Fundraising for flood vctims, and a little personal jig dance for myself

So I finished my M.A Part2 exams way back in June & so for all practical purposes, I've nothing to do with my beloved university till the results come out I-don't-know-when.And I've read some books since then- Rushdie's Midnight's Children which was mesmerizing, then Shashi Tharoor's brilliant novel Riot (hey, I thought the guy only tweeted! Ignorant me!), then a non-fiction book by Amitabh Ghosh about Pokhran and nuclear weapons (well, when I bought the book from a railway station platform, I thought I was buying fiction... but anyway, Ghosh is still good, even though he totally flummoxed & disappointed me with the ending of Calcutta Chromosome) & then a Bengali translation (by Rajsekhar Basu) of the Mahabharata- which left me clueless about the roles of fate and free will in the epic, and then, guess what I ended up reading next? The vegetarian vampires cometh, netizens- yess, I've finally read Twilight. Bella - you're the most disgusting, hyper-dull damsel-in-distress that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter in fiction(I think the movie Bella is actually a little better, at least she's not gushing about her angel all the time), Edward- you are what in fanfiction terms would be called a male Mary Sue- perfect to the power of ludicrousness. To be honest, I did enjoy reading the book, as I have enjoyed many Mills&Boons stuff in the past- but for this to be a worldwide sensation? And they actually prefer this over Harry Potter? It baffles me.
Thankfully, I got a chance to recover into reading fantasy via the wonderful Inheritance Series. Christopher Paolini- please write the fourth book soon and send that Stephanie Meyer into oblivion. But everyone should hear Mark Oshiro talk about Twilight- I haven't read his Twilight reviews but he drops enough references in his Harry Potter blogs- check this out-
Mark Reads Harry Potter
And so BigBadMedia (I don't know about big & bad, but they do seem to have a fascination for blowing off people's heads- check the video on their home page) are trying to raise funds for the flood victims in Pakistan by putting together a collection of 50 stories by various writers. The reason behind the jig? I'm one of those 50 writers.
So if you've got time- take a look at this as well.
That's all folks!

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