Category: Musings

Musings

Arthur Hailey is good

His books are absolute page-turners, and you just can’t keep them down. I loved all the books I read of Arthur Hailey. Airport, Wheels, In high places, Strong Medicine, Overload, Hotel, The Moneychangers….. each one was better than the other.

I wish he had written some more books.

For those of you who are not familiar with Arthur Hailey, he was a British/Canadian novelist. Born in England, lived in Canada. He wrote about a variety of topics, in a variety of settings or rather industries. A master of parallel plots or parallel stories, his stories have drama, emotion and tons of suspense. Hailey would spend couple of years researching a subject before writing the books, and that helps him talk like an insider on the topics he has written on.

If you are planning to start on a book of Arthur Hailey, try Airport. That’s my favorite.

Musings

Singing with the koel

My dad’s house in Kerala has a large compound with lots of trees and birds. (Also a pond which we used to love as kids)

Koels are quite common there, and one of my hobbies was and is “singing with the koel”. Here’s how it’s done. The koel goes koo-ooo and you do the same. After about 5-6 times, the koel would take offence and keep quiet. You do the same. Then you try to start off and the koel always follows suit. It’s very difficult to spot them in the foliage, but singing with them is very enjoyable.

Today I was in my office in Bangalore and heard a koel sing. Was so tempted to try out if koels in Bangalore were the same as koels in Kerala. But kept quiet for humanitarian considerations. The fact that I have been singing with koels since childhood, and the fact that my voice still remains like that of a crow, is better kept to myself:)

Musings

Proverbs Chapters 1 through 30 – try it in your life!!

I wanted to read the whole bible for a long long time. Lot of unsuccessful attempts later, here I am, on a venture that started about 6-8 months back. I am on Proverbs now, the 20th book. And I guess, one of the most beautiful books in the Bible.

Starting with “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” in the first chapter, and “Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf with hatred. ” in Proverbs 15, all of Proverbs is filled with beautiful verses like “Better a patient man than a warrior, a man who controls his temper than one who takes a city. ”

But strange that all these words of wisdom came from Solomon, who exclaims “”Meaningless! Meaningless!” 
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” in the very next book Ecclesiastes.

Should read more on Solomon, the great guy who asked for wisdom and not riches from the Lord, who saw and talked to the Lord only in his dreams (unlike Moses or David), who built the beautiful temple of the Lord and so on.

More on this later….