Midsummer ruminations

Summer is here…

Summer is here at last and not a moment too soon. Warmer temperatures had earlier flirted with us, tempting us and offering a tantalizing glimpse of what lay ahead but come June we are well and truly into summer. The grass is green, the birds and chirping and the insects of all shapes and sizes are out to explore and enjoy the long summer evenings. The sullen whir of the air-conditioner or the ceiling fan is sometimes the only sound you hear on those occasions when its either too hot or ominous dark clouds threaten outside and you are forced to stay indoors.

Next on the list

Over the past few days I’ve been hunting around for my next read. Having finished two back to back adventure books (Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing and Between and Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston) I am looking for something with a slightly lesser dose of testosterone this time around. Fiction is out and so are fat (archaic term in the era of ebooks, I suppose) wiredrawn tomes. But truth be told, I stumbled upon something I think will be interesting one languid summer evening on the Amazon best books list. It’s titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and it’s apparently a true story of a woman who died young but unknown to her family, after her death her cells were used in medical research that enabled scientists to make many path breaking advances like the Polio vaccine among several others. The breathless reviews were enough to add that book to my list of ‘To-Read’ books.

The Abbottabad connection

The city of Abbottabad was in the new recently for all the wrong reasons of course but in the deluge of news articles and TV shows the followed lay buried two interesting facts about the place. Firstly, the city was established by a Bengal Artillery officer named Major James Abbot who wanted to setup a hill station to rival Darjeeling in the east. He is also noted for writing a poem about the place titled ‘Abbottabad’ that has the dubious distinction of being called "one of the worst poems ever written" by the Guardian newspaper. Another little delicious little tidbit from the pages of history: Gandhi also visited Abbottabad twice during the freedom movement and even once wrote to Hitler from Abbottabad with a plea to make peace when Hitler was about to unleash his savagery on Poland. Gandhi ended his letter with the lines “Anyway I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you." One wonders what Gandhi would have written about the ogre in hiding.

Johnners

Cricket aficionados might have heard about the inimitable Brian Johnston. He was a BBC presenter and a cricket commenter who is best known for some immortal lines he actually uttered during matches. Like when the West Indian, Michael Holding was bowling to batsman Peter Willey of England: “The bowler's Holding, the batsman's Willey” and on another occasion commented “There's Neil Harvey standing at leg slip with his legs wide apart, waiting for a tickle.”