I read the above off the cover of a book - it sounded interesting. I've been walking around in Landmark book store for two nights now. You can't just walk around for 5 odd hours in a book store without accidentally buying a book. In fact, I bought a couple.
I bought the Seven Deadly Colours (ISBN0743259394) and started reading it on Sunday night. The essential magic number of 7 seems to appear out of nowhere a lot of times. 7 Days in a week, 7 Deadly sins, 7 visible colours and 7 distinct musical notes. Anyway the book is about the way colour works in an evolutionary system - about how the eye is just dazzled and cheated by colors. An evolutionary arms race between the eye and colours in nature - from the camflouage of the tiger, to the mimicry of warning colors of the mayfly moth,. the blue tree frogs illusions versus the development of the kestrel's UV vision or the movement detecting eyes of a bush baby. The essential fact being that colour is as much of an evolutionary weapon as the eye is - it is not always sexual selection (selecting the flamboyant male for the reason that he survived inspite of the flamboyance) that guides colors in nature.
I also bought another scientific book - Lucifer's Legacy. This book deals with the essential assymmetry of nature. Why are people left-handed or right-handed. It is interesting to note that the angel of death is always at the left of God - and the word sinister actually means left handed.
Anyway more interesting are the books I didn't buy (for obvious lack of need and cash). Tom Holt's Paint The Dragon . It reminded me of a simpsons episode All Singing, All Dancing when Homer brings home a Clint Eastwood movie - Paint your Dragon with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin in a musical comedy !. Anyway, the second book was Snow White and the Seven Samurai - a reference to the classical film Seven Samurai (seven again !) . Anyway it was about human hackers messing with the wicked queen's mirror network (Mirrors 3.1).Thus on the seventh day, he rested. And read a good book.
I visited home (Kerala) last week for about 4 days . I got there by a night bus which takes me into the heart of cochin , cutting via the beautiful nilgiris (in the early hours of morning). After waking up as it neared Cochin,I was surprised to see no buses or road blocks these road hogs cause. The private buses in Cochin were on strike.
'T was a dark and gloomy rainy day in cochin. All my cousins were either falling ill, already sick or recovering from viral fever (otherwise known as asian flu). I tried to use the two wheeler for transport around cochin - an idiot with a cycle made me brake hard. I skid nearly four feet and did a tire burning 180 on the main road.
To get away from all this, I started for Trivandrum - my hometown of sorts. Trivandrum central was a mess - full of slushy mud and dark. But at least it was dark at nine in the night. I did sleep really well that night, what with all the travel. Woke up and realized that my college is barricaded by police with water canons and tear gas shells. There's a student riot about the fees charged by colleges owned by private proprietors. There are good things about kerala model socialism - it just concentrated on food and education. Violent and semi-violent protest is just one of the side effects of a strong college union with connections to those in power. The engineering education costs something around 10,000 INR per year - while 6 years back it had cost just over 2000. Anyway, so I come home and watch TV.
Anyway, all in all that visit was about watching TV , away from my cousins so as to not catch the flu. Sadly rain in kerala is nice when you don't have to go out. It's almost like a kodak moment, watching the drops flow down the roof tiles onto the courtyard in the centre of the house .. with nearly 8 cousins sitting around eating dried mango peel and talking about random stuff , playing board games , just being a kid.I still hope and dream for that nostalgic utopia of childhood.