Kishori In My Soul Passion of an Unlettered Fan -1-   It was my first posting in service, if one discounts a year of internship at Bangalore. Place was a godforsaken corner of rural Delhi, about forty-five kilometres from New Delhi Railway station - a dismal wasteland of cheerless shrubs and trees. It housed a surface-to-air missile unit. Missile had now gone senile and awaited its formal burial.   Station had lain barren for years before this unit moved here a few months back. All buildings were in an advanced stage of ruin.   Often a huge chunk of plaster would detach from the roof exposing the rusted network of dirty-green iron grid beneath. Ground water was unfit for any use but for flushing the loo. A water tank fetched drinking water from the city, thirty kilometres away. Officers of the unit were as washed-out.   There was no work at the dispensary. Ten to twenty patients came every day with vague, imaginary, uninspiring ailments; probably out of boredom than d

Hi!       I wrote about my Maugham mania in a previous post. To learn facts about the life of the author whose books you have adored for long must be a universal urge amongst book lovers. I have read many biographies of Somerset Maugham; perhaps all which have been published. Maugham’s life was as intriguing as his stories. He was an extremely successful playwright, novelists and a short-story writer in the first half of the twentieth century. He earned immense wealth from his writings. Rain, one of his most popular short stories, allegedly earned him one million dollars in royalties. But critical acclaim never came his way while he was alive. Though he affected to know his lowly place amongst exalted authors of his time-I know where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate; he was fond of saying-he nursed a deep hurt all his life for this neglect by the intelligentsia among critics. Some of this resentment he poured in his brilliant novel, Cakes and Ale. He wrote that ve

Biography   The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Selina Hastings   Somerset Maugham was the most popular English author in the first half of twentieth century and the most successful playwright of this era. His books had sold eighty million copies in his life time. He earned huge money through his books and was the richest author of his time. But critical acclaim and the more prestigious awards like OBE and Noble, eluded him. His unconventional views and sexual life were responsible for this neglect by the intelligentsia. This dislike was aggravated by his unparalleled popularity amongst the reading public; an attribute particularly looked down upon by the high brows amongst critics. Though he professed to know his precise place in the hierarchy of English writers - ‘I know where I stand (in the gathering of literary luminaries), in the very front row of the back benchers’- and affected to bear this neglect with nonchalance, this slight rankled him lifelong.   There are f

Science   The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution Richard Dawkins                   Richard Dawkins is perhaps the most articulate and fierce proponent of the theory of Evolution today. He has authored many books on various facets of evolution, but had not collected and discussed the extant evidence for evolution in one place. In this book he has done this. He has mounted a terrific, unassailable and mammoth counterattack on the opponents of Evolution, the so-called believers in the theory of Intelligent Design, the Creationists. He calls them ‘history-deniers’, the 40-percenters. He explains citing believable allegories how deniers of evolution deny history. And the name, 40-percenters, because forty percent Americans deny that humans evolved from animals and believe that we were created by God in last 10,000 years. He presents incontrovertible evidence, one after another, in a most coherent manner, in a brilliant and lucid prose to prove the incontrovertible

Science   The Inflationary Universe-The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins Alan H Guth   There is a bewitching charm in contemplating the origin of universe. I’ve read innumerable books on the subject but the spell the first book cast only gets denser with every new book. Mere size of the universe numbs the senses. Our world, our dreams, our past, our future are all pinioned to earth which is merely a moderate sized planet in a planetary system revolving around one insignificant star, the Sun, which is one among hundred billion such stars in the galaxy Milky Way, in a universe comprising hundred billion other similar galaxies. Now, hundred billion is a huge number. If someone stacked hundred billion sheets of paper, the pile would reach a staggering six thousand miles in space. I can think of only one subject which is as absorbing, sublime and humbling; the origin of complex life forms on earth.   Alan Guth, a theoretical physicist was in the vanguard of scientists

Science/Psychology   Influence-The Psychology of Persuasion Robert B. Cialdini, PH.D   Ethologists for long have found some strange patterns of behaviour in birds. A mother turkey fawns and takes are of a chic that makes cheep-cheep sounds. Actually, even if a stuffed polecat, a natural enemy of turkey is artificially made to produce the sound, mothering behaviour of the mother turkey is switched on. And if a turkey chick doesn’t utter these magical notes, it is neglected by its mother. This is trigger feature of animal behaviour. ‘Click’ of a particular stimulus ‘whirrs’ the appropriate response, the ‘click-whirr’ pattern. Humans have inherited much of their behaviour from animals, from whom they descended in millions of years. ‘Click-whirr’ pattern of our behaviour has been confirmed by psychologists in many ingenious experiments. In most situations that we face in daily living, this action-reaction form of behaviour serves us well. It is fast and it saves the body precious

Travel   In Xanadu-A Quest William Dalrymple                   William Dalrymple, at the age of twenty-two, travelled from Jerusalem to Xanadu in China. He followed the route Marco Polo had taken about seven hundreds years before. This book is a marvelous record of this journey. Book moves at a breakneck speed. Writing is so lucid and effortless that the reader finds himself travelling with the author in his quest for the fabled capital of Kublai Khan, sharing author’s privations, his frustrations and his pleasures too. With compelling skill and erudition William Dalrymple weaves the story of his travel, sketches of characters he meets in this long journey, the landscape he witnesses, the architecture he admires in various cities, towns, and villages along the route and intersperses these with history of the place without ever sounding didactic or tedious. Tone of the book is jaunty and humor abounds. Every now and then you shake violently with laughter and nearly fall out of