Of Marguerite St Just, Sir Percy Blackeney and those golden days!

Disclaimer : For those who are uninitiated with "The Scarlet Pimpernel", here's where you can get your copy. The rest of you, here's a piece dedicated to that marvel.

And for those to whom, these names do ring a distant bell, welcome back to the age of English I (Prose) and English II (Non Detail). 'The Scarlet Pimpernal' was among the non detail books that we read during high school. It surely has been one of the best reads for me till date, though I have matured from the school book reader to the regular bed-time reader. I vividly remember the opening scene of the novel portraying the busy guillotine at its ghastly work. The carnage ceasing only at the late hour of the day, so that people could move on to spectating another amusing event of sorts..viz. the massacre and abuse of the aristocrats who have been exercising tyranny hitherto. The Calais to Dover ferry is another thing that comes to mind when one thinks of those 3rd period English classes, where people took turns to step onto the teacher's dais and read their assigned chapter out loud. The ones who gave a lyrical and musical touch to the narration were an instant hit among the girls and our beautiful English teacher who used to test those boys from the back bench frequently for their language skills. Of course, those lucky ones who stood out by way of narrating it musically, became articles of scorn from fellow last benchers. But it never stopped one from trying one's best to catch the eye.

My personal favorite from that beautiful novel has always been this prose that repeatedly appears through the narration.

"We seek him here, we seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
Is he in heaven?—Is he in hell?
That demmed, elusive Pimpernel."

I still remember the way I used to finish that paragraph stressing the "demmed elusive" with all the fervour and respect for the guy in command of the 20 member secret committee. The war between the secret society of English aristocrats and the conspirators at the guillotine was an enthralling one and the narrative of the spy novel was too good to resist for any high school guy. The eloquent blend of espionage and romance between the Scarlet and his wife makes for a wonderful ending. Chauvelin was probably one of the most successful villain characters of that era and his portrayal brings to mind Col. Hans Landa of Inglourious Basterds fame. Still, the literary character (Scarlet himself) who captured the imagination of many generations of readers from around the world was definitely the hero for many boys in my class and I remember how we used to steal scenes from the novel and enact it with modifications during those interval recesses in between classes. In fact, theories suggest that the twin lives of Zorro, Batman, Superman and the like have been copied from this one time and again since Orczy put pen on paper. Though the celluloid adaptations of the book didn't bring home the bacon, they become known names in the period drama genre as the movies and series captured something as sensitive as the French Revolution and espionage during that period.

All said and done, this one has been and will always be the most convincing book I have ever read and I would do injustice if I write a punch line to finish my lengthy acclaim of this novel.

Baroness Orczy, apparently wrote sequels to this masterpiece later on. But none of them made such an impact as this one. Here we are, talking about it 6 years later, on a fine monsoon afternoon, just because of the impact it has made in the minds of readers. I am sure those who have read the novel aloud in class, along with me, will second my opinion on this stunning book.

Mix Yourself some Whiskey with Soda

Disclaimer: The text that follows is not worth reading if any of the following holds good:
1. Have some work at office for which your manager is right behind your back.
2. Your wife has given you a list of things to buy and you have just lost it. In which case you will have the uphill task of remembering what was there on the list lest you will be massacred.
3. You have planned to read something worthwhile for today and have summarily rejected any content that has no substance.
4. Your day looks so busy that you have planned only a few hours of sleep.

Then please refrain from continuing as i would categorize the following paragraphs as "Something of no essence"

It would not be news to any of the regular visitors of this space as the first few posts on this blog revolved around Wodehouse and his books. I have taken a long enough hiatus from that obsession and effectively refrained from writing on that topic for a while now. The reasons for the hiatus never stand to mean that i released myself from that Utopian, ethereal world of Wodehouse. After a few of my readers reprimanded me for being so obsessed that the blog was filled with praise for Wodehouse and other related posts, I decided to take a break from those topics.

But now, i have garnered the resolve to touch upon that topic once again. No! Do not Panic. This is not yet another book review. This time it is slightly different. As I had nothing worthwhile to do at office on a nice Thursday morning, I did a strange thing. I took my notepad and started penning down a few of Wodehouse's witty ones that came to mind just then. And then I realized I had a nice list: A few good ones from the best of Wodehouse! So here they go.

