Ruchira's Ramblings

The Ether App is like a Magic Book – one little thing with an endless number of stories, poems, essays – whatever you want to read, whenever and wherever, provided you have your little Apple gadget with you. It’s your own personal library- the special thing being it is pocket-sized and therefore portable and a whole lot easier to handle. No dusting the shelves, no loose pages coming out, no having to remember putting in naphthalene balls, it’s completely fuss-free. This is not to suggest you do away with your old library but it will be fun to have a little library on the go, won’t it? And you can easily have one. All you need to do is get an i-phone or i-pad touch, download the FREE Ether Mobile App, and then choose whatever you want to read. A part of the contents is free – and that includes some amazing work by writers both famous and new. The remaining part, which is again from both established and upcoming authors, comes at a price, but think about it- you would pay to buy a magaz...

In most parts of the world, Halloween is celebrated – in some form or another – this weekend. Your challenge this week is to write a horror scene ( or something horrific) using a wet noodle, a styrofoam cup and a feather. So here's my first go at Fiction Friday - hope its not complete rubbish. ________________________________________________ Perfumes and Lipsticks I ignore the rusty letterbox and grope in my pocket for the keys. As the key is about to turn, my hand falters. Someone’s dropped an empty white cup in front of my door. Rage and buried melancholy fights within me, the rage wins. I crush the cup under my feet and kick it away. I turn the key. Click. In the kitchen I open the hidden pocket inside my bag and take the knife wrapped in cellophane to the sink. When the last drop of red is gone, I turn off the tap, replace the knife and open the window. It is getting cold. The wind from the North is dry, slightly chilling, and it brings a strange scent with it- almost ...

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, ...