Relocated to readwithbookmeabook.blogspot.com

Hi

We’ve relocated our blog to :

http://readwithbookmeabook.blogspot.com/

Hope to catch you there !!!

Awaiting 26th January 2010.

These days, as I commute to work every day, I am often delayed at Rajpath, where practice for the 26^th January Parade is going in full swing. Though I am usually quite put off by delays in the morning, as they create a domino effect on the rest of my day, this delay I bear happily!

The Parade always instils a feeling of patriotism in my mind. However unmindful we are of our Nationalism the rest of the year, January brings us this reminder of our country’s strength—both military and cultural! The crispness of the uniforms of the jawans, the colour of the school children’s costumes and the beauty of the jhankis (the tableaux), all reiterate the grandeur of our wonderful country!

Of course, for me the Republic Day parade also brings nostalgia of several years of my childhood spent around the India Gate area. We used to watch the Parade live on TV, then rush down the stairs and line up on the roadside, while it went past. This was of course when the Parade went right through Kasturba Gandhi Marg (erstwhile Curzon Road) and then through Connaught Place, and not on its now-shortened route along Tilak Marg.

As we watch the Parade this year, whether on TV, or along Rajpath, I hope all of us reaffirm our belief in, and love for, this wondrous country of ours!

Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year…

I have spent the last two weeks were spent in reading 5 of Matthew Reilly’s novels. After the nerve chilling adventures of his characters, I need a serious break from thrillers!

The books I am going to spend my Christmas weekend reading are 4 Mills and Boons which shall soon come onto the BookMeABook catalogue too. Penny Jordan’s The Christmas Bride Carrie Weaver’s Home for Christmas Carole Mortimer’s The Christmas Night Miracle Cathy Gillen Thacker’s Christmas Lullaby That should bring some good Christmas cheer my way! Here’s hoping your Christmas weekend is great!

Have a lovely weekend, and Happy New Year to all of you.

Our Plans..

Reading Plans, silly!! We have no ‘other’ plans in the near future. After Diwali, its just been a huge rollercoaster of a time. As always, the rest of the year will whizz past for us, as with many of you, with unending social events, celebrations, weddings, and other fun happenings!

Since we set up our site—and it’s been more than two years now—the commonest question we have encountered is regarding our tariffs.

Although they are tabulated on our site under the section “Our Plans”, here’s a quick overview. We have five plans, with different monthly tariffs based on the number of books you order. The refundable security deposit we take across all plans is the same—Rs. 500. Apart from this you have to make a monthly subscription which ranges from Rs.600 down to Rs.100 according to the plan you choose to take. The plans are as follows:

SUPER READER- gives you an unlimited number of deliveries of SIX* books at a time. Monthly Subscription Rs. 600. This is by far the most value you can get for your money.

REGULAR READER-gives you 2 deliveries of 3 books each in a month. Monthly subscription Rs 400. Our most popular plan!!

RELAXED READER-gives you 2 deliveries of 2 books each in a month. Monthly subscription Rs.300. This is a plan which most people begin with, and then jump to regular reader from it.

CASUAL READER- gives you 2 books a month. At Rs 150 a month, this is a JOLLY GOOD DEAL.

TURTLE READER- gives 1 book a month with a fee of Rs. 100. We only recommend this for those who really are hard-pressed for time!

Apart from the monthly subscription plans, our readers get interesting offers for subscription from time to time. For instance, we ran our 1+1 month offer with Yo! China earlier this year, which was a great experience. Our Book Fair membership offer got our new readers a choice of free books, and currently we are offering readers who give the entire year’s subscription 2 complimentary months! So you get 14 months reading for the price of 12.

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*Alright, so its an open secret now!! Yes, it’s true that our Super Readers have been receiving 6 books in one go for the past two months or so. Since it has been such a success, and has seen so many of our regular readers moving from Regular to Super reader, we shall soon make it official on our site too! In the meantime, Happy Reading!

Long Weekend Ahoy!

