On books

Read recent blog by avi on his thoughts on Pride and Prejudice. It instantly reminded me the character of Meg Ryan and her love of Miss Bennet in the movie, "U Got Mail" and how passion of one person can induce others to follow the suit.
On the topic of books, given that nowadays, life is pretty relaxing, I have had good fortune to read a few very interesting books. The Diary of Young Girl, Anna Frank being one of them. Quote from the book "I trust in luck and do nothing but hard work", seemed to have stuck in my mind. The book is about this young girl at the tender age of 13 years being forced to go into hiding with her family in Nazi Holland, during the time when Hitler almost was on verge of conquering the whole of Europe. Anna is a very intelligent girl for her age and all her emotions being stuck up in a small hiding villa, upstairs of her fathers former office, are poured out in a diary which she maintained through out the period she was in the hidding until the day, SS found the family.

The other book I have read is "Train to Pakistan", by none other than Khuswant Singh.
It is a tragic story of a very laid back village, at the border between the newly formed country of Pakistan and India, finding itself in the midst of all the massacre and killings that followed partition of India in 1947. The protagonist of the plot, Juggat Singh, the gunda of the village, finds himself entangled in the chaos follwing the killing of the village landlord, and how he manages to save his pride and love and in the end his sacrifice resulting in 100s of lives being saved.

2 more recent books that I had fortune to read are by the same author, "Mitch Albom",
Tuesday with Morie, which I just happened to get and the other very recent book by him, "5 people we meet in heaven", which I saw while I was loitering at Kansas airport the other day. the prologue to the book seemed to enchant me and I ended up shelling 20 bucks at the book store. Am right now into the book and it simply is enchanting. As Amy Tan puts it, "its a novel u will devour when u fall in love"
and being very close to that, thats exactly what I am doing right now.

kansas

3 weeks ago, had someone told me, I would writing a blog titled kansas, I would have laughed my hearts out. True, the word has some significance in my circle of friends. Number of my friends have spouse/the significant others, living in kansas at some point in their lives. Though kansas was as far for me as far is say antartica. Neways here I am sitting at Kansas city airport, waiting for my flight back to San Diego. What has life in store for u, u never know. Live life by the day, is the message I am taking with me from here. It has been wonderful experience over last 2 days of my stay here in Kansas city, for a change trying real hard to speak in my mother toungue, Marathi, whose domain for me somehow had always been restricted to moms and pops and me. It was refreshing to get to eat puran poli, made at home, in this foreign land. Thanks J^2.

Got to go now, time to fly back.

´Castle

The seemingly amusing title for this article is stirred by my current visit to one of the modern old castles in Bavarian Germany, about 1 hr drive from Munich. Ringberg castle as it is called, is located at the foothills of of Bavarian alps, mountain peaks covered in snow, akin to icing on the cake, on the northern end and a beautiful lake on the southern end, much similar to experience of cold winter evening in Srinagar, Kashmir, the Dal lake. The only thing missing though were those beutiful kashmiri damsels in their canoe, selling flowers and kashmiri kishmish.

The setting at the castle is amazingly romantic. Though the history of castle is quite amazing. It is a monument commemorating the idiosyncrasy, originality, and remarkable single-mindedness of two men: Duke Luitpold in Bavaria and his friend, the alround artist, architect and interior decorator, Friedrich Attenhuber. This castle dominated the lives of thsese 2 people to a point that it became an obsession for both. Surprisingly, none of the most popular reason like love of dearest or say, defence of territory, were the reasons for building up this castle.

In the twilight years of his life, the duke decided to donate the castle to scientific community of Max Plank institute, which supposedly had enough money to accept this grand gift as one can easily imagine the cost of maintaining the castle in this modern world. However as it turns out, I think this is one of the few best things that academics has to offer. Max Plank society in Germany now owns this castle and it is used for the purpose of retreat by many Max Plank labs all over Germany. It is in this context that I had this wonderful oppurtunity to experience the life of castle.

Amazingly the castle is extremely modernised to the point that it has a central heating unit, wireless lan, music room filled with all the hightech gadetry, excellent conference room for holding lectures, amazing library and all the facilities that a scientist in modern era need to work.

I wonder how many places in the world such as this exist in the world, wherein the modern is so well integrated with the old and in a sense, resulting in a unique ambience, one can only describe by being part of it.