I wasn’t a big fan of Anderson Cooper, until last week. One would have started to notice him just before Katrina. That’s when Aaron Brown’s prime time on CNN was taken back and allocated to Anderson’s 360 show. His Katrina reporting was talked about. I felt, he made animated movements trying to exaggerate the situation.

Last week, browsing through the cable, I came across Oprah show where Anderson was the guest. Coming from the royal family of Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper had taken challenging journalist pursuits in Kenya and Myanmar. It was astonishing, given the fact that he was barely out of his teens when did such expeditions.

As he puts it, there is nothing wrong if a reporter feels emotionally about the news. One needs to be objective about the news but one can certainly feel the news that is being reported. That was a fair statement which explains his animated movements and unique intonations while reporting tragic events. What made the show was the quote, Hope is not a plan. Don’t hope for something. Plan for it. Makes sense.

Bappi Lahiri renders the title number of Mani Ratnam’s Guru. That’s what you call, comedy.

I might take back my words listening to the number.

There was a bug in the blog. No idea how it was created. No idea how it was resolved. Life goes on.

To whichever ghost that screwed up the blog, may the 49.5 % policy be enforced in hell also. And I pray that you should wander around without a single place to rest.

Kamal Hassan’s shortstory in Vikatan[28 May 2006] named, Anayaa Neruppu, is a dazzling sample of his story-telling skills. I’m not hinting the story. But it’s a class apart. No jokes. Tell me if you weren’t amazed.

P.S – I read it for the second and third time. I’m still amazed. Much more than the first time. How could he ever think of this dimension, from a story that’s so common. Every single sentence has been crafted after much thought. Brilliant. I’m not going ga-ga because it’s Kamal. For a short story, this is one helluva trip.

P.P.S – Just came back after watching the Da Vinci Code. It did strike me that Kamal just explained, in this story, how Dan Brown managed a Da Vinci Code. This story is a sort of mini Da Vinci Code on Hinduism.

Last week, I was reading a column from Ashokamitran Katuraigal. Asokamitran worked for Swadesamitran, a newspaper of yesteryear Tamil Nadu. He wrote political opinions in a pseudo name, Kinkaran. He describes the doomdays of Swadesamitran as it was struggling to compete with Alai Oosai, another newsdaily. The column was a sensitively written moving account about the death of the newspaper.

Swadesamitran was started by G Subramania Aiyer who was then owning The Hindu. From 1904 to 1906, Subramanya Bharati worked as a sub-editor of this newspaper and was writing radical opinions against the British Raj. He left Swadesamitran to start another newsdaily, India. Later he re-joined Swadesamitran in 1920 and continued to work for them until his death in 1921. Swadesamitran was closed in 70′s after losing to the competition of Alai Oosai and Dina Thanthi which brought modern journalistic practices to Tamil journalism.

The news here is this. After reading two columns of Ashokamitran on Swadesamitran’s history, I was inquisitive to read more history of this newspaper. While searching on the net, I found this gem written by the historian S Muthiah. In this awe-inspiring article, S Muthiah talks about the rise and fall of Swadesamitran. An extract –

Nevertheless, Bharati in 1914 wrote of him, “unaided he has made Tamil Journalism a fact of the world in spite of his imperfect early training in Tamil. … They win who dare; Mr. Aiyer dared and he has succeeded in establishing a Tamil daily journal which, with all its faults, is the most useful paper in the Tamil country. His whole political gospel can be summed up in these words: `Peaceful but tireless and unceasing effort.’ Let us sweat ourselves into Swaraj, he would seem to say.”

Seriously ill in 1915, Subramania Aiyer persuaded A. Rangaswami Iyengar, Kasturi Ranga Iyengar’s nephew and right-hand man at The Hindu, to take over the paper and he made the Swadesmitran “a new force, potent and pervasive… (changing) the placid atmosphere of Tamil Journalism”. Rangaswami Iyengar brought in his kin C.R. Srinivasan to manage the business end of the paper and Bharati, back from Pondicherry, rejoined the paper in 1920. The three made the Swadesamitran ” a literary masterpiece of political analysis.”

