Return of the Podder: More of my favourite Podcast Shows (Part 2)
KCRW’s BOOKWORM Umberto Eco Nicole Krauss Bret Easton Ellis Identity (Series of 10) This is where the big guns of literature come out to bat. Or to talk. KCRW’S Bookworm is a major literary podcast show. It features serious, detailed discussions on literary matters, featuring big-name authors. One of their longest, most fascinating series was [...]
Invasion of the Pod People: The wonderful world of Podcasting and my current favourite Pod shows (Part 1)
A podcast, in case you didn’t know it already, is an audio recording intended to be broadcast over the internet, usually through an Apple store (check your iTunes program) and then downloaded onto your iPod, hence the name. You don’t need to DL to an iPod only. You can simply DL to your comp, and [...]
Multiple worlds, many wars: ‘Master’ Harry Turtledove’s treasure trove of Alternate History war sagas (Part III)
The World at War series The WorldWar series The WarWorld series The Colonization series The American Flag series The Videssos Legion series etc all by Harry Turtledove He’s called the ‘master’ of Alternate History and rightfully so. Harry Turtledove is an amazingly prolific, amazingly dependable author. He belies the notion that some readers have that [...]
History was never such fun: S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket Trilogy and other must-read Alternate History thrillers (Part II)
One of my all-time favourite Alt-hist series is The Nantucket Trilogy by S.M. Stirling. The Nantucket books are titled Island in The Sea of Time Against the Tide of Years and On the Oceans of Eternity (As with all my blogposts, I’m not going to tell you every detail of the plot and describe every [...]
“What if India & Pakistan Had Joined Forces To Fight A War Against The British Empire”: The thrilling sub-genre of Alternate History (Part I)
One of my favourite genres is ‘alt-hist’. Or, to spell it out, Alternate History. It’s often considered a sub-genre of Science Fiction, or, as some people prefer to call it, Speculative Fiction. That’s because, most of the early alternate history stories were first published under the SF genre, the theory being, I guess, that SF [...]
My Wife’s Murdergascar: (Definitely Not) A Review of Ramu Picture wallah’s latest fiasco
One of my quirks is an unconscionable tendency to deliberately mispronounce words, especially titles of movies and books, names of celebs, and even song lyrics. I do this so routinely that at home they’re used to deciphering my weird mispronunciations. So, for instance, to give you some recent examples, Parineeta becomes Perinatal, My Wife’s Murder [...]
“Never judge a book by its film”: Book reviews of two books on Mangal Pandey
This review appeared in HT. Mangal Pandey: Brave Martyr or Accidental Hero? By Rudranghsu Mukherjee Penguin India; 110 pgs; Rs 150 Mangal Pandey: The true story of an Indian Revolutionary by Amaresh Mishra Rupa & Co.; 106 pgs; Rs 95 First of all, let’s breathe a sigh of relief. Neither of these two books belong [...]
Six-gun Vixen and the Deadcoon Trashgang: A short story
This is a short story that I wrote some years ago. It’s a hybrid between the science fiction, western, horror, fantasy, and mystery/private eye genres. As you’ll find out when you start reading it, it’s set in an alternate world ravaged by nuclear holocaust generations earlier, where the US has regressed to the days of [...]
Movieblogging: A non-profit approach to independent individualistic film making under the Creative Commons License
A number of you have written in asking about my proposed film Beautiful Ugly as well as other film projects I’ve said I wish to pursue. A common question most have, or misunderstand, is regarding the kind of film/s I’m interesting in making. Let’s be clear about this: I’m not at all interested in commercial [...]
“Dharma is that precept that tells us that Bush is not just wrong, he is evil. And so is any nation that wages war upon others, with or without cause”
Ashok Banker interviewed by Richard Marcus on blogcritics.org: Part 2 This is the second part of a two part interview I conducted via email with Indian author Ashok Banker. Ashok is best known currently for his adaptation of the classic Indian epic The Ramayana. In this part of the interview he discusses some of what [...]
“I could be a fictional construct you made up and posed questions to for this interview, and then answered yourself”
Whew. It’s great to be back in the blogosphere. I’ve got tons of catching up to do, loads of reviews on new movies, DVDs, music, books, etc I want to post. Also lots of new reviews of my Ramayana books in general, and Armies of Hanuman in particular, both from readers and critics around the [...]
