From the Print Editions

I am using Google Reader a lot, and by way of giving something back to it, made a post there, and is cross-posted here-

From the Print Editions:

"I think I should share some news from here at India.

From The Times of India:



In Coimbatore, workers affiliated to Marxist-Leninist group hit Roy J. George on the head with iron rods and killed him. He was an alumnus of IIT-Calcutta, VP (Human Resources) at Pricol. Pricol is not just another ordinary company, it employs thousands, and this is generally bad news for industry in Coimbatore. People are generally anti-corporate, pro equality.



It seems that Chandrayan, the prematurely expired moon mission, is not such a great disaster- in fact, it could be that announcement of a major discovery is in the offing- Did Chandrayan find Water in the Moon?, the newspaper speculates- if you are imaginative you could wonder if it did find some Martian or Moony, but the fact is, ISRO and NASA have scheduled an announcement at NASA headquarters on Thursday, something big is coming up.



There is a bit of background info about Kobad Gandhy, the arrested Naxalite. He is a son of a MD in a MNC, educated at Doon School, St Xaviers College, Mumbai and studied accountancy in England. He showed a tendency towards delinquency at an early age, when he stole an expensive gold watch and gave it away to a servant. Why would a young man from a rich family walk away from it and try to found a classless society through revolutinary activities, is the implied query. Who knows!



P, Chidambaram, the Home Minister, is pained at the lack of traffic sense among the people of Delhi, where Commonwealth games are to be held. The High Commissioner of Mauritius is quoted as saying, 'Delhi drivers are very bad. They do not drive in lanes', and P. Chidambaram is quoted, 'We must behave as citizens of a big, good, international city'. The headline screams, 'Mind your manners, PC tells Delhiites'- I though it was about not littering the streets and things like that.




The New Indian Express:



A study in Chennai finds that 51 per cent of young men and 56 per cent of young women support the idea of beating a wife by way of disciplining her. I don't believe it- '38 per cent women believe they deserve to be beaten if they do not agree with their husbands... Among married women, 43 per cent justify being beaten if they fail to inform their husbands while going out'- overactive imagination, or Chennai women are masochists. Mine is not, definitely not.



This one looks good: 'Sonia word for Tharoor: Stick to Tweet Nothings'. Sashi Tharoor, the failed UN Secretary General, tweeted that economy class passengers in airlines are all cattle class- and promptly got into trouble. He has been warned to not even jokingly hurt public sentiments.



That's it."

*Rubber or Plastic?- a Grave Issue*

Rubber or Plastic?- a Grave Issue: "'The writer David Sedaris, describing an argument with his partner over whether someone's artificial hand was made of rubber of plastic, also foresaw no end to their disagreement:

'I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,' people would say, and my rage would renew itself. The argument would continue until one of us died, and even then it would manage to wage on. If I went first, my tombstone would read IT WAS RUBBER. He'd likely take the adjacent plot and buy a larger tombstone reading NO. IT WAS PLASTIC.'

Sedaris, D, Dress your family in corduroy and denim, quoted in A mind of its own, by Cordelia Fine, page 106."

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Notes on Writing

Garrison Keillor, creator of  of Lake Wobegon "where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." " (The Universe of Discourse, the blog where I also found this: of which later) writes on writing:

". . . If you work 9 to 5, that means setting the alarm for 5 a.m. so you can shower and dress and have some coffee and take a nice brisk walk for 20 minutes and then settle yourself down in a quiet place and have two luxurious hours of stillness in which to put something on the computer. Then make a hard copy and stick it in your back pocket to mark up during any odd free moments during the day. If you’re out of the habit of writing, you may need to do some exercises — give yourself some assignments — write about your parents, describe your best friends, write the story of your worst low point in life, etc. Just to get your brain working. In the evening, I’m afraid, your brain will be tired of words, so the morning is your best bet, and you’ll have to give up some of your evening pleasures so you can get enough sleep. But it’s worth trying this for a year or so to see what comes from it. And I wish you well."

Link through  Atanu Dey on India's Development


Sage advice.


And what did I discover at The Universe of Discourse?

"Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about how he was diagnosed with cancer and given six months to live. This sounds awful, and it is awful. But six months was the expected lifetime for patients with his type of cancer—the average remaining lifetime, in other words—and in fact, nearly everyone with that sort of cancer lived less than six months, usually much less. The average was only skewed up as high as six months because of a few people who took years to die. Gould realized this, and then set about trying to find out how the few long-lived outliers survived and what he could do to turn himself into one of the long-lived freaks. And he succeeded, and lived for twenty years, dying eventually at age 60."

links

News:

I've been updating a blog that is mostly about links: What is the use!

The golden age of blogging has already passed...

I was thinking about making two posts about two posts that made quite a deep impression on me. I am somewhat lexically handicapped, grammatically hobbled, lyrically blind, given to verbal diarrhoea alternating with intellectual constipation, style deaf and more. And also incredibly lazy and time-wasting, forgot to mention that. I should have done this post earlier- but here it is.

