LINKS OF TINTIN EBOOKS ...

 Tintin in Soviet Russia (1929–1930) - b/w

 Tintin in Congo (1930–1931) -b/w

 Tintin in America (1931–1932)

 Cigars of the Pharaoh (1932–1934)

 The Blue lotus (1934–1935)

 The Broken Ear (1935–1937)

 The Black Island (1937–1938)

 King Ottokars Sceptre (1938–1939)

 The Crab with the Golden Claws (1940–1941)

 The Shooting Star (1941–1942)

 The Secret of the Unicorn (1942–1943)

 RedRackhams Treasure (1943–1944)

 The Seven Crystal Balls (1943–1948)

 Prisoners of the Sun (1946–1949)

 Land of Black Gold (1948–1950)

 Destination Moon (1950–1953)

 Explorers on the Moon (1950–1954)

 The Calculus Affairs (1954–1956)

 The Red Sea Sharks (1958)

 Tintin In Tibet (1960)

 The Castafiore Emerald (1963)

 Flight 714 (1968)

 Tintin and the Picaros (1976)

 Tintin and the Alphart (1986)

Surely You're joking Mr. Feynman

When I was at my graduate school, I must've read this book more than 10 times. It was that good.  Its now almost 5 years since I last read it, but I still remember some of the funny stuff that I read. It just leaves an everlasting impression in you comparing to others whose effects are ephemeral. He just leaves a mark on you without any seriousness and the way he does it is something better read than me saying it.... 

• 
  
• What is great about Richard Feynman is his refusal to take anything too seriously. Rather, he refused to take anything too seriously because he was damn serious. When you think of it, only people who are not really serious appear to be serious. Seriousness in appearance is different from seriousness in essence. While its hilarious in one side, its also serious on the other side.
  
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• A staff (also a good friend of mine) at that time used to do tutor for students who wanted to do well in other competitive entrance exams. She used to make the students read excerpts from Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. She said the pupil liked the chapter on how to become friendly with women. Now, that was funny, with Richard Feynman trying out the instructions of the bar master, almost failing, but then sticking to his gun, and finally getting the reward. If you scratch your head and don't know what it is all about as you read this blog, then you should definitely read this book. I assure you that you would be laughing like mad before long.
  
• 
  
• Here is a review of the same it toolbox i thought it'd be better if you read a review than my usual musings....

Mood: Lack of sleep 

There is a question, somewhere deep in my head: Is it possible that Leonardo da Vinci has bored just once per whole civilization? Is there truely no place nowadays for real "renaissance person", who has some achievement in more than two,three disciplines? The book is the answer for the question: definitely there is at least one such a person - Mr. Feynman.

The book describes the incredible life of open-minded person, who can during one life do the following:

• learn to repair radio as a thirtenn years old child
  
• how to learnd italian quickly :D
  
• take a part in Manhattan project (atom bomb) - surprisngly he writes the most about how the life in Los Alamos looked like, than about his real work. It seemes like he worked more in nearby factory in Oak Ridge, than in Los Alamos ;)
  
• open locker, wardrobes and safes (I need to remember 25-0-25 and 50-25-50)
  
• how to make impression on women in bars (do not pay for them silly)
  
• how to earn money in Las Vegas
  
• how to be friend of big fish in Las Vegas
  
• try to repair Brazilian schollar system
  
• play on pandeiro and frigideira (whatever it is) and took a part in Carnival celebration as the samba school member. Hotel boy screaming - "O PROFESSOR!"
  
• learn why you should not earn too much
  
• paint
  
• why to be in touch with people from other disciplines and not to go for the interdisciplinar conferences discussing general topics
  
• get Nobel prize (it sounded like the ceremony was the worest challenge)go through the hell of scroing US school books
  
• how to play hald-professionaly on the drum for the ballet
  

So when you read the list there may be the following feelings in your head.

Did he really do these things? Yes.

Is he a megaloman? A little.

Why I hear the surname for the first time? I was surprised as well :)

As you can see making the extract from the book, which is the extract from such a rich life, like the Feymann's one, gives the odd results. Nevertheless what was the most inspring in this all - Feynman has always very pratical approach and even when he speaks about VERY complicated things (including philosophy), everything is served in straightforward way (without a single formula).

You can not be the professor Mr. Feynman.

Why?

Because I understand everything what you are saying.

On the other hand the book is simply SMART. It contains plenty of tips&tricks including not only "uncommon integration" (how you can gain from possesing the other toolkit), but also "how to cut massive number of string beans" or "how to deal wit a women". What is truely inspring it desribes the things AS-THEY-ARE and not with rounded words, so you can find even once a crossword on f, when he speaks about the government :D

He was also the one, who reminded me that if you want to achieve something in long term, you need to be honest in front of yourself and when you present the results of your work you must present ups and downs.

And at least, but not at last - the book is hilarious, so you enjoy reading it. It will be definitely well spent 11$.

Score: 6/6 (very good)

Now i'll give you another opportunity to read if you feel its not worth spending....

Here is a link for the same as PDF i request you guys to read this for serious inspiration - Mr. Feynman's way...

Surely You'Re Joking_Mr Feynman.pdf

Don't be serious... be sincere! Chetan Bhagat's speech @ Symbiosis

Don't be serious... be sincere! Chetan Bhagat's speech @ Symbiosis

Good Morning everyone and thank you for giving me this chance to speak to you. This day is about you. You, who have come to this college, leaving the comfort of your homes (or in some cases discomfort), to become something in your life. I am sure you are excited. There are few days in human life when one is truly elated. The first day in college is one of them. When you were getting ready today, you felt a tingling in your stomach. What would the auditorium be like, what would the teachers be like, who are my new classmates - there is so much to be curious about.

I call this excitement, the spark within you that makes you feel truly alive today. Today I am going to talk about keeping the spark shining. Or to put it another way, how to be happy most, if not all the time. Where do these sparks start? I think we are born with them. My 3-year old twin boys have a million sparks. A little Spiderman toy can make them jump on the bed. They get thrills from creaky swings in the park. A story from daddy gets them excited. They do a daily countdown for birthday party – several months in advance – just for the day they will cut their own birthday cake. I see students like you, and I still see some sparks. But when I see older people, the spark is difficult to find. That meansas we age, the spark fades. People whose spark has faded too much are dull, dejected, aimless and bitter. Remember Kareena in the first half of Jab We Met vs the second half? That is what happens when the spark is lost. So how to save the spark? Imagine the spark to be a lamp's flame. The first aspect is nurturing - to give your spark the fuel, continuously. The second is to guard against storms. To nurture, always have goals. It is human nature to strive, improve and achieve full potential. In fact, that is success. It is what is possible for you. It isn't any external measure - a certain cost to company pay package, a particular car or house.

