Hi!   I started the blog, about a year back, to talk about books I had read. For past few weeks I was grazing new pastures. I beg your indulgence as I return to the old grounds in this post. I am aware that the digits on my hands are way too many to count the people who do afford time and patience to browse my words. And with my insistence to speak on books, I fear, I may lose even these (readers, not digits!). But there is an irrepressible urge lurking stubbornly in a cranny of my mind. This post may see it sated. And I may then find inspiration to think about other matters.   I bring to your notice two books of V.S. Naipaul, both allegedly travel books, but not really. These are on his craft. I liked them. These showed me new ways to understand the art of a writer. I will straight plunge into them. A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking & Feeling V.S. Naipaul Every sincere writing is foremost the result of author’s irrepressible urge to communicate to the world, so...

Travel/Nature   Last Chance to See Douglas Adams/Mark Carwardine   Every species of living organism is a uniquely crafted specimen of nature. Be it a bacteria thriving on human waste, wood pecker with beak that drills holes in hard bark of trees in search of insects lurking beneath, Sphinx Moths with ten-inch long proboscis to suck nectar from flowers with nectary situated in its depths or an Influenza virus that rapidly changes its genome   to evade host defence mechanisms. Each is a work of art created over millions of years to deftly exploit the niche of nature it inhabits. The most wonderful aspect of this process of creation of millions of species on earth is the blind creator of these marvels. The creator is a simple law of nature, Evolution by Natural Selection, breathtakingly bewitching in its stark simplicity and mind-jarring in its unfathomably huge powers. It works relentlessly, untiringly, blindly, without forethought, and without an objective. Speci...

                                                                                                                                                       Travel Chasing the Monk’s Shadow Mishi Saran In seventh century, a Chinese monk Xuan Zang set off from China on an epic journey to India. His aim was to seek Truth, the Law of this Universe, in the land where this knowledge had originated, the land of Buddha. His enthusiasm to study Indian Buddhist scriptures and to learn Buddhist philosophy from the great Brahmins of this blessed country was only matched by his passion to visit the holy places where Bu...

                                                                                                                                                       Travel The Lost Continent-Travels in Small Town America Bill Bryson             Bill Bryson comes from a small town in mid-west America, Des Moines in Iowa district. When he grew up, he went to England and worked there for many years. In his mid-thirties he had an urge to visit the America of his childhood, the America of small towns which lived in his imagination, embellished by the movies he had w...

                                                                                                                                                        Travel A Walk in the Woods Bill Bryson Appalachian Trail, the ‘Granddaddy of long hikes’ runs for about 2,200 miles through the lush woods of Appalachian Mountains along the eastern sea board of USA from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south. Bill Bryson has a brilliant idea of embarking on this long hike and he has Stephen Katz, last seen with him in Europe in Neither Here nor There , as his companion. And the result is this humorous account of t...

                                                                                                                                                        Travel Slowly Down The Ganges Eric Newby There are many breeds of travel authors. Some like Paul Theroux are, it seems to me, weary of their travels. They find fault with everything in the journey. One wonders why do they travel at all. Some like Colin Thubron see hidden meaning in every sight, every people they encounter. They write heavy, ponderous prose. Writers like Graham Greene write captivating prose of their inner journeys, spawned by the trave...

                        Travel Delhi-Adventures in a Megacity Sam Miller             Sam Miller worked for BBC's World Service TV and was stationed in Delhi for a couple of years in early 1990s. He returned to Delhi in 2002 to live here permanently. He is married to an Indian.             He is an avid walker and calls himself a 'Flaneur', a French word for one who walks a city aimlessly. He considers walking the best way to see a city. I too love walking. Though I have not explored the streets of Delhi systematically, I've walked its roads on many an occasion in winters, on a refreshingly sunny Sunday, equipped with a small backpack containing a thin book, a bottle of water and a packet of biscuits, covering 12-20 kilometres on each perambulation...

****/*****                                                                                                                         Travel/Memoir An Unexpected Light-Travels In Afghanistan Jason Elliot This is a stirring account of author’s travel in war ravaged Afghanistan, a journey as much across this strange land as into the deep, hitherto unexplored dungeons of his inner self. Jason...

*** 1/2 /*****                                                                                                                                                      Travel The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island Bill Bryson Abou...

*** 1/2 /*****                                                                                                                                         Travel An Area of Darkness V.S. Naipaul Books are my necessity. Today, for someone who reads English and is a slave of his book-reading habit, it is impossible not to have read V.S. Naipaul. But this has been my despi...

**** 1/2 /*****                                                                                                                                                                    Travel ...