One of the "Castle" episodes had this line - Love you till I die, meet you on the other side. I searched on the internet and found the lyrics.

These days I am reading "Moonlight Becomes You" by Mary Higgins Clark. In the author's note, she has mentioned a couple of books about funeral customs as well as practices that she read and found fascinating. No doubt this is quite a morbid subject, I might take a  look at them one day. Here they are for future reference:

Consolatory Rhetoric - by Donovan J. Octs
Down To Earth - by Marian Barnes
Celebrations Of Death - by Metcalf Huntington

'शेलार खिंड' ची आगाऊ नोंदणी

Bank Of Maharashtra मध्ये बाबासाहेब पुरंदरे ह्यांच्या 'शेलार खिंड' या आगामी कादंबरीची आगाऊ नोंदणी सुरु आहे. किंमत ६०० रुपये. पैसे रोख किंवा चेकने भरायची सोय आहे. नोंदणी केल्यास 'शेलार खिंड' सोबत "राजा शिव छत्रपती" चे २ खंड आणि बाबासाहेबांच्या कथाकथनाच्या सीडीज मिळणार आहेत. आता नोंदणी केल्यास एप्रिलमध्ये पुस्तकं मिळणार. ही सोय केवळ ज्यांची खाती आहेत अश्यांसाठीच आहे का ते मला माहित नाही. आणखी एक गोष्ट म्हणजे नाव, पत्ता वगैरे बाबी ३ वेळा भराव्या लागतील - एक कॉपी Bank साठी, एक नोंदणी करणाऱ्यासाठी आणि एक पुरंदरे प्रकाशनसाठी.

Happy New Year

Here it is. The very last post of 2013. I go into 2014 with only one resolution - to become a better person. And hope to God to stick to it, come what may.

So, here's wishing all of you a Very Happy, Fulfilling, Healthy and Wealthy New Year!

ADIOS 2013!

HOLA 2014!

Jack Higgions - A Game For Heroes

I must confess that after reading a few pages of this book I wondered if I should have got some other book instead. The tale of British soldier Owen Morgan towards the end of WW2 didn't seem to make any sense, at least to me. Neither did the characters - Owen, Ezra, Simone, Steiner and others. It also didn't help that many of the terms like coxswain, mill race and Pioneers were totally unfamiliar and I was in no mood to trawl the net looking for the explanations.

But I didn't want to leave my last reading of 2013 halfway through. So I trudged on. And was glad in the end that I did.

As far as the plot goes, British soldier Owen Morgan is sent to an isolated part of Channel Islands - St. Pierre, where he grew up - in order to gather information about a secret project undertaken by the Nazis there. A band of American soldiers is sent with him to mine everything standing in water. This group gets captured but Morgan manages to hide in a secret location. He is forced to show himself when he finds that no one is willing to venture out on a mine-laden beach to save a man who has been washed on shore.

Enter Manfred Steiner, a German officer, who is in love with the same woman Morgan once loved, Simone. Morgan has every reason to hate Steiner and yet, he finds himself agreeing with the assessment that his friends on the island have made of the German - that he is a very remarkable man.

Morgan - and the rest of the people on the island, except for the SS men - have a very different opinion as far as Colonel Radl goes. They are proven right when Radl declares his intention to keep fighting, despite the fact that Hitler is dead and Germany has lost the war. Things come to a boil when a boat called Pride Of Hamburg tries to find its way to the island in very bad weather and Radl refuses to send anyone to the rescue of the people on board.

A few lines from the novel will remain forever etched in my memory:

The field of battle is a land of standing corpses. Those determined to die will live. Those who hope to escape with their lives will die.

Men die or get wounded or crippled for life for the same reason it rains for every day of the fortnight's holiday that some poor wretch has saved for, and looked forward to, for the whole of a working year. Things happen because they happen. No reason. No reason at all.

The Oath Of The Vayuputras - Amish Tripathi (Spoiler Alert!)

