MAD Magazines (and Moghul Library, Hyderabad)

Comics were an important part of my childhood like my first blogpost which was dedicated to ACK comics showed.

MAD called itself a ‘magazine’ and was fairly popular both in the US and India and this success in itself was a surprise.

ANNOUNCING MY BOOK - Our Quizzing Journey

Have great pleasure in announcing the launch of my book co-authored with my brothers "Our Quizzing Journey"

Available on Amazon and you can buy it here.

Also available in paperback which you can buy here.  

National Geographic Magazines

My relationship with NatGeo is a little kinda ironic. On the rare occasion when there was a great deal on their subscription I took the plunge and subscribed to it for 2 years, and didn't read a single copy of the magazines.  But when I stopped and would get my hands on any issue of the magazine, it would be unputdownable, usually in flights, and I could read it cover to cover.

And that was the irony.

Haruki Murakami's “Scheherazade" in the New Yorker

Short stories can be tricky and I think the jury is out on what really makes a good short story.  When I got around to reading the short stories outside my textbooks -  This is very different, I realized,  from what I read in school - which were mostly reeeeally short as in SHORT stories. Most of the stuff I read in school were the shorter ones by RK Narayan (malgudi) and O Henry etc.

So, some very good ones would actually not be very short at all. I quite liked reading Maugham's stories from the orient, and expatriate life back in the days when colonization was in its last days. Jeffrey archer, Roald Dahl, Jhumpa Lahiri etc. were some of my favourites (and I think the entire list would be difficult to put down ehre)

UPPER CRUST – the magazine

One of my favourite things to reach out for to pick me up is the magazine Upper Crust.

In fact if I may say its one of the best kept secrets and you are unlikely to know about it until you come across it accidentally because a) there are only four issues in a year, and b) it is not circulated like other magazines. So the few issues printed and given to stores are normally sold out like real fast.  (The best way to ensure you get a copy is through subscription, and now if you are an NRI they also deliver to foreign shores)

Oprah...

Some of my best learning's have come out of watching the Oprah Show. However, most of it would be serendipitously, for the majority of Oprah’s shows didn’t interest me – from makeovers, the book reading club, some odd American celebrity that I didn’t know anything about, and then the episodes which I hated the most – Oprah’s giveaway programs where you just simply hated everyone lucky enough to be in that audience!.  Clearly it was mostly targeted mainly/ and only to Americans.