I am sure all of you are looking forward to the long weekend! We are closed on Sunday, our weekly off day, as well as Monday, since it is Id. I had selected two books to be my reading material for the weekend, but have unfortunately finished both already, so will just have to read my collected A.A.Milne! The two books I have just finished reading are Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, and Ravi Kapur’s The Sacred Secret. The Lost Symbol is a constant page turner, and just the thing for a lazy weekend! Each chapter ends with a thrilling bit of information which brings the protagonists, and us, the readers, closer to the end of the quest. As with The DaVinci Code, this book also uses symbols—theological, alchemical, scientific, astrological, pre-christian—to unearth and decode a fantastical secret. Must stop now, or will find myself revealing the entire plot! Book your copies soon, as we have put only 10 copies out for circulation—this being a really heavy book, as it is in hard cover. We will wait for the paperback version to come in before we add more copies!

India – Land of Entrepreneurs : Delhi Book Fair

My sister once did an entrepreneurship course from EDI, Ahmadabad. The aim of the course was to develop entrepreneurship among the youth.

From the action I witnessed at the Delhi Book Fair, the youth of India (and even some middle age individuals) doesn’t need to be taught entrepreneurship. It runs in its blood.

List of services I was offered on the day 1 of the book fair:

1. Floral arrangement
2. Volunteers to manage the stall.
3. Plants to decorate the stalls.
4. Tea/coffee
5. Lunch/dinner
6. Housekeeping
7. Loading and carrying services.
8. Web designing services (although why I would need one on the spot is a mystery only the heavens above can solve. )

And –finally, the most unique offering of all -> For 20 bucks only, to be told my fortune only for today !

Several years ago when I was living in Reading,  I saw what I thought was inhuman and cruel. I saw people walking the street with their children on leashes. Yes ! this contraption which you secure around your child’s waist allows her to roam only within the radius you set.

Today at the book fair I came to appreciate the true value of such a thing. Here is the booty my 2 daughters have gathered on Day 1 of the book fair :

1)      The Magic School Bus – Books 1 to 10

2)      Horrid Henry Runs away

3)      Barbie jigsaw puzzle – 1 nos.

4)      Glass colours, 2 sets

5)      Erasers : 1 box of 20 pieces

6)      Suncatcher craft set : 1 nos.

7)      Glitter Crayons: 2 sets

8)      Baloons : 4 nos (in 2 batches of 2)

9)      Art Deco set : 1 Nos

10)   Champak: 2 Nos

11)   Bookmarks: 5

12)   Coloring Books: 5 Nos

The Book Fair is really going to take a toll on my bank balance – given my elder daughter’s warning that “we have to see Hall 9 & 10 tomorrow!!”

OH Golly!

A very reasonably priced Indian edition of the “Amelia Jane” series has been released recently. With it s lovely brightly coloured covers, it was something we could not not buy(does that make sense?).

We immediately bought it for our elder daughter, who is too young to read it on her own, but refuses to sleep unless reams of fiction have been read out to her.

For the last three days, I have been feeling horribly uncomfortable reading them. Something was missing. Something was definitely wrong I thought, as I read out chapter after chapter to Keya.

I, who have read, and know by rote, all the Enid Blyton books that exist(even titles the lay Enid Blyton fan would not have heard of—The Adventure of the Strange Ruby, The Secret of Spiggy Holes—did not recognise a character called Tom, the toy soldier, in Amelia’s nursery. However familiar the story seemed, Tom was not part of my memory of the book. I let it pass the first few times, thinking I may have happened to skip a chapter (uncharacteristic, but there seemed to be no other explanation).

However, Tom the toy soldier was quite a central figure in the nursery. He was kind, he was jolly, and he was the only one who could actually put Amelia in her place.

I was quite hot and bothered about this, and decided to dig out my own old copy of Naughty Amelia Jane. On comparing the two books I realised why I hadn’t identified Tom—Tom the toy soldier was actually the new avatar of Golly—the lovable golliwog who was Amelia’s nemesis in so many of the stories. The golliwog was one of the dearest characters in Amelia Jane, and in several other nursery stories of Blyton’s. I presume the change has been brought about in order to make Blyton’s books more politically correct.

Enid Blyton has been criticised variously, for being racist and sexist and class-conscious. (Notice how in all the adventure series, the boys ‘protect’ the girls, the girls handle the tea and meals, and any girl bolder than the boys is termed a tomboy! Also, a lot of the rogues in the adventure books are of non-English backgrounds, and if English, they often are from the lower classes.) However, one has to see that her attitude would have been the widely prevalent one. It is not her sensibility, but that of an entire generation of English people. As a prolific writer, she has merely served to be a spokesperson of the times.

