Why am I unable to write something elaborately these days ? Thanks to Twitter and its social counterparts, not only my reading has gone down, writing too. Every thing I want to write is now being crunched in the head, meaning every word goes through serious criticism if its actually necessary, replaced with synonymously shorter words or with similar SMS glossary, then typed as characters(instead of words).

I was prolific with blogging once before the info-overload hit. When it did, I was tracking 250+ blog feeds on my feed reader which drew me nuts. To take myself out of the over load was quite a task and I’m not overloaded any more. I track a handful of blogs and follow a dozen or so twitters, all of whom I know personally(@ravages, @chenthil, @mdeii, @anantha, @writerpara) or have read them(like @shashitharoor) or watched them(ok, i know its sinful to follow a celebrity but i do think @trisha_26 is slightly(very slightly) better than most of her k.wood peers).

In any case, Twitter has moved away from its initial state. Instead of ‘What are you doing now?’ its ‘What’s Happening?’ now. So I’m going to stop rambling about brushing, driving and/or sleeping. And I don’t believe in answering What’s Happening all the time. Pause.

What triggered this post was that I found this 1072 page novel of Stephen King at Costco(sort of Chennai’s big bazaar but with a big BIG). Totally a wrist breaker to the extent it shouldn’t have even be printed but only sold electronically. I even wonder how King wrote with so many distractions going on around the world. In his partly autobiographical, ‘On Writing‘ King reveals his secret of writing such absurdly thick and gripping novels is to lock himself every morning until his daily quota of 10 pages of words are typed.

P.S – This is an unfinished post from November 25, 2009 at 10:50 pm. Don’t exactly remember how I intended to finish this. So instead of this remaining in the draft section for a long time to come or get deleted, it sounded better to publish it. Sorry if this didnt make any sense, just like my other fully written posts. Take it easy!

In any case, Chennai and Airtel together, have made me ramble big time on twitter. So there is that.

In my hand is Amit Varma’s My Friend Sancho that I was happy to pick from the best seller’s section in Landmark.

The book was priced at 195 rs and the ’specially’ discounted price that landmark advertised it for was 165 rs. While I, to some extend, understand the pricing politics behind the books, I wished it was priced at 95 rs like the hotselling Chetan Bagat’s 2 states.

Beyond the story and the easy-to-read style of Chetan, I do think the 95 rs pricing of his books make him more affordable and approachable. Well its a Catch-22, one would say.

In any case, I loved the subtle design of the cover, the blurb, the author intro and acknowledgments. Now to the book.

Pathetic state of affairs. And this interesting-yet-not-so-surprising post on Times. Apocalypse now….run!

Link – Praveen.

I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those.

I wanted to quote this from Gone Baby Gone, when I read this post from Krish. BTW, GBG was a well written directorial debut from Ben Affleck. Yes, Ben Affleck as in Bennifer(Ben+Jennifer Lopez).

Listening to Cat Stevens the whole of y’day was solacing. A Deep voice, lonely acoustic guitar strums and subtle harmony characterized Cat Stevens’ music. So if you like such a setting, he is the master-blaster.

This blog has already become a collection of youtube bookmarks. Adding to it, here is one more that influenced my late teen/early twenties(now that I have moved away from it). This song has much more to it than just Cat’s voice. The lyrics, in form of a dialogue between a father and son reveals a father’s remarks on his life behind him and for the son, the life ahead of him. Such philosophy!