First of all, why do we blog? I have probably five or ten readers, possibly two or three- but still, I go around mooning about making brilliant blog posts that would make you ask for more. So when I read this post at A Commonplace Blog, I found myself nodding, "yes, yes, this is it"- it described what I myself have been doing here:

Now, I hope you go to the blog and read the post in its entirety- because I found it moving. It spoke to me, and for me.

"“A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories’: and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.”

Jonathan Swift, A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet"

That is what this blog is, right? A vanity may be, that I have made it public- but it is all me, my commonplace book, where I've been squirreling things that I've fancied.

Now, I hope you go to the blog and read the post in its entirety- because I found it moving. It spoke to me, and spoke for me. You know why?

Now is the time to mention the other post I wanted to write about: I read it via TCWJ- "Amy"

Soulberry writes,

"Amy hadn't been here for a while, and neither had I paid a visit to her's in a few weeks. So I went over to check today, and came across a post by her friend, Kate, informing us all about the shocking news that Amy was no longer with us."

So I went to her blog and read what her friend has written:

"My name is Kate. I was one of Amy’s closest friends before she passed away in July in a car accident. She was 26. For a long time I’ve been deliberating over whether I should post this and I haven’t known how to deliver the painful news to people I don’t know. I wasn’t even sure whether I should say anything at all, but I feel a responsibility to post this because Amy obviously felt this blog held some importance to her or she wouldn’t have continued posting until she did..."

"I can only assume that this blog meant something to her because she kept writing even after she recently changed jobs and started working in Canberra as a staff member handling media relations for Kevin Rudd’s office. It was physically and mentally taxing and because of it we hadn’t been in much contact for the few weeks before she became sick. But she kept posting here and so I feel you should at least know what has happened to her. "

And in the sidebar, I find-

RIP AMY

Amy has passed away, but this blog will remain as is to preserve the writing and effort put into it over many months. May her words remain eternal.

Being inadequate to the task of expressing honest emotions, let me go to The Commonplace Blog and borrow this:

"• How do you respond to this statement? “Blogging is just another hobby, like stamp collecting or hockey.”

"Blogging is more a way of life, of satisfying an urge to respond to stimuli and to receive feed back; to communicate, connect; to share thoughts on what has been seen or read or heard with like-minded people; to comment on significant events or entertainments. Life now doesn’t seem complete unless I'm actively contributing/participating in this way. Watching, listening, reading alone is now, just not enough. I’ll often see and photograph things for my blog. Blogging isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of experiencing the world."

This might seem to go over the top, "Blogging is a way of life", like it is Hinduism or something- but I think most of us will agree with this- and I am sure Soulberry will. I definitely do. We get nothing out of it, but we put ourselves in it- whether we are good at blogging or not, we have made it our life.

So I felt moved at Amy's death, and the response to it- 98 comments to the post at her blog that she did not write- people sharing their friendship with a fellow-blogger-

"Hi,

I'm only 16 so not very good at handling death, but this got to me.

I always wondered why Amy stopped blogging but just thought it was cos she was probably busy with work etc. Never did I think of this..

Thank you so much Kate for letting us all know. Amys blog became a part of my life, reading up after anything happened in cricket, just to hear her opinion and laugh with her.

She brought cricket fans together all around the world.

I'll miss her.

Samina. x"

This is what keeps you blogging- not showing-off, but the community-feeling.

It feels meaningless to say this, "Rest in Peace, Amy', but I feel like saying it. And for the people who love Amy, 'We feel some of your pain..."

Sorry- but the funny thing is, Balajhi and Watcher and Siva will kill me for saying this- "If anything happens to me, someone should put a post of it here"

That is how important blogging feels important.

And I am glad Kate understood that about Amy.

A History of Tragic Times

"In a memorable episode, Dirac and his wife visit their closest friends, Peter and Anna Kapitza, in Russia. In 1934, the long arm of the Soviet state had wrenched Kapitza, despite his devoted long-distance fellow-traveling, away from his lab at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford and back into the Soviet Union. In 1937 the friends reunited at the Kapitzas’ summer house in the piney woods of Bolshevo, “with wild strawberries ripe for gathering and a fast-flowing river close by.” They arrived only “days before Stalin authorized the torture of suspected enemies of the people,” Farmelo writes. “On the roads around Bolshevo, some of the trucks marked ‘Meat’ and ‘Vegetables’ hid prisoners on their way to be shot and buried in the forests to the north of the city which Dirac admired through his binoculars.”"

New York Times

What I should not have done...

Let me apologise for the hiatus. What has happened is that, carried away by the recent burst of energy, I foolishly set myself the goal of posting five stories every week. The pressure of impending work smothered what little creativity there was.

So I deleted the Goals Gadget on Tuesday. It has taken three days for me to recover from the weight of aspiration- but still, at last, here I am, no damage done, though not none the worse for the wear.

Be happy.

(By the way, if you are interesting in writing, read this about Kurt Vonnegut. It is actually about Vonnegut's remarks on why we want drama and go to stories to find that, but it could help you write better. Just remember this: the darkest night is before the dawn, and there is a silver lining to every cloud. The graph is cool)