How does one deal with one’s peculiarities?


For instance, suppose that you are talking to someone who has just hijacked the conversation and has been explaining for the past hour about how his wife, his colleagues, the shopkeeper and the rest of the world are conspiring against him. Even as he is inculpating half a dozen of your common acquaintances, you see him take shape as one of the non-entities in the book that you might write. You strive to listen to him and make the appropriate sounds but all you see is his first scene, with him telling his friends in a passionate voice that his brother, who is an overbearing ass and who stole his girl (and who is incidentally your hero), had just fired him because he couldn’t type fast enough. You see how his shifty eyes never waver when he feels righteous or when he talks about his brother. You debate between the choices of adjectives and sentences spring to your head. You craft him carefully, highlighting his essential weakness but without creating in him an antithesis of your hero, giving them both straight noses, stubborn chins…

Unfortunately, the number of non-entities in my books seems to be inordinately high. How DO you deal with this?

No matter with what ingenious ways I try to reform myself, it always comes back to the same thing. Always. Books. Never mind, the post is not a rant.


I don’t relate to movies. I watch them fully only when the alternative is worse; impossible for such a scenario to recur often. Also, the number of movies I’ve watched for half an hour is many so you can’t say I don’t try.


Since I keep up with the dullest books to the end and seldom commit the offence of giving it up unless out of disgust, I do not believe it is boredom that drives me away from movies. I suppose it is that the movie usually ends before I get to know the people in it. I prefer the slowest of books to any movie I’ve seen, as long as I remember a guy from the book after a year.


So what’s this bookish movie I saw?


I won’t tell you. It just had two people talking throughout, literally, and I’m sure I’ll remember the girl after a year. It felt just like I’d read another lovely book. :)


I must be missing some key aspect in movies. Don’t tell me in the comments - I don’t care to learn. I have enough on my plate already, for whatever time I have.

Not as good as his other books but definitely worth a read. I liked Wisdom of Solomon among the entire collection. It had the last line twist that Archer is famous for. That leaves me with just a few more of his books that I have not read! Hoping to get hold of them soon!

After a immensely long time, I decided to read a book and boy, what a book it was. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is quite simply the best book I’ve read. (Though that is no big deal, it does not reduce the quality of the book in any way). I was amazed by how the author could see through humans so easily. I strongly recommend the book for all. My review (!) of the book here.

It has been almost a month since I read ‘The kite runner’ and I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since. But that did not happen for long and when I got back to posting a few days back, I almost thought I would forget the impact the book had on me. Quite unbelievable I must say! Its characters, the contrasts, the plot, the obvious and the not so obvious, each and every part of the book touch you more than you would expect. No spoilers intended, so I won’t say anything more than the fact that you just cannot miss this book.

“It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn’t make everything all right. It didn’t make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking the wake of a startled bird’s flight. But I’ll take it, with open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and may be I just witnessed the first flake melting.

I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. I didn’t care. I ran with wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the valley of panjsher on my lips. I ran.”


-Khalid Hosseini.

Foundation is the first book in the Foundation series by Asimov. Interestingly it was published before the Prelude to Foundation. The reason is simple. A good amount of the Foundation series’ fans could not handle the 12,000 years leap into the future. Consequently the Prelude to Foundation was published. It gives a reasonably elaborate background to Foundation and addresses all the why, who, how and when comprehensively.

For the uninitiated, the Foundation is a group of scientists settled at either ends of the Galaxy,  who work on documenting all the inventions and scientific discoveries until then, for the future generations. One such end of Galaxy is where the planet Terminus is situated. This story is about the Foundation in Terminus.

The book is set at a time around 12,000 GE(Galactic Era). At this time, Hari  Seldon, a mathematician is all set to lay down the laws of psychohistory. Psychohistory in short is a mathematical study which aids in predicting the future with a reasonable accuracy. For a more rigorous mathematical introduction you can read the Prelude to Foundation. Of course, if you have some understanding of the adage “Power corrupts” and how our entire history has been centered around that, you could have guessed Seldon was not left in peace. He was always suspected to have an eye on the Empire. Before going any further, you must understand that the 25 million worlds and a quadrillion humans surviving in them were governed by a single Emperor, from Trantor. So, he was being watched, tailed and what not. You can imagine a futuristic version of Will Smith’s Enemy of the State. Of course Asimov  does not narrate any such action-packed sequences and has left his readers to imagine according to their times. He just gives what you need to know. And you get a Galactic wiki in the form of the Encyclopedia Galactica in the beginning of every chapter. All this gives you a feeling that you are looking back at how the Foundation was formed. All the futuristic details of  the Galaxy is given in a matter of fact manner.

After the laws of psychohistory had been laid, an arrangement called the Time Vault is made. The Vault is where Seldon makes his virtual appearance at intervals of around 50 years. He explains to his audience what crisis they have just evaded and what they are expected to face. But he does not and can’t explain how each of these Seldon’s crises can be handled, because it will alter the assumptions that were made in calculating the future based on the laws of psychohistory. Now it is evident that only those who have understood the basic tenets of Seldon’s psychohistory have been at the helm of things, mostly mayors of Terminus.

This book narrates the story of three Seldon’s crises. The first crisis involves a neighboring planet Anacreon getting power hungry and hinting war. This is handled very aptly by Salvor Hardin, the then mayor. Himself being a psychologist and a believer in Seldon’s psychohistory, he waits till the right moment when there is just one path of action possible. He very cunningly holds talks with all neighbors of Anacreon explaining that Foundation is in possession of atomic power and how the other nations may want to share the Foundation even if it were to be defeated.

The second crisis is more like a leak in the first solution. The fear instilled in the neighbors slowly dies. In the meanwhile Hardin had invented a religion that made the scientific advancements of the Foundation acceptable for the neighbors. This religion got entrenched into the lives of the inhabitants of the neighbors. Thus religion was used as a tool to avert an ultimatum of war by Anacreon again.

As time passed by, a new phenomenon of spreading this already weakening religion was discovered. Trade of Foundation’s scientifically advanced gadgets along with the spread of the religion was facilitated. Traders became the people with power. This crisis again involves an ultimatum to war, but the course of events that lead to the crisis are more complex than before and now trade is used as the tool to bring the war to a stalemate.

One thing we must certainly appreciate Asimov is for the way in which he has groomed the Galactic fate. He has certainly taken inspiration from our own world history. We can see that the author has drawn analogies  between events of past and future. This emphasizes his belief in the saying, “History repeats itself”. The Foundation being a newly born planet, goes through the transitions any society undergoes. Very similar to our history, he first scripts the birth of a religion. Though it was not practiced on its soil, it was applied on its relatively barbaric neighbors. Then is the birth of trade as a tool to wield power. In fact, we can see Seldon comparing Foundation’s work with that of the Renaissance. Renaissance of social, scientific and economic system of the existing, decaying Empire to give birth to the Second Empire.

By Space, I think i went on and on about the book. This is a very popularly noticed psychological phenomenon among Foundation series readers. They cant stop talking about it. So hurry and grab a copy, its hardly 200 pages. I am sure you ‘ll come to back to see what I have written about the book after reading it.