Saturday-Sunday Rap

16 October 2005: My friend, Bipasha, who has recently moved to Singapore to be with hubby Varun, has sent some lovely pictures of their son, Vansh. I call him Mr. VRM, the Cool Dude. Do check out the pictures here. Don’t you think it’s a swell idea to use KodakGallery.com to post and share your pictures? This is what the social web is all about. More power to you, Bipasha.
Vansh and Bipasha

Saw Riding the Bus with My Sister starring Rosie O’Donnell and Andie MacDowell on the Hallmark channel. A moving true story of two sisters with one coming to grips with the other who is developmentally challenged. Check out Andie’s interview here.
Ah, and before I forget, have finally started Shalimar the Clown. It has already cast a spell on me. Rushdie, how do you write like a dream!

15 October 2005: Do take a look at Meebo. A project of three ex-Stanford students, it is trying to bring IM to Web 2.0. You can do all your IMing at one place here and it’s still evolving. If it can seamlessly integrate all IM platforms and iron out bugs, it will work. Work like hell.

Read a lovely piece of literary review at my absolute favourite, NYT.com, by Langdon Hammer of Yale. He was reviewing a new book by Helen Vendler, in the genre of literary criticism. This is what Hammer wrote: “Vendler is a formalist critic who describes how poems are made. In this book she explores how the "tones of voice" by which a speaker is created imply a relationship between the speaker and a listener or reader, which she sees as ethical in nature. A poet's manner, his verbal style, is a set of manners, a way of being with the reader. Nothing is more time-bound, more subject to social definition, than our manners. But Vendler is interested in a "Utopian" kind of poem that, rather than confirming current social expectations, wants "to redefine them." Such poems look into the future or the past to forge a bond - spiritual, erotic or artistic - that is unavailable in the present. They create an uncanny intimacy, inviting us into a space outside ordinary time, somehow within the language of the poem itself.”
Invisible Listeners
Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
By Helen Vendler
95 pp. Princeton University Press. $19.95
(In January this year, I visited Dow Jones at Princeton, and on a rainy evening, ‘toured’ the venerable University in a car. What a magical, serene, scenic place of scholarship!)

Saw Hawking on the Hallmark channel. "Stephen's is a heroic story of great achievement. It's about the nature of time on both a deeply personal and a universal scale. At the moment when his intellect was striving to grow to its full potential, his physical self was cruelly closing down. The fact that he never spoke about it, but through sheer force of will and personality determined to be bigger than his illness, is inspirational." - Jessica Pope, Hawking producer. Brilliantly told story of a man who wrote “A brief history of time” and “The universe in a nutshell” and rose against a debilitating disease. Hawking was played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a moving performance.
Hawking and Cumberbatch

While I was watching the film, I thought of four things:
a) Man is capable of doing great things
b) Woman is capable of doing greater. Only they can somehow find it in themselves to sacrifice more for love. Hawking’s wife, Jane, is an amazing woman.
c) There’s something about England. It nurtures talent and scholarship. That’s what makes it a great country.
d) T at this very moment is in Trinity.
Do check out Hawking.org.uk to learn more about this courageous and luminous man.