Am I back??

Whoooooo...!!! Been a long long time since I had the inclination to blog. I see my last blog was on St. Valentine's Day this year. Seems an eon ago, what with so many events happening in between. A quick recap of what I had happen in my life since February 14th, 2006:

Found a girl (or rather, my elders did), talked with her & her family, chatted with her, liked her, loved her, got engaged to her, spoke & chatted with her even more, fixed a date for the wedding.... all this without ever setting eyes on her once. For those of you for whom arranged marriages are nothing new, you know the fun in this process. For those of you in the dark about this system of marriage, eat your hearts out!!! A week before the wedding was when I finally met my sweetheart. And then, BOY!!, was it tough to get that 1 week of separation out of the way.

That was the life-changing event in the past 9 months. Apart from that, things have been pretty normal... classes, semesters coming and going, meeting project deadlines, writing research papers, winning a NASA Fellowship (no joke, I did!!). But somehow, I just couldn't find the inspiration to write, my inspiration running in other directions, as it were. But now, like a few other things, I think I'll make it a point to be regular here too. So, as the song goes - "Hasta Manana until then"

Book Review

Finished a book by Wilbur Smith yesterday. Have rarely had any time to read novels lately and this was a welcome break. The book was titled “The Leopard Hunts in Darkness”. It was a book with the racial and inter-tribal rivalries of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe as the backdrop. A synopsis can be found on Wilbur smith’s website (http://www.wilbursmithbooks.com/books/leopard.html).  Although the website has this book listed under his “Ballantynes” series, the only link to a Ballantyne is the central character, Craig Mellow, being a descendent of theirs on his mother’s side.

It was a book in Smith’s general style of writing. I am a big fan of his and just absolutely love his Egyptian novels – River God, The Seventh Scroll and Warlock. Almost all his books are Africa-centric, and this one is no different. However, what put me off was that towards the end, Smith seems to have heavily borrowed from “King Solomon’s Mines”. A search for diamonds, said diamonds being buried with an ancient king’s body, only a witch doctor knowing the location, good guys getting trapped in the cave where the body is, king’s body placed in seated position,  -  and this was just a tad too much to be a coincidence for me – king’s body placed directly under a water drip and being slowly encased in the calcium deposit!! What was Smith thinking?? Was he so sure that nobody reads the classics these days and so he could get away with it?


Overall, I felt a bit cheated as I was expecting something better… a lot better, in fact. I was thankful that I decided to borrow the book from our university library instead of buying it. This is one Wilbur Smith creation that I will not miss in my collection. But that does not take away from my love of his books. I still like his style and look forward to reading the ones I have missed so far.

The sun sets on the old year

The old year is no more. Here are a few images of one of the last sunsets of 2005. They were shot at a place called Lake Somerville in Texas on the 28th of December, 2005. Lake Somerville is a 45 minute drive from College Station.