You like reading once in a while. Books and all that. But heck, no time from all the work and the occasional socializing event. How do you catch up with some reading? How do you finish a novel in these times?

The answer, ladies and gentlemen, is DailyLit.com (Link obtained via Mrs. DhiOnlyOne, who was kind enough to gift me a book from DailyLit – more on gifting follows).

DailyLit allows users to browse through the hundreds of books that they have listed (including 700+ free books). Once you have located the book, you can then subscribe to it on your RSS feed reader. DailyLit will then send you one page of the book on your feed reader everyday. All you need to do is spare 5 minutes to read a page, and before you know it you would have finished reading a moderate sized novel!

Cool eh? There is more. While browsing, in case you would like to gift a book to a friend (or your spouse, as in the case of Mrs. DhiOnlyOne), they have a simple “gift this” button. Your beneficiary receives a link on his/her e-mail and all they need to do is include that link as a subscription in their feed reader. Here onwards, the person starts receiving one page per day of that book.

What if I want to read more pages, you may ask? Trivial stuff, I say. They have a link after every page which allows you to instantly get the next page, instead of waiting for the scheduled feed.

PS: Find a feed reader too geeky? They also send you book pages on your e-mail.

Here’s to more book reading minus the time-related excuses. Cheers!

A perfect example of ridiculous writing. ToI is probably the only piece of paper that can patronize, or rather afford to patronize, this particular writer.

The government is contemplating removing the subsidy on petrol. Which will effectively hike up petrol prices by more than Rs. 10. On a purely economic basis, this appears to be a good decision.

The subsidy on diesel shall remain. This too is good economic sense because most of the essential goods are ferried across the country on diesel fuel. Additionally, farmers make use of diesel for their agricultural activities.

However, where this will backfire is there will be a greater demand for diesel run automobiles. All the swank and big cars nowadays sport technologically advanced diesel engines. With petrol prices going significantly up (and hence the difference between petrol and diesel prices crossing a critical threshold), diesel cars shall become the natural choice of all new car buyers. Which essentially means that the subsidy on diesel shall be availed by people who don’t really need the subsidy, and hence the oil companies will continue to bleed.

What the government needs to do is classify diesel into two categories: Automobile Diesel and Essential Diesel. Automobile Diesel shall be available only at the various fuel pumps across the country and shall not be subsidized. This will bring in a parity on petrol and diesel prices and at the same time will not be a burden on our publicly owned petroleum corporations.

Essential Diesel should be the one used by essential services (including transport vehicles which are used to ferry grains and essential commodities) and for farmers. And yes, this one should be subsidized (of course, there is a whole set of arguments against the concept of subsidy itself, but I shall refrain from commenting on that here).

Now the question is: How do we prevent automobile users from misusing this system and driving their cars using the Essential Diesel? Although both the categories are essentially (no pun intended) the same fuel, a color solvent can easily be added to the Automobile Diesel without affecting the properties of the fuel.

The color solvent shall ensure that the Automobile Diesel looks different from Essential Diesel. Now, the law enforcement agencies, who catch drivers to check for invalid licenses or below age driving, should conduct random checks on the color of the Diesel used in the vehicle. A sample of the diesel shall give away whether the fuel used was Automobile Diesel or not. If not, then the fine should be a hefty one (and a share of the fine should be passed on to the petroleum corporations) and this should serve as a deterrent for users from misusing the system.

Of course, law enforcement agencies have been found wanting in executing their duties sincerely, but then that is an administration issue that needs to be looked at. If the above system is implemented, then the subsidy on diesel shall go to the rightful recipients, our petroleum companies will breathe a little freely, and there will be a reasonable demand for mass transport systems across our cities.

Around a year ago, Fermilab received a coded letter at their Public Affairs office. The letter had a series of line strokes on the top and bottom and a set of symbols in the middle.

Click here to see the letter in its original form.

Many people are currently attempting to figure out the underlying message that this letter carries. The top and bottom sections appear to have been decrypted so far. For following the entire process on how the decryption has been taking place, read this link on Symmetry Magazine. And if you think you want to give it a shot, feel free to join in the comments section of that article.

Personally, I found it extremely interesting to follow the thought processes of the various contributors as they go about solving this mysterious code.

First, read this article by T. R. Ramaswami in the Mint on the battle of Kurukshetra. Then, there is this war of words started by a blogger called Eroteme.

Personally, I like Ramaswami’s article because it gives me a different set of things to think about with respect to the Mahabharat (and Ramayan). Sure, we all know the usual story and the date of its occurance and all that. But giving it a different line of thought makes it worth reading and I am glad Mint published it. As regards to its factual credibility, I am not too hung up on that. When I read The Mahabharat, I found it to be an interesting page turner and really racy. Eroteme might probably be right with all the factual references (although he does leave out conveniently Ramaswami’s point of the Kalat region in Baluchistan where a Dravidian language is still spoken), but for me Ramaswami’s version added more spice to the whole saga that is the Mahabharat.

All this aside, I highly recommend Ramesh Menon’s version of the Mahabharat. It is in-line for the contemporary reader and is laced with a lot of contemporary “values”, if you know what I mean.

Running out of a word supply, I fall back on photos for this blog post.

This time its shots I took of various objects around home.
The two colours that are usually present on almost any religious functions:

Window stoppers:

A Lone Guard:

Closeup of an artifact:

Enjoy.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

This book is a lot more intriguing than what its title conveys. Kafka on the Shore is a metaphorical passage spanning across life’s tragedies and tribulations, attempting to throw questions about death and the metaphysical world which we, as day-to-day people, tangentially touch every now and then.

