Three books

On the recent trip north I bought two books to stave off boredom: Robin Sharma's The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari and Jeffrey Archer's False Impression.

Robin Sharma's book is something that I've been aware of for a while and thinking of reading but didn't get around to. Its in the broad self-help literature category. I didn't find it that good (which was more or less what I expected but I wanted to read it anyway). It was pleasant and might have been saying true things and if you took the book seriously and did what it said you would find your life transformed. But it didn't affect me enough to take it seriously, and as literature it kinda sucked. One tidbit: the book is a long 'sermon' by one person being listened to by another person. To break the monotony, the listener every now and then is made to interject with a comment or a question. The interjections are however really lame and the entire effect is quite jarring.

Jeffrey Archer's book also sucked quite badly. It was interesting enough to keep you turning the pages, but only just about, and only if you didn't have much else to do. When I read a book like this I'm surprised at how much I've grown as a reader from the early days (not saying this in a self-congratulatory way, just saying that I'm surprised). Back then authors like Jeffrey Archer could do no wrong, their books were spellbinding and perfect. Now the flaws are so obvious. An alternate possibility is that this particular book is pretty bad, but I've seen the same effect elsewhere, like with re-reading Alistair McLean.
Dan Brown's stuff is much better than this book if you want a simple thriller.

I also read Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide. Now that's a much better book and a lot more challenging to read and review so let me put off writing about it to another day.

Acronyms

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in telugu acronyms. One day I was watching a telugu news channel and they were referring to an organization called "Terassa". I couldn't figure out what it was for a while, and then realized it was the "Telangana Rashtra Samiti" (google it if you care). They were referring to it by its acronym, only the acronym was being made up by the first letter of the word as written in telugu: Te(lan ga na) Ra(shtra) Sa(mi ti). The point is, for a long time, even telugu newspapers and tv used the english acronyms so it seems somebody realized there was a way to overthrow this irksome English imperialism. I'm all for it. However, they were still referring to the Telugu Desam Party as TDP since that is an acronym that has been around for a while. The Terassa came up recently so I guess they could use the new way of doing it. Since then I have seen this new acronymizing in other places in Telugu, so I guess its here to stay.
I noticed a similar thing some years back in how some people called BMW (the car company) as Beemwa which is (I don't know for sure actually, but seems very logical) the way the acromym would be pronounced in German.

Lion Statue

In Himachal, I came across this wooden statue of a lion at one of the temples which I was much taken with. There is a phrase in John Fowles' "The French Lieutnant's Woman", which stuck in my head, 'superb fragment of folk art'. Seems to apply here.

Right to Information petition

For those who already know something about the Right To Information Act of 2005:
There is an amendment to this act being worked on that would exclude 'file notings' from the purview of this act. This refers to the comments on the files that are made by the various people through whose desk the file passes. This would eviscerate the RTI to a large extent -- to quote from someone , you would know what the final decision was (which you would know anyway in most cases when the government implements the decision) but not how it was arrived at, thereby denying people of critical information to contest governement actions. Most of the NGOs are very pissed off and gearing up to fight it, and to the best of my understanding its a critical fight.

So if you want to sign the petition protesting this, go to:
http://www.petitiononline.com/save_rti/petition.html

If you don't know much about the Right To Information Act, here's an introduction:
http://sidshome1.blogspot.com/2005/10/on-right-to-information-rti-in-india.html

T-shirt

One of the subspecies of cheap T-shirts in India is this stuff you get which have absolutely random things written on them. Its like they opened a page of a book, and picked up one or two sentences from there and put them on the T-shirt.

So my wife bought one of these recently. The t-shirt says:

and she said
he ran away
but he said
he'd only gone for a walk

I think that's deep.

The Israeli government cares ..