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Colorful Notions

Book Review Colorful Notions: The Roadtrippers 1.0 by Mohit Goyal is a unique novel insofar as it combines masterfully travelogue with fiction.  The novel tells the story of three people in their twenties who give up plush jobs and secure life in order to embark on a three-month long journey across India covering 25 historic destinations.  Their personal stories are intertwined with the journey and present dramatic scenes making the novel a gripping read.  The reader also travels along with them from Delhi to places such as Ladakh, Kanyakumari and the Sundarbans.  Abhay, Shashank and Unnati are the travellers.  Abhay hails from a broken family and there is little love lost between him and his parents.  He longs for relationships.  The massive Shashank is a businessman whose weakness is food.  Unnati is his fiancée and the journey offers her a few occasions to rethink her romantic attachment. The personal stories of the three characters appear at relevant places and ti

English and Personality

“Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.” Professor Higgins tells that to Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion . “Does speaking well in English add a sparkle to one’s personality?” asks Indispire Edition 145.  I have seen the foulest of souls speak the best of English.  And they came in the name of a religious cult and its sanctimonious morals and mores.  I have seen rustic people with no knowledge of English behave with poise and sagacity.  The opposite is true too.  All generalisations verge on falsehood and the assumption that speaking well in English can make one a sparkling personality is at best a pretty joke.  The theme is listed under “humour” at Indispire and so this post of mine is perhaps out of sync.  Personally, I am a lover of English simply because it i

We are born to gossip

“Do you think that history professors chat about the reasons for the First World War when they meet for lunch, or that nuclear physicists spend their coffee breaks at scientific conferences talking about quarks?”  Yuval Noah Harari raises the question in his fascinating book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind .  His answer: “Sometimes.  But more often, they gossip about the professor who caught her husband cheating, or the quarrel between the head of the department and the dean, or the rumours that a colleague used his research funds to buy a Lexus.” Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar argues that human language evolved for gossip.  Harari says that “The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end.”  There is no human life without plenty of gossiping.  Gossip, among other things, makes the human beings quite different from other animals.  When a monkey sees a lion, it can communicate the pot