Far From The Madding Crowd

While most news networks avoided showing the entire sequence of events leading to Saddam Hussein’s death, showing only up to the part where the noose was placed around Mr. Hussein’s neck, videos of the entire execution did surface on the Internet. Grim as the footage may be, there were those who still took delight in sharing the video.

With the proliferation of broadband networks, information can hardly be suppressed nowadays. But questions nag about the ethics of such information sharing. Sensationalism still sells, even at the cost of taste.

I got this from Laila Lalami’s blog and am grateful for the wonderful stuff she writes.

Just a few days after the Asian tsunami, Amitav Ghosh went to the Andaman and Nicobar islands. In a New Yorker essay titled “The Town By The Sea,” he wrote of the environmental devastation, the physical destruction, and the unendurable tragedy that were visited on the people of the islands. Ghosh describes a middle-aged scientist, a man referred to merely as “the Director,” who was traveling to the town of Malacca to look for his wife and daughter among the few survivors that had been found. This was not the first time the Director had undertaken this trip, and sadly there was no trace of his family.

As he walked among the ruins, however, the Director came across a set of slides from his epidemiological research, and he picked them up, carefully selecting which ones he would keep. A little later, he spotted a yellow paint box that his daughter had owned. He chose to leave it where it lay. Ghosh writes:

I had expected he would stoop to pick up the box, but instead he turned away and walked on, gripping his bag of slides. “Wait!” I cried. “Don’t you want to take the box?”

“No,” he said vehemently, shaking his head. “What good will it do? What will it give back?” He stopped to look at me over the rim of his glasses. “Do you know what happened the last time I was here? Someone had found my daughter’s schoolbag and saved it for me. It was handed to me, like a card. It was the worst thing I could have seen. It was unbearable.”

He started to walk off again. Unable to restrain myself, I called out after him: “Are you sure you don’t want it - the paintbox?”

Without looking around he said: “Yes, I am sure.”

I stood amazed as he walked off towards the blazing fire, with his slides still folded in his grip: how was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve were those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder: what would I have done? what would I have felt? what would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all, but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision. In the manner of his choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps, that in this moment of utter desolation there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? Or was there some consolation in the very lack of immediacy - did the value of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unendurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, it was plain his mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.

There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events: to think, to reflect, to write seem trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms, and some time after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.

It’s that time of the year when you are flooded of top 10 lists of practically everything under the sun.

Here are some:

Times’ list of the 10 best books of 2006

and The Guardian’s list of best fiction of 2006.

Meanwhile, New York Magazine gives us the year in culture with its top 10 books (fiction and nonfiction all thrown therein) and rounds it out with a few honorable mentions. While the L.A.Times breaks it down, including both fiction and nonfiction categories for its top picks.

And, finally, a list of what sold best in our very own New Delhi

This article reflects the scenario in the UK but it could well be an indicator of things to come in India.

The question on everyone’s mind: Will small-time independent booksellers last very long in India? Or will the Landmarks and Odysseys gobble them up? Will economics of scale dictate what Indians, already starved of good literature, can and cannot read?

While the savings look good for the consumer, the benefits of these price wars may be short-term at best, according to Jonathan Spencer-Payne, who runs the Peak Bookshop. Independents carry a much greater range of titles, he says, so a greater diversity of authors and books are represented, including traditionally hard-to-shift first novels. “We support publishers with other titles, with the backlist,” he says. “The feeling in the independent sector is that publishers aren’t thinking about tomorrow. If independent bookshops disappeared, where would they sell the full range of their books? It would be a terrible indictment on society if one or two sellers sold a limited range of books and they basically picked and chose what people read.”

Here’s a really neat webpage I came across. Fore-edge art at its best.

Books are back on the shelves of insurgency-wracked Kashmir which has been blighted by a literary drought for several years.Now, the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy jostle for space with Salman Rushdie and Dan Brown bestsellers in Srinagar’s few bookshops.

For more, read this article.

I chanced upon this interesting article in The Telegraph….about a project by St. Xavier’s College, in partnership with Unesco to conserve its rare collection of books.

To preserve the past for the future, St Xavier’s College has embarked on a journey with Unesco to conserve its wealth of rare books and manuscripts. Driven by the urgent need to archive rare works marked by broken spines and brittle pages, Xaviers has become the first college in eastern India to be a part of Unesco’s Memory of the World Programme.

You have probably never heard about Edwin Frank. But he is onto something special these days, bringing back from obscurity those stories that are long forgotten. Frank is the editor who oversees the New York Review Children’s Collection, a modest publishing venture that reissues eight or 10 out-of-print books a year. Some of the titles that have been re-published are Lucretia Hale’s “The Peterkin Papers”, E. Nesbit’s “The House of Arden”. Other titles similarly resurrected are “Jenny and the Cat Club”, “The Island of Horses” and “D’Aulaires’ Book of Trolls.”

For more on this, read here

While checking new content on the Web, I came across this website called ComicVine. The website’s ambition is to be the wikipedia of comic-book heroes and makes no bones about that fact, stating that it is “a social encyclopedia for comic book lovers that everyone can edit”.

Members can go a step futher and create their own superheroes, writing information about their new creations and describing the superpowers attributed to them. For starters though, since each superhero has a full page dedicated to herself or himself, you could add your knowledge of trivia and make your superhero’s page a bit more interesting. You could also rate the superheroes so that yours comes out on top.

For the comic book fans, here’s a website that could keep them busy for hours on end.

Here’s one for the attempts to bridge the digital divide. According to The Hindu, dated 24th December:

BITS, Pilani alumni have launched “Project Embryo” to offer live, interactive lectures and seminars with the help of internet-based video-conferencing. Live lectures will be delivered online by BITS alumni experts are accompanied by interaction between the speaker and the students creating a dynamic environment for the dissemination of knowledge. It also helps to bring global and emerging trends in science, business and technology right into the student community.