"The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun"

"Marriage isn't a process of prolonging the life of love, but of mummifying the corpse"

"A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of someone who had searched for the leak in life's gas pipe with a lighted candle"

"He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more"

"I explain this to Jeeves and he said the same thing had bothered Hamlet"

"Her face was shining like the seat of a bus-driver's trousers"


"There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine"

"I always advise people never to give advice"

"You know how it is with some girls. They seem to take the stuffing right out of you. I mean to say, there is something about their personality that paralyses the vocal cords and reduces the contents of the brain to cauliflower."

"Mere abuse is no criticism."

"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Aged woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."

Now, I request readers who were erstwhile criticizing my obsession towards Wodehouse to hold off from scathing attacks by way of comments. The post is basically like a mix of whiskey and soda. One needs it at regular intervals. Hence i pictured the 57th post on my blog as an "interval" and thus filled it with this restorative combination.

Freakonomics: A Review

After a really really long time, I have tried my hands on yet another book review. Though I was slightly late in embarking upon this classic, now is not the bad time because the sequel: Super Freakonomics' is topping the charts at book stores.

Steven Levitt (a famous economist and a Harvard graduate) and Stephen Dubner (a New York journalist) have produced an impeccable work in Freakonomics. Using statistical data to reveal grotesque connections and heterodox behaviors is the basic concept behind the book by and large. Having said that, it is important to note that the book does not have any unifying theme. The authors have chosen to call this approach a treasure-hunt approach to the art of explaining the oblivious.

Is there an incentive for real estate agents to sell their own homes for more than they sell their clients' homes? How would parents react if child care centers started charging fees when they pick up their children after closing time after it had been previously free? Who is most likely to cheat when bagels are paid for on an honor system? Why do drug-dealers tend to live with their moms? What is common between school teachers and Sumo wrestlers? How did the police break into the Ku-Klux clan in 'reality'?Answers to all of these and much more is what is contained in the book. Those answers are simple but surprising. Behavioral economics is the name of the genre that includes this type of number based behavioral reasoning.

Though the book proclaims no unifying theme, to me personally, the unifying theme behind the book is obviously to make the reader find ways to asking questions. The revised edition of the book contains additional texts which are excerpts from the Freakonomics blog and columns. What I got out of the book is a new dimension to my thinking - an economic way of thinking. The Abhorring conventional wisdom was clearly an intention of the authors. Causes of problems that seem obvious usually, might not be the real causes more often than not. Hence, questioning everything is the right starting point to decode any conundrum.

Malcolm Gladwell's thoughts are very very closely aligned to the thought process behind this book. Super Freakonomics is slightly different from the prelude. The authors have taken a counter-intuitive approach to peep into the future.

Verdict: An excellent read. Should be read at one go. Will most likely entice the reader to buy the sequel and in some cases entice the reader to buy all of Malcolm Gladwell's in wholesale. (Last point was true in my case)

Happy Reading!!

2009- A Round Up

That's another fabulous year coming to an end. It has been a roller coaster ride for most of us with the world-wide recession, job turmoils, RIP MJ, Obamotopia, Tendulkar's 20, Woodsaga and a lot more. Some good and some bad. My year wasn't too different. The "one last time" visit to Pilani as a student was a wholesome experience. 15 days of ecstasy filled with assorted "highs". One last shot at The Age of Empires and Fifa, Movies, Sitcoms, Series and more. January and February went by looking forward to and reminiscing from the trip to Pilani respectively.

2009 was the year of Journalism with Digital media coming to the fore with all the might and power. One of those things what we could have done without was the hype that media created for Kareena's saree act or the Woods' bedroom act. Social networking took a new shape with the prominence of Facebook and Twitter. 09 was the year of linking and networking of course. Blogging became popular all the more and personally i was part of that Blogger revolution. The months of March and April indicated some respite after a dull ending to 2008 on the economic front.

