Domain Maximus

Image via Wikipedia

(As seen in the Lounge edition of 16 April 2010. I had a much longer uncut version somewhere. Will post when I find it.)

It might seem presumptuous to judge a country by your experiences as you land for the first time at the airport. But sometimes, airports are splendid barometers of culture. Heathrow, for instance, immediately has you thinking: “What atrocious advertising! Surely, this is the kind of nation that would give rise to Monty Python…”

Zurich’s airport, on the other hand, is all straight lines, simple signage, orderly queues, meticulously timed shuttles, pressed uniforms and insurance advertisements. The message is simple: “Welcome to Switzerland. We have banks. We are very clean. And our very clean trains run on time.”

So sterile and generic is the airport that at one point it felt exactly like Dubai airport in the minimal pre-Burj 1990s. But only with Nordic white people instead of Malabari muscle.

But don’t let that fool you. Switzerland is rightly held in high esteem by tourists of all races, colours and packages. It is the sort of country where you could, if you had the stamina, photograph everything in sight. Even the policemen.

Having had our passports stamped by two splendid samples of the Zurich constabulary, my colleague and I ran to the railway station across the road. The two of us were on a hectic business trip that would have us visiting Basel and Geneva, with our base in Zurich. Read the rest of this entry »

Cover of Wolf Hall: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)

Have I told you about my obsession with author podcasts? About how I diligently download as many author interviews as I can onto my iPod and then listen to them many times?

Personally I like to skip the parts where they talk about one, or several, of their books. Instead, I like to focus on the writing process they follow. Do they wake up at 4:30 AM and start typing? Do they carry moleskine notebooks around to jot down ideas? And how did/do they go about researching their books?

The latest addition to this collection is an iTunes “Meet The Author” interview with Hilary Mantel. I haven’t read the Booker prize winning Wolf Hall yet. The book is one of the many I abstained from while editing up Dork. (Fear of “inspiration”, insecurity etc. etc.)

You can listen to that episode, and archives of the “Meet the Author” podcast, here.

My favourite-st author interview show however is the BBC’s excellent World Book Club. Superb interviews with great authors. And extremely accessible. Plenty to listen to online and on the iPod, here.

The latest episode of WBC featured John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas:

Some of the other authors featured on WBC include Annie Proulx, Kiran Desai, Wole Soyinka etc. etc. Splendid archives.

Another superb place to evesdrop on the “writing process” is the wonderful “Writers’ Rooms” series at the Guardian. The last update, however, is dated last July. Pity.

I am back. Again.

Ahem. Hello there. Welcome back.

As you may be aware this blog was away for three months doing authorly things like launching, reading, interviewing, posing for pictures, reading good reviews, reading bad reviews, crying ourselves to sleep and so on. And amidst all the celebrity-ing, Pranab Mukherjee presented a Union Budget. The union budget is pretty much the highlight of the annual calendar for the business journalism business. (Whatay play on words.) Which means the Union Budget is one of those “do anything as long as you are doing something” periods in the office. And boy did we do things. Many, many things.

Of course today no one remembers anything Minister Mukherjee said or announced during the budget. Read the rest of this entry »