BANKER’S BACK!
Well, it happened. Thanks to the intrepid team at Blogger Support, led by one Eric, who were hugely supportive and helpful, the problem with my blog is finally fixed. Apparently, I was exceeding the space limit on archived posts on a given page. The limit is 1 MB. If the posts archived on that page [...]
Still Trying, Almost Crying…but never say Dying
Still trying to lick the blog-tech thingie. Meanwhile, am listening to Bare Naked Ladies, Sloan, Keene, The Yeah Yeahs, The Ramones, Rod Stewart (huh?), Kate Bush, Cranberries, Def Leppard, and Fiona Apple. More about the best of those later. Watching The L Word on DVD. Amazing! More about this later too, along with a whole [...]
Adventures in Blogosetting: Checking the tech
Excuse me if you’re reading this same (or similar) post again. This one’s from my usual browser (Safari) and with the same ISP (Sify) and same comp (Mac OS X). I’m trying to see if it goes up as well, since the post from Netscape went up without no problemo. This is at the suggestion [...]
Checking the tech: Adventures in Blogosettings
Here goes another attempt. This one’s from another browser (Netscape instead of my usual Safari) but with the same ISP (Sify) and same comp (Mac OS X). This is at the suggestion of Blogger Support – yes, they got back to me yesterday (US time, India time differences) and were very helpful. More importantly, they [...]
Same Post, Different Day: Still battling the blogobhoots
This is further to the post I blogged (below) yesterday – though it actually only came up today… Am still not able to blog as before, and can’t for the life of me figure out why. Have read every page of Blogger Help twice or thrice, as thoroughly as proofing a novel, and found nothing [...]
Trouble in the blogosphere: Unable to blog (hope this post gets through)
Hi all. Am having some kind of problem with blogging lately. I think it’s a tech problem, so hopefully it’ll be solved soon. This is my tenth, or twelfth, attempt to blog in the past several days. Somehow, one post got through – the one about the first part of my interview with Richard Marcus [...]
No Holds Barred: Richard Marcus gets one of my most honest interviews
Yesterday, a fan, a friend really now, conducted a longish interview with me. The first part is already up today. The second part will be up tomorrow. (It’s a longish interview.) Now, I’ve done a lot of interviews. In fact, for the nonce, I’m actually not supposed to be doing any more. But in this [...]
And finally a Ramayana that’s also fun to watch!
Talk about different versions of the Ramayana – it’s about time we had a version that was also fun to view! On the same Sepia Mutiny discussion page I blogged about (below), I discovered a link to a series of short animated films made by an American artist named Nina Paley. The original title of [...]
So Many Ramayanas: Sepia Mutiny’s online discussion group
Another useful link from a fellow Epic Indian. http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/002046.html This one takes you to a discussion on different versions of the Ramayana. Much of it is ‘know-that’, ‘heard-that’, or ‘read-that-one’ before stuff. But it’s still interesting to know how little most people, even Indians, actually know about the Ramayana. Right now, as a debate rages [...]
HIS STORY in his own words: Thoughts on a chronology of Indian history and on western bias in Indological studies
Banwari Lal Sharma of the Epic India Group sent me this link today. It leads to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file on what seems to be the Kent University, UK, website. http://www.cs.kent.edu/~jchitali/history/Royal_Chronology_of_India.xls The spreadsheet presents a chronology of major persona and events in Indian history, starting from the earliest times down to the present time-period. [...]
Pangs of New York: Book Review of Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis
This review first appeared in HT. Pangs of New York Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney William Heinemann trade paperback; 474 pp; L 7.25 If you’ve fallen under the spell of Caleb Carr in his brilliant novel, The Alienist and its sequel The Angel of Darkness, then you might pick this one up believing it to be [...]
Mangal Pandey at the US Club: Review of The Rising and a brief word on our “independence”
Saw Mangal Pandey: The Rising at Inox yesterday with my wife and two friends. I loved the film. No two ways about it. Loved it from start to finish. I know the history of the period reasonably well, since I’ve researched it extensively for a while, for my “Epic India” series of historical fiction books, [...]