I became a graduate in June and the eventual melancholy for missing college days ruled over me for about a month since then. First Job, Heavy work, Coding miseries, Corporate tamasha, Late nights, Team outings and other common buzzwords did buzz past me in the months of July and August. 2009 has been a 'year of reading' for me and I managed to cover a wide variety from Wodehouse, Orwell, Mohammed Hanif, Khaled Hosseini, Forsyth, Ken Follett to Gurcharan Das, Tharoor, Jhumpa and Naipaul. Later parts of the year witnessed a first order ruckus revolving around CAT and the mouse. A 'colossal failure' would more or less capture the essence of the CAT 09 saga. So after calling it 'RIP CAT09' after November, the footballing world caused surprises with the Big Four in England taking a beating. Now, the stage is set for a competitive season overall. An obsession for writing and journalism began to evolve and i started devoting a lot of time on political, economic and social writing in the month of December.

Overall, Not a great year. It did have the good's like the first job, great football, good movies and awesome books. The bad's were there too with RIP MJ, Religion and Politics, Dirty Media, Swayamvars, Hype on Climate change, Costly movies, Costly food, CAT meltdown and more......

Looking forward to a better year in 2010 with better health, better wealth and better knowledge. A Very Happy New Year to all !!

Chasing the Capitalist

"I do not know of any book that describes the impact of India's economic policies on her growth as analytically, logically and vividly as this one" - N.R.Narayana Murthy on "India Unbound" by Gurcharan Das.

The socioeconomic transformation of our nation has been well documented in this novel by the much acclaimed writer and public intellectual. If one is looking for a perfect introduction to contemporary India, it is here. Something tremendous has been happening in our country right since the dawn of 15th August 1947. India had to go through various phases in this epoch that started after the spring of hope in 1947. There was the lost generation in the era of 60s and 70s which went through Caste based demarcations, licensing blues and a surge in inequality. And then came the rebirth of dreams in the form of the "Golden Summer of 1991" and then we had a new country. We are what we are today, solely because of all the things that happened in the summer of 1991. Financial reforms came out in unbelievable speed and efficiency and the country was starting to enter the limelight.

In 1947 we were a free lot and there was a lot of enthusiasm and energy in the air. Nehru stood at the fore and showed signs of able leadership. Everything in the country started to happen in an organized fashion. Bureaucracy was the order of the day. The License Raj was at the helm. Entrepreneurs were a titular lot. This was the era of socialism. And soon, economists started realizing the negative implications of Nehru's ideologies. Things became worse when Indira Gandhi decided to build upon what her father had laid. The war in 1971 and the emergency that followed didn't help things anyway.

Our nation, which once was prey to dogmatic colonists in search of riches and treasures was becoming a poor nation after all. Harvard graduates were coming of age and the Indian top brass needed a good overhaul, when Prime Minister P.V.Narasimha Rao gave powers to two such graduates Dr. Manmohan Singh and P.Chidambaram. And then, the rest is history. The economy began to grow leaps and bounds year after year after 1991. This was when the country went through a phase called liberalization. I would prefer to call this phase-"the quest of Capitalism". The west had proved a point which their capitalist methodologies and The tigers of Asia viz. Hongkong, Singapore, Japan et al. had followed suit by now.

The country allowed investment and gave powers to budding entrepreneurs. The bourgeoisie became a buzzword and reforms were underway to get its size soaring year on year. This growth was fueled by a variety of foreign investments mainly due to the abundance of highly skilled software professionals in the country and the open society that was on offer due to liberal tax regimes.

The book touches each of these eras and paints a clear picture of the Indian economy's trajectory over the past 60 years. Our economy has been one that should be placed right at the center of an imaginary line drawn between socialism and capitalism. The learned top brass that we have as our representatives today have carefully sketched the coordinates of the point on that imaginary line. Arguably, that has been the main reason for India's nonchalance and tactical brilliance in having avoided the traumatic consequences of the recent global slowdown.

Verdict: This book offers layman friendly discussions of economic theories of poverty and serves as a key guide to the country's recent past.