Anyhow, to come back to the golliwog’s disappearance from the books—I now notice that they have disappeared from the Noddy books too. Mr. Golly, the owner of the Toytown garage has been replaced by Mr. Sparks. The thieves in the Toyland woods, who used to be golliwogs, have been replaced by some pink-faced pixie-like characters, which are going to be difficult for me to get used to.

While one does welcome this change as a move forward in the direction of making a better and more equal world than we live in now, nostalgia prevents me from enjoying the books without the golliwog!

What do you think about the move? Is it a step forward, or do you feel they could have retained the original as a true picture of the time in which the books have been written?

Professor Vinod Sena

We often associate people and memories with objects which may have no overt connection to each other. For me, one such connection which is thinking of the late Professor Vinod Sena when seeing any painting by Breughel.

 Those of you who might have done an M.A in English from the Arts Faculty before 2000 would have had the joy of having been taught poetry by Professor Sena. Much of my love for Yeats stems from Vinod Sena’s engrossing lectures. (Interestingly, the person who first introduced me to Yeats is also a VS—Vinita Sinha!)

Prof Sena had problems with his sight, so he would ask us to volunteer to stand at the head of class and read out lines 4 at a time, which he would subsequently explain. His set of slides on Ireland and Yeats’ life are a legend in their own right. Despite the fact that he could not see us in the classroom, we were a quiet lot in his class (this from a batch who had been described as incorrigible by several other professors).

His concern for the visually impaired led him to begin a library of recorded texts from the M.A. syllabus for visually impaired students who pursued the M.A. course.  Having been away from the university so long, I have no idea where the collection is now housed, but I hope it is in competent hands.

 Anyhow, to get back to the connection: Breughel and Vinod Sena. Well, the connection is simple enough—W.H.Auden. auden’s poem Musee de Beaux Arts makes a mention of Breughel’s painting ‘The Fall of Icarus’. And of course it was Prof. Sena who taught it to us.

Any memories of Prof Sena to add, anyone?

Why did Lata choose Haresh?

I am still not reconciled to Lata’s decision to marry Haresh. For the past thirteen years, everyone, from my best friend to my Mphil supervisor have tried to convince me that Lata made an informed choice. Is it the dreamer in me, the idealist or the fool who still doesn’t want to accept this?

India Through Fresh Eyes….

Shashi Deshpande, Anita Nair, Geetha Hariharan, Manju Kapoor, Arundhati Roy, Chetan Bhagat, Vikas Swarup, Siddharth Dhanwant Sanghvi. Aravinda Adiga, Amitava Ghosh, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, Smita Jain, Swati Kaushal, Advaita Kala, Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, Krishna Sobti, Kiran Desai, Anita Desai, Ruskin Bond, Satyajit Ray, …

these are some names i can rattle off–of Indian Authors writing in English. this is a just a handful that came to my mind…i am sure many of you can add to the list.

 

The theme of the London Book Fair this year is “India Through Fresh Eyes”. It will focus on Indian publishers and writers, several of whom are expected to attend the numerous talks and seminars which will be organised as part of the fest, from 20-22 April 2009. The numbers Hindustan Times gives are 51 authors and 90 publishers! Thats huge. It makes sense I suppose, for the fair authorities to focus on Indian Writers as the number of new Indian authors is on the rise.

As a country, despite statements made by politicians like Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav, a working knowledge of English is definitely a widely sought after skill. Let’s face it, most of us, armed with an English medium education can churn out some fairly good stuff. A lot of us write—letters, blogs, articles for newspapers. As I see it, every other average Indian is a potential writer. Blame it to our rigid education system which forces us to be exceptional if we want to be even an inch above the herd, but the fact remains that the inherent potential we have in this country is amazing. We have a host of writers, all writing exceptionally well.   Further, most publishers too have become more open to giving out contracts to new authors.  Now even relatively lesser known writers are getting good contracts and advances from big publishing houses.

Which is why Indian writers are really making it big today.  any thoughts on this?