Thank God for alcohol. K has been a very gracious companion to my spur of the minute can we please go out and drink because I really need to get out of office SOS calls. If nothing else, I have a new found appreciation for beer. It might be unhealthy.
Also thank the lord for weekends. Tiny little opening to just be.
*Not well is not a state I like being in. But on Monday I finished of Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain and watched Majid Majidi's lovely Baran. On Tuesday, I read Kamila Shamsie's Salt and Saffron. (It was a fun read. I would like to come from a family called the Dard-e-Dils. I am silly like that). TAP had the temerity to tell me, "It's almost like you took off to read!" Then again, maybe it was some subconscious thing.
8 comments:
:D :D :D
am a little confused - is that last pic yet another green door?
TAP: Yes, yes! :D
??!: Nooooo...it's actually a *blue* *window*. And the glass inside makes the gap look green :D
hey there. hope the beer did the trick and you are feeling A-1! so what did you think of dalrymple's book? i find his older travel+history books are much, much better than the more recent ones where he constantly harps on his own notion of a historic idyll of hindu-muslim-christian relationships (and the number of times he has repeated the story of ochterlony, his multiple wives and elephants, is not funny anymore :)... what do you think?
ahh - quite a neat pic.
finally a new post :-)
the green opening is fascinating!
feanor: hi! Beer is always good at making things a bit better :P!
I really enjoyed the book, actually. I thought it was better written than In Xanadau, though I liked that book quite a bit as well. I must confess here that out of the books he has written on India I have read only The City of Djinns which I think is superb and The Age of Kali which is again very good (I especially liked the bits of the Rajmata of Gwalior and the section on Pakistan.)
Have stayed away from The White Mughals because the entire premise just isn't very appealing to me. (My friend once told me that it's an interesting hypothesis but the research doesn't lead anywhere at all!)Have you read The Last Mughal? I would like to read that.
I enjoy Dalrymple's articles and op-eds and I don't think he harps on about "his own notion of a historic idyll of hindu-muslim-christian relationships" as much in those as he might in his newer books (???). I think he tends to be decently even handed though, no? I thought he was quite fair in From the Holy Mountain, though I'd like to believe that things have improved in Turkey but who's to say. (I have had some blatantly weird and infuriating conversations with people about Armenians and Christians there. Not to mention one where I had to really stop myself from strangling a person for coming up with some weirdo theory about Pamuk being a Jew conspiring against Turkey. Disturbing on the whole.)
??!: Thanks ;)
roxana: thank you! yeah, the picture turned out to be quite interesting! (Work has been getting in the way of blogging even though there's much I want to write. I might just put up my thoughts in pictures for a bit now....)
hiya! i typed out a response and blogger lost it when i tried to post it. sheesh. so i expanded and posted it over at mine. hope you don't mind too much! :-) indeed, i liked his xanadu, djinns, holy mountain which were written before he got onto that ecumenism and how things were so much more convivial in the past trip. i can't claim he is wrong, but i suspect he is being over-optimistic... at least, that's the idea i get when i read white mughals when he tried to convince the reader that the brits were wholesale adopting desi traditions. but as he himself says only about a third of them ever left their wealth to their native wives... and even a recognised hero like the anglo-indian skinner (of skinner's horse fame) found his kids facing tremendous discrimination when he sent them to school in britain), and for all the admiration from the brits, he for very long didn't receive a commission in the british army owing to his mixed parentage...
btw, have you read victoria clark's Why Angels Fall? It deals with the Orthodox Christianity in Eastern Europe, and intersects with and takes off From the Holy Mountain. Good stuff!
now i gotta go exercise my fingers to get rid of the cramp...
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