Book Review: A Case of Exploding Mangoes

Fiction Based on Assassination is an interesting topic in the modern era which is pregnant with instances of terrorism and genocide. Mohammed Hanif's first book takes this subject and the novel is a plot about men plotting to murder other men. The timing with which the book has been published could not have been better for when it rolled out, General Musharraf was busy fighting Islamic Terrorism and NATO Forces were monotonously dealing with the mights of Taliban. Pakistan remains something of a mystery for most people in North America, occasionally gaining notoriety for acts of violence against women, political assassinations, and insinuations about its ties with the Taliban and the insurgency in Afghanistan. The author hails from Pakistan and in his first work has decided to touch upon the history of his own nation.

On 17 August 1988, a plane carrying General Zia ul-Haq, the military ruler of Pakistan since 1977 and America's staunchest ally in the first Afghan war, went down in flames, killing everybody on board. Zia was accompanied by some of his senior generals, the US ambassador to Pakistan and the head of the US military aid mission to Pakistan, all of whom died. There was no real investigation and no culprit was ever identified or, at any rate, announced. The novel gives an account of all the plotters who were involved in the mysterious death of the First Citizen of Pakistan (then). The style of writing forces one to brand this a "war novel" but the contents make it one with a mixture that includes Religion, Terrorism, Sex, Violence, Humor and Politics.

General Zia's death threat has been daunting since its outbreak about a year before the real demise. The protagonist, Colonel Shigri in this "so called fiction" is one of the plotters who works ardently to sketch a revenge against the Army General for the death of his father who used to serve the army too. The novel exposes a number of plain facts which are yet untold in the context of detentions and tortures suffered by victims jailed by men in uniform --be it any army in the world.

Apart from this revengeful plot by Ali Shigri, Pakistan's number Two, General Akhtar is trying his luck with another plot aiming at the same end result. The name of the book would go unjustified if i don't mention the plot by the "Secretary General of the Mango Farmers Association of Pakistan". The book unintentionally ends up explaining the birth of the modern terms-"jihad" and "mujahideen". In the end one goes back to square one for the climax keeps the reader at bay and the controversy behind the mysterious death of the General remains as it was.

If one doesn't mind sporadic attacks on religious sentiments, this book is a good one for the way things build up to the D-Day when General Zia boards the Pak One for the last time in his life. But given the fact that this book is a product homogeneously from Pakistan, the religious zeal in Hanif is understandable. Mockery on India, Indians, Indian Army, Indira Gandhi, Nehru, Hindus, Christians, Jews and what not is to be digested while one reads through this fabulous account of the Assassination of General Zia Ul Haq, the then President of Pakistan.

Life would have been better If

• If I did not stop quizzing after high school because it involved a lot of preparation if one had to make a mark when on stage
• If I really cultivated the habit of reading way earlier in life (say 7th standard or something)
• If I concentrated on my chess and took it further when i started playing during my school days
• If I did not take up engineering after school
• If I did not opt for a dual degree from BITS ahead of a Comp. Sci degree at Anna University
• If I knew after school that Journalism was a decently paying career option
  
• If I did not appreciate the fact that getting high when in college was a fantasy
• If I had inherited loads of money and a big business to look after when i graduated
  
• If I really utilized my five years in BITS for constructive purposes
• If I had the courage and money to start up on my own when I wrote my first business plan
• If I really did not think MBA was the easiest path to money
• If I did not choose Software Development for my First Job just because it pays me well
• If I was born in a meagerly populated country
• If I knew how to manage time better
• If I was not the lazy goose that I am
• If Engineers in the country got high paying management jobs right after graduation
• If I could work from home always instead of going to the workplace daily
• If I had realized PG Wodehouse is the most hilarious writer quite earlier
• If I don't suffer from "lethologica" as frequently as I do
  
• If I was really not in the position to write this post after all
  

These are a few of the million things that I regret for having done in Life. I bet everyone has a big list like this one and I know this post is one with which I can tag other bloggers after all.

After writing so much of what i feel, I am sure i have made quite a big deal "Thinking Aloud".

No points for guessing that I am a big pessimist after one reads this.