Most of us are from middle class families. To us, having material landmarks is success and rightly so. When you have grown up where money constraints force everyday choices, financial freedom is a big achievement. But it isn't the purpose of life. If that was the case Mr. Ambani would not show up for work. Shah Rukh Khan would stay at home and not dance anymore. Steve Jobs won't be working hard to make a better iPhone, as he sold Pixar for billions of dollars already. Why do they do it? What makes them come to work everyday? They do it because it makes them happy. They do it because it makes them feel alive. Just getting better from current levels feels good. If you study hard, you can improve your rank. If you make an effort to interact with people, you will do better in interviews. If you practice, your cricket will get better. You may also know that you cannot become Tendulkar, yet. But you can get to the next level. Striving for that next level is important. Nature designed with a random set of genes and circumstances in which we were born. To be happy, we have to accept it and make the most of nature's design. Are you? Goals will help you do that. I must add, don't just have career or academic goals. Set goals to give you a balanced, successful life. I use the word balanced before successful.

Balanced means ensuring your health, relationships, mental peace are all in good order. There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions. You must have read some quotes - Life is a tough race, it is a marathon or whatever. No, from what I have seen so far, life is one of those races in nursery school, where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same with life, where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die. One last thing about nurturing the spark - don't take life seriously. One of my yoga teachers used to make students laugh during classes. One student asked him if these jokes would take away something from the yoga practice. The teacher said - don't be serious, be sincere. This quote has defined my work ever since. Whether its my writing, my job, my relationships or any of my goals. I get thousands of opinions on my writing everyday. There is heaps of praise, there is intense criticism. If I take it all seriously, how will I write? Or rather, how will I live? Life is not to be taken seriously, as we are really temporary here. We are like a pre-paid card with limited validity. If we are lucky, we may last another 50 years. And 50 years is just 2,500 weekends. Do we really need to get so worked up? It's ok, bunk a few classes, goof up a few interviews, fall in love. We are people, not programmed devices.

I've told you three things - reasonable goals, balance and not taking it too seriously that will nurture the spark. However, there are four storms in life that will threaten to completely put out the flame. These must be guarded against. These are disappointment, frustration, unfairness and loneliness of purpose.

Disappointment will come when your effort does not give you the expected return. If things don't go as planned or if you face failure. Failure is extremely difficult to handle, but those that do come out stronger. What did this failure teach me? is the question you will need to ask. You will feel miserable. You will want to quit, like I wanted to when nine publishers rejected my first book. Some IITians kill themselves over low grades – how silly is that? But that is how much failure can hurt you. But it's life. If challenges could always be overcome, they would cease to be a challenge. And remember - if you are failing at something, that means you are at your limit or potential. And that's where you want to be.

Disappointment' s cousin is frustration, the second storm. Have you ever been frustrated? It happens when things are stuck. This is especially relevant in India. From traffic jams to getting that job you deserve, sometimes things take so long that you don't know if you chose the right goal. After books, I set the goal of writing for Bollywood, as I thought they needed writers. I am called extremely lucky, but it took me five years to get close to a release. Frustration saps excitement, and turns your initial energy into something negative, making you a bitter person. How did I deal with it? A realistic assessment of the time involved – movies take a long time to make even though they are watched quickly, seeking a certain enjoyment in the process rather than the end result – at least I was learning how to write scripts, having a side plan – I had my third book to write and even something as simple as pleasurable distractions in your life - friends, food, travel can help you overcome it. Remember, nothing is to be taken seriously. Frustration is a sign somewhere, you took it too seriously.

Unfairness - this is hardest to deal with, but unfortunately that is how our country works. People with connections, rich dads, beautiful faces, pedigree find it easier to make it – not just in Bollywood, but everywhere. And sometimes it is just plain luck. There are so few opportunities in India, so many stars need to be aligned for you to make it happen. Merit and hard work is not always linked to achievement in the short term, but the long term correlation is high, and ultimately things do work out. But realize, there will be some people luckier than you. In fact, to have an opportunity to go to college and understand this speech in English means you are pretty damm lucky by Indian standards. Let's be grateful for what we have and get the strength to accept what we don't. I have so much love from my readers that other writers cannot even imagine it. However, I don't get literary praise. It's ok. I don't look like Aishwarya Rai, but I have two boys who I think are more beautiful than her. It's ok. Don't let unfairness kill your spark.

Finally, the last point that can kill your spark is isolation. As you grow older you will realize you are unique. When you are little, all kids want Ice cream and Spiderman. As you grow older to college, you still are a lot like your friends. But ten years later and you realize you are unique. What you want, what you believe in, what makes you feel, may be different from even the people closest to you. This can create conflict as your goals may not match with others. And you may drop some of them. Basketball captains in college invariably stop playing basketball by the time they have their second child. They give up something that meant so much to them. They do it for their family. But in doing that, the spark dies. Never, ever make that compromise. Love yourself first, and then others. There you go. I've told you the four thunderstorms - disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die. I welcome you again to the most wonderful years of your life. If someone gave me the choice to go back in time, I will surely choose college. But I also hope that ten years later as well, your eyes will shine the same way as they do today. That you will Keep the Spark alive, not only through college, but through the next 2,500 weekends. And I hope not just you, but my whole country will keep that spark alive, as we really need it now more than any moment in history. And there is something cool about saying - I come from the land of a billion sparks.

Jurassic Park Creator Michael Crichton Is Dead

He had truly led us into his world of imagination through his fiction works that were fascinating and are usually told out of time.... like they say he is a prognosticator who knew where these Technologies would lead us to and had lot of imaginative intuitions on the implications of the technological advancements..... its really a worrysome news for all readers and his followers like me and is indeed hard to digest his sudden demise even as we were expecting his next Fiction work....

So sad to agnise that after his NEXT, its nothing.. we miss u crichton.....

Chuppandi AKA Subbu

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Jurassic Park Creator Michael Crichton Is Dead
Swapnil Bhartiya, EFY News Network (Thursday, November 06, 2008 11:13:26 AM)

The magician who brought alive dinosaurs has died at the age of 66.

Thursday, November 06, 2008: Michael Crichton, the author of the phenomenon Jurassic Park, died Tuesday at the age of 66. He was suffering from cancer. Crichton was a multi-talented person. Regarded as the father of techno-thriller, he was also a film producer, film director, medical doctor and television producer. His books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide. His works were usually based on the action genre and heavily featured technology and tried to peep into the consequences of misuse of technology.

