Tim Burton’s movie Big Fish was based on a novel?? Nobody told me!

My sister, now in London with her husband, has got herself quite a nifty accent. The nice, “pretty good, innit?”-kind of an accent that I always wanted to acquire. No, really. I have a thing for proper Brit/Irish/Scottish accents. Reading Garth Ennis and watching Guy Ritchie movies do that to you.

Re-reading one of the best books from my boyhood ( Ahahaha, the word “boyhood” always cracks me up) – As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer. The man might be a swindler and a perjuror, or whatever it is they call him, but that doesn’t take away the fact that he writes neat plot-driven stuff. Used to, rather. I think I need to reread the best of his epic-family-squabble-thingie (Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter, all his latter-day output degenerated to the same pulpy two-guys-seperated-by-class-and-with-interwined-lives plot that Kane and Co did to perfection) Man, As The Crow Flies is getting me all nostalgic. I read it the first time when my younger uncle was getting married, and pissed off a lot of my Evil Relatives by taking the book to the wedding and punctuating the assembly with occasional sighs and giggles and “yeah, BABY!”s. That was the closest I came to being interested in entrepreneurship, or commerce of any sort. Charlie Trumper, the main character of the book was on my Personal Pantheon for quite sometime after that; matter of fact, I think I need to put him on again.

So a quick trip to Planet M resulted in my finding an album long on the list of personal curiosities – The Essential Tri Atma. What’s so special about this band? Just that the third song on the album, O Moena was ripped off in the famous Siyaram ads of the eighties ( Remember that tune? “O Siyaram, coming home to Siyaram” and all that jazz…) Listening to the album right now, and the rest of the songs are pretty good. The band Tri Atma is made up of a Bengali percussionist Ashim Saha( “O Moena” starts off in Bangla, and it seems it’s about a Mynah bird) and a German guitarist Jens Fischer, who also sequences the tracks. Considering that it’s a band from the seventies, the sound is extremely contemporary, the tabla used to good effect throughout.

So I also moved flats in Hyderabad. I was there for two days this week, and thankfully, didn’t break my back lifting crates of books, because we hired a bunch of movers who did everything ( except the packing, which we did ourselves). The move was necessary because vrikodhara is all set to leave for Calcutta, and we were paying too much for the three-bedroom apartment, which was also beginning to resemble something that was a cross between a bombed-out refugee center and a set from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So this new place is a two-bedroom flat, the only disadvantage being that it gets nastily hot in the summer. I was really worried my books would spontaneously combust or something – because I came into the house at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, about to leave for Bangalore, and it felt like I had walked into an oven. It’s not the house’s fault, though. Hyderabad is a bloomin’ oven in May. It rained sometime in the night during the bus journey and I woke up shivering early in the morning, as it entered Bangalore.

I took a picture of my room right after the packing was complete; Sasi, friendly reminder, send me the photograph, will you?