The essential guide to email writing

Interesting review in the New Yorker, about a book on how to email. This book seems to lay down the rules for this new medium, and it reads ....

Shipley and Schwalbe enumerate six essential e-mail types (the Ask, the Answer, Grovelling, etc.), eight deadly sins (too casual, too vague, too illegal, etc.), and a four-step checklist (S.E.N.D.) that reflects the authors’ broad-ranging e-mail conservatism. “S” stands for simple, “E” for effective, “N” for necessary, “D” for done. Generally, they’d have you hit “send” later and less often. They offer a hermeneutics of the cc, an invocation against the word “please,” and a number of rather chilling but by now self-evident rules (“Never forward without permission, and assume everything you write will be forwarded”). The reader gulps at the thought of unexploded self-incriminations ticking in servers around the world. The authors, astonishingly, come out in favor of exclamation points (“ ‘Thanks!!!!’ is way friendlier than ‘Thanks’ ”), abbreviations (“Is LOL . . . really inherently more opaque than FYI?”), and emoticons (those smiley faces and the like may “bug many people but they make us smile”).

sacred games

vikram chandra returns with sacred games...heres what the guardian had to say

If I was sorry to learn that Mumbai police do not talk in the language of their newspapers (where miscreants are always nabbed red-handed in the nick of time), then I was grateful for my full-blooded lesson in Hindi curses. All are brilliantly embedded so that every meaning is clear, a remarkable achievement. Anthony Burgess once did a similar job for Russian in the teenage argot of A Clockwork Orange, but his publisher insisted on a glossary, against Burgess's better judgment. Chandra manages without. Next time some maderchod Mumbai tapori tries to cheat me, he'd better watch out. My tongue is gonna be sharper than one of Ma Singh's lime pickles.

munnabhai lage raho

I saw it on saturday, in a little hall in boston. Great movie. I have been a little saddened by the tendency in India these days, to heap abuses on Gandhi and blame him for all the problems. I guess some people will never forgive him for openly admitting that we were weak and creating a solution within that constraint.

It makes people like me a little apologetic for still finding him admirable. Its no longer easy to say that one is a gandhian, unless u mean that you support the Dynasty.

This movie managed to get its message across without being preachy and it was a load of fun too. It seems that the whole Bhagat Singh/Subhash Bose vs Gandhi debate is happening in indian cinema now…in the form of Rang de Basanti vs Munnabhai :). Both movies look at the problems in big cities in India. Where one gets serious and preachy and finally advocates going down in a blaze of glory, Munnabhai starts off funny, stays funny and ends up advocating peaceful non cooperation and satyagraha. Nicely done!!

following up...read this...seems the citizens of lucknow have taken the message to heart...and the gandhi caps are much in demand.