Feline Musings

The banks of the lake are dotted with temples and ashrams and colorful shops selling beads and essential articles. Fish feeding has emerged as a thriving business and recreation, and local vendors sell dough to lure the fish, which display ample gluttony to allow everyone to feed them to their hearts content. Monkeys thrive in this area, competing with the fish for their share of food, but are less aggressive than the ones we encountered in Pushkar, on our way to the Savitri temple. Strangely, for a place with so much vegetation, and greenery, it is disappointment for the ardent bird-watcher, except for the Raven that is spotted in the lush trees.

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called wave. With the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform, and allowing people to communicate and [...]

While WYSIWYG became one of the most commonly used phrases in Technical Publications, it also became a misnomer, for developers and technical writers working with various HATs, and word processors realized that many times what they actually saw in the editor didn’t usually match the results. WYSIWYG was becoming a fallacy and the reality was closer to the description of WYSIOP (What You See is One Possibility).

So, when I decided to dabble with 55-fiction, I expected it be cakewalk. It wasn’t. It’s very difficult to contain thoughts in as little as 55-words, while maintaining a plot, characters, conflict, resolution and the shock element. I had storylines but after I jotted them out, I spent a lot of time editing and redoing the sentences to reach the magic number. I finally have five stories in place that I am sharing here.

Books by bloggers are becoming a cultural phenomenon and a trend, and so is populist writing. Any blogger with a blog that will entertain and amuse the public has a chance to get a book deal. The appeal of a blogger’s personality and the passion for a subject becomes an attractive force for publishing houses looking for long-term commitments and sustained zeal. Aspiring authors are even coming out with e-books that can be downloaded from their websites and blogs. (I am reminded of Paulo Coelho’s web-based marketing wherein he releases some chapters of his forthcoming publications on his website, and regularly contributes small pieces of writing on the online newsletter – Warrior of the Light.) Today, such marketing concepts are being well-utilized by the tech-savvy, young and ambitious Indian writers!

The 20th century is the age of structured authoring and optimizing information reuse. Interactive media, content and learning management systems, authoring tools, and the need for diverse and multi-output documentation to support the upsurge in application development, as well in consumer-focused mechanizations, have given end-user based technical documentation a professional status.

Anita Nair has a knack for crisp and complete characterization and is also an accomplished prose writer with liberal rendering of the scenic and daily life of a small (and fictional) village in Kerala. She has touched on many controversial and sensitive subjects, but all with extreme grace and subtlety. She talks about untouchability, casteism, cultural and religious bias, adultery, exploitation and disregard of women, dominance of power and money, bureaucratic red tapism, and even homosexuality.