"Michael's talent out-scaled even his own dinosaurs of Jurassic Park," says Steven Spielberg, the director of 1993's Jurassic Park. "He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the earth. In the early days, Michael had just sold the Andromeda Strain to Robert Wise at Universal, and I had recently signed on as a contract TV director there. My first assignment was to show Michael Crichton around the Universal lot. We became friends and professionally Jurassic park, ER and Twister followed. Michael was a gentle soul who reserved his flamboyant side for his novels. There is no one in the wings that will ever take his place."

There is a very interesting anecdote. During his undergraduate study at Harvard University, Crichton copy-pasted an essay by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. But the essay of Orwell was marked as 'B' grade. The experiment of Crichton worked, and he learned that the mediocre people just cannot appreciate the quality work.

Chaos was one of the focus areas of Crichton's works. Most of his plots portrayed technological developments going out of control and thus leading to chaos. Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Airframe or Westworld – they all have the same focus, technological advancements going awry.

Expressing his grief at the unfortunate demise of Crichton, Arvind Mishra, secretary, Indian Science Fiction Writers' Association, said, "If anyone is to be given a sole credit to popularise science fiction in India and take this genre to even gullible masses through his epoch-making writing -- Jurrasic Park, it it no one else than Michael Crichton."

The author who wrote the famous lines in Jurassic Park, "Life breaks Free...But life finds a way" has finally gone to an eternal sleep from where he will never wake up, leaving us behind with a lot to learn. And remember his warning, "Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."
-- Swapnil Bhartiya

Aravind Adiga - Profoundly Indian - UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA

An excellent article in Frontline about the Indias new celebrity - Aravind Adiga... Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, “The White Tiger”, is the story of India’s underclass and its life.

IN June 2006, in an essay titled “My Lost World” published in Time magazine, Aravind Adiga wrote about a personal search he made in the Indian city where he grew up. That city was Mangalore, nestled alongside the Western Ghats on the Karnataka coast. Born in Madras (now Chennai) in pre-liberalisation India, Adiga spent his early childhood years in that city before moving with his family to Mangalore, where his father worked as a doctor.

In Mangalore, Adiga first attended Canara High School and then St. Aloysius High School. Despite the loss of his mother to cancer shortly before his secondary school leaving certificate examinations, he reportedly stood first in the State. He knew the importance of education. “When I was growing up,” he wrote in the Time essay, “young men of all religions were united by shared values of hard work, enterprise and a desire to get out of Mangalore as quickly as possible. My brother left when he was 18. I left when I was 16. Many of those who got out never returned. There was no need to go back because the place never seemed to change.”

Adiga left Mangalore in 1991 when his father moved to Australia. Returning to the city 15 years later as a journalist with Time, he found it vastly changed. The population had doubled. Shopping malls and high-rise apartment buildings had reshaped the skyline. There were now five medical colleges, four dental colleges, 14 physiotherapy colleges and 350 schools, colleges and polytechnics.

The new affluence seemed to have come at a price, however, as Adiga wrote: “I met neighbours, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way – one had his own house, another a car. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend’s daughter had married a Hindu, and her family no longer spoke to her. A Hindu friend’s daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, interreligious marriages, homosexual flings – the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small city had grown up.”

Looking around the transformed city, he also noticed “a group of drifters and homeless men, some carrying rolled-up mattresses” – part of the underclass who seemed to have been left out of the story of India’s growth. Adiga was curious and troubled by the sight, and during his travels in India as a journalist, he wanted to find out more. The White Tiger, Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning debut novel, is the story of this underclass and its life – begging for food, sleeping under concrete flyovers, defecating on the roadsides, shivering in the cold, struggling, in the 21st century, for its freedom. The White Tiger gives this underclass a voice: one that is intelligent, savagely funny and quite unforgettable. It is a voice that seeks out and understands the power of beauty: “If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.” But it is also a voice of anger and protest, and it is almost completely unsentimental. “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience.”

The novel is structured as a series of letters written to the Chinese Premier by a former car driver from Bihar. Why the Chinese Premier? “Because,” the narrator Balram Halwai, now based in the city of Bangalore, writes, “the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse.”

Balram explains, further, why he is writing in the language of the “erstwhile master”: “Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.” Things like Balram’s story of “entrepreneurship”. The Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” is apparently interested in the story of Indian entrepreneurship; Balram, the narrator of the novel, is an entrepreneur based in the city of start-ups. His story, he assures his addressee, will not be found in the white-washed version or the cellophane-wrapped pirated copies of business bestsellers that are sold at traffic signals: “Don’t waste your money on those American books. They’re so yesterday,” he writes. “I am tomorrow.”

He is, furthermore, “The White Tiger” of the title: “A Thinking Man/And an entrepreneur/Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), Bangalore, India.” The India of that address is actually two countries in the novel: one of “Light” with access to education, health care, good roads, electricity, running water, as well as hope and justice; and the other of “Darkness”, where there is only deprivation and injustice. Balram’s story is about how he clawed his way out of the Darkness into the Light.

Balram, or Munna as he was named by his parents in the Darkness where he was born, is the younger son of a rickshaw-puller, “a human beast of burden”, in Laxmangarh, a tiny village in Gaya on the banks of the river Ganga. One of Munna’s first lessons in growing up comes when he follows his family members on his mother’s funeral procession. “My mother’s body had been wrapped from head to toe in a saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garlands. I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life. (Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.)”

Refusing to call him “Munna” because that is not a name at all, the teacher at the local primary school gives him a new name. But Balram is not destined to remain in school for very long: there is a wedding in the family, they have the girl, and therefore, as Balram writes, they are “screwed”. The family has taken a loan to pay for the wedding and the dowry, and they must now work for the moneylender to pay off the loan. So Kishan, Munna’s brother, takes him out of school and to the tea shop where they will spend their future working as “human spiders”, mopping the dirty floors or smashing chunks of coal against a brick.

Years later, while telling his story, the narrator reflects on this part of his life: “Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep – all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

If we see the physicality of poverty (“My father’s spine was a knotted rope… cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist…. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”), we also see the carefully protected lifestyle of the ultra-rich: security guards, Alsatian dogs and, literally, bags of money.

The two worlds intersect within the strict bounds of the master-servant relationship. In Laxmangarh, the rich landlords are a pack of animals – stork, buffalo, wild boar and raven – who feed on the village until there is nothing left for anyone else, and the rest are forced to climb onto the packed buses that lead to the world outside – Dhanbad, Calcutta (Kolkata), Delhi – to find work.

In Delhi, the rich are driven around in air-conditioned cars, protected from the pollution that takes years off a man’s life. But Balram, as he drives the rich around in their cars, will always be a member of the world outside – a member of the servant class. The servant who washes his master’s legs in a bucket of dirty water and massages them; the servant who pours out the drinks while keeping one hand on the steering wheel and an eye on the road; the servant who can be smilingly cajoled into taking the rap when his employer, in a drunken haze in the middle of the night, drives the car over a small, dark ragged shape that might have been some sort of small animal but actually turns out to be someone’s child.

