I had been eager to read The Inheritance of Loss ever since I heard that Kiran Desai had won the Man Booker award (2006) for this book. I was glad when my colleague Kusuma offered to lend her copy to me.
As is usually the case with things that are hyped up, I half expected this book to be bad. The opinions I had heard from friends, and their friends, about the book was not too promising either. Everyone had felt that the book had started off well, but then deteriorated towards the end. It was very depressing. Kiran Desai’s writing style was very close to that of Arundhati Roy. (I haven’t read any work of Arundhati Roy myself, so I can’t comment on that.)
I beg to differ.
I fell in love with the book. Kiran Desai’s writing is so very good. I am surprised at the clarity with which she understands and describes the Indian psyche. How is she able to put in words the workings of the minds of so many different Indians with such alarming precision?
Kiran Desai’s writing style is excellent. There are places in this book where the prose is so painfully beautiful that you can almost feel the words jutting out of the book and reaching for your soul.
A word of caution, though. If you are Indian, the cynicism can be a bit of a burden. Don’t start reading this book when you’re feeling low. 
books
India needs to look away from the past. As a country of a billion, we need urgently to turn around and take a hard look at what lies ahead of us – what lies in the present, what is in store for the future. It is not so much the problems that we may encounter in the future that worry me, as much as the fact that we’re not looking ahead. We’re walking ahead alright, but we are constantly looking back even as we march ahead.
Take any average Indian. You get to pick who. You could really choose anyone from this country – a college-going teenager from a metropolis like Mumbai, or a poor nobody from the remotest part of rural India. Ask him this simple question: “What makes you proud to be an Indian?”
No matter who you chose, the answer is bound to come quickly and it is bound to be the same. You are going to hear the same rant about the culture and heritage of this country.
We all know the works. We have all been trained from our very childhood to repeat this same ramble, just as a beauty pageant contestant go on and on about Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa.
India is a country with a long heritage. We’ve been around for five thousand years. We have a great culture and heritage that we’re all proud of. There isn’t anything modern day scientists know today, that our ancients didn’t already know. Despite all this knowledge, Indians have always been the most humble too. Indians are the most peace-loving people in the whole wide world. We love each other, and we are the epitome of unity – despite, despite, and despite our many traditions, religions and languages. These only add to the richness of our culture.
It nauseates me to go on. If you are an Indian, you probably didn’t even read the previous paragraph. You simply skimmed over the surface. Why? Because you already know what is written. You’ve heard it a thousand times before. I myself did not have to think before forming those sentences. It was almost as if my fingers knew what to type and did their job without any help from my brain.
We are too much in love with ourselves. Over generations, this love has turned blind. We don’t know what we are in love with. We don’t know why we are in love with it. All we know is that we are a great nation: because our mothers told us so, because the television programmes told us so, because the newspapers told us so.
Sit back and think for a while what it is that really drives your love for this country. When you do so, you will begin finding answers. You will still be in love with this country, but you will know why. The reasons will not be as rosy as the beauty pageant answers; they will be far more humble.
But it is important that we start asking these questions. We all need this reality check today.
society
This is a trial post made from Microsoft Word 2007.
Firefox 3 to support HttpOnly Cookies
This is good news; it does add a measure of security against cross site scripting (XSS). ASP.NET 2.0 apps and the PHP ones that use HttpOnly cookies should now work as deisred with Firefox 3.0. Now, if only Sun Microsystems would follow suit and add support for HttpOnly cookies to Java applets. I remember having filed a bug report with Sun on this.
web
Airtel Do Not Disturb
Post-paid customers can register at the website above. Since I use a pre-paid connection I had to SMS BLOCK to 222. I got a reply SMS that all promotions will be stopped in 48 hours. I’m yet to see if this is actually going to happen. Keeping my fingers crossed for now.
Update: It has been weeks, and no calls so far. It’s looking good.
Google News is now available in Hindi
There are not so many services on the web today that attempt to use any of the indic languages. Webmasters in this country, in their ignorance, prefer to use custom fonts (which users may download) to display indic languages rather than using UTF-8. This is still understandable, since most users in this country do not have the windows language pack installed, and this causes ligatures to be displayed incorrectly. It is interesting to know that Google has put in efforts specifically in this direction — converting non-standard indic text to UTF-8.
But I wonder how useful this is to most surfers in the country. They would use the English language anyway.
web
I never get Daylight Savings Time (DST) right. I guess we folks living in the tropics can never quite appreciate it. The immediate source of the problem was (is? will be?) a conference call this morning. It is supposed to be 30 minutes from now, but I already got an email from Chicago asking me why no one attended the call. 
If and when we invent a time machine, the travellers are bound to feel like me.
Since I was wiser after reading the email, I decided to play smart with the other folks. I called up Abhilesh.
Abhilesh: Hello
Me: Are you attending the meeting?
A: Yes
Me: When? Yesterday? The meeting's OVER!!
A: Huhh?
Me: Have you heard of Daylight savings?
A: Oh... he he... Daylight savings turned out to be useful to us at least once.
The 50 Most Important People on the Web
Interesting list. I find myself agreeing with it.
web
I came across this picture in today’s online version of Deccan Herald. How many people actually believe that this picture was taken where it is claimed to have been taken?
In another demonstration of American double standards, the New York Times editorial today read:
On Sunday in Basra, British troops stormed an Iraqi intelligence office and found about 30 prisoners, some of them tortured. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was outraged — not at the torture, but at the raid that halted it. Soon British troops will be leaving Basra, leaving Mr. Maliki and his security forces free to do as they please.
I can only imagine what this same editor would have written had the British troops stormed Guantamano Bay.