Category: Personal

During my stay in Kolkata last week, the weather was pretty cool and it rained quite a bit. Last Saturday, 2 friends and I went on a long drive along the Kona expressway in the night. It started raining. We had to slow down a bit, the cool blasts of wind was something to cheer about though. The rain-washed halogen-lit roads looked sparkling too! Before hitting the highways, we spent a long time chilling at Golpark CCD. The coffee kept us awake!

Last month I wrote about the books I have been reading recently. I forgot to mention one though. The Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.

It is an epic tale and the first part of what is going to be a trilogy, called The Ibis trilogy, named after the ship Ibis which has set sail across the Indian Ocean. On board the Ibis are a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman, who soon come to discover that their destinies are strangely tied together.

To read Sea of Poppies was a real treat and as it came to an end, I wished it din’t! It is colonial India brought alive with all its richness and variety. I am eagerly waiting for the next two parts.

The Ibis Trilogy has its own website with all the informations and trivia the reader could ask for. From the reading guide on the site I found this list of further reading –

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Out of these I have read the first two. Plan to read Midnight’s Children some of these days.

After much speculation about its fate, the circular finally came and interns and housestaffs will now get the hiked salary as proposed before.

Well the poll results are out and guess what I kind of knew that UPA was going to return to power. Not because the media was on their side. Good governance, that says it all. It was positive votes in favour of UPA. Please read the poll results analysis I wrote just as the results came out.

In West Bengal it was a completely different story though. As people break out in joyous frenzy after the terrible rout of the ruling party of our state, this is a link worth checking out – Raja Khaye Byang Bhaja.

The proposed pay hike for medical interns and housestaffs ain’t gonna happen. http://pranabchatterjee.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/tune-of-the-day-monday-april-27-2009/

Version 8 onwards Yahoo Messenger boasts of a completely revamped interface. Everything – from how plugins are handled to how notifications sound – have been spruced up completely. Ever felt an urge to get back the old sounds? I did. I have a liking for the old sounds. Agreed that the new sounds are less intrusive, that is to say, don’t mess up your concentration in a big way and are probably suited to the no-frills chat of these days, pioneered by Gtalk I should say. But folks seriously into instant messaging may just find the old sounds perfect. And although I rarely use YM nowadays, I miss the knock-knock-knock when somebody comes online or the creeking of a less-oiled door if somebody leaves, sounds which have been etched into my memory!

So here’s how you can reclaim the sounds from the past!

DOWNLOAD Yahoo Messenger Old Sounds

1. Download the pack of old sounds from the link above.
2.  Extract the files from the archive. (by using Winrar for example)
3. Copy all the files to this folder X:/Program Files/Yahoo!/Messenger/Media (where ‘X’ is the drive letter where your ‘Program Files’ folder is located, most often it is ‘C’). In the file replace dialog box that pops up, select ‘Replace All’ to replace the default sounds with your favourite sounds.
4. There is no 4th step. 😀 You are all set to enjoy the original YM sounds!

Right now, I am reading Atlas Shrugged. In this novel, Ayn Rand further expands the ideas and philosophies she introduced in Fountainhead. Ayn Rand’s writings have inspired millions of souls. I have learnt to think in a complete new way. I have learnt to value individualism. I have known about many theories so far unheard to me, ideas I had no clue about. I have jotted down my thoughts on Ayn Rand’s writings here – Thoughts on Ayn Rand’s Novels.I just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Khaled Hosseini’s writing is rich in graphic imagery, drawn in vivid detail using plain and simple language. It was heart-wrenching – he knows how to pull every cord in the reader’s heart. The novel is like a condensed history of Afghanistan – before and after the Talibans. Khaled Hosseini’s family stayed in Afghanistan till 1980 after which they received political assylum in US. He is a doctor trained in US. He has now given up medical practice though and works with the UN. There’s a link on his website where you can donate to Afghanistan’s welfare. Last year, I also read the more recent Hosseini novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. This one is even better than The Kite Runner, if you ask me. This enduring novel spanning decades, set in the Afghanistan, follows the tumultous lives of 2 Afghan women and how their lives cross each other, and proclaims that love will continue to bloom in young hearts even as nations fall apart in destructive wars.

Another book I plan to read very soon is Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. Not long ago, I read Brida by the same author. Paulo Coelho’s ideas are great. It says – Magic is a bridge between the visible and invisible world… and that magic is…. love. Then another idea I liked was this – Everyone is a mirror of yourself. So don’t think too much about others. There was yet another line I am unable to recall right now.

Last Pujo vacation, I was reading Inheritance of Loss, the 2006 Booker Prize winner by Kiran Desai. She is the daughter of Anita Desai whose piece is included in the +2 English syllabus of Delhi board.  The setting of Inheritance of Loss is Kalimpong and Darjeeling and the story delves into the hill movement of the 80s – things I had vague ideas about but didn’t know clearly enough. Came to know from the book what really happened back then, up there. Just as life in a retired judge’s house in a sleepy hill town is supposed to be, the speed of the novel is also slow. It progresses very slowly and there are often flashbacks from the past, in the form of the recollections of the judge’s early life. It is so well written that one can actually feel the clouds that clog the windows all day long, smell the heavy air in the judge’s decaying old house or savour the foods prepared by Noni and Lola, the rich sisters who often fly to London. The story goes in a direction opossite to what the reader’s heart wants. One would wish Biju would settle himself well in the US which was never too happen. Nor can Sai and Gyan continue their romance against the backdrop of a ethnic rivalry brewing in the hills. The ending of the story was meant to be like that, not a happy ending.

I am still reading Atlas Shrugged and wish to do a lot more reading in near future. I have a huge to-read list. Time is a constraint though. With all the departments going great guns, there is hardly any breathing space!

Hoorah! Today I received a Spread Firefox t-shirt from the SFX community. I am among the top 250 Firefox affiliates for quite some time and last quarter I was lucky enough to be selected as a featured affiliate which earned me the coveted Featured Fox award and this tee! This was due for some time and finally it came by UPS courier today all the way from US. This is the second Firefox t-shirt I’ll get to flaunt since I already wear the one I received with my Campus Rep swag pack.