Yet Another Book Review: "Ring for Jeeves"

No matter what one might argue about PG Wodehouse's style of writing and the lack of seriousness and essence in the stories that he narrates, he is undoubtedly one of the most gifted authors who has the knack of taking his readers through a moving humorous novel each time he attempts to draft one. "Ring for Jeeves" is a typical one which is full of humor and sarcasm that offers a leisure read with all satisfaction.

The novel is arguably one of the most hilarious works ever offered, for the portrayal of characters is absolutely outstanding. In Biggar, the instrumental character in the plot, Wodehouse paints a naughty but witty hunter who plays an important role in the "All's well that ends well" climax that's in the offering. The protagonist Bill plays a dummy hero as he rides upon Jeeves' wit all through his difficulties in handling the comic villain Biggar.

What amuses me most is the way Wodehouse portrays wealthy widows in England for he mocks thoroughly upon their innocence and gullibility. The novel takes one through an entertaining ride with all ingredients of a hilarious British milieu.

The novel is a must read for light readers who enjoy the language and satiric tendencies more than the essence itself. It gives the right feel of PGW and his style of writing. A big hats off to the most hilarious writer of modern times.

Book Review: "Great Indian Novel"

Shashi Tharoor’s debut novel’’’’The Great Indian Novel“ presents a lot of material for many accusations. However from the title to the content you have to be a “proper" Indian down to the last bone in your body, if you’re going to truly appreciate this book. This is a satire and as is the case with such works you have to be an insider, to really “get” the joke.

So with that i would say, the book does bring about a successful marriage between The Mahabharata and Pre-Independence politics. For, the Mahabharata is probably the earliest account of the struggle for power and control.It is the story of the great war of Kurukshetra between the Pandavas and the Kauravas- the story of the war to establish the right over the Indian throne.Underlying it is the eternal conflict of Dharma versus Adharma. So on a bigger note, the concept of the book is tough to imagine. Outstanding i should say has been the thoughts behind it's creation.

The author through the voice of Ved Vyas takes us through the major events that shaped India’s destiny in the period that eventually culminated in freedom from the British. The second half of the book deals with the rise(& decay) of independent India & the woman who ruled her. It takes the characters out of the Mahabharata ,paints them with unmistakable traits of modern Indian politicians & in the process,turns both the ancient Indian epic & history on its head.

A Mohandas K Gandhi who stood up for his ideals & for his country was elevated to the status of a Mahatma. However we gloss over the fact that he had his failings. Whether it be eye-brow raising eccentricities like forcing his wife to lie naked next to him as an ultimate test of his self-control or more profound ones like his inability to prevent the partition of India despite his promise never to let that happen. He was only an ordinary man albeit one with extraordinary vision.

Would our history have been different if he had not had to maintain his image? We don't know. The novel makes one think on these lines is what i intended to convey.

Verdict: The marriage was a success, no doubt. But the reader has to put in extra efforts to appreciate the satiric way in which the novel has been narrated. Nevertheless, it gives a great picture of India from behind till date.

Worth a leisure reading when one really feels like contemplating on the two biggest phases of Indian history.

Book Review: The KiteRunner

Without revealing much of the story and its plot, what i have tried to do here is give an account of what the reader goes through in this stunning piece of work from Khaled Hosseini. It is a recommended read for all. In short, the novel gives a transparent, devastating and ruthless account of lives in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion. I was pretty much moved by the way the story shapes up to a fitting climax at the end.This post would be more of what one feels while traversing through the astounding waves of emotion and thought in this book, than being a book review.

I want to start with a few lines on the author. Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul where his father worked as a janitor for the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry. In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Tehran where his father worked for the Ambassador of Afghanistan. When Khaled Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian Poetry and many other translated works. Hosseini's memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, as well as his personal experiences with the hazara tribes of Afghanistan led to the writing of his first novel, The Kite Runner.

The novel is a straight forward and an overly transparent account of Afghanistan during the Soviet Invasion. He takes us through the period that marked the fall of Monarchy in Afghanistan with the help of two characters Amir and Hassan. Amir is portrayed as a well off boy from the Pashtun Community (read superior community) who is brought up in the typical rich family arena. Hassan is from the Hazara tribe which forms a small minority of Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan. The characters of Amir's father and his Friend Rahim Khan are well sketched and respectable. The story narrates the life of the protagonist Amir right from his childhood days. Hosseini has drafted an excellent account of Amir's childhood days with Hassan. Hassan who is the son of Amir's father's servent Ali is the trump card in the pack. Hosseini has used this character to keep the readers' emotions at a high throughout the book.