SHAUN CURRY/AFP

Aravind Adiga with the 2008 Booker Prize, in London on October 14.

Even Balram’s God is a master who demands gratitude for the scraps he gives him, as we read in one unforgettable scene. Once, returning to his village, Balram climbs to the top of a hill, to the black fort, and looks down at the view below him. “Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, a billion such people. And God asks this little man: Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand? Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?”

Born in Chennai, brought up in Mangalore, writing about Delhi, and living in Mumbai, Adiga loves Tamil, speaks Kannada and writes in English. And in this language of the “erstwhile master”, without exoticism and without sentimentality, he has written a profoundly Indian story. It is not as if other writers have not written about the other, forgotten side of India.

For example, Amitav Ghosh, whose novel Sea of Poppies also appeared on the Man Booker shortlist for this year, has written memorably, with rich detail, compassion and wisdom, about those on the margins of history and geography as has Kiran Desai, in her Man Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Adiga’s prose is not quite so elegant, but the force of his writing comes from its savage humour and its strength of feeling.

The pages of the 34-year-old Adiga’s novel, however, are different, in their dark humour.

They are also incandescent with anger at the injustice, the futility, the sheer wrongness of a life such as the one from where a bright little boy called Munna, who was later called Balram Halwai in his school records, and then called the White Tiger of the jungle because of his good performance during a school inspection, was pulled out of school and told to smash coal for a tea shop. Where private armies roam about the fields, men and women live sad and stunted lives, and dreams are cut short even before they are fully formed.

Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta is in the Indian Administrative Service. The views expressed in
this article are personal.

Indians fear Adiga's Revelation - Telegraph Reports

Indians fear Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' says too much about them - Telegraph reports

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was praised for highlighting the injustices and poverty present in the rapidly changing India when it won the Man Booker Prize, but now many Indian critics have expressed outrage at the judges' decision.

Many Indians feel that Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize winning novel - The White Tiger - presents their country in a poor light Photo: EPA

For some, Adiga's savage indictment of the way the rich treat the servant class panders to western prejudices.

"I felt the book took us back three decades," said folk art expert Ritu Sethi. "It had every stereotype going in it. The BBC used to show nothing but cows on the roads for years. We're back to that with this book."

Others criticised the novel for being dull and demeaning. Author and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan dismissed it as "a tedious, unfunny slog".

She agreed that much of the recent hype about India as an emerging superpower was dishonest and complacent but asked: "Is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?"

Having bought the book, affluent Indians may shift uncomfortably in their seats. The daily inhumanity shown by the rich towards their domestic staff in The White Tiger is something of which many will realise they too are guilty.

The fearful crime which the protagonist Balram Halwai commits will send a frisson of fear up their spines.

Adiga says the Indian middle class is paranoid about servants and their "laziness", "greed" and "thieving" tendencies but expresses amazement that, given the huge disparities of wealth, so few actually commit any crime.

"Look at the intimate access that servants have to their masters in their homes, and yet there are very few murders or attacks. But that doesn't reassure the middle class. It is becoming more insecure than before because it is richer now and has more to lose," says Adiga.

The White Tiger marks a new departure in India by portraying the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the hitherto invisible poor. For Adiga, his achievement is capturing "something new" in India, a stirring, a glimmer of a refusal by the poor to accept the fate ordained for them by their masters.

But this flicker of an "awakening" does not mean the end of the current social order where the poor slave 24/7 as cooks, cleaners, drivers, nannies and maids so that the well off can feel comfortable.

"The system is beginning to deteriorate but it remains. It will remain, but with higher levels of crime and lower levels of security," says Adiga.

The author looks at India with the perspective both of an insider, having grown up in India, and as outsider, having emigrated for years and then returned.

"As an immigrant in the US and England, I was an outsider. I spent a lot of time being confused, trying to figure things out. That was how I understood how Indian villagers feel when they move to the big cities for work," Adiga says.

William Green, former Time Asia Edior understands why the book has raised Indian hackles. "It is an unsettling novel, it touches very raw nerves, but I think he captures the complexity and subtlety of India in fiction in a way that you don't see in journalism," he says.

For some Indians, The White Tiger is an appalling regression. Just when they thought they had finally shed the old image of India as a land of poverty, cows and snakecharmers and started being respected as a hi-tech, prosperous nation, along comes Adiga to, as it were, rub their noses in the dirt again.

"I used to hate Naipaul for talking contemptuously about India, about how cleaners mop the floor in restaurants by crouching and moving like crabs and all that talk about Indians defecating in the open," said a freelance editor, Anjali Kapoor. "Adiga is the same, focussing on everything that is bad and disgusting."

TINTIN Books & Videos - Free download - Comic series

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Not much distributed all over the world but written by Herge
(Herge's 1st 2 books on Tintin):

01.Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Black & White)
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02.Tintin in congo (Black & White)
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Lagrely distributed all over the world
(which we commonly See and buy):

03.Tintin in America
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04.Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh
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05.Tintin and the Blue Lotus
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06.Tintin and the Broken Ear
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07.Tintin and the Black Island
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08.Tintin and the King Ottokars Sceptre
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09.Tintin and the Crabs with the Golden Claws
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10.Tintin and the Shooting Star
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11.Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn
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12.Tintin and the Red Rackhams Treasure
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13.Tintin and the Seven Crystal Balls
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14.Tintin and the Prisonres of Sun
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15.Tintin and the Land of Black Gold
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16.Tintin and the Destination Moon
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17.Tintin and the Explorers on the Moon
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18- Tintin and the Calculus Affair
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19- Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks
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20- Tintin in Tibet
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21- Tintin and the Castafiore Emerald
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22- Tintin and the Flight 714
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23- Tintin and the Picaros
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TINTIN BY OTHER WRITERS

This story was incomplete because of Herge's untimely death. Some other writers completed the story and got it published:

24.Tintin and alph-art(Some original sketch of Herge is included in this book)Read NowDownload NowNot Written by Herge, But u can buy these in some stores:

25.Tintin and the Lake of SharksRead NowDownload Now
A few stories written by different writers:

26.Tintin in thailand(Black & White)
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27.Tintin the freelance reporterRead NowDownload PDF

28.Tintin and the mysterious visitorRead NowDownload PDF

29.Tintin they explored the moonRead NowDownload PDF

30.Tintin and the voice of the lagoonRead NowDownload PDF

31.Tintin and the Flute of the WendigoRead NowDownload PDF

Q & A with Michael Crichton

Very informative for budding writers ...

