News. After the break.

This is the longest I have been away from the good ol' blog since the time I started this gig. The reasons are the usual boring cliché ones - an overdose of work. There are other reasons too - each one is too insignificant to list here but the small bits add up and create road blocks.


There is too much happening in the world too. My favourite butt of jokes - the politicians and bureaucrats are in a race to outdo each other to gain top honours in areas of incompetence, corruption and utter indifference. Not just in our country, but elsewhere in the world too. Of late, I have heard this being said quite a few times, "If things continue this way, soon we will have a revolution like Egypt." I don't think so. We, the Indian middle class, are indifferent in our own way and are not exactly above reproach ourselves. That, and our new-found prosperity will ensure that we will not congregate in, hey, we don't even have a common square where we can meet to protest. On the other hand, mini-revolutions are happening all around us in the country. The Maoists are surfacing in newer and newer places around the country. They were called Naxalites once and I have heard stories about them from my uncle who studied in IIT Kharagpur in the sixties. When I was in college I had attended a concert of the Naxalite-Poet, Gadar, from Andhra Pradesh. The North-East has never been quiet. For anyone who is twenty years old in Kashmir peace is an unnatural phenomenon. One thing that probably stops us from breaking out into protests like in Egypt is probably the size of our country and the lack of a common language and shared culture. (This is my theory and as always, is based on nothing except my opinion.) The danger is that if the economic and social gaps between the haves and have-nots keep widening then these scattered mutinies will intensify and turn more areas of our country into replicas of Kashmir.


This is way too serious. This blog used to be a fun thing to read once. Maybe it is better to recover from whatever I am suffering from and then return to blogging!


But hello! Don't go away! I have news to share! It is about me. Last month, one of the photographs clicked by me was included in an online journal of Asian American Poetry published in the USA. 


If you click here, it will lead to the page in the journal that features the photograph.


One of my short stories had won the top prize in a contest held by an independent book store in Vermont, USA. K.D. Norris, one of the winning writers in that contest is the editor of the arts and literature section in a local newspaper called Bennington Banner. He interviewed me on e-mail last week and yesterday's Bennington Banner carried the interview.


Click here to read the interview.


Now let me go and bury my nose where it belongs - in work. Until soon. Hopefully.