Words From Vaish

The Hunger Games Suzanne Collins Scholastic 2008                                                374 Pages            Dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction used to be a staple of the heyday of the Cold War during the 60s and 70s when nuclear Armageddon seemed to be a very real possibility. As one of SF’s great humorists, the late Robert Sheckley (1928-2008) saw the satirical possibilities in such scenarios – and explored them in a loose trilogy; Hunter/Victim, The 10 th Victim and Victim Prime . Sheckley posited a future Earth ravaged by man’s thoughtless greed, where the spectre of all-out total war is kept in abeyance by televised violent to-the-death hunts in which teams of sponsored killers alternate as both “hunters” and “victims”. This premise probably influenced both   Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale and Suzanne Collins’ cult YA novel The Hunger Games ; but with teenaged protagonists and sans Sheckley’s dryly sardonic black humour. That’s one of

One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing Jasper Fforde Hodder 2011                                                                          388 Pages What if characters in books had a life of their own when no-one was reading the books they inhabited? The marvellously named Jasper Fforde runs (all over the place) with this meta-fictional conceit in the inventively whimsical One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing . His BookWorld is a meta-textual realm (a vast planet? dimensional plain? or alternative universe?)   inhabited by every fictional character ever to appear in print and where competing genres – i.e. Racy Novel and Chick Lit – often overlap and sometimes clash. A potentially cataclysmic all-out genre war is in the offing, and to avert it requires the services of diplomat-detective heroine, the real Thursday Next - who appears have permanently retired to the Real World. Or has she? Her sudden disappearance a week before the peace talks could be for reasons far more sinister

All political careers end in failure.” -         -   Anon Politics is a tricky business with far too many variables, far too many divergent agendas, far too many disparate interests for any one person to successfully prevail in perpetuity. The need for consensus and compromise mean that whatever achievements or victories gained are at best, limited, and often, short-lived. There’s also the fact that the particular political environment and circumstances that nurtures a politician’s career can change with frightening speed. Yesterday’s success can become outmoded very quickly… An example of the above would be the late Baroness Margaret Thatcher who was generally portrayed as an unbending dominatrix who always met with success in getting her way. This was summed up by the famous quote – “the lady’s not for turning”. Moderate Tories in her party were accused of equivocation and derided as “wets”. In practice, as Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher turned quite often on

The Exam Scam “India has a very well-organized examination system. It is not very clear if it has an educational system.” -          -  Attributed to a former advisor to the Government of India. Gaming examinations through diverse methods is a popular activity worldwide. This has the power of often magically transforming a “D” grade into a seeming “A” grade. In India, much of such activity is generally considered cheating. For many, this is justified as ingenious creativity in beating a flawed system that puts desperate students under crushing pressure. To educationists, it’s a very unethical practice that invalidates the very purpose of examinations. That is, of accurately assessing the actual academic status of individual students. In a system that greatly values degrees, certificates, grades and scores as a gateway to lucrative positions and careers, the temptation to cut corners and manipulate results and outcomes is understandable.   Anyone remember th

What you eat affects the world. There was a time when most food was produced (and consumed) locally. Less resources were needed to raise and transport it; from farm to fork. Raw food stock didn’t undergo the kind of energy-, water- and chemical-intensive processing the modern food industry employs today, either. But there’s no way we can turn the clock back and return to those simpler times. The urgent need to feed growing populations means that factory farming and mass production techniques can never be wholly abandoned. However, there are ways to mitigate the burden on our health and the planet’s. Eating more healthily could: ●      prevent 5.1 million deaths per year. This is because this would reduce the prevalence of chronic, non-communicable diseases associated with high body weight and unhealthy diets. ●      help mitigate an expected growth in food-related greenhouse gas emissions. ●      enable economic benefits due to lower healthcare costs and fewer l

Still Me    Jojo Moyes                Michael Joseph 2018                                                                           472 Pages As the blurb on the back cover put it, Louisa Clark knows many things. And in Jojo Moyes’ Still Me , she’s getting to know a whole lot more - as an expatriate Englishwoman in New York. Much less sentimental than previous outings Me Befor e You (2012) and After You (2015), this latest installment in the adventures of much-loved character “Lou” sees her separated from new beau Ambulance Sam by the breadth of the Atlantic. As an “agony assistant” to Agnes Gopnik, a wealthy American’s second wife, she initially experiences a giddy whirl of shopping, cocktails, glittering society events and so on.   But the needy Agnes, a former physical therapist, has issues with her old money husband’s family who despise her as an arriviste Polish gold-digger. Apart from her abundant physical attractions, this truly awful creation is a hi

THE HIT A man waited in an attic room in Srinagar . The room’s only door opened onto a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase to the shop below. The attic was dark with shadows in a dingy half-light. Dust motes danced in the dank air. The room was filled to overflowing with stacks of cartons and boxes. A nest of hosiery and ready-to-wear garments in transparent wrappings had been carefully arranged on an overturned display case. The man lay almost full-length in the nest, cradling a Kalashnikov AK-74 rifle. A length of twine was taped taut from the edge of the display case to a large gap in the broken slats of the shutters on the front window. An irregular patch of light, striped with bars of shadow, crept down the wall beneath the window and down on to the grimy floor. The gunman in the back of the room was invisible to any watchers out in the street. He wore a dark gray woolen balaclava mask that revealed only a narrow crescent-shaped area around the eyes, zip-up navy-b

Dragon Teeth Michael Crichton HarperCollins Publishers 2017                                             295 Pages The late, great SF maestro Arthur C Clarke once postulated that many extinct species could possibly be resurrected - once   the science of genetics had advanced enough. Michael Crichton took that idea forward with his novel Jurassic Park , later filmed by Steven Spielberg. In Dragon Teeth , his posthumous “other dinosaur novel” Crichton takes a look backwards at the early days of palaeontology in 19 th century America. From beginnings in England where certain fossil remains were first recognized as the remains of a long extinct order of giant reptilian creatures, the focus of hunting for dinosaurs had shifted from Europe to North America by 1870. This scientific effort was fuelled, in part, by the bitter rivalry between feuding real-life Professors Edward Drinker Cope, University of Pennsylvania, and Othniel Charles Marsh (of Yale). Their fan