I have always been intrigued by alphabets, which may go hand-in-hand with my delight at reading dictionaries. Whilst I know learning Latin and Greek until I was sixteen may have been part of this fascination, it extends to an interest in all alphabets from cuneiform to the beautifully fluid scripts of classical Sanskrit and Mandarin…
Month: May 2011
Time Flies
I recently met my father after thirty or more years estrangement. I don’t think it necessary to go through any of the arguments for the distance but when waiting to board the delayed plane back from Mumbai I wrote the following: Some stories that are written are inked in Tears if undistinguished arguments and…
We Are Lead By the Past
I remember when reading Thucydides as a teenager studying ancient history how the Greek historian interpreted speeches from his memory and from the recollection of those he had talked to about them and perhaps from fragments others had written down. It was an interesting exercise because reading Pericles and Brasidas and others one quickly saw…
More Is Less
I have a friend who knows a good deal about the history of photography who revealed to me that around 1910s the Kodak book of photographic papers had 120 listed papers but by the 1980s when photography had left the preserve of the few and become a mass market experience the number had gone down…
Choose Your Mafia
I think we all tend to join or make groups. Mostly we view them as benign and for many of us membership is as open as buying a house in the neighborhood, joining a club or graduating from a school or University. For all of us the membership is selective though, limited to a certain…
How To Think
While I am sure that brain research will revolutionize our understanding of ourselves during the course of this century I presume to predict one of its key findings will be the ways in which we are taught to think, that stay with us for our whole lives and become almost second nature. Because as children…
Running Without Satire
There are those who think Candide is a huge satire poking fun at writers and society at one and the same time. Which, seeing as most great writers have been somehow outside mainstream society, is quite an interesting conceit and once which Voltaire is easily capable of managing. Gulliver’s Travels has long been the bane…
Times Don’t Change
When I was last in Mumbai it was Bombay, and there were a lot of beggars on the streets. Not only did they flock around Westerners and the rich when they walked in the streets it was noticeable how they haunted the traffic lights and swarmed out when they were red and the cars stopped,…
Publishing On Demand
Having been part of the new wave of self-publishing for over a year now, and run the gamut of marketing techniques, joined about every social networking site I thought might be sensible and done a certain amount of work purely for the number crunching than for the direct relevance, I have realised there is one…
Mumbai
I recently had the pleasure to sit in the Willingdon Club with relatives by a golf course on a balmy evening outdoors in the hot month of may in Mumbai. The club was built by the British and it is based on the clubs you find in London. I was told of an even more…