Model has over 13km of railways and 215,000 tiny figurines. The diorama also has its own police force, murder scenes, red light district, bank robberies, football stadium, car chases and authentically rocking tiny camper vans which are presumably filled with anatomically-correct tiny couples making efficient German love.

Enjoy our virtual Wunderland! (Miniatur Wunderland on Facebook)

!!!Rock On !!!

Name: Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Author: Haruki Murakami
Genre: Fiction
Language: English (Originally in Japanese)
Pages: 400 (Paperback)
Awards: – Tanizaki Prize
Movies: -
Buy: FlipKart, Amazon
My Rating: 

 His fantasies, with their easy reference to western pulp fiction and music, retain a beauty of the mind- Gaurdian

 A remarkable writer… He captures the common ache of the contemporary heart and head – Jay Mcknerney

Here is an abundant imagination at play – Sunday Times

Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World follows split and parallel storyline. Both story narrated by either same person or different person (Tough to decide)The odd-numbered chapters take place in the ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland’ while  even-numbered chapters deal with ‘the End of the World’.

In ‘Hard-Boiled Wonderland’, narrator is a “Calcutec” a human data processor/encryption system who has been trained to use his subconscious as an encryption key and working for “The System”, governmental system, to protect data against “Semiotecs”, organization of criminal work in black market.  Calcutec called down by mysterious scientist, who is exploring “sound removal”, in a laboratory hidden within an anachronistic  version of Tokyo’s sewer system against regulations/law and agrees to “shuffle” data and completes an assignment. The calcutec eventually learns that he only has a day and a half to exist before he leaves the world he knows and delves forever into the world that has been created in his subconscious mind.

In ‘the End of the World’, a strange – isolated walled Town depicted in the frontispiece map as being surrounded by a perfect and impenetrable wall. The narrator is in the process of being accepted into the Town while his shadow has been “cut off” as per rule of Town. Residents of the Town are not allowed to have a shadow, and, it transpires, do not have a mind. The narrator’s shadow lives in the “Shadow Grounds” where he is not expected to survive the winter. The narrator goes to the library every evening where he is assisted by the librarian and learns to read dreams from the skulls of unicorns – work assign to him as Dream reader.

It gradually becomes evident that this Town is the world inside of the narrator from the Hard-Boiled Wonderland’s subconscious (the password he uses to control different aspects of his mind is even ‘end of the world’). The narrator grows to love the librarian while he discovers the secrets of the Town, and although he plans to escape the Town with his Shadow, he later goes back on his word and leaves his shadow to escape the Town alone.

Both storyline are thought proving, extremely creative, brilliant writing and exploring concepts of consciousness/unconscious mind. This is one  more masterpiece sculpted from so deep a place of imagination.

Some good lines from book:

• Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
• Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.
• Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes.
• Everyone may be ordinary, but they’re not normal.
• Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.
• Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
• Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.
• I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.
• The mind is not like raindrops. It does not fall from the skies, it does not lose itself among other things.
• Huge organizations and me don’t get along. They’re too inflexible, waste too much time, and have too many stupid people.
• You got to know your limits. Once is enough, but you got to learn. A little caution never hurt anyone. A good woodsman has only one scar on him. No more, no less.
• What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.
• The unwaking world was as hushed as a deep forest.
• Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
• The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.
• Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can’t even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.
• The voice of the light remains ever so faint; images quiet as ancient constellations float across the domw of my dawning mind. They are indistinct fragments that never merge into a sensate picture.
• Genius or fool, you don’t live in the world alone. You can hide underground or you can build a wall around yourself, but somebody’s going to come along and screw up the works.
• I wasn’t particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don’t have to die the next.
• Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.
• Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

It’s well worth reading. Get it and read it.

About Author:
Source [Wiki]: Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and Jerusalem Prize among others. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised him as “among the world’s greatest living novelists” for his works and achievements. Murakami’s fiction, often criticized by Japan’s literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time digresses on themes of alienation and loneliness.Through his work, he is able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and explore the negative effects of Japan’s work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decline in human values and a loss of connection among people in Japan’s society.