The next thing, I did was to reach out swadesamitran.com. I figured that the domain wasn’t even booked. Wayback Machine doesn’t even have a trace of this site which means it wasn’t ever booked in the history of internet. That is such a pity. Though the company closed down, I assume that someone would be holding the registered trademark of Swadesamitran. I expected Hindu to have booked the domain in rememberance of this newspaper which once started the newspaper experience to the Tamils. I wanted to buy it and then create a remembrance site of the newspaper. With just three articles on hand, two by Ashokamitran and one by S Muthiah, I booked swadesamitran.com. It’s currently in the construction mode.

On the other hand, I’m not sure if someone would come now, after all these days, with a copyright violation. Ofcourse, I’m ready to transfer the site to them without any conditions and even ready to sponsor the domain registration charges. But I have no clue, why those of them who hold Swadesamitran trademark haven’t even bothered to book the domain. I’m also clueless if someone really holds the copyright of this newspaper at all. I was also thinking of shooting an email to the Hindu editor, to check if they hold the copyright and are interested to host Swadesamitran.

Neverthless, I will find time to host the site with whatever available information I have. If any of you have any mastheads, paper cuttings or other information on Swadesamitran, please pass it on. Will host it crediting your name like how they paint a sponsor’s name ‘through-out’ the tubelight in temples. That was meant to be a joke for this rather serious blogpost. Konjam Siringappa.

Rajeev Menon is currently shooting Mani Ratnam’s Guru. We all know that. Seems to be too spirited these days. Working again with Mani Ratnam may be one of the reason. But he goes to the extent of even talking in a little detail about Guru’s premise. I’m surprised. This morning when Mani Ratnam sips his coffee and reads this Vikatan interview, he will be surprised too.

BTW, what’s with this Ambaani story and all. Starting from the day when the story started to sneak out, I was hanging out silently to get this confirmed. With this answer of Rajeev Menon it’s nearly confirmed. Nearly. Usually, when the screens light-up for a Mani Ratnam movie, I anxiously await to be over-powered by the images on the screen. This Ambaani matter is somehow hindering the expectations.

Who is GURU ?

I know this is crazily tough. Keeping mind the previous cars were answered in matter of hours, sometimes in minutes after posting, this needs a tougher cinephile. There are enough clues. Go guess.

Are you new to this silly kollywood car game, look here.

Thanks Keerthi.

One couldn’t guess what he/she can find in a library. On a sunny day like yesterday, I found a rack of tamil books in the Seattle Pubic Library. I had to literally discover them located in one corner of the library. So I picked a bunch of those books. More Info overload.

The bunch included Neela Padmanaban’s Therodum Veethi, Suprabharathi Manian’s Appa and Matrum Silar and Ka. Na. Su’s Thomas Vandhaar. The most interesting find were two books by Ashokamitran. One was En Payanam, sort of an autobiography on his writing career. Donno if they included these articles on Ashokamitran Katturaigal book. The other one was Iruvar, a double novel published as a single book. I haven’t heard about Ashokamitran’s Iruvar before yesterday. Seems like its a long forgotten book.

Kush !!

This one should be the most easiest one. Will have another one for tomorrow.

Usual Stuff – For starters, guess the movie and the sequence. There is a clue available in every(well, mostly) kollywood car quiz. This is important – If you are planning to guess the answer, don’t open the comments box and spoil the fun yourself. Once you have guessed go straight ahead and comment it without looking for answers. All Kollywood Cars.

Flickr just announced that it will go into Gaama after being in Beta for a long long time. Since then the look and feel of Flickr has changed a bit, for better.

And if you are someone using Flickr to host pictures for you blog, you might want to read the Flickr Terms of Service. From today, when you try to grab the img tag of a picture to post on your blog, there is a reminder message below which reads, Remember! Flickr Terms of Service specify that if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page. (So, use Option 1.) Hence if you see the previous post, I have given a permalink[#] to the appropriate Flickr photo page.

#

You might want to check out Apple’s latest consumer laptop, MacBook.

* This is probably the most boring post ever written on this blog. So skip it, if you feel like *

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it’s the reader’s greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the “Alchian and Allen theorem.” Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts. Our greater access to books also means that each book has less time to prove itself. A small percentage of the books published account for a large share of the profits, thus setting off a race to track reader demand. Many customers want very recent best-sellers, often so they can feel they are reading something trendy, something other people are talking about. Of course, that’s its own kind of affectationand not an entirely pleasing one.

