E-BOOKS VS PRINT BOOKS

And the debate rages on...

Says One: I love holding a book in my hands. The feel of it. The weight of it. The smell of it. The dog ears and the flippable pages. The option that I can tear out the pages I hate and make paper planes with them. The hours I spend wandering around a library, caressing leather bound spines and embossed letters. The sheer majesty of a floor to ceiling book shelf, it's like my personal stairway to heaven.

Says Two: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stop kidding yourself. Holding ancient papyrus scrolls and cuneiform tablets isn't going to get you any closer to Aristotle, or God, for that matter. And think about the waste, man. The trees desecrated, the jungles destroyed, the eco-system damaged...do you even know how ink is manufactured? Print books are bulky, have become more expensive and soon won't be so easily available with all these bookstores (your portals to nirvana) shutting down helter-skelter. I'm not even going to think about your stupid paper plane fetish.

Says Me: It's the content that matters, y'all, not the book's publishing format. Good prose will remain good prose whether its  carved in stone or gigabytes or ink. 

What say you?

THE DEATH OF A CITY.

Bengaluru: No more a city of a thousand lakes.

It seems that half of Bengaluru (Karnataka, India) will have to be evacuated by the year 2023 as the rapidly expanding city is facing a water-shortage crisis. More than half of its bore wells and tap water have been contaminated by E.coli bacteria and no plans are in place to reverse this outrage. How is it contaminated? By letting sewage run into groundwater rendering it un-potable. 

Once, many decades, maybe centuries ago, Bengaluru or Bangalore had been described as a land of a thousand lakes. But today only 200 of those lakes remain and are nothing better than sewage tanks. The rest of the 800 were sucked dry and built over to expand the city's acreage. No one thought to build around these lakes? Can no one enforce sanitation laws? It's not only unbelievable, it's shameful.

Out of the usable water that flows into the city a third is wasted due to leaks in transportation. The numbers are all out there for all to see. Why is no one seeing? How can we let this happen?

Seems a patently fake image.

That's more realistic.

MUMBAI MADNESS IN APRIL.

Meow! I'm Kiara. I'm a cat and that's my jungle, humans. A jungle of buildings and cars and water and humans for miles and miles and more. Observing Mumbai's like my favorite hobby and I do it so brilliantly. Next time, I'll take you on a hands-on city tour so keep watching. Ciao!

MANY MASTERS LOTS OF CONFUSION

April 8th: Truffles Kothari's 4th birthday. Yay! I have to, have to do a post on him. 

Truffles came to us when he was only 10 weeks old. My daughter, husband and I went to get him from Brooklyn (first and only time I've been to Brooklyn, but that's another post altogether.)

We went, we saw a litter of puppies and I wanted the tiniest, prettiest one but my husband said he and my son would not be caught dead walking a pretty and cute dog. He wanted a manly man's dog. Now, a Maltese isn't a manly man's dog but I valiantly did not point it out to my manly man then. So we found a scruffy, unkempt enough, dog to suit him and my son named him Truffles. (after the white chocolate, not the mushroom.) I wanted to name him Henry, the Eighth, but was vetoed unanimously.

4 years later, we do have a manly man's Maltese. Truffles has broken records as being the biggest, sweetest, most lovable and thorough confused Maltese in the world. (They do say a dog reflects his owner. Heehee.)

Watch how we confuse poor Truffles by clicking the sentence below.

Trick or Treat, Truffles?

HAPPY HAPPY 4TH BIRTHDAY MY PRECIOUS POOCHIE. WE LOVE YOU!

WRITING SKILLS

The Art of Galumphing:

ga·lumph 

intransitive verb \gə-ˈləm(p)f\

: to move with a clumsy heavy tread

To unblock writer's block or to get the creative juices flowing on slow days, I was introduced to the art of galumphing. Which I've found is less of an art form and more of a trick. It is nothing but a lottery you play and hope to get lucky with the chits you pick. 

This is how it works: 

Make several dozen word chits. The words must be a mix of names, places, animals, things and actions. Scramble up the folded chits or close your eyes and pick a minimum of 3. The lesser chits you pick, the easier the trick works, I've found. If you want difficult, by all means pick 10 chits. Open the chits and there, you have your lucky draw. Then use the words you've picked and write a paragraph or two or three with them. 

It's really a neat trick to do. At worst, you'll end up giggling at the words you've chosen. (I once picked: fart, Venice and Internet.) At best, you'll have something worthwhile on your laptop.

Here's one of my galumphs:

Garbage Can, Car Salesman, Sandy Beach.

Mike Cohn, car salesman extraordinaire, was having a great day. He'd sold two cars today, leased another two and had the potential of two more sales going through tomorrow, and by God he would make sure they did. It was a day made for whistling, he thought, glorious, sunny, warm and fresh. All he needed to make this glorious day stupendous was his surfboard, some surf and the beach. 

He parked his midnight blue ’99 GT Convertible in his daily spot, smack dab in the middle of the parking lot that led to the white sandy beach, the pride and joy of his quiet, North California town. He stretched, popping the kinks and tedium of the day away and grabbed his checkered Billabong shorts. He striped of his suit and put on the shorts, keeping an eye out for peeping toms and prudes with screechy voices. He did not want to waste a single minute mollifying anyone or explaining why he was inflagrante delicto in a public place to the cops. 

There! All done. He grabbed his board and the empty coffee cup sitting on the roof and started jogging towards the beach. He detoured in the direction of the garbage can to toss the cup in, and he froze.

Holy shit! What in hell was that peeking out of the garbage can?

It took me about 10 minutes to do that. Not bad, eh? 

So, go on. Do your own Galumph and tell me you rocked.