Interesting, the way life gives you reminders for some things which you tend to neglect otherwise. A nasty twist and a huge bulge on my ankle, that I managed while playing today, reminded me that I needed to renew my medical insurance for another year. It was due expiry tomorrow!! Come to think of it, this would have been the last thing to cross my mind in such a situation, had I been in India. Medical insurance is of utmost importance here, simply due to the fact that even an x-ray on this ankle would cost me a $100, whereas in India it would just be 100 (INR) :-). I just hope its not a fracture. I dont want to sit at home and spoil my “well deserved” summer vacations :-).
I have been making significant progress in catching up with my backlog of books. The latest to have come out of the shelf is “Suite Francaise” by Irene Nemirovsky, a memoir published 64 years after she died at Auschwitz in 1942. I guess the book needs no further elaboration. Its a true first person experience on what happened during those years under the reign of Adolf Hitler, the hitler (an adjective that his name has turned out to be, these days 😉 ). The novel, two of the five she had planned, remained hidden, unknown and intact all these years !!
And the book that went back into the stack was Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh. I must say, the book started of rather very well, with the story being built up in an “RK Narayan-way”, while the style of writing reminding me vaguely of Saki. But somehow it gave me a feeling that somewhere in between, the author wandered away, when Alu ( aka potato ;-), the central character, called so due to an interestingly huge bulge on his head) makes his trip to al-Ghazira, while a “bird watching” (in its real literal sense) policeman pursued him there. Even his style of writing took a narrative mode, as opposed to the descriptive start he had to the novel. Having said that, the book never let me want to drop it off in between, like I did with August Frost 🙂
Idle thoughts 