Snow by Orhan Pamuk

‘Snow’ is a popular novel by Nobel Laureate (2006 for Literature) Orhan Pamuk, translated from Turkish. My reading of Snow itself is a separate story. I attempted reading it thrice before finding and completing it on the fourth attempt. On all previous attempts after few initial chapters, I misplaced it or the book lost me. Last week, while cleaning up a cupboard, it found me.

The protagonist ‘Ka’, a popular Turkish poet and a political exile who returns to Turkey, from Germany, for his mother’s funeral, sets on a bus journey to the border city of Kars. Ka, is an unhappy man searching for happiness, who goes in search of his love to Kars. He wants to infuse happiness into his life with his love ‘Ipek’, a beautiful woman whom he knows and loves from his university days. His motive is simple, to meet his love, a divorcee, and take her with him to Frankfurt where he resides. He missed Ipek to his friend from university days even before he could convey her, his love. It is when he hears about the divorce of Ipek, from a friend, on his return to Turkey, he starts longing for Ipek and makes the journey to Kars. For this he goes to Kars under the pretext of a journo who would write for an Istanbul magazine, about the wave of suicides by young muslim women in Kars and also to cover the mayor elections to be held. 

Kars was invaded and ruled by various powers (Russian, Armenian, Ottoman) and is full of their architectures. Ka’s memories of Kars from his visit(s) in childhood is different from what he sees on his return in his 40’s (assumed age though there is no mention of his age in the story).  It has lost its sheen, is poor and religious fanaticism catching up fast. Pamuk brings out the city in front of your visual eyes so well with his vivid and brilliant description (even I had a dream wading through the streets of Kars on one of the nights I read ‘Snow’). It is in this city, during his 3 days stay that Ka experiences extremes of emotions. He meets his love, wins over her, meets families of those who committed suicides, experiences religious encounters, meets a terrorist, and be witness to a coup.

The novel begins with a bus leaving ‘Erzuram’, a Turkish city, to Kars as Ka boards it on a winter day, and the bus journeys through a blizzard. It’s captivating straightaway. You feel yourself inside the bus as a fellow passenger of Ka. Once I went to Ooty in the night, via Kotagiri, few weeks after a big landslide washed away quite a few hair pin bends, and people with it, on the Coonoor-Ooty  road. Once the bus started climbing the mountains there was hardly any sound other than the bus engine noise. Everybody was awake but silent. We all had to take the trip, yet wished we weren’t. The fear of something going wrong any time was enormous. That feeling returned to me when Ka travelled to Kars in that bus from Erzuram, through the blizzard.

I cannot say that the whole novel is full of brilliance but there definitely are brilliant passages and invigorating thoughts.  Vivid description is something that won over me. We all visualize and even an ordinary writer can make us visualize but making one feel the touch, feel the sensation are something that I felt for the first time. When Ka has sex with Ipek I felt my body is touching the body the author was describing. I have read many stories, many descriptions of sexual activities by many authors including famous ones but this was the first. Saying this may prompt someone to ask something awkward or silly in the comments section but then if I don’t mention it here then am not doing justice to this review. Orhan Pamuk has a way of saying things. By the way don’t rush to read it for the wrong reasons, you would be terribly disappointedJ.

So what happens in the story? Twists and turns, some imaginable, some unimaginable but then the artistic liberty is with the author. You go to a city to meet and win your love back. You meet her, you witness a murder, you visit a spiritual leader, you then go to meet a terrorist, then watch a play which leads to a coup, have sex with your love, win her love, get her acceptance to come with you to Frankfurt, then become a tool in the coup leader’s hands, have sex again, then another play follows and then you leave Kars. Ka experiences it all in Kars.  Read it, if you haven’t already. Snow is a good and serious read. 

Economical sound proofing using thermocol / packing tape

My office room is located in the ground floor of our house and is adjacent to the living room of my uncle who lives in the ground floor. We have excellent relations but the trouble was the noise from the television whenever they watched it. There is a door (which is permanently closed) between my office room and their living room. Evenings are always sound-full and so are the afternoons (soap timings) It was annoying to say the least. Whether they followed the stories (are they any?) in the soaps they watch or not, I knew them. I know the characters, some of the dialogues. It's more like listening to AIR dramas in the bygone era. I did not think it was right on my part to ask them not watch it. I can't even ask them to reduce the sound, because my uncle needs it loud to be able to hear. I was searching for solutions on the net. Acoustic curtains, that will cut / reduce noise are there all over the net but I couldn't find any in Coimbatore despite visiting almost all the shops selling curtains / home furnishing items. I almost settled for the status-quo and kept telling myself to focus hard and treat work as meditation. Ignore outside noise, listen to the inner sound, try harder, try harder. The harder I tried more annoyed I became. Out of the blue came a suggestion from a friend, who asked me to  do thermocol packing. I followed his instructions and completed a thermocol packing this morning. 