Where were you born? What's your background? I was born in Chicago in 1942, during World War II. Not long after my birth my father was drafted. When he went overseas I lived with my mother and sister in Fort Morgan, Colorado, a town of about 2,000 people, until the war was over. Then we moved to Roslyn, Long Island which is where I grew up and went to school.

What got you to start writing? My dad was a journalist, so I saw him typing when I was growing up, so it seem like a normal occupation, to sit down and type something as your job. I myself began writing pretty young. In the third grade we all had to do puppet shows and most of the kids just did a little skit. I wrote a 9 page play that my father had to type up for me, using carbon paper, so all the kids would know their parts. And I wrote a lot in fifth and sixth grade, too, and I became known for it; I was the weird kid who wrote extra assignments the teacher didn't ask for. I just did it because I liked writing so much. I was tall and gangly and awkward and I needed to escape, I guess.

When I was fourteen, my family took a car trip to the West, and we visited Sunset Crater National Monument in Arizona. I thought it was very interesting and people should know about it. My parents suggested that I write an article about it for the New York Times travel section, which accepted articles by regular people who had had an interesting travel experience. So I wrote my article and sent it in, and the New York Times printed it, which really encouraged me. (They paid $60. I still have the check stub.) I also wrote for the town newspaper, covering high school sports, and for the school paper. Later, I wrote for the college newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

I wanted to become a writer but didn't think it was likely I could make a living at it, so I went to medical school. I was looking forward to becoming a doctor. Then I started writing paperback thrillers to pay my way through medical school, and the books began to be successful. Finally I just decided to do it full time, after graduation.

Where do you get your ideas for your books? I wish I knew. They just seem to come from nowhere. But often I think people put too much emphasis on the "idea" behind a story, anyway. First of all, there isn't just one idea in a story, there are lots of ideas. And second, an idea by itself isn't worth much until you do the work necessary to get it down on paper. And in the course of doing the writing, the idea often changes. It's similar to the difference between having an idea for a building, and actually constructing the building. The building often turns out differently from the original plan or intention.

How did you become such a good writer? Plenty of writing! I began writing really diligently when I was in high school, and I kept at it.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be a writer? I am sorry to say I don't have any advice except to write as much as you can, and keep writing. It's often said that if you can do anything else with your life, you should, because the life of a writer can be a difficult one. I think that's good advice.

If you really want to pursue writing, there are some journals you can use for guidance and reference: The Writer, and Writer's Digest, both of which have articles about writing, and list publishers for books and magazines. Nearly all libraries have these journals.

Do you read your books once they are published? No. It takes a long time to write a book, and by the time it is finally on the store shelves I am usually working on a new one. From time to time, I've gone back and looked at earlier books (it's not really fair to say I read them, I just sort of flipped through the pages and read a paragraph here and there.) I usually like them, although they usually seem to me to have been written by somebody else.

Why do you like to write science-fiction books? I don't know, I have a technical background and technical stories interest me. So that's what usually comes out of my head. But I have also written historical novels and non-fiction.

I try not to make too many judgements about the books that come out of me. I just write them and carry on. I try not to define myself, or what I do, because any definition is limiting. I like to leave the future open.

What makes you write your stories the way you do? I have no idea. It's just how they come out of me. Sometimes people ask, "Why did you write this scene, or this character?" I don't have a good answer to questions like this. It's like getting dressed in the morning. If somebody asked you why you put on the clothes you did, you'd make up an answer, but the truth is you probably just got up and put on something you thought looked good for that day. And when I decide a scene, or a character, it's sort of the same. I just write something I think works well.

What types of books do I like to read? When I was a teenager, I read lots of science fiction. Now, I tend to read non-fiction almost exclusively. I hardly ever read fiction.

Do you base the characters on people you know? Not usually. Once or twice, I've wanted to pay somebody back so I put them in a book in an unflattering way. But they're usually disguised so that even the person wouldn't know. Sometimes I base characters on people I know about, but haven't met. In Jurassic Park, many people have noticed that the character of Alan Grant was quite similar to a real dinosaur paleontologist named Jack Horner. But I never met Jack until years later, after the movie came out.

Most often I take bits and pieces of real people and combine them into a character that does not correspond to any single person.

How long does it take to write a book? It's difficult for me to say. Usually, an idea "cooks" in my head for a very long time before I begin to write it. During that preparation time I will make notes and do research. The actual writing can be relatively quick---four to fifteen months---but I could the preparation as part of the work. So in that way, The Great Train Robbery was 3 years. Jurassic Park was 8 years. Disclosure was 5 years. Sphere is an odd example: I started it and wrote part of it, but didn't have a good ending, so I stopped. Twenty years later, I picked it up again and finished it in about two months. So: did it take 20 years, or two months?

Who most influenced your career? Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, and Alfred Hitchcock.

What are your working methods? I get up early, usually at 6 AM, and drive 2 miles to my office, where I begin work in isolation---and much of the year, in darkness. I like my surroundings to be quiet, and I work most easily alone. My assistant comes in later, around 9:30. I continue working until lunch-time. After lunch, I answer mail, or fuss with what I have written. I quit about 3 PM, take some exercise, and go home.

Usually I begin writing each morning by rereading what I wrote the day before, and revising it. I try not to get bogged down in the rewrites, but to move on to the new work each day. I prefer to revise in passes---do it once, then go back another time, do it again. I don't try to make it perfect because I know I am going to come back to it.

As the novel progresses, I work longer and longer hours. Pretty soon I work during the afternoon right up to dinner. Eventually I come back after dinner to work some more in the evening. I usually can finish a draft in a few months.

I experience a lot of doubts when I am working; I never feel confident. About two hundred pages in, I decide the book's no good, and it was a mistake ever to begin it. And I think there is no way to fix it, and I am generally miserable…If I tell my friends about these concerns, they just say, "Oh, I'm sure you'll work it out." This is very irritating.

How do you pronounce your last name? It sounds like Cry-ten (rhymes with frighten). It's Scottish.

What type of schooling have you had? I went to public schools in New York; Greenvale Elementary and East Hills Elementary. I went to Roslyn High School. I have a B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard College and a M.D. from Harvard Medical School. I haven't gone back to school since then.

What were you like growing up? I am the oldest of four children. My father was a journalist and my mother was a homemaker. I grew up in Roslyn, New York, which is a suburb of New York city, on Long Island. Most of my time growing up was painful. I was shy and awkward; at the age of 13 I was 6'7" tall, and I weighed 125 pounds. They made me wear heavy shoes so I wouldn't blow over in the wind. My brothers and sisters were much more gregarious than I was. I was pretty quiet and studious. I played basketball; I was also on the track team. I was my class vice president in my senior year.

