manianviews

 "Prophet song" -  my impressions           This is certainly one of the books that was very disturbing and made me realise that how much relatively peaceful and comfortable atmosphere we are living in India. The story of the book is set in a totally imaginary period of time in the country Ireland where it is not clear which of the political formations fight for power. What are the idealogies, left or right, religious or irreligious, etc. are not mentioned. Booker was awarded to this book last year. On what basis? I think the reason for giving the Booker prize must be the political relevance of the content. More so, these days people do not seem to understand enough of the importance of civil rights of individuals in societies. This book really brings that to the forefront and descrbes the struggle of a family during the time of suspension of all civic rights in the country.          So essentially the novel takes us through th...

The Narrative is shockingly similar               Recently I attended a seminar on our country's secularism and the main speaker was writer Tamilselvan, one of the important functionaries of Tamilnadu Progressive writers and artists association. The association is a known intellectual and writers wing of the CPM in the state. Writer Tamilselvan is the author of many books and also an important left wing leader. He surprisingly gave his speech with a power point presentation which I think,kind of impeded his flow of speech. He is one of the prolific orators of the party and he is always at his natural best on stage. With a power point at hand, he might have wanted to try something new using modern technology. In my view the use of such a tool for a person like him did not make his speech any better.          In about one and half hour of speech he tried to cover everything from evolution of  humans to historiography of race...