"As for examples of writer's block, the strange thing is how paradoxically eloquent many writers are in describing their block. Because a block is often very genre-specific, as anyone knows who has felt blocked on a big paper and has procrastinated by writing long e-mails." Or blogging. Sigh. "As for treating writer's block, there is much more consensus among people who have it that it needs treatment. And there is a long history of writers self-medicating, usually not very successfully, with everything from alcohol to coffee to amphetamines." Ah well, while i go get me some coffee, you go read this interview about hypergraphia and its opposite, writer's block, with Alice Weaver Flaherty, the author of The Midnight Disease.

"To enjoy Synchronicity is to consider one's self to be socially enlightened without having to dredge up any real empathy." "You fantasize that your friends come over and admire you for having this album don't you? Yeah, too bad you can't fucking stand this shrill, rambling, incoherent mess." "All the years of Quaaludes and teenage groupies culminated in this plodding, faux-blues double LP." "...you'll wonder if you ever heard so much pompous whining in your life." "You should know that Beck is the Christina Aguilera of the indie set -- sell this piece of shit while you still can." "Give it away give it away give it away now." "Most jazz created after the Big Band era is essentially musical masturbation (and like masturbation, if you must do it, you should do it in private!)."
That's just a teeny sample from the deliciously vicious One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately. Among the skewered are The Joshua Tree, Nevermind, Let It Be, Synchronicity, Bitches Brew, Giant Steps, Dark Side of the Moon, Out of Time, anything by The Grateful Dead, and lots more. And there is also, as you may have guessed, a long list of comments ranting for and against the list.

Are you a cynic?

Mahesh Murthy on picking oneself up and carrying on.

Them non-bloggers have begun to whine.

And we, by the way, have a great face for radio.

A few posts ago, we confessed to sometimes not watching just the news when we watch the news. And now, a glance at the site stats tells us that right after Kitabkhana and Desiviews, our biggest referrers are Google searches for Nidhi Razdan. Dang. So much for targeting the cream.
Oh well, might as shamelessly exploit this for the hits. Do tell, who do you think are the best looking news anchors?

Also at Outlook, Aman Khanna on Naipaul and the BJP. Naipaul at one point during the chintan baitak, while expounding on Indians and history, said, "subsequent Mughal rule and the British conquest too left their impact on India," but "one must move on." No, Khanna does not report if he prefaced that with "Take it on the chin."

Some tasty reading: the winners of the third Outlook-Picador Non-Fiction Contest, Cooking Women, are on the site. First prize went to Cooking Women by Anuradha Roy. Joint runners-up were English Vegetables, Desi Steak by our dear friend, Nilanjana S Roy, and Dr Sad and the Power Lunch by Kavery Nambisan (not yet up on the site).
And while you're there, you might want to check out the 2000 and 2001 winners and short-listed entries.

The Maharastra goverenment's recent decision to enforce the letter of the law when it comes to under-21s drinking, brings up the topic of antiquated or just plain stoopid laws, of which we have our fair share in this country. "To some extent, I can understand why crooked politicians and corrupt officials do not amend idiotic laws — they remain a good way of extorting money from citizens." That's Vir Sanghvi letting off steam on some of them. Though he seems to have forgotten about the "permit" one needs to legally drink in Maharashtra. The one that certifies you as being an alcoholic who needs a certain amount of booze every day for health reasons? So, in Bombay, if you want to stay on the right side of the law and still have a tot or two in a "permit room" as bars are still called here, or anyplace else, for that matter, you must admit to being an alcoholic. One wonders if Bal Thackeray, who's most , er, endearing (to us, that is) trait has been a reported fondness for a glass of warm beer of an evening, has a permit? Oh yes, Vir, and what about the law that makes homosexuality a criminal offence?
Mr Sanghvi also would like to hear your point of view. "If you know of a law that is absurd, idiotic or impossible to follow — or designed only to enrich those charged with enforcing it — write in to us at this email address: counterpoint@hindustantimes.com. We’ll carry the best letters on our website and we’ll print a selection in the paper."
Hey, and if you're writing in, send us a copy, will you?

"[Naipaul] and Nadira, Lady Naipaul, want me to go with them as a silent observer, for a reason. Neither of them know what form the interchange with the cultural cell is to take. They’ve been assured that the press will be kept out of it.
On a previous occasion, two years ago now, Vidia spoke to some members of the BJP high command and soon after Salman Rushdie wrote in the New York Times that this was a disgrace, that Naipaul had supported if not advocated the killing of Muslims and that the Nobel should be withdrawn from said writer.
Rushdie, an honourable man, must have been grievously misinformed. When the record was put straight, I am sure he wrote to the New York Times to recant, but alas the conniving Americans, with their divide and rule imperial policies towards the brotherhood of non-white writers, never published it.
There was to be no such misunderstanding this time. I was to tag along and be a fly on the whitewashed wall."

That's Farrokh Dhondy writing about Sir Vidia's recent tea party with the BJP.
We disagree with a some of what Naipaul is quoted as saying, but we wonder what you think of this snippet: "If the British hadn’t colonised this country we would have ground each other into dust." We have long held the view that India was a British creation - or rather, that the only thing that brought together such disparate communities and cultures was a desire to get rid of a common enemy. And a lot of of the country's current problems come from the fact that once we did get rid of them, we didn't quite know what to do with each other.
Disclosure: A significant part of our ancestry came from the sceptred isles, so the version of Indian history we heard from our grandparents had a different slant from the chapters we studied in our school history texts. For instance, "The Mutiny" as opposed to "The Uprising" of 1857.