Books that never left me

So I got challenged to list out 10 books that have made an impact on me for whatever reason. I think just listing the books wouldn’t have been enough. So instead of spamming the FB wall space I thought I’ll post a blog. Not giving a reason why they made an impact would be sacrilege!  There is no numbering, since it’s not an order of priority. So here goes:

• Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson - Strictly speaking not a book. But I couldn’t miss this one. It has more life lessons that many other tomes and the characters are just adorable and infinitely relatable.
• Mrityunjay, by Shivaji Sawant – It’s the story of the outcast. Perhaps the strongest character in the Mahabharat after Krishna. And it’s told beautifully. You feel like you are living in the life and times of ‘Karn’ and you feel the anguish in the pages. I have read it 11 times already and I think after this blog, I’ll start again.
• Gone with the wind and Scarlett, by Margaret Mitchell & Alexandra Ripley – I am listing both here because they are sort of incomplete without each other. I don’t consider it a war novel or a romance one. It’s for me the story of a girl who was ahead of her times. I love her sheer bewilderment at not being able to fit in, her grit and determination, and ultimately her journey to find herself as a woman.
• Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden – I don’t know why. But this is still the most thumbed book in my bookshelf.
• Alice in wonderland, by Lewis Carroll – for the sheer madness of it. And the golden snippets scattered across the text. My favorites are where Alice finds out that if you don’t know where you are going it doesn’t matter which road you take and that sometimes to stay in the same place you have to run really fast.
• Everything by P G Wodehouse – Exactly my kind of humor.
• Love Story, by Erich Segal – this was the first book I read that made me cry
• The Game of Thrones Series, by George R R Martin – It’s unexpected. People die like flies. There are dragons. Blood, gore, sex, politics, magic – what more can one want??
• Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson – This was the first biography I ever read, and I couldn’t put it down
• The kite runner, by Khaled Hosseini - I cried when Hassan recovers Amir’s kite.
• Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien – It does look like I love fantasy novels doesn’t it?? But well, this book created entire worlds and races. Have to love it.
• The Fountainhead, by Ayan Rand – Probably because some people identified me with Dominique
• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayan Rand – It was the first book I couldn’t finish. Still haven’t and will never.
• The inheritance of loss, by Kiran Desai – Yuck! Hated the way it was written
• Five point someone, by Chetan Bhagat – for the sheer stupidity of the narrative. Oh and also, the language was terrible!

Ok this is getting terribly long!!! I think I’ll stop now and tag other people. Ha!

A day without the Internet

I got up unsuspecting on a hot Saturday morning in Bangalore. Blurry eyed I groped for my phone and checked my mail. Strange! No new emails in the night! Must be because of the long weekend, I thought naively. I opened Facebook while I was brushing my teeth and hells bells – no new notifications! I sat zonked for a minute till consciousness kicked in. And I checked the time of the last post visible on my facebook wall – 1:00am. There had been no update for the past 8 hours!!

In a moment of sheer brilliance, I checked the network and saw that I’m not connected to the wi-fi. And that’s when I realized that my connection isn’t working. Like a true techi, I fiddled around with the modem, no avail. Finally I gave the service provider a call – we all know THAT doesn’t work – only to find out that some line had been cut last night and they were trying to repair it. And here comes the beauty – the repairs will take 24 HOURS!

So began a day with no internet. To be honest, initially I was stumped. And the super slow 2G on my phone was no relief either. I lolled around on the sofa, flipping channels, but I am not much of a TV person and I soon got bored. And then here is what I ended up doing:

1. Made breakfast and lunch. And managed to bake a cake. Of course with no internet I couldn’t google recipes, so I had to dig around in my old cookbooks to get to one
2. Actually made butter at home from all the cream that had collected over months. I have a solid 200gms of homemade buttery deliciousness now
3. In that process, figured out my new food processor that was waiting a demo. Use the guidebook instead and it worked.
4. Wrote 800 words on a random topic
5. Read 100 pages of ‘21^st century skills’
6. Went for a walk
7. Arranged my wardrobe
8. Did 2 loads of laundry
9. Had friends over for some booze and chit chat, and
10. Finally wrote this blog

Of course all this happened while checking my phone multiple times in the hope that the wi-fi is back. And with some chatting on whatsapp since that was the only thing working. But all in all, it was a very productive day. I would say all of you must try it once – the digital detox. You mull over it, the net is back, blog is posted and I gotta Facebook.