Did you find yourself relaxed to read that entire paragraph ? Or did you skip few lines and went straight down.

The above paragraph was just a piece from a larger article. First, I wasn’t even comfortable to paste a huge quote because I felt no one would read this entire paragraph. Such is the speed of reading these days. The quote rightly says, how people are more and more interested in consuming smaller bits of information than larger ones.

This is due to the in-famous information overload, being discussed in this blog often. I’ve been munching my thoughts on this info overload for atleast 2 months now. Resistance if futile. I couldn’t resist the information overload. In this speedy world of internet and weblogs and podcasts, books are becoming a heavier by the day. The moment you shut-off from the world and go back to books, you tend to have withdrawal symptoms. By the time one completes half a book, there are a dozen novels to be read, a dozen Mission Impossibles to be watched, handful of blogposts to be written.

At the same time, here is another thought. To write a book, something thats published on wood pulp, takes a long time. The book has to be composed , edited and published. And it takes it’s own time to reach the hands of readers. Someone has to read the book and then write a piece of appraisal on it. Only after this, the author of the book gets the first comments from his readers. Until then, its like waiting political parties waiting for the vote count, a grave silence.

Blogs are from a different leaque. I’m now writing this blogpost. I will post this[even without editing] in the next few minutes. Most probably the first comments could be seen within the first two hours. Sometimes, when books are discussed here, there is a grave silence but that is a different issue. So I as a blogger know the comments for or against will reach this blogpost in the next 2 hours. Whereas imagine if someone wants to write this same stuff in a book. It would take weeks/months for him to get the bouquets or brickbats.

At the same time, Blogs are laudatory and ephemeral. Books stand over time. Sidin Vadakut had written the famous blogpost on single south indian men. That was probably the most famous blogpost ever written. Leave out the war cries on IIPM(which were again ephemeral), they just caused some hot air. Now do you think Sidin’s post will be remembered 5 years from now. But if only it was a book, it would reach out for years to come. That’s just my belief.

May be all the above is just trash. May be we are going through a transformation and blogs are probably the future books. We don’t know, atleast me. Neverthless, this urbanised world is rapidly moving towards something. And its causing a lot of information overload. I have no clue how I would survive the load but I wish I could sit tight and read Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. Donno if I could it. To hell with information.

[Vikatan]

When I had mailed Sujatha on his birthday, he replied with a news for me. He said there will be a series *ing Ganesh – Vasant, soon on Vikatan. Never knew it will be so soon. I do know he is writing Saagasam Aayiram in Kalki but couldn’t read it since I don’t have a kalki subscription.

Silvia which starts this week has Sujatha’s popular duo, Ganesh and Vasanth. To add spice Sujatha brings back the same Mexico Salavaikaari joke even here and ofcourse as expected he hasn’t revelead it yet. Read the extract.

Recently, Sujatha hasn’t been writing too much fiction. Infact even the recent series, Irandavathu Kaathal Kathai wasn’t close to Sujatha’s standard. With Silvia, I’m sure he will have enough surprises and suvarasiyam.

[Source - Vikatan]

That was Simbhu shouting.

Vikatan reports that Simbhu and Nayanthaara are head-over-heels in love. And Simbhu’s naturally vivacious personality is making him more possesive towards Nayanthaara, resulting in missed film chances and financial hiccups for the Vallavan team. The report also speculates that Simbhu blocked Nayan’s car near Vadapalani Ram theatre and asked forced her to get into it. Thoda !!

Here’s the background. The Overaa Illa kiss generated intial publicity for the Vallavan movie. A year after that, looks like the producers want to get going with the film. The report says the movie is already sold for 8 crores and now the distributors have to get it back. Given a year of delay in releasing the movie, the post-production build-up is quintessential to generate hype. It seems to me that this Simbhu – Nayan love matter is a well staged hype, a marketing effort in boosting Vallavan’s release.

Leave alone all that, here is the punch. Vikatan also reports that Simbu took the entire footage of Vallavan to edit it in his house. We don’t know its true but this is just enough to reduce all the hype surronding the film.