If the above paragraph seems a bit abstract to you, I have probably done justice to the book. It is a fantasy novel, a page turner, a thriller, a concept, an introspection and a series of questions – all rolled into one.

There are two parallel stories that slowly converge and possibly intersect at one point in time. Kafka Tamura is a 15 year old boy who runs away from home, to escape a curse bestowed upon him by his father. His journeys finally take him to a library in a rather nondescript town where he lands a job as an assistant. Here, he meets the library owner, Miss Saeki, who is possibly his mother. The boy, who takes upon himself the name “Kafka”, based on his likings of Kafka’s works, is seeking answers to certain important aspects of his life. Does he find those answers at that library? That is hard to ascertain. What he does find is a painting of a boy on a beach, and a song which had been a huge hit in an era gone by. The song’s title? Kafka on the shore. What does this painting and the song have to do with this 15 year old is left to you, the by-now-completely-hooked reader to figure out.

The other story is of Nakata, a 60+ years old man who has little or almost nil intellectual ability owing to a freak incident that occurred to him when he was 6 years old. As a child, he was taken to a forest for an outing by his class teacher along with his other fellow mates. A bizzarre incident brought them all down unconscious. People later attributed this incident to probably some warfare experiments, but no one knew for sure. All the kids who were struck down recovered within a couple of hours. However, Nakata took a long time to get back to a normal life. And when he did, he found that he wasn’t able to read or write or assimilate information. However, this one incident gifted him with an ability that no human has – the ability to communicate with cats. Taking on the profession of a finder of lost cats, Nakata stumbles upon an incident that changes his life forever and takes him on a journey which he knows nothing about.

Does Nakata have anything to do with Kafka or his life? Possibly. There are instances where we get to see that both Nakata and Kafka enter the “other” world, a world which borders on the edge of our “known” world. They both move across these realms, and in the process, discover certain hidden meanings of the current world.

The reason I use the word “possibly” in the above paragraphs is that Murakami does not conclusively tell you what exactly is going on. The book is a series of metaphors and riddles that leaves the reader to decipher and understand. Due to this, you may have your own conclusion about things like “the other world”, “death”, “entrance stone” and all the other “concepts” that are deeply touched upon while keeping the page-turning on.

Clearly, this is by far the most difficult book I have had to review so far, primarily because I found it leaving me with many questions and not too many answers. But, that is the beauty of this book. There are enough avenues for us to get our answers and we have been through many such books.
What Kafka on the Shore achieves is that it makes you appreciate questions – a task that cannot be achieved easily.

To sum up in words a book of this infinite stature would be quite a fruitless task. Nevertheless, for the minimalists, this is a book of metaphors and questions. I would highly recommend it, ladies and gentlemen.

Read this. Nothing needs to be said further.

Yesterday, the by-now-once-a-year shocking news made its customary appearance. Jaipur was rocked by a series of blasts and the official death toll as of now is somewhere upwards of 80 (according to many news sources).

I heard the news, opened up a couple of news websites, read about it, shook my head in disgust, and then moved on with my day to day activities. The event did not create a rage inside me. What creates a rage now is this question – Why I did not get affected about this news as much as I should have?

Why? Is it that we as a nation have become immune to this trend? Is it that we have forgotten to demand basic security within our country premises? Or are we just too caught up on the growing super-power epiphany that we have adopted for our selves?

The IPL happens, and the entire country has an opinion or two to share on everything related to the game. Including on the cheerleaders. But where is this country when the need is to decide on how we should secure our citizens? Why is this job left to the government, which makes a shoddy job of it in the first place and then engages in a blame game just to ensure that their electorate does not get too unhappy? The news papers will be back to showcasing cricket and bimbos on the first page from tomorrow onwards. This particular news item will now move to the narrow columns on the left or the right and then a few days later will be pushed to the inner pages, where you might stumble upon it to be immediately attracted by an advertisement on the next cool property to buy.

What about those who lost their lives in Jaipur for no fault of theirs? What happens to those million dreams which reached an inconclusive end, an unfair death? Who takes responsibility for all this? We? Our government? Our intelligence agencies?
Why is nobody held accountable for the safety and security of our fellow countrymen?

This post has nothing to do with preaching about civic responsibilities. Its more of a personal angst on my inability or, rather, lack of willingness, to form an opinion on an event of this tragic a scale.

The weekend gone by saw us on another trip, albeit a shorter one. This time we headed towards the coffee plantations of Coorg. The place is beautiful, as we had anticipated of course. But what struck me is the amount of greenery that this area showcases. I have been to trips and forest treks earlier (no, I am not the trekking kinds, but have landed up in such places by chance) and nothing has come close to the amount of dense vegetation that Coorg has.

Upon reaching our accommodation, we took a walk around the place. There are numerous flowers around which I had never seen before.

The large number of green plants and trees come with their own share of insects, bugs and other small crawlers.

Towards evening the clouds decided to get into a sombre mood and congregated over us. It rained heavily and there was little left for us to do than be cooped up in our rooms and watch the rain drops fall defiantly on the tree leaves and grass blades, bending them in the process before collapsing into puddles of water. The thunder roared in acknowledgment of this task well done.

The rain cleared just as quickly as it had begun, and the darkness was slowly swept away by the never-tiring and all pervasive rays of the sun.

We spent another day in this place before heading back to the highways infested by cars, trucks and other automobiles. However, in a strange way, I am always glad to be back in the city and its accompanying pollutions. Nature and all that is great yeah, but only for a few days for me. I need my daily dose of cacophony, chaos and life.
Have a great day, ladies and gentlemen. The week has begun.