Hassan is a successful "kite runner" for Amir, knowing where the kite will land without even watching it. One triumphant day, Amir wins the local tournament, and finally his father's praise. Hassan goes to run the last cut kite, a great trophy, for Amir saying "For you, a thousand times over." This part of the novel is where the reader is prone to get really fervent. Hassan's rape and further complications due to the village "Teen King" Assef moves one quite a bit. Amir who pays his price for socializing with a Hazara finally frames his friend and his family's exodus by planting a watch and some money under Hassan's mattress; he falsely confesses.

After the Russian invasion Amir and his dad flee to Peshawar and later to America. He marries an Afghan in the streets of Fremont, California, with who he falls in love. The second part of the novel takes you through Amir's return to Peshawar and then to Kabul to meet Rahim Khan where he learns about Hassan's death and a few other confessions that increase his desire to meet the lone survivor of the Hazara Family. His pursuit for Hassan's only son who is in Kabul is very well written and makes the reader involved. The last part of the novel gives many answers to the questions that Amir had had since childhood. The "All's well that ends well" climax gives a sigh of relief to the reader after going through tough emotions all through the novel.

Analogies make you think!!!

Keeping oneself engaged thinking of the philosophy around nature and life is not a commonplace activity. I am not an exception to it either. Such things don't usually interest many people. These thoughts generally take you nowhere. Even after hours of thinking one completes a circle of thoughts and comes to no conclusion. But what's amusing about this activity is the reason why you start doing it then after all. I have been wondering why it suddenly comes to your mind then. A tranquil state of mind is an arena in which this school of thought is said to rein frequently. Notice here that i just used an analogy. Reining a 'state of mind' which i just called an 'arena'.

I chanced upon an analogy about life very recently and it interested me a lot. I saw the usage in "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. There is this guy who is on a road trip on a nice autumn weekend and the book goes through his mind as it wanders throughout the journey. Thereby taking the reader through a journey of life from a very different perspective. The book talks a lot about the author's ride on the motorcycle and a lot more about the art of maintaining it during such long trips. At one point the author refers to two different views to life- "The Classic View and The Romantic View". The Classic view involves understanding everything we come across using it's underlying form. The Romantic view involves understanding of things based on it's functionality. To understand these two views to an extent, there was an interesting reference to a blue print of a building. From a romantic point of view, it just means a maze with hundreds of lines leading to nowhere. From a classic point of view, it leads to a huge apartment with a dazzling facade. It is important to see the beauty behind such a thing.

Man is almost always a romantic thinker. A Classic view of anything is tough to comprehend from a human brain perspective. But it is not impossible. Consider the example of the blueprint. An architect would obviously understand the blueprint from an almost classic point of view if not fully. But that doesn't make him a classical thinker. It is important to view everything (even those that you don't relate yourself to or those that don't bother you) from the classic point of view. And then will one realise the essence of nature and life. Laws of nature are understood from the romantic point of view as some supernatural creation. But science created them says the classic explanation. 'Nothing can be called a valid assumption' is also one of the tenets of the classic view. Now the analogy that i was talking about- "Human mind is a knife. It cuts a person's thoughts into two worldly views..The Classic and the Romantic." But the latter half seems to be the dictator of the human mind. The knife that cuts my mind made me write this post where i think i am trying to cross the fine line that divides the two cut halves. It is a very fine line and it is important to try and identify and cross over to the less comprehended but more invading school of thought.

Random Tag

Here is the 25 things about me post!!..I just learnt from a couple of pals that one of the few inital posts ought to be this. Random things about you. I dont know if i can pen down 25. Will try to make a decent number atleast.

1. Firstly i have something close to "brain fog". Dont google it now to see what it is. It might give fearful results. Just that i dont remember things too well.

