“To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.” ― Will Thomas, Some Danger Involved   He was the first and the most committed bibliophile I met. We were posted in the same hospital. He was not a doctor, but as is known in the military medical fraternity, a non-technical officer. Till then, I owned very few books – mostly fiction and a smattering of volumes on Indian philosophy. Latter were so obscure that I had not read more than a few pages of any. A succession of events about this time changed the world of my reading. We bought our first personal computer. Within a few months, internet too arrived home. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was tremendously popular then, especially among children. My kids learned of a new mode of buying books – an online bookshop. I ordered the book at indiaplaza.in. A colleague lent me Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything . I read the b...

  ‘It is natural for men to tell tales, and I suppose the short story was created in the night of time when the hunter, to beguile the leisure of his fellows when they had eaten and drunk their full, narrated by the cavern fire some fantastic incident he had heard of’. Thus speculates Somerset Maugham on the origin of short story in his eponymous essay. This was the story he wrote and he wrote a many. Maugham was immensely popular as a writer of short stories in the first half of the twentieth century, notwithstanding the turn of cold-shoulder – doubtlessly spurred by his huge commercial success – of the literary high-brows. His stories stand out by their bewitchingly singular simplicity, a plain, conversational prose that is effortless to read, and a plot that binds your attention from the first word to the last. Many of his tales are constructed around a quirky human behaviour, one that most men will find immoral. In a score of them he juxtaposes good and dishonourable in the...

  Of Sin and Virtue Belief in God and practice of religion are universal attributes of humans. To most, this faith offers a support to bear the vicissitudes of life with a semblance of fortitude. In a changing world, ways of which are beyond us, religion with its seemingly timeless teachings and rituals, provides one stable refuge to the anguished soul. Perhaps this is why, freedom to practice the religion of our choice, is an inalienable right, guaranteed by the constitutions of all secular states. In the early twentieth century, a brutal persecution of religion was unleashed in Mexico, in the form of a socialist revolution, by the president Plutarco Elias Calles. English novelist, Graham Greene, was commissioned by a publisher to write about this anti-clerical purge. He visited the provinces of Tabasco and Chiabas in Mexico, in the spring of 1938. His travel account was published as The Lawless Roads in UK and The Labyrinthine Ways in US. Journey also furnished Greene with...

  The Painted Veil: W. Somerset Maugham Make-believe and the Real Title of Maugham’s books, especially his novels, are always intriguing. A critic once poohpoohed one of his books saying it had the usual Maugham fare - a mishmash of old themes. His next story collection was titled, Mixture as Before. Title and epigraph of The Painted Veil come from P.B. Shelley’s poem Lift Not the Painted Veil. It is more profitable to read the complete poem – presuming one hasn’t read it yet – after they have finished the book. One can then variously interpret Maugham’s allusion to a painted veil. In the preface, Maugham recounts how he came to write the book. ‘I think that this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character. It is difficult to explain the relation between character and plot. You cannot very well think of a character in the void; the moment you think of him, you think of him in some situation, doing something.' Idea for the s...

Dictionary defines travel as: to go from one place to another, especially over a long distance. This is travel in space. We travel not only in space, but also in time. Einstein unequivocally equated time with space, making it the fourth dimension of the Space-Time matrix. But time and space have always been used interchangeably in language: Past is behind us while future lies ahead, opportunity passes-us by, and a deadline approaches insidiously. We intuitively speak of life as a journey through the landscape of time , as one is born, grows old, and dies. Unlike travel in space, travel in time is involuntary and inescapable. Other than space and time, humans travel in another dimension in their lives. This is travel in relations with other human beings. Each one of us is veritably a different landscape; Each has a distinctive personality shaped by their unique experiences in lives. Knowing a variety of individuals, interacting with them, and nurturing relations with some, enriches ...