My trip to Colombo this time was rather hurried. To make it worse there were meetings scheduled throughout the day. I hardly had the time to explore the city. "Explore SriLanka", which I picked up at the arrival lounge listed a new restaurant "Thambapani" on Duplication Road however incessant rains kept me indoors. I had to skip even my regular stops - Barefoot, Lanka Ceramics, Paradise Road. I had Shashsi Tharoor's, Bookless in Baghdad for company."Bookless in Baghdad" is a collections of essays and personal reflections of Shashi Tharoor on matters literary, several of which have been published in newspapers like The Hindu and New York Times in the past.
The book gives has an excellent start and the prose is fluid, spiced with anecdotes, quotes, humour and unconsciously a bit of trivia. Tharoor's writing is light as he approaches each essay without prejudice; difficult for someone who is a writer and a reviewer of books himself. He refers to his own works - The Great Indian Novel, Show Business, Riot in several of these essays, the motivation for writing them and the reviews each of them have received. However these have been without literary blasphemy, which usually creeps in when an author talks or writes about his own work.
There is an essay for Wodehouse fans aptly titled "Right Ho, Sahib" capturing the Author's fascination for the master from his days in College at the prestigious St. Stephens, Delhi. The pleasure he derived from reading the Masters oeuvre is evident from the casual introspection of his collegiate days as a member of the Wodehouse club and his near attempt to write a letter to the Master himself.
In one of the essays the Author dismisses Nirad C Chaudri's Anglophone affiliation by dissecting the Autobiography of an unknown Indian (pun intended) and mocks his xenolatrous allegiance. "The committed Poet" is about the Spanish diplomat and Nobel Prize winning Litterateur Pablo Neruda. I must mention the piece on Sir Naipaul is particularly illuminating and goes on to trace Sir Vido's humble beginnings and the days in Oxford, particularly the correspondence between Sir Vido and his fond Pa, as he used to call his father. Salman Rushdie makes his appearance in several essays and the Authors description of Rushdie's first public appearance after emerging from hiding lets you relive the moment. Very interesting though is the Author's take on Indianness and his attempt to answer the question, Who is an Indian? The author traces the roots of the INC and systematically demolishes the statements of several politicians and takes pride in the rich diversity of our Rashtra. This critical commentary has me convinced, and has helped change my perspective on what is true nationalism while it has also made me realise there are still others waiting to be educated on this.
I must emphasis "Illiteracy in America", a shocking account of how 50 million Americans cannot read or comprehend things above the 8th grade level. What that means is that, these people don't possess the comprehension ability to understand the instructions for an antidote on an ordinary can of cockroach poison. Astonishing? Worse, to quote the author functionally illiterate which means they don’t have the ability to understand traffic signs or product labels. which makes these people unequipped for life in a modern society. And these it seem exist predominantly in the inner cities. All in a country with a single major language. Compare this with a developing nation like ours with 1200 officially recognised languages and about 22,000 dialects, we seem to be better off with the illiteracy being relegated to the rural areas. Paradoxically the following essay 81% of Americans feel that they should write a book! In several essays the theme is to portray India and its culture and dispel the western notion of India being a chaotic, poor and sluggish country though I am unsure if the Author set out to achieve this.
There is a hilarious account of the making of 'Show Business" by a Blondie Singh who called the Author from his bath tub. I cant imagine someone can have the arrogance of calling an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations during his ablations. So Blondie Singh, Mr. Bikram Singh to some and BJ (no mischievous smiles please!) to several others was excited and wanted to make a movie of the novel "Show Business" after the deal was signed Blondie showed the first draft of the screenplay - it was almost the entire novel, verbatim! The final movie had the credits "Lyrics by Shashi Tharoor"!
The book is an eclectic mix of Indian culture, Authors, Book Bazaars, about reading, writing and reviewing and is a delightful read especially in moments of solitude. Once you are done with the book you are likely to add items to your reading lists. I for sure did. I hope to read this book again in a few months.
Picked this up at the Landmark sale along with several other books last week. Onto the 4th chapter. Dylan Jones describes his adolescent years with LP's and Cassettes and his graduation to the MP3 era with an iPOD. As an ardent music fan with a collection of over 200 cassettes and an equal number of CD's its not very difficult to understand his plight. I got my 80GB iPOD a little over 6 months back, Only last week did I manage to complete loading all my CD tracks onto this. A good read if you grew up listening to Brian Ferry, Fleetwood Mac, Floyd...etc. The book has some interesting bits of Trivia LP : Longer Programming, iPOD : Internet Portable Object Device. The book is loaded with Dylan's experiences with alternate chapters covering the iPOD. Wish Dylan had a much wider coverage of the iPOD and kept his experiences to a bare minimum.
There are podcasts on every conceivable subject on the internet, Music being the most popular followed by Comedy, Podcasting, News etc. Apple’s itunes store is probably the best with its cool user interface. Other sites to download good podcasts are The Podcast Directory (http://www.podcast.net/); Yahoo Podcasts (http://podcasts.yahoo.com/); Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com/); IndiePodder (http://www.indiepodder.org/) and GarageBand (http://www.garageband.com/). Most Podcasts are free and you’ll need a lot of space on your digital media player to accommodate all of them.
To subscribe and download podcasts you’ll need an aggregator like Juice and a media player. Some players like Apple’s iTunes have built in podcast features. Once you have this installed you can subscribe to several thousands of podcasts as they are published and these get downloaded invisibly onto your computer. You can then sync your media player to load these podcasts so that they are available to you when you are on the go. So how’s it different from any other audio file? Well the power of podcasts is that you can subscribe to the feeds and as and when a new audio file is published the aggregator will download it for you. Imagine this. You have enrolled into a long distance learning program and you are expected to take 20 hours of lessons every week. Before the advent of internet you’ll have to wait for the post man to deliver the printed lessons. In the age of the internet you’ll have to wait for an email so that you can log-in to the univ’s site and listen to the audio files. In podcasting the aggregator regularly monitors the RSS feeds and downloads any recently published audio lessons.
To create a Professional quality Podcast you’ll need to record the audio in MP3 format using the software available from Garage Band (http://www.garageband.com/), Sound Forge’s Audio Studio or Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/). Having recorded your piece, You’ll have to then create an RSS feed that points to these files and publish it as a podcast on your website. A RSS file is an XML file with directions for aggregators. You can use MyRSSCreator (http://www.myrsscreator.com/) or Podcast RSS feed Generator (http://www.tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/podcast-generator.php) to create the RSS file. Use an FTP software like Mozilla FireFox’s extension FireFTP to upload the MP3 and RSS onto your server. Use an RSS validator like http://rss.scripting.com/ or http://validator.w3.org/ to validate your RSS and you are done. You’ll probably want to advertise your Podcast in the sites that I have mentioned above or to keep it simple email your friends telling them about the new craze that’s got onto you.
But then why would you want to create a podcast? You might be the professor in the long distance education program that I mentioned above; Your are a budding musician and have just recorded your first Ghazal and want to offer it to potential fans; You are a highly paid management guru, you just spoke at a seminar and your audience wants the complete recording of the speech; You are a techno lunatic, you want to tell the whole world on the conspiracy surrounding Indian Cricket or you just want to do it for fun, whatever maybe the reason Podcasting is the new broadcasting medium.