2. I trust in very few people in life and they ve been there with me since long. One of them is of course my brother who seems to understand me better than anyone else in this world. The other few are a couple of my close friends.

3. I eat anything served (but vegetarian). This habit of mine has come to me recently after a series of events in my hostel mess over my 5 yrs at college.

4. I remember a few things very keenly in life. They are a selected few which seem to interest me. But i emphasize on the "few" here.

5. There are two priorities in my life- My career and my family. Nothing other than these two are of serious importance to me.

6.I believe in Charles Darwin's theory of Survival of the fittest. I am good at adapting to the surroundings andd changing myself to adjust to the milieu.

7. Getting high is one of the irresistable things in life.

8. There are five things i love..Special mention these 5 things require-because i get into a different frame of mind wheni have a majority of these with me at a given particular time.- "Manchester United", "Funky techie cell phone", "my bike", "internet" and "cricket".

9. I love Manchester United-Hardcore.

10. ARR, Ilayaraja, Creed, Switchfoot, U2 and Pink floyd make up for almost 90 percent of the music i listen to.

11.I get angry kinda frequently but only with people who mean a lot to me.An assumption which makes me feel that these people are ok to mess up with. After all they ll be back with you kinds.

12. I can control the hours of my sleep. I am neither hypersomniac nor insomniac.

13. A trusworthy person is how my friends have judged me as yet.

14. I talk to myself more than i talk to others. I love solitude but not an excess of it. I can keep yumm yumming for hours. But there are certain topics which i prefer to discuss with myself.

15. I keep my time and expect people around me to do it either. But a far cry. Not many live up to it. In short i am punctual and a time freak.

16. I can sit idle for hours and hours and hours. It does nt disturb me.

17. I am too pragmatic at analysing situations.

18.I have a very different view of God. In short i believe God created something called evil.It did not start existing by itself... and i feel God makes man think.Man does nothing of his own.

19. I am over ambitious but i am over pessimistic too. So a plethora of confusions rule my thinking in general.

20. I select my friends and keep those which i think add meaning to my life.

21. I expect my best friends to live upto what i think of them.Because i value them a lot and they form an important part of the decision making process in my life.

22. I am afraid of rats since childhood. It is an allergy, a fear or whatever..i really don't know.

23. I am not a great liar. I get caught too easily. Disadvantageous many times.

24. I love the way Indian culture revolves around a number of values. I dont mean to say i am against westernization, but i prefer limitations to it.

25. I cant think about a thing for too long. Lack of concentration i should say...coz i took about 3 hrs to draft this page.

And i would tag somebody for sure to do this bugging task of thinking about oneself for so long.

Classic Two!!

Apparently, the two books that i am talking about were my latest two.

I can't read P.G. Wodehouse every day, nor would I want to. They are like a deliciously decadent and fattening dessert that you allow yourself to indulge in once every so often, except that Wodehouse's decadence lies in his luxurious, playful and masterful manipulation of the English language. A perfect day for me involves lounging on the deck of my best friend's family cottage with a Jeeves and Wooster book in one hand and a margarita in the other!

Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse

As with most of the Jeeves and Wooster series, the plot of this novel isn’t as important as the language Wodehouse uses to describe the messes that Bertie gets into. Nevertheless, the long and the short of it is that Bertie leaves the city to improve his health only to find that Aunt Dahlia has other plans. An important horse race hinges on the presence of a certain cat and as usual, Aunt Dahlia wants Bertie to steal the cat so that a certain horse will lose the race and she will collect on her rather large bet. Bertie has also managed to get between a friend and his lady love and must convince the friend that he is not a threat and convince the lady that he is not the marrying kind. As usual, it is Jeeves who comes up with the cunning plan and saves the day.Lightest book that I've read till date.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

The novel relives the days following Caulfield's expulsion from Pencey Prep, a university preparatory school based loosely on either Ursinus College or Valley Forge Military Academy, Salinger's alma-mater. Caulfield tells his story in cynical and jaded language, frequently using disparaging language and profanity. In the end i felt i had just come across a new type of humour which is not much different than that of PGW's. But a thoroughly enjoyable book,i should say.