The Man from Earth

Why is the movie 'The Man from Earth' named liked it is? If you can figure it out after watching it you are smarter than I am.

It is about a university professor who claims to be 14000 years old, practically immortal. The movie picks up when he's about to leave his job for another so that people don't start wondering why he does not grow old. The rest of the movie is made up of the conversation between him and his colleagues at his farewell party.

There is no passion, no great revelations, a cliched view of world history, a single attempt at jolting Christian audiences. It's a very short movie. Not in length but in content. Minimalist is the word.

I liked K-Pax better. If you're thinking what these two movies have in common, it's the nature of the ending.

Book Fair acquisitions

Picked up the following at the annual Hyderabad Book Fair -

• The Penguin History of Early India - Romila Thapar
  
• Indian Muslims - Where have they gone wrong? - Rafiq Zakaria
• Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
• Mostly Magic - A collection of children's stories - yet another of those books which you have to buy just because they are so beautifully made.
• Batman - Knightfall - Dennis O'Neil
• The John Varley Reader
• DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction anthology
• Early Novels in India - Meenakshi Mukherjee
• Intersections - The Sycamore Hill (SF) Anthology
• The Martian Tales Trilogy - Edgar Rice Burroughs
• The Mind Map Book - Tom and Barry Buzan
• Asimov's New Guide to Science
• India : Historical Beginnings and the Concept of the Aryan
• India by Al-Biruni - Ed Qeyamuddin Ahmed

Fruitful visits, I would say :D.

After watching Star Trek Voyager Seasons 1 - 4 continously over a period of weeks...

...I've decided that the album I'm going to release if I ever become a DJ would have tracks with the following names

• Energize!
• How do you know that? We Are Borg!
• Akuchi Moya - the midnight remix
• Warp 8, Mr Paris.
• Modular bipolar cellular protobionic alphanumeric hemispherical cortical encapsulator. In other words, your head.
• M-Class (M-Class, M-Class, M-Class goes the chorus)
  
• Ridged forehead fetish
  

Indian Science Fiction, this week

To start with, the Indian Association of Science Fiction Studies' annual conference starts tomorrow, 9th and goes on to the next day 10th, in Pondicherry, India.

Tehelka has a story on Indian science fiction in regional languages. The same issue also mentions writer Vandana Singh's upcoming book, The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet.

A snippet from the UK Times Online where Brian Aldiss shares a little bit of history explaining why Salman Rushdie's Grimus was withdrawn from the nominations for a science fiction award (which one, I wonder?).

Personally, I got a copy of an old Hindi movie called 'Wahan Ke Log'. The title literally translates as 'The People from There'. Haven't watched it yet, but the cover says 'Were they really from Mars?', complete with saucer shaped UFOs and a dial-and-button console.

All of you have a nice weekend, too.

Mindmapping Books

Mind Mapping is a visual modelling concept where related ideas and tasks are arranged around a central idea.

I often come across people talking about using mindmaps for the books they read. It makes more sense for non fiction books of course, and is a great way to summarize the book. The summarization can be done to any level of detail - the more fine grained you are, the more nodes your mind map will have.

I tried it on a book I read recently - Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods. I did not have the patience to go to a very fine level of detail, so it's very very brief. Nevertheless, creating one is a good way to keep the central ideas of the book in focus.