Arbit Scratchpad

Amitav Ghosh is a fabulous writer, who's polished and beautiful prose inspires. His last book 'The Glass Palace' was one great book weaving the history of Burma, India, the World War II with fiction to concoct a very well-researched tale. In 'The Hungry Tide' he gets better. It is the best book of his till date ('The Shadow Lines' for its inter-continental tale and 'Calcutta Chromosome' for its sheer novelty come second and third in my list). 'The Hungry Tide' is set in the tide country of the Sundarbans with its mangrove forests and Royal Bengal tigers, enough to send a thrill of anticipation up your spine. The book is fast-paced and mysterious, as well as mellow and langurous, simultaneously. Starting off with the travails of a lady researcher (Piya) in dolphins and marine mammals (cetologist) from the US, the tale courses through the upheavals in the life of a social worker (Nilima) and her husband (Nirmal), along with their nephew - a tr...

Had been to this concert at Chowdaiah Memorial Hall last Saturday - Zakir Hussain, Taufiq Qureshi, and Niladri Kumar. Superlative performance by each of them. It started with a prelude by manipuri drummers and was followed by a solo performance for about 40 mins by Zakir himself - amazing range - ranging from slowest and low freq to high speed - he played the tabla like a storm. Niladri Kumar then joined him on the sitar - he is an amazing performer for his age - very young guy. Then Taufiq joined in - he plays percussion instruments and other drums etc (like Sivamani). Also he did some amusing things just using his mouth and his hands - aural tones and beats ... Then they were followed by four Manipuri drummers who did synchronized acrobatic dances. Towards the end all of them played out, together. The jokes and humour peppered show (especially quips by Zakir) was my first classical concert proper - thanks to RickB. It ended with auctioning of Shahrukh Khan's jacket which some for...

Here is a short story to break my writer's block: Unconscience (PDF) Update: Here is some evidence for the medical part of the story from a doctor friend of mine - Dr.Vivek Chail. Though the reason for writing the story was more than just exploring medical possibilities through science fiction . hi shamit, thnks for your mail/story link your flow of thought is great. comng to your ques.. 1.is the medical possibility there, that the ova can be extrated from a human female and injected with sperm and placed in an artificial placenta like chamber and fed with appropriate nutrients. the ova extracted frm human female and injected with sperm is the same as test tube baby..frst done in 1970s the second part i would like to clarify that the placenta is a temporary organ that serves as a link between the deloping fetus and the uterus. The fetus develops in the uterus..i suppose you meant that as the "chamber"..still in rare cases the fetus can develop outside the uterus and this ...

Seems like one amazing book, need to get my hands onto this ... Some excerpts and reviews: http://www.themedicieffect.com/book/book_about.html http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/4376.html http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/BookReviewDetails.asp?a=159 http://www.innovationtools.com/Weblog/innovationblog-detail.asp?ArticleID=551 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1591391865/innovationtoo-20