichton.

Crichton spoke against ‘Global Warming’ and ‘ills of passive smoking’ activism – he said their facts were skewed. They said the same about him.

I used to spell Crichton – Chriton. 

I have read all his books, almost.

Michael Crichton died yesterday of cancer, he was my first favourite authour

I kept looking looking for symbolism in Fiesta. Didn’t really get what it was all about, like I told you. This Time magazine article from December 1954 explains Papa Hemingway a bit, the writer and the heman. Good read, Essential Hemingway

John Donne provided Hemingway with the title of For Whom the Bell Tolls. “No man is an Hand, intire of it selfe,” said Donne. Says Hemingway now: “A man both is and is not an island. Sometimes he has to be the strongest island there can be to be a part of the main. [I] am not good at stating metaphysics in a conversation, but I thought Santiago [the Old Man] was never alone because he had his friend and enemy the sea and the things that lived in the sea some of whom he loved and others that he hated.”

Five thousand miles away in Stockholm, a white-starched, tail-coated assembly of the Nobel Foundation was about to bestow literature’s most distinguished accolade on the products of his pencil. This week, “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration,” the Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded to Ernest Miller Hemingway, originally of Oak Park, III, and later of most of the world’s grand and adventurous places.

Rising up from one side of his villa is a white tower from which he can gaze meditatively at Havana and the sea, or at his own domain—the finca’s 13 acres, including flower and truck gardens, fruit trees, seven cows (which provide all the household’s milk and butter), a large swimming pool, a temporarily defunct tennis court. In the 60-foot-long living room, heads of animals Hemingway shot in Africa stare glassy-eyed from the walls. But most imposing of all are Hemingway’s books.

He consumes books, newspapers and random printed matter the way a big fish gulps in plankton. One of the few top American writers alive who did not go to college, Hemingway read Darwin when he was ten, later taught himself Spanish so he could read Don Quixote and the bullfight journals. Hemingway has never slept well, and reading is his substitute. Finca Vigia holds 4,859 volumes of fiction, poetry, history, military manuals, biography, music, natural history, sports, foreign-language grammars and cookbooks.

In his poem, “So That You Will Hear Me,” Pablo Neruda evokes the frustration of using language that resists translation. His words, which have been tailored in relation to himself, cannot illustrate his mind as he sees and feels it. But they will try anyway: “And I watch my words from a long way off.before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy, and they are more used to my sadness than you are.”When Haruki Murakami writes that “One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harajuku neighborhood, I walk past the 100% girl” no matter who you are, you can’t help imagining that you are that girl, or that you have noticed her

So it seems obvious that I would turn to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose Love in the Time of Cholera has immortalized the universal idea of unrequited love. His opening lines, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love,” 

Did you throw away the book when Fermina Daza with a mere wave of her arm ends all her enchantment with Florentino Ariza? If you did, then this is for you. Alexis Almeida screams out her love affair with literature for the less cynical side of ours, the believers.Enchanting piece like the books she quote.

So herein I profess my strange and bizarre love affair with literature. Literature is my lover: offering me so many things in her own terms but refusing to be tied down, giving herself to everyone, but not all of herself, perhaps just enough, on her better days. She doesn’t commit to anyone, but she gives people what they want; they start out thinking they want her and then they realize they need her, they use her to serve their own needs but she will never admit to serving them. Her soul serves only herself, but in this world, we could never be resigned to believing that. In this world where we need conduits and catalysts, we tailor her face to our own desires and ideals, to inspire us. And she lets us, because she knows who she is, underneath all of the beautiful, cryptic language that adorns her life.

Have you read Parveen Shakir? I’m just kidding, you dont have to :)

Mush : “the initial signs of sincerity and flexibility that I sensed in Manmohan Singh seem to be withering away. I think the Indian ‘establishment’ – the bureaucrats, the diplomats and intelligence agencies and perhaps even the military has had the better of him”

OHYEAH Mr Mush, India has a long history of military bureaucracy getting the better of the elected democratic government. 33 out of 48 years of the Republic,it was India which was under military rule. Nice that you reminded.

Mush : says, India obtained its Nuclear centrifuge and some of its missile technology from Pakistan through A Q Khan’s dudes in Dubai.

Yes Mr Mush,personally I remember Indians returning home from Dubai carrying little neutron devices in VIP suitcases.

You know what, the authour of Indian bomb programme and Pakistan bomb programme reside in New Delhi,the capital of India. The first one resides in Rashtrapati Bhavan, the second one is a India Today reporter who on an overdose of ecstasy, wrote you guys had a nuclear bomb ( someone in Pakistan read the article and then you guys started claiming you had THE bomb )

Bottomline is YOU DONT HAVE THE BOMB (You want one ? We’ll drop one over Karachi)

Mush : On why he had to align with US on 9/11 “America was sure to react violently, like a wounded bear. If the perpetrator turned out to be al-Qaida, then that wounded bear would come charging straight towards us. Powell was quite candid: You are either with us or against us”

The whole world thought Al Qaeda was a myth – like your Nuclear Bomb

“The mullahs would certainly oppose joining the US. There would be an adverse reaction too in the NWFP. Sindh, Karachi and Balochistan would be lukewarm. The Punjabis would understand me.”

You are the leader of ?
Have you heard of Rushdie’s novel “Shame” – have you atleast heard that word.

“In what was to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage added, if we chose the terrorists then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.”

Where do you suppose you are now ?
They cheated you man,these Americans – do you think they landed on moon ?

Mush : On the Agra summit failure “There is the man and there is the moment. When man and moment meet history us made. Vajpayee failed to grasp the moment and lost his moment in history”

No Mr Mush,the moment was not Agra it was Amristar – when that old man boarded a bus to Lahore. It was Mrs Gandhi and the moment was Shimla. It was Nehru and the moment was Kashmir.

Dear Mush,

In India -

We dont mind a Ibrahim,Dawood smuggling gold from Dubai – at times we adore his tapori style but he’ll pay for the two fifty seven dead in Bombay ’93.

We dont mind a Prabhakaran,Velupillai playing a tiger or a lion for his brothers – at times we sympathize with his cause but he’ll pay for our youthful leader’s life he took in May ’91

We dont mind a Musharaff, Pervez writing an autobiography – at times we make it a best-seller but he’ll pay for the five hundred and twenty two young men dead in Kargil ’99

So make merry – now you have a best seller

this time its for you

Good Night and Good Luck !