My friend, Aparna, recently created a blog of her own and after being nudged by some inspiration, I have finally decided to get back to check up on my own and revive it.
I have been doing quite a bit of reading this year as I had intended to at the start of it. Of all my resolutions at the start of this year, the one I have been actually following up on has been reading. I realized that I used to be quite an avid reader when I was younger but somewhere along the road, I lost out on a lot of time I realize I could have used for this purpose.
I have managed to get back into this habit this year and I'm trying hard to stick to it. The books that I have read this year include Crash, The Last Unicorn, The Emperor's Children, By the River Piedra I Sat and Wept, We, Song of Kali, The Man In the High Castle and a few other names I cannot really recall this moment. And to speak of temporary amnesia this early in the morning considering the fact that I didn't sleep last night. Yes, I wrapped up 'By the River Piedra..' last afternoon and I completed 4 chapters of 'The Calcutta Chromosome' by Amitav Ghosh, it seems like an intriguing read so far. I was also reading 'The Secret' which seems quite interesting.
Some other books on my reading list for this year are Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie), Propaganda and the Public Mind (Chomsky), Timequake (Kurt Vonnegut), some Calvino, Umberto Eco, Ursula K. Le Guin (I'm dying to get my hands on her new release 'Lavinia'!!) and other titles.
One thing I realized is that there's way too much propaganda and such stuff that's lying around for everyone to pick up on, and not everyone can really tell when the truth is being told and when fabrications are made, or whether any amount of truth actually remains. I realized then that I must not believe everything I read, I need to be a lot more discriminating against fabrications and I must believe only what seems closest to the actual facts. But how does one do that when the truth is deliberately blurred for us by all forms of media and the ideologies they represent? Well, the media is far from reporting anything even remotely related to the facts, so I guess we have to listen to everyone, read what everyone has to say and make our conclusive truths. In this age, I think we all have our own truths. Truth is subjective - believe what you must and understand that you may never be enlightened on the actuality.
Circumstances will change, hopefully. Fingers crossed!