I also wrote for the high school paper, and the local town paper, where I covered high school sports (I was also the photographer.) I began writing in this practical journalistic way, and I continued to write in college, for the school paper, the Harvard Crimson. I was very lucky in high school to have teachers who encouraged my writing.

What was you mother like, and did she help you in your life? My mother was a very dedicated parent and very encouraging to her children; she used to drive me to the next town, Great Neck, because it had a better library, so I could do my school research there. She was very interested in all kinds of art, and would drag her kids to museums and plays at least once a week. We all complained bitterly---not another museum!---but the result was that I'd been exposed to a lot by the time I got out of high school. I felt I had a lot of support for my work and writing in my family, growing up, even though emotionally it was a pretty crazy house with lots of turmoil and yelling and screaming.

Why did you decide not to become a doctor? There were really two reasons. The first was that my writing in medical school had become successful and I realized I could probably support myself as a writer. The second reason was that medicine really wasn't for me. I didn't like being on call; I didn't like getting called at night. I just wasn't suited for a physician's life.

Where did you get your interest in computers, and did you like them as a kid? There weren't any computers when I was a kid. But I've had an interest for a long time; I did my college thesis in the 1960s on a computer, which was a huge IBM mainframe. It took a whole building at Harvard and I think it was a 12K machine. About as powerful as a Gameboy now! I got interested in personal computers in the late 70s and started writing on computers back then. So my interest just developed as time went on...

No computers? What else didn't you have as a kid? Before the age of ten, no TV, no direct dial phones, no jetliners, no credit cards…a lot of stuff didn't exist in my childhood. A great deal has happened during my lifetime!

When you write, do you think of a movie? It's impossible not to think of it from time to time, but in general I try not to, for several reasons. First, it's possible no movie will be made. Second, the director will decide what parts of the novel will go into the movie, and he may very well cut your favorite parts and add others. So you might as well just write the scenes or characters you want in the book. And third, to worry about practical considerations when you write a chapter (how can they ever film this?) is a waste of time. The experience of movies is that certain apparently simple scenes prove impossible to shoot, and certain extremely difficult scenes turn out to be not so bad, after all.

So in the end, I try to just write a book and not to think about what may happen to it after publication-not only in terms of a movie, but also in terms of what readers will think, what reviewers will say, and so on. Because all that is beyond my control. It happens after the book is published. All I can do is write a book, so I just focus on that.

Reluctant centenarian - N. RAM

Malgudi will live on, long after the October 10 centenary of the birth of its creator.

---

The first commemorative offering, scheduled for an October 10 launch, is a limited deluxe edition of Narayan's acclaimed autobiography, My Days (1974) ...

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PHOTO: RAGHUBIR SINGH





NO COMPROMISES: R.K. Narayan was the first modern Indian writer in English to make a full-time career out of literature.

THERE are intimations that the birth centenary of R. K. Narayan is being observed in a modest, contemplative, almost-apologetic way. If you search the Internet, you will find such commemorative events as a seminar on "Relocating R. K. Narayan" organised by the media studies department of a Bangalore college, or a reminiscential talk somewhere else. You will find postings on blogsites where citizen journalists register sentiments like "R. K. Narayan, the man for whom simplicity meant everything... has had a great influence in my life." You are likely to read journalistic or scholarly articles, specially commissioned for the occasion in India and abroad, on the writer, his body of work, his life, perhaps on his current literary standing and even the future of his literary reputation.

You might be intrigued to come across "churumuri's R. K. Narayan campaign," which wants the commemoration to go beyond "getting a road or circle [in Mysore] named after him" or "holding a seminar or centenary events" and create "something more substantial, something that will last forever... [and show] how we honour the good and the great." You will learn about the forthcoming `R. K. Narayan Birth Centenary Conference' in Mysore, a two-day scholarly event organised by the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and the Sahitya Academy. In a communication accessible on the Internet, the chairperson of IACLALS notes that the conference, in which top Indian and international "experts on Narayan" will participate, has been planned on "a small and unpretentious Malgudi scale."

I know the creator of Malgudi would have been amused. He might have approved of the low key of these celebrations — adding, in all likelihood, this caveat: `if celebrate you must.' Narayan disliked anything extravagant, sentimental, `artificial.' I know from repeated observation that among the television scenes that offended his literary-aesthetic sense most (and he invariably converted his disapproval into a sense of amused acceptance) was the sight of VVIPs making a beeline for samadhis, as though these flower-bedecked, staged events would confer immortality on the great departed.

Just as he was both displeased and amused by the constant stream of `book releases' by presidents, governors, ministers, judges, bankers, industrialists, editors, entertainment world figures, and other bigwigs. "Books are there to be picked up from the shelves of bookshops and libraries," he remarked to me once. "They should not be written to be `released'." Of course, as a life-long professional writer with a keen practical sense and an unrivalled knowledge of publishers, agents, copyright, and the book trade, he went along with publishers' book launches and other promotional arrangements, even consenting coolly, in his advanced years, to sign copies for book buyers as well as recipients of his books as gifts.

Commemorative editions

I know Narayan would have been happy that Indian Thought Publications — the unorthodox publishing experiment he launched in 1942 that had him as the sole author and is today a thriving business venture run by his grand-daughter `Minnie' (Bhuvaneshwari Srinivasamurthy) — has special publishing plans for the centenary year. The first commemorative offering, scheduled for an October 10 launch, is a limited deluxe edition of Narayan's acclaimed autobiography, My Days (1974), with R. K. Laxman illustrations, rare photographs, and a new introduction by the writer Alexander McCall Smith. Next will come an omnibus collection of Narayan's best short stories, some 75 of them, with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. A volume collecting the writer's less-known travel writings, also under the Indian Thought imprint, will be another special treat in the centenary year.

If I were to make up a Narayan quote, as some practitioners of the (now quite old) `new journalism' allow themselves to do, it would be something like this: "Celebrating the centenary of somebody's birth, a mere accident, is a meaningless sentimental exercise. If a writer's readership and appeal survived his death by some years that would be worth celebrating." The Narayan I knew would certainly have been far more pleased with the prospect of his debut novel, Swami and Friends, being in print in 2035, a hundred years after its publication, than with the celebration of his hundredth birthday.

Art of omission

"There is but one art, to omit!" noted Robert Louis Stevenson many years before Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami was born and grown into a publishable writer. "Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an `Iliad' of a daily paper." Out of such knowledge and secret was born Malgudi — India's best-known, best-loved fictional town — and the lovely, grave as well as comedy-laden, art and voice of its literary creator who is widely regarded as India's greatest writer in English of the twentieth century.

