It's November now

So yesterday was Halloween, and if I'd been in Seattle right now it would have been a big deal. I would have spent the better part of the evening at my dad's office where they really celebrate it. But over here the word itself is foreign and the prospect of celebrating Halloween is as distant as finding an octopus in the Gobi Desert: which is to say, no prospect at all. Although channels such as Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon do advertise it by airing Halloween-related stuff for a good period of time in the evening, it is safe to assume that the Indian people's notion of Halloween is limited to these shows. Although there have been rumors that the youth are making a great deal out of it, probably because they need an excuse to go over to the nearest bar and drink until their livers explode.

So today one of my teachers didn't show up and I was going through the newspaper (everyone gets one), while the rest of my class took permission from the Vice Principal and played basketball. Don't get me wrong, because I do love playing basketball. It's just that school does not provide the atmosphere necessary to inspire me. I'm lazy, if you want, and unless suitable conditions like shade and so forth are met, basketball cannot interest me. So anyway I was going through my newspaper in peace when I spotted one of those one-line news-flash like things. This one went like this: "British Premier Gordon Brown has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressing his shock at the bomb blasts in Assam on Thursday." Please enlighten me. How is an expression of shock the slightest consolation for the dead and the bereaved in Assam? If every bomb blast in India were to elicit a telephone call from a shocked British Prime Minister, I wouldn't be surprised if he is electrocuted someday. I mean, some help, his expressing shock, really. Sure, the Prime Minister and the rest of the Indian Government might take it as something else and party because they think their problems are being recognized on an international scale; the problems themselves, forgotten. Let's not dwell on the controversial and deadly realm of Indian Politics, which defies all logic and morality.

I have, by the way, finished Twelfth Night; some days ago, actually. And contrary to what I'd promised myself, I began reading A Tale of Two Cities before finishing even one of those other books I was reading and said would finish first. I'm done with Book The First, which isn't a great feat, seeing as it comprises only six chapters and some ten times as many pages. I have reached a dead-end with Robin Cook's Marker, seeing as I can't bring myself to read another chapter of his story. He spends so much time describing things that have no pertinence to anything at all, and man oh man, are his chapter huge! It's so discouraging when you think you've read a lot and you want to see how much longer there is to go for that chapter to end, and you end up flipping more pages than you've read. I read by the chapter, so even if it's midnight I can't really put the book down for fear of becoming inconsistent, because if I pause somewhere in the middle of the story and resume some twenty-four hours later from the point where I left off, I lose interest in it. Anyway I began reading Marker in July, and if you compare it with the other books I've read, like The Da Vinci Code, I should have been done with it in some two weeks. But here I am, four months later, and still on the sixth chapter, which is not even a third of the way through the book! Although it still is an achievement per se, since it proves that I'm a lot more determined than I thought I was, especially since the chapters are painfully long. Moreover, Robin Cook does not seem to be familiar with a certain element in grammar called the PRONOUN. Here's something similar to what he does: "Laurie wondered what Jack was thinking. Laurie wanted to ask him. Lauri asked him." His portrayal of the characters exudes a kind of maniacal pride. Some authors prefer to work on the physical and/or emotional setting of the story rather than characterization, while others prefer characterization. But Robin Cook has taken characterization to a whole new level. Another aspect is that the technical terms are KILLING me. I don't know half of those medical terms or biological terms and what not, and he just goes on using them as though he expects readers to be medical graduates or forensic scientists. His vocabulary is good though, but it wouldn't hurt to spice up his prose a little with imagery, because Marker is just like a children's book written with more complicated words. Some scenes are just so unbearably immature that I am in a half mind to skip them altogether, or perhaps lend the book to my former English teacher who's been asking to borrow it since August or something. I'm sure she'll enjoy it more than I am right now.

What else? I've ostensibly recovered from my brief illness--minor flu-like thing--and am currently filling my gut with a hot cup of lemon tea because my sore throat really needs something of the sort. I also spent the last evening and the greater part of this morning coughing, since I'm asthmatic and it doesn't take much to get my lungs choking out every last bit of air, if I can use the word 'bit', so my throat requires therapeutic attention right now, which I'm giving it in the form of the tea. And soon I'll be going outside to play basketball... all by myself. And then I'll be back inside by around 6 (it's now 5) and start studying history, because that's one of my weaker subjects. The last exam of the tenth grade will be taken on a nationwide scale, and in mid February, so I have just three months now, and history is a big subject.