First, I pasted the brown color packing tape all over the edges of the door. Then stuck thermocol over the gaps in, under and over the door and taped it again. Then made a thermocol door (pasted 4x2 thermocol pieces and taped them), stuck it, leaving 4'' gap from the closed door, between the walls where the door. So far so good. There was considerable reduction in the noise when they switched on TV some time back. It made me feel good, having done all the work for nearly three hours on my own. To make it (sound reduction) more effective, planning to buy a heavy curtain and hang it in front of the thermocol door. 

As you can see it is far from a neat and professional work but has helped in improving the situation. The picture captures only the top half of the thermocol door as taking the picture of the entire door would have meant removing and rearranging all my laptop and accessory wiring. If someone who needs a solution for cutting down noise finds this article, this article would have achieve its purpose.

This seems promising, so I'd like to pass it on.

 As per a communication I received, "The graphic design firm RipeConcepts is offering two hours of free graphic design work as a way to meet new potential clients." You can make use of the two hours "to design a new logo for a blog, put together a banner, template for a newsletter, create a customized business card, etc." Looks like it is totally free. Seems useful.

 Check out www.graphicdesignoffer.com -if you are interested.

Melting Dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan

Got up early in the morning to do some work in my hotel room in Bangalore. With my intestines prompting me went down to the restaurant only to be surprised, 'Restaurant not open on Sundays'. Then the name of 'Vidyarthi Bhavan' from my memory splashed across and took an auto to reach Gandhi bazar Road at Basavangudi where it is situated.

Heard a lot about Vidyarthi Bhavan, its famous dosa and the celeb visitors. It, I must say, lived up to the hype. Never tasted a masal dosa so good and the Kharabath (Upma) was good too. Coffee was fine but nothing extraordinary. It costed Rs.61 for a Kharabhath, Masal Dosa and a coffee. You might rush to think it's cheap but it's not. Kharabath quantity is half of what you would get in other restaurants. Masal dosa size too is smaller, akin to the size we make at home. But then it's not pricey, it can at best be put at 'moderate' tag.

The masal dosa was crisp (which means oily) and tasty. The masal is so good that when combined with the dosa, gave a melting sensation once inside my mouth. The dosa is thick unlike regular masal dosa that one would get in other restaurants. One side is crisp and other side of the dosa (inner side if you would like to call it) is soft like it is in uthappam (oothappam). More than the process, which one could gauge and attempt, the ingredients that go into to achieve the taste is bit puzzling. They must be using a different rice variety and may be a different proportion of main ingredients. All in all a good masal dosa to have once in a week.


There isn't much variety (I went there for breakfast). There were only 4 items (Kharabath, Masal dosa, poori and idly).  I saw all four items being served in good numbers, with Masal dosa being the dominant one. When the server came to take order, I said 'Kharabath' to which he asked 'Kharabath and Dosa?', which says a lot about their dosa and its popularity. 

They must be good at all of their morning varieties otherwise one can't explain the heavy rush on a sunday morning at 8.00 am. People were standing near every table when I walked in. Since I was single, found a place easily. When I walked out, loads of people were standing outside, booking tables with the man near the counter. What is even more surprising is it's not just men but families that dominated the crowd at 8 in the morning on a Sunday. Having tasted their Dosa I understand why.

It was good to taste something different. A regular item with a different taste. Overall a very good experience

Still Feeling Sorry about Google Reader

A griping post.

The worst thing that happened last year was the Iron Curtain that fell over Google Reader - when it came to life all of a sudden, I had great hopes for it. It promised a personalised web: in the first week, search results showed up pages from people I were following, and pages I had bookmarked on Delicious, and from the subscribed tags on Delicious. It was brilliant : when you google, say, Brecht, you might get study notes and stuff on the first page of its results- but not on Reader. Reader gave you results that mattered to you.

You use the web for these three things : find, keep and share stuff. Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing stuff, and indirectly finding stuff. But there is no way for you to keep those stuff if you don't do something about it. Try searching Twitter or Facebook for something you noticed a couple of weeks bacjk.

All Google had to do was make it easy to subscribe to the RSS of any particular public page, and create a more easier user interface for sharing stuff from Reader. I used pull in stuff from Twitter and Facebook for safekeeping, sure that I could retrieve them as and when I wanted to do. All that was not to be.

Google Plus is trying to do something that Facebook and Twitter are doing extraordinarily well. But with Google Reader with its superior search engine, they could have given us a personalised web. Google's failure to see this is painful, to say the least.