All of Narayan's fiction testifies to this secret knowledge, as does much of his non-fiction. In fact, such was his commitment to the art of omission that he had absolutely no problem when the 38-letter name, which appears on his degree certificate, was shortened in 1935 for literary convenience to R. K. Narayan at the instance of Graham Greene and the publisher Hamish Hamilton. His writing career was exceptionally long lasting, encompassing seven decades. His literary output is rich and varied — 15 novels, all but one set in Malgudi; scores of short stories, the best of them offered in two collections, Malgudi Days (1982) and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985); retellings of Indian epics and mythology; travelogues; essays; and the autobiography, My Days.

For Narayan's `discoverer' Greene, it seemed, nothing could better Swami and Friends, the typescript of which charmed the English writer in 1934-35. Most critics are likely to consider the eighth novel, The Guide (1958), as the writer's most imaginative and accomplished. However, each reader might have her or his personal favourite — The English Teacher (1945) or The Financial Expert (1952) perhaps. (Narayan once related to us what he claimed was the real life story of a practical banker who, beguiled by the title of the sixth novel, ordered dozens of copies for the edification of his employees and then, when he discovered its fictional content, didn't know what to do with his paid-for stock.)

PHOTOS: THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY





PAGES FROM RKN'S LIFE: A page from the original manuscript of The World of Nagaraj.

A reader's favourite might also be Mr Sampath — The Printer of Malgudi (1949) or The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962) or The Vendor of Sweets (1967) or The Painter of Signs (1976) or The Dark Room (1938), the little-known `schematic,' socially radical third novel that Narayan, in his autobiography, describes as a product of his obsession with "a philosophy of Woman as opposed to Man, her constant oppressor" and as "an early testament of the `Women's Lib' movement." Readers looking for a full literary cycle — the return of the writer's fiction and voice to the autobiographical mode — will be charmed by the last novel, a novella actually, The Grandmother's Tale (1993).

Like many a writer, Narayan went through a period of derivative, footloose, "unclassifiable" experimentation — before he discovered his métier. In September 1930, when be began writing his first novel, Swami and Friends, he made his breakthrough: "I began to notice that the sentences acquired a new strength and finality while being rewritten, and the real, final version could emerge only between the original lines and then again in what developed in the jumble of rewritten lines, and above and below them. It was, on the whole, a pleasant experience..." In July 1983, he told a group of American teachers who met him in Mysore: "I always blue pencil anything that seems at all repetitive."

Interestingly, a few months before Swami and Friends was published in England, Narayan's literary promoter, Greene, expressed in a letter practical anxieties about the brevity of the debutant's work: "I think if we fail to get it published, it will be chiefly because of its length; 50,000 words is awkwardly short. It may seem foolish that good work should not be published because it isn't padded out to 70,000, but that's how the racket is run..." It is a measure of Narayan's artistic integrity that not once during an exceptionally long writing career was he tempted to compromise with "the racket."

Look out of the window

Contrasting with the style and approach with which Narayan seemed to arrive, readymade, on the world literary stage was the plenitude of material that seemed always at hand. In 1962, when Ved Mehta asked Narayan in New York if he was ever oppressed by a sense of diminishing literary powers, the novelist came up with an answer that was only half-joking: "I really have more stories than I can write in a lifetime, and probably in the next janma I will be not an author but a publisher... How nice it would be to live in Malgudi."

In his author's introduction to the splendid short story collection, Malgudi Days, Narayan returned to this theme of the richness and diversity of story material India offered any perceptive writer who had the technical competence to work on the ideas: "The material available to a story writer in India is limitless. Within a broad climate of inherited culture there are endless variations: every individual differs from every other individual, not only economically, but in outlook, habits and day-to-day philosophy. It is stimulating to live in a society that is not standardised or mechanised, and is free from monotony. Under such conditions the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character (and thereby a story)."

The earliest known photograph of the writer, aged about 6, taken by his uncle T.N. Seshachalam circa 1912.

This writer placed a high value on spontaneity and `non-deliberateness' in fiction, as he did in real life. Any knowledge of his novels and short stories reveals that he is the most unselfconscious of writers. He has himself explained, on more than one occasion, how as a writer he let things run their course, allowing characters to surface or ideas to develop without `deliberateness' of any kind.

Roots

But all this understates, in a crucial respect, what Narayan came to believe a good novelist needed. The art of omission, a plenitude of story material, perceptivity, and unselfconsciousness and non-deliberateness in the writing are necessary and vital — but still insufficient conditions for mastery of his kind of literary art. This is made clear in an insight he offered Ved Mehta in 1962: "To be a good writer anywhere, you must have roots — both in religion and family. I have these things..." The idea of being rooted in a society and civilisation — in one's own culture, traditions, values, changing local milieu, modernity and family, and among one's own people — is important to Narayan's development as a writer and, incidentally, to his assessment of other writers. "His writing is interesting," he would remark to me about some writer who was temporarily in the news. "But you can see the writer has no roots."

Literary standing

There is a tendency among some lesser writers of Indian origin, the likes of Shashi Tharoor, to denigrate the literary art and achievement of Narayan. Among other things, his vision is held to be "narrow"; his concerns "banal"; the pool of experience and vocabulary he drew from "shallow"; his style "pedestrian," "metronomic," "predictable," "limited and conventional," and "impoverished" (all these adjectives must be credited to a Tharoor column). The birth centenary is perhaps a good occasion to proclaim that there can be no serious question about where Narayan stands in the literary world, especially in relation to his detractors.

His international standing is expressed in the fact that his novels, short stories, and retellings of Indian epics and myths can be read in most of the world's major languages; that his fiction has been the subject of a substantial scholarly and critical literature produced over several decades; and that elaborate literary tributes appeared in the world's media following his death on May 13, 2001. He was nominated on more than one occasion for the Nobel Prize, although like his friend Greene, he did not win it. Like the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies whom he greatly admired, Narayan — the most unpretentious and accessible of writers — is also regarded as a writer's writer.

Voice and style

His fiction, deceptively simple and elusive in terms of literary theory and technique, is distinctive for its voice, its fusion of the comic with the sad, and its philosophical depth. He is famed for his lightness of touch and a style that is lean, lucid, undecorated, but wonderfully expressive and full of understated surprises. Narayan was a master of the `clear glass' style long before that term of art was invented. "Since the death of Evelyn Waugh," declared Greene, "Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language." It was no small praise from one of the great writers of the twentieth century. For John Updike, Narayan's ability to convey the "colourful teeming" of his fictional town places him in the Dickensian tradition.

Graham Greene's letter of August 1, 1935, giving the writer great news.

