Beef's no holy cow

Some farmers give aging cows to Hindu temples. At the Vedanaiki Solisvaran Temple, near the cow market, prayer leader Dharmasivan says temple leaders are too busy with day jobs to care for the donated cows. So the temple sells them in the market. Dharmasivan has seen a cow being slaughtered there. "We know it's wrong," he says. "We can't stop it."

That was WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl in an article he wrote, How Many Ways Can You Skin a Cow? In Hindu India, There Are Plenty, perhaps a few months before he was abducted and killed in Pakistan.

The piece sums up the many Indias in the country we call home. I love the irony of it all. Incidentally, the cow's probably one of my favourite animals. And it seems I'm certainly not the only blogger to think so.

My favourite Polish export (not the Pope)

Reader's block. You're just not able to settle into a book. You try one, discard it, pick up another, only to toss into that pile you call 'for later'. You begin to feel you'll never finish a book again. You blame yourself and become so irritable that one day your partner tells you to quit belly-aching, roll over and go to sleep. And then one day you bump into a book that brings back the magic of reading, and all is well again. As you may have guessed by now, it was so with me until I came by Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

I first came across Kapuscinski in The Soccer War, as the 4 1/2 readers of this blog already know. So I won't bother with a long introduction, to Kapuscinski, the writer and journalist. Suffice to say, Travels with Herodotus was his last book before he died earlier this year, a part-memoir and part-meditation.

Kapuscinksi begins by saying he was presented with a copy of Herodotus' The Histories just as he was headed for his first overseas assignment - to India. In fact, Herodotus remains a reassuring presence as the young Polish journalist embarks on his journeys with eagerness, naivete and the air of one who is blithely unworried about where his next meal will come from.

Reading through the book, one doesn't quite know who's the better teacher - Kapuscinski or Herodotus. But there's no need to compare. Both of them have valuable lessons for the journalist. Kapuscinksi, then in his 30s, writes of Herodotus,

I was quite consciously trying to learn the art of reportage and Herodotus struck me as a valuable teacher.

And he goes onto to tell you why the ancient Greek writer was a good reporter.

But to the extent that it is possible to do so - and, given the epoch, this speaks to a tremendous expenditure of effort and to great personal determination - he tries to check everything, to get to the sources, to establish the fact.

That should tell you not to google.

A little later in the book, Kapuscinski speaks of a moment of epiphany while in Algiers. A coup has taken place, but on the streets there's nothing to show for it,

...it was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening I had been searching for spectacular imagery...it was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosion, engulfed in flames...

Lessons for journalists, lessons on writing, Travels with Herodotus also underlines some of the faultlines of the world we live in today, the struggle between militant Islam and the rest of the world for one. It is certainly a book to be read again & again. Let me quote Kapuscinski one final time,

One must read Herodotus's book - and every great book - repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.

There are at least a couple of more books of his I'd like to read, Shah of Shahs and Imperium, among them. Who woulda thunk RK would one day replace Joseph Conrad as my favourite Polish writer?

I think I'm a fan of...

... Neil Gaiman. (And no, this isn't about Sandman.)

A few moons ago, I did a piece on what fantasy fiction to read after Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, for which I was in turns praised and criticised. I took the help of my friend Jayaprakash, someone who's read more fantasy (and other genres) than anyone else I know. He'd then recommended three books/series I hadn't read, one of them being Coraline, by Neil Gaiman.

I managed to track down Coraline while in Bangalore. At a little over a 160 pages, this is a slim novel about a young girl (Coraline), who, while exploring her new house, discovers a passage leading into another world. A world where her 'other mother' and 'other father' want to trap her and never let her go. How and if she managed to come back is what the tale is all about.

Coraline has received many awards in the 4 years since it was first published. And it's easy to see why, for the book breaks new ground and steers clear of your typical fantasy set-pieces and settings. Philip Pullman, of His Dark Materials fame said in his review,

Gaiman is too intelligent and subtle to invoke the supernatural - this is much more mysterious than that - and too wise to let Coraline face the horrors alone: she has an ally in a sardonic and very feline cat.

Ah yes, the cat. That did it for me. The black cat, reviled and used as an evil conceit in literature for long, is one of the good guys in this tale. That alone deserves a thumbs up!

A few hours after finishing the book, the partner and I watched Stardust, at the friendly neighbourhood theatre. Another one of Gaiman's creations, it has all the ingredients of a good, children's movie. I say children's movie, but it's perfect for adults as well. Even the bad parts are good, if you know what I mean. Since I'm feeling too lazy to write more, I'll point you to a Roger Ebert review. He's critical of the film, but since he is a bleeding critic that's okay.