For whom the bell tolls

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Yesterday night, I heard a grown man cry. He was right behind me, but i didn't have the guts to turn around and meet his eyes. He tried to hide his breaking voice, in the sniffles and sneezes of a head numbing cold. But still, he cried. We were heading home on the office night drop. I'd been thinking about my unfinished story, about the blog I'd write on Monday, about my first two day off in three weeks. He on the other hand was wondering what he'd do with the rest of his life. He had been told he didn't need to report to office on Monday. Two or three months salary as severance pay. And a sympathetic 'Thank You'. That was the end of a five year affair. In five years, he'd changed from a raw prick fresh out of college, into a genius storyteller,....

Write a novel in one month

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There's no prize for the winner, no hope of becoming famous, or rich, or published. Just the satisfation of punching out that story you always wanted to tell. Would you do it? And oh, there's a minimum word limit. Fifty thousand words. One hundred and twenty thousand people from ninety countries around the globe did it last november. Between them, they typed out a total of one billion, six hundred and forty three million words last year. For the past ten years, the national novel writing month has been celebrated with wild, passionate frenzy, at www.nanowrimo.org. According to legend, ten years ago, twenty regular guys, holding down full time day jobs, just like you and me, decided they'd write a novel each, in a month. They worked after hours, stayed up nights, guzzled litres of coffee, partied together and often, passed out on the floor. At the....

Phantoms in my brain

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A full second before I decided to type this blog, my muscles twitched and my skin temperature rose mildly. Not a full second after. A full second before - my brain even registered my intention, my WILL, to type. Someone in my head knew before-hand what I was going to do. Someone in my head made a decision for me. Then made me believe that I'd made that decision. Before you come at me with a straitjacket and a sedative, rest assured - I'm not a raving lunatic. Brain scientist V S Ramachandran's done that and many other weird experiments on people. Repeatedly. And on the way he's uncovered a goldmine. "We're poised at the cusp of the greatest revolution of all - understanding the human brain", he says. "Unlike earlier revolutions in science, this one is not about the outside world, not about cosmology or biology or....