Monday, October 22, 2007

An endless journey into the morbid

The search for the arcane is killing quizzing. Some of the recent quizzes that I have been to, have simply been mind numbingly boring. In their bid to set uncrackable questions, QMs are getting questions from the arbitest levels of obscurity. Blame wikipedia for it, if you will, it has made fundaes too readily available for easy consumption. A small piece of advice to wannabe quizmasters. Read BOOKS!! They provide some really good fundaes if you can put in some effort.

Which brings me to the other point of this entry. Some voucher's won in some quizzes funded some really nice reading material. The first was "The Man who knew Infinity" , a biography of the Ramanujan. Excellent reading, a tad too impersonal though. And from an engineer's perspective, would have loved to see more in depth mathematical explanations in it. But nevertheless, this gave me some impetus to get the rust of my brain and search the net for some good reading material on the same. This is what I found. Read it at leisure for it will keep you absorbed for days if you are caught unawares.

The next book that caught my fancy was "Celebrating the best of Urdu Poetry". I have managed to read quite a few vernacular writings, but unfortunately never had a chance to lay my hands on real urdu poetry. Nay, probably my lack of understanding of the Urdu language has been the reason behind this hesitancy to pick up Urdu text. But this book turned out to be a nice surprise. Urdu poetry in Hindi for a change and with English translations. I am sure it hardly reflects the best of Urdu Poetry since 300 odd couplets can hardly do justice to such a genre but what the hell, its good for a start. Zauq,Meer, Ghalib, Iqbal all the doyens are suitably represented here. A nice read through and through.

Which brings us to the video accompanying this post. Some people have questioned the fact that there haven't been any good metal vids put up as yet. So here's the fix. Archenemy- My Apocalypse