Quickie!

No...this is not what you think!

I've been meaning to write and somehow it just did not happen. There are four auto-saved drafts and I can't seem to remember why and where I stopped and what I meant to write. I just hope that this does not become the fifth!

There are a couple of tags, one old and one really old, to which I was put up by Macadamiathenut and Silverine respectively, that I will sometime in the near future complete.

In the meanwhile, here's a bunch of reviews of books that I read over the past couple of months.

First off, Chowringhee. I picked this up at the Crossword outlet-let(meaning small outlet) at Shopper's stop after having been dragged there by a friend. I was and still am in this weird phase of reading books by Indian authors. The blurb to this one by Shankar seemed fairly interesting. And honestly, it was an awesome read. I later found out that, this book was originally written much before Haley wrote 'Hotel'. Having read 'Hotel', I couldn't help but imagine that Haley probably pinched the basic idea of the plot. The English one, is of course a translation, but a very good translation. I'd definitely recommend it.




I'd heard a lot about Amitav Ghosh, especially about his 'Calcutta Chromosome' that a friend had once read. I couldn't find that one, but I found the 'Glass Palace' instead. I was a little apprehensive about finishing this one considering that the copy of 'One hundred years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that I purchased some eight months ago, I have yet to start. And, the 'Glass Palace' is quite a fat book. It started off nicely enough and is descriptive throughout. Somewhere in the middle it get a little a slowly, but you assume that it will become better and it does. It starts in the pre-independence days and then ends not long ago - in our times. At the end of it all, there is a slight nagging doubt - something does not seem to have fallen into place. Surely worth a read though.


The last one is the 'Silent Raga' - Ameen Merchant's first. I generally find most of the book reviews in 'The Hindu' pretentious and boring - stuff that I read when I have finished reading everything else that is worth a glance. It so happened that I chance upon this one, the same day I read a review in the Hindu. The review was not so great, but it wasn't bad either, so I decided to pick up the book despite the lousy blurb (What do Tamil Brahmin girls do when the turn eighteen...? or something like that) which I thought was damn silly. The story follows the life of a girl brought up in a conservative Tam-Bram family in a small town when her mother dies in an accident . The story jumps back and forth from the past into the present. The story is a little too slow and becomes boring, but when you do finish it and then think about it, is when you begin to see what the author was trying to get at. If you can understand Tamil, then there's a lot of Tam lingo that you will find in the book. All in all - above average - maybe worth a read.

And that bring us all to a very arbit and possibly (no...definitely) lousy bunch of reviews by a sleep-deprived 'saaftwear yenginyer'. Have a nice weekend, folks!

P.S : I swear I've been a good boy!

The Lament of the Laptop

I happened to ask Ra about whether his laptop had a single core processor and whether the Centrino Core 2 Duo was a 64-bit processor. This is what happened. At least, the interesting part.

[17:40] Ra: This laptop is ok.
[17:40] Ra: Serves the purpose.
[17:40] Ra: I'll get one when this gives up and dies.
[17:42] Me: when the processor's ghost exits through the cooling vents...
[17:42] Ra: Yes then.
[17:43] Me: ...and its tormented cries rent the fabric of your display into a complicated networks of tears...
[17:43] Ra: Haha.
[17:43] Me: ...when the keys become so weary that they no longer produce a click, not even the cheap sound that compaq is famous for...
[17:44] Me: ...when your battery will leak critical life blood lithium ions...
[17:44] Me: ...and when there is no nirvana playing in the backfground to make the whole thing ironic as hell...
[17:45] Ra: Ah, my suicidal laptop.
[17:45] Me: ...simply because the magnets in the speakers have long demagnetized to scrap iron.
[17:45] Me: I am sounding bleak aren't I?
[17:45] Ra: You are sounding rather funny.



P.S : I just wanted to rub in the fact that I was getting a new laptop. Fully loaded. Well, almost.

Red pill or blue pill?

Another one. Dead baadi ?

Following dreams.

Here's one. Hopefully, if it is liked, there will be more. Or else, there will still be more.

Update

The story is open again.


It's been moved to http://toscsp.blogspot.com

To make stuff easier, we will contribute and discuss in the comment section of each chapter and then we are ready to close the chapter, I will manually update the post to show the complete chapter and we will move on the next.

For easy reading of the comments section, write you contribution in a bold face. All you have to do it put your contribution within and . It will make things nicer and will be much more easier for me to put stuff together later.

So far so good...!!!

Let the yarn begin...again!

The discussion thread

Hi,

This is the discussion thread as promised for this. Please use this to discuss major twists and turns with other contributors.

Cheers.

UPDATE: Let's not go into a abstract philosophical plot right away, it's just going to make things complicated. Simply stick to nice clean simple line with maybe a hint of mystery. I am hoping that more people will contribute. If you can put a little post or a link to this blog post on your blogs it would be nicer. Bigger the party, the better.

If I feel a plot is too weird then I will delete it, or rather hide it. I will repost it on the discussion thread so that we can see how it can be made to fit in.

Please number your contributions so that we do not loose track. We have hit 3 so far so, continue from 4 now.


UPDATE : We are on to Chapter 3. Chapter 3 is flashback. We need to sketch out the two characters k and the nameless guy. We need to bring the woman who is proably involved with K into the picture NOW! Give her nice sultry sounding name. Nothing raunchy and all but something that reminds of open blue skies and yellow corn fields. Or whatever!

The Open Source Collaborative Story Project

I dunno if it's already been done, but this is something that I have always wanted to try. Simply because Open Source code projects are so much more robust and better than proprietary stuff in many ways.

This is going to go like this :

1) For obvious reasons, including my laziness, this thing will be working entirely in the comments section.

2) I'll start off with an opening line and then as and when people drop by they add a line or a paragraph to the story.

3) If you feel you are nearing the end of a plot/sub-plot/idea, feel free to start a new chapter. This comes with the little problem of someone wanting to contribute to a chapter and then not being able to since it is already closed. We'll get to that when we have to cross that bridge.

4) Feel free to add characters, names for characters, places and so on. But, don't do it just for the heck of it. Let there be a reason. (I'll start another post, that could be used a discussion board of sorts. Feel free to bounce ideas around there.)

5) Please please please keep it clean. I am not enabling moderation on this, since that would be like code review before a checkin and can get quite messy. But, if something is totally in bad taste I shall remove it. Sorry, but let's try to keep it nice. At least for the time being.


Why am I doing this in the first place?

First off, I had tried this a long time ago over SMS and though we did not get very far, there was some really nice stuff that came along. Sadly, all those messages got lost when I changed my phone. It actually felt good. The other two contributors of that effort visit this blog - Ra and CJ. CJ had one excellent line in that - "The cold draught of air passed by him like a stoned angel".

And secondly, I think it is going to be good fun.

To make life easier, I'll post links to this post and the discussion thread on the sidebar so that you can reach stuff easily enough. Or you could bookmark those links on your browser as well. Whatever grabs you.

Let's see where it goes. Maybe, if it hit the right notes we could make a book out of it all.

After all that here goes the first line :

"He stubbed his cigarette out and called for a coffee. The coffee was, of course, lousy and it was by far the safest of all the bistro had to offer. The rain hadn't let up yet; the reflections of yellow street lights danced merrily on the puddles outside."