The views expressed here do not in any way reflect, may in fact be anti-thetical to, those of the establishmet.
Recently read, seen or heard...
Richard Powers The Overstory
Previous blog post superseded! This book changed my life. Made me want to give up everything and go
live in a forest.
Jeff Koehler's Where the wild coffee grows
One of the best books I have read in a long time (Δt from previous blog post notwithstanding).
Being a gift to myself on birthday, reinforcing my special relationship with coffee that started around the
same time in 2004 (or maybe it was endemic, but blossommed on a hospital bed as I lay in a coma...)
Anyway, a really well-researched book. The story of coffee originating in the eponymous Kafa province of
Ethiopia is told with the right dose of melodrama thrown in, stopping just short of a national geographic script..
A long lasting impresssion it leaves, and cements a long-held desire to retire to a coffee plantation somewhere in Coorg...
Vikram Seth's From Heaven's Lake
Picked up a tattered copy of Seth's early book (1983) from the Prithvi theater bookstore. Yes, they have an attic like
room in the back of the store with tattered old books that no one wants. The front is still packed with high priced
Penguins on cheap paper.
Heaven Lake gives
quite a bit of insight into the sociology of China as Seth hitch-hiked his way home from Nanjing through Tibet back home
to Delhi. Very dated - China has probably changed a lot in the last thirty years, but the book foretells the great
things that Seth would write later in life. I was pretty impressed with The Golden Gate when I read it
in college at an impressionable age. Then of course I went on to discover incomparable novels in verse like OmerosUmberto Eco's The Prague cemeteryUpdate: Finished this book (sort of) over endsemester exam period - hope the profound negativity of
the book didn't spill over into my PH108 exams...
Ermm.. I think actually real life counter-reacted to anti-everything stuff in the book: the course ended on a high
note for me and at least for the ~500/900 students who got AA/AB grades.
Hoping for some good serious reading, after
having slogged through the utterly paperback rubbish of Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence... (I can rarely
put down a book half finished)
I think Rushdie is only good enough now to come up with clever names for his books like
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights which, in the end was not much more than a potboiler.
Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts and Between the woods and Water
When I travel, as I did quite a bit during this time, I like reading travelogues. These books were written with the wisdom of over five
decades after the actual travels. Fermor
gives an encyclopaedic account of his personal confrontations with middle Europe and its history. A Europe whose essence
has sadly evaporated over the author's lifetime. Fermor went on a walking tour of Europe skipping out of a stodgy school at the age of 18
in 1933. He kept a diary of his travels, but wrote the books in 1977 and 1986 when he had had time to reflect on his experience.
The final volume in the trilogy The Broken Road was published posthumously in 2013 two years after his death at the age of 96.
Got a dog-eared used copy when I was visiting Sam in London, will read it on my next travels, probably in the summer.
Formative books I've read earlierIn the vineyard of the text by Ivan Illich traces the evolution of the written word in the Western world from antiquity to the present age. Also Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, which talks about the paradigm of modern education - caused quite a bit of stir when it was first published in 1971. But it did lead to rethink of what teaching means and pretty much kickstarted the field of education research (represented in IIT by the program on Education Technology)
D.I.Y.
I like building things -which often includes taking apart broken things, fixing them and putting them
back together so that they work again. If you have ever worked on fixing a car, you'll know what I
mean. All through graduate school I had a love affair with this,
a 1983 BMW M635csi.
A car that old needs the occasional tweak-up. Auto mechanics crazy enough to work on such an old car
are hard to find, so what's a grad. student on a budget to do? Roll up your sleeves, wear three woollen
layers under your overalls and creep under the car in sub-zero weather to tweak it up. About that
fix-up thing being hard... car manuals are all the same.. they describe really well how to take
things apart. .... Assembly is the reverse of removal, Yeah right, how does
that crankshaft line up?
Design
I fix broken things, and I also build new things. In recent years, I have delved mostly in
wood-working and building useful objects out of found material.
Through friendships with colleagues at the
Industrial Design Center
dating back to my student days here at IIT-B, I have always had an interest in the design of
man-made objects. Though I lean mostly towards the Bauhaus,
Gerrit Rietveld stands out as a big inspiration. Here's an
article on his work. The proverbial
light bulb clicked on in my head after I read this article answering the question - What is the purpose of
design?
The purpose of art is to develop and nourish a specific sense organ.
As our senses are more or less cultivated, we become more or less aware,
and our consciousness develops.
Breadth of vision depends on growth of awareness. Welfare of our being depends upon the
development and health of the senses. With reverence for
"the immediate life, the ordinary, simple, direct experience of reality",
Rietveld formulated his goal: Intensification of life-enhancing sensory experience.
His method: cumulative visual experience, catalyzed by the designed object."Rietveld and the Man-Made object" by Theodore M. Brown