It had been nearly six months since I read the first two installments of the Shiva Trilogy by Amish Tripathi. So I wasn't sure I remembered all the details of the story. My first task, upon resuming the library subscription was, therefore, to read The Immortals of Meluha and The Secret Of The Nagas. About two weeks back, I brought home the last novel, with a lot of expectations.

And then I was mightily disappointed.....besides being very sad. Why, oh why, did the author have to kill Sati? Granted, as per the scriptures, Sati is supposed to have thrown herself in the sacrificial fires at her parents' home because her dad insulted her husband, Shiva. And then Mahadev has married Parvati - the daughter of the king of the mountains, Himalaya - who has remained his consort thereafter. But the trilogy has used only parts of the well-known story. I wish the author hadn't stayed true to the part that took her away from Shiva. :-( To be fair, I am glad that he showed her to be a woman with not only a great character but with exceptional fighting skills. But I must also confess that I couldn't make myself read through her last fight. :-(

I didn't understand why Shiva decided to use the Pashupati Astra to destroy Meluha because it housed the backup Somras building factory. Surely, after what happened to Sati, it would have been possible to convince the Meluhans to destroy it willingly and also to punish Daksha through proper judicial means - especially given the fact that the knowledge about the Somras was supposed to be preserved. The author described the destruction of Meluha in vivid details but devoted only a few paragraphs to the revenge that Kali, Ganesh and Kartik exact on her true Egyptian killers.

Having said all that, I liked the way he tied the storyline to the Zoroastrian faith, the battle of the Mahabharata, Lhasa and the Lama, the founding of the North Indian states - like Tripura, Manipur and Nagaland - and the practice of worshiping Ganesh and Kartik in the southern and northern Indian states. But, like a true Indian, who likes to see all loose ends tied up nicely at the end of the story (in a typical Hindi movie 'And They All Lived Happily Thereafter' style!), I expected some sort of closure to the childlessness angle of the Krittika-Veerbhadra storyline.

All in all, the 3rd part of the trilogy disappointed me a great deal! But at the same time, a paragraph provided me with a strange sort of comfort and calm. I quote it here:

Indians believe that the body is a temporary gift from Mother Earth. She lends it to a living being so that one's soul has an instrument with which to carry out its karma. Once the soul's karma is done, the body must be returned, in a pure form, so that the Mother may use it for another purpose. The ashes represent a human body that has been purified by the greatest purifier of them all: Lord Agni, the God of Fire. By immersing the ashes into holy waters, the body is offered back, with respect, to Mother Earth.

Death, when viewed from this perspective, sounds neither terrifying nor random, does it now?

It's hard to say what is more delectable - the chef or his creations. But I will go out on a limb and vote for the Chef - Vikas Khanna. ;-)

Looks like Fox Traveller is all set to air his show "Twist Of Taste - Coastal Curries", starting 20th January, 2014, 9:30pm.

You bet I have got my reminder in place :-)

A haunting line from a book I am currently reading led me to a search on the internet. The book mentions that the line comes from a Chinese poem that was translated by Ezra Pound. The poem is titled 'Lament of the Frontier Guard'. You can read it here.

In case you are wondering about the line, it does like this - Lonely from the beginning of time until now!

As the X-Files progresses well into its 9th and final season, I find myself getting increasingly exasperated with the storyline. Whatever happened to good old aliens and their grand plans to take over Planet Earth? The idea of super-soldiers sounds so stale now (maybe it wasn't in 2001 when this season was aired in the US). Oh, and correct me if I am wrong, but aren't such soldiers supposed to be immortal? If what Scully's son can do is anything to go by, these soldiers are adept at telekinesis. Then how can they be killed by iron? In the words of John Doggett 'it doesn't make any sense to me'.

There is no denying the fact that agents Monica Reyes and John Doggett have brought the show a much needed freshness. I was getting tired of Scully's 'I am sleep walking' look as well as Mulder's smugness. I positively rejoiced when he got abducted.

Here's hoping that I will get to see an episode or two of an x-file that has nothing to do with super soldiers before the series draws to a close.