The remarkable thing about Narayan — master of the art of omission — was that once he discovered his metier and his fictional town, he stayed with it for life. All his originality, inventiveness, imagination, and philosophical resources were invested in the space of his small town, now familiar to millions of people through the medium of television.

Narayan had a special ability to make the rhythms, intricacies and humanism of South Indian life accessible to people all over India and indeed to people of other cultures round the world. Central to this achievement was Malgudi, the fictional South Indian town, which he peopled with ordinary men and women made memorable by his art. The stuff of his fiction is the precise registration of the particular and the local, mediated by the art of omission — what V. S. Naipaul memorably called the life of "small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means."

"Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi?" was the thought that occurred to Greene when he finished reading, usually in manuscript, a Narayan novel. He knew that if he went out of the door into "those loved and shabby streets" of Malgudi, he could see "with excitement and a certainty of pleasure" a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, and the haircutting saloon — "a stranger who will greet me I know with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open a door on to yet another human experience."

It is `voice' as much as anything else that defines our writer. Learned essays and treatises have been written about it. As has already been noted, Narayan's is a lovely, original, grave as well as humour-laden voice. In its registration of ordinary life in Malgudi, its unhurriedness, its imperturbable humour set against a "sad and poetic background," its many shades of irony, its never-heavy philosophising, and its detachment and constancy, this voice seems to convey something universal. There is nothing false, strained, `deliberate' about his fiction.

Pioneer

Another dimension of Narayan's literary achievement needs to be highlighted. He was the first modern Indian writer in English to make a full-time career out of literature. He was, in fact, modern India's first successful professional writer in English. When Narayan started out in the 1930s, he had no literary forebears or peers to relate to. When he was ready with his first novel, he could find neither a publisher nor a reading public. The India of the 1930s and early 1940s lacked an organised publishing industry. Writers who got published in newspapers or periodicals were paid essentially small change. The absence of a significant book-buying public for Indian fiction in English must have been enormously discouraging.

It was a heroic struggle for the first 20 years and it is to the credit of the Indian press that during this period it provided support to the creative writer. A monograph can be written on Narayan the journalist. In 1931, after trying to interest "every kind of editor and publisher" in his short stories and after making a half-hearted attempt to land a job in The Hindu as a trainee sub-editor or reporter, he had a book review and short story published in The Indian Review. In 1933, he scored a one-off: Punch published his short satirical article, "How to Write an Indian Novel." In 1934-35, he worked hard as the Mysore stringer for The Justice, the official organ of the non-Brahmin movement.

Narayan and Greene at a BBC Studio in London, 1957.

In the late 1930s, Narayan made a breakthrough with The Hindu — with Kasturi Srinivasan asking him to contribute short stories and other pieces because, as the great editor put it, he "valued good English, which was in short supply." Thus began a long and productive association with our newspaper group, which meant that many of the writer's well-known short stories and essays were first published in The Hindu. From the second half of the 1980s, our fortnightly magazine Frontline had the privilege of publishing a number of Narayan "Table Talk" pieces, some short stories, and even three novels in serial form. In the middle period of his creative writing, Narayan had a productive association with The Illustrated Weekly and The Times of India, with whom R. K. Laxman, India's greatest cartoonist and the writer's youngest brother, has had a wonderful lifetime association.

Narayan never wavered, never deviated from the decision he made early on that the only life for him was that of a writer. Recalling that decision made around 1929-30, he once remarked to me: "I wonder how I had the foolhardiness to make such a crazy decision! I don't think I could do it again if I had to make a choice." This part-joking, part-serious remark seemed to capture the essence of Narayan's early life as a writer. He summed it up for his biographers: "Good reviews, poor sales and a family to support."

The last years

I can recall some typical Narayan observations in his final years. He would remark that as writers (for example, Saul Bellow or himself) grew older, their novels got shorter. "It's like the Indian goldsmith at the end of the day," he told me once. "He sweeps in the dust carefully to retrieve the gold particles he thinks can be found in the dust."

On April 10, 1994, when his daughter Hema died of cancer — the worst personal blow since the death of his wife Rajam, from typhoid, in 1939 — he said to me: "We are all in the queue. She has jumped the queue." And on the side-effects of chemotherapy under certain circumstances: "It's like setting fire to the house to roast the pig." The allusion, extraordinary for a lifelong vegetarian and an 88-year-old father grieving the death of his only child, was to the `Chinese manuscript,' or rather fable, figuring in Charles Lamb's "A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig" in Essays of Elia (1823). For me, this observation presented a rare insight into a creative mind.

This writer's mind was extraordinarily clear until the last. In an introduction to a Narayan novel, Greene once speculated: "a writer in some ways knows his own future — his end is his beginning." Narayan in his nineties would return imaginatively to the characters and scene of his childhood, as though he were examining them as subject matter for new, shorter fiction.

Sharing a joke with Mulk Raj Anand in Chennai, 1995, photographed by N. Ram.

Just a few hours before being put on a ventilator in May 2001, while he was experiencing fairly severe cardiac-respiratory problems and the duty doctor was cautioning against the strain of talking, he told us who were at his bedside about a "short novel" he wished to begin. He spoke of its plot at some length. It would be based on the life of his tahsildar grandfather, who had managed to accumulate property way beyond his legitimate means and lost it all. "Part biography, part fiction," these words keep ringing in my ear. We discussed the book's length, I enquired, "about 35,000 words?" and the writer agreed: "that will be appropriate." He wanted me to bring him a diary in which he would start writing his 16th novel. He was in the habit of writing his fiction and essays in old diaries when he did not use elegantly bound notebooks. The way a book or notebook was bound was important to him. "Will it be a 2000 diary or a 2001 diary?" were the last words I heard from him. To my wife, he said: "Please ask Ram to bring the diary quickly, the story is forming in my mind."

Some decades after Narayan — in the company of Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, the last of the `big three' to pass on — cleared the path for modern Indian fiction in English, there has been a remarkable flowering of literary talent of Indian origin in English. Successful and, in some cases, world-renowned writers of Indian origin have dealt with imaginative themes in diverse ways in varied voices and different styles. You can take your pick of world-view, approach, theme, narrative technique, style, voice, it is a free literary world. In the midst of all this, Narayan's work stands tall — unpretentious yet original, understated yet path-breaking, `non-deliberate' and accessible yet philosophical and profound.

It will ensure that Malgudi lives on, long after works by younger writers have lost their public.

(This article incorporates some material from the Cover Story by N. Ram, "Malgudi's Creator: The life and art of R.K. Narayan (1906-2001)" published in Frontline, June 8, 2001; and from the biography, R. K. Narayan: The Early Years - 1906-1945, Penguin India, New Delhi, 1996, by Susan Ram and N. Ram.)