Lost in the illusion - It's a wonderful world

"There is heaven in the sky and Hangzhou on earth" - Chinese Saying It is a magical city around the older part of the city - the ancient West lake. A renowned city in China for centuries, an ancient capital, Inhabitants famed for their refined tastes in culture and food. Marco Polo supposedly visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century and was very impressed with it. His book refers to the city as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." Although he exaggerated that the city was over one hundred miles in diameter and had 12,000 stone bridges, he still presented elegant prose about the country: "The number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof." (Src. wikipedia reference for Hangzhou) Apparently right after Marco Polo's visit and the good PR and WOM that followed - the population grew to 3.5 mio making it one of the biggest urban...

A consistent thread in my life is the pleasure of books. Buying them in bookstores from Chennai, Mannheim, Mumbai, Kathmandu, Mumbai, Bangkok, Shanghai and Amazon. Reading them in places from the bathroom to those interminable airline check-in queues. But – often, in a quiet moment, examining the conscience i.e. bookshelves, I note several books left unread. Or some carefully flirted with for a single dinner date for a few pages. A few probably bedded with for a few nights for a couple of chapters. A book that always was quiet in its sombriety, yet compelling was Steven Pinker's “How the mind works". Bought on a whim due to it's name and author, it lay ignored for a long time. Yet, it continued to wrestle with my attention until I finally decided to curl up with it a couple of weeks ago. It has been a glued obsession. I love it. I understand it. I feel it. A cloud has parted. So, this it. You can't come to a book. It must come to you. At a time fertile in its myriad ...