Monday, June 19, 2006

Blogging, almost a year on

In July – July 21st to be exact – it’ll be a year since I started blogging. But since July will be a busy month and I don’t expect to post much, I’ve decided to go ahead and do the looking-back-in-retrospect thing right now, more than a month early. :)

I had been skeptical about blogs and blogging and it was only after some conversations with Brewtus (thanks very much to him) that I decided to start a blog myself. Almost a year on, I’ve come to realize that blogging has sustained my writing, or whatever little there is of it, in unexpected ways.

So here's a list of my favorite posts:

1. Phoenix, Arizona: First post - a dreamy sort of tone.

2. On alcove residences and Chaco Canyon: This is one of many posts that came out of my frequent road trips to northern Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

3. Empires of the Word, A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler: A casual review but I really enjoyed writing this, and the pleasure of reading this again and again hasn’t gone away either.

4. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature and Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi: Casual review again, along the same lines as the previous one.

And now for the next three – the three that I especially like. The ideas for all of them came from a short trip to southern Arizona, close to the Mexico border, in December 2005.

5. Chasing a Mirage
6. The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 1. On matters spiritual and temporal
7. The Spanish among the Pimas: Part 2. The Killing of Saeta

And finally,

8. The atrium and related thoughts: This post is too recent to pass a judgement on, but that’s fine.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Ahmadinejad's Letter

An interesting find: this is the letter that Iranian president Ahmadinejad wrote a few weeks ago to President Bush.