Enjoy Reading !!!

Act On Diabetes

World Diabetes Day is the primary global awareness campaign of the diabetes mellitus world and is held on November 14 of each year.Each year, World Diabetes Day is centered on a theme related to diabetes like diabetes and human rights, diabetes and lifestyle, diabetes and obesity, diabetes in the disadvantaged and the vulnerable, diabetes in children and adolescents and talking about Diabetes. This year theme is Diabetes Education and Prevention (“Diabetes education and prevention,” the theme chosen for the period 2009-2013).

“I send my greetings to all those who have this health challenge. Best wishes to all diabetics and their care givers.”

More on:

• World Health Organization
• UICC
• Changing Diabetes Barometer
• National Diabetes Education Program
  

Name: Aleph
Author: Paulo Coelho
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Pages: 300 (Paperback)
Awards: -
Movies: -
Buy: FlipKart
My Rating: 

When I picked-up Aleph – Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, I was eager to know about Aleph. What is Aleph? What’s Significance of Aleph?

In General, Ālep is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. In Mathematics, Aleph numbers are a sequence of numbers used to represent the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets. As per Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph was about two to three centimeters in diameter, but all cosmic space was there, with no diminution in size. Each thing was infinite, because I could clearly see it from every point on the universe.”

Paulo Coelho written Aleph to describe his own remarkable journey of self discovery. Setting off to Africa, and then to Europe and Asia via the Trans-Siberian Railway, he initiates a journey to revitalize his energy and passion. In this journey, He meets Young violinist – Hilal – to whom he loved five yeares before. Together they initiated a mystical voyage through time and space, traveling a path that teaches love, forgiveness, and the courage to overcome life’s inevitable challenges.

Like “Winner Stands Alone”, with lots characters with lots of shades, All the characters in Aleph has their own space and significance like Hilal as pretentious naive adolescent woman or Monika as poor agent or Paulo’s master J. with his extra ordinary skill, Yao as great companion with dark side and Paulo himself with strong enough to take risk to discover life/destiny.

Though we cannot compare Aleph with Paulo’s other work but I was expecting same charisma like Brida or Winner Stands Alone or Alchemist but still Aleph is very touchy and amazing.

Some good lines from book

• When a sense of dissatisfaction persists, that means it was placed there by God for one reason only: you need to change everything and move forward.
• Go and reconquer your kingdom, which has grown corrupted by routine.
• As it says life is a journey constantly changes the landscape, people, the train moves forward, and we are the train not the station.

About Author:

Source [Wiki]: Paulo Coelho is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist. In 1982 Coelho published his first book, Hell Archives, which failed to make any kind of impact.In 1986 he contributed to the Practical Manual of Vampirism, although he later tried to take it off the shelves since he considered it “of bad quality.” After making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in 1986, Coelho wrote The Pilgrimage. The following year, Coelho wrote The Alchemist and published it through a small Brazilian publishing house who made an initial print run of 900 copies and decided not to reprint. He subsequently found a bigger publishing house, and with the publication of his next book Brida, The Alchemist became a Brazilian bestseller. The Alchemist has gone on to sell more than 65 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books in history, and has been translated into more than 70 languages, the 71st being Maltese, winning the Guinness World Record for most translated book by a living author.

!!! Enjoy Reading !!!

Name: After Dark
Author: Haruki Murakami
Genre: Fiction
Language: English (Originally in Japanese)
Pages: 201 (Paperback)
Awards: -
Movies: -
Buy: FlipKart, Amazon
My Rating: 

The novel delivers gloriously… Inventive and alluring - David Mitchell, Gaurdian

Hypnotic, Spell Binding – The Times

Alienation is the central theme in this novel set in metropolitan Tokyo over the course of one night. Main characters include Mari, a 19-year-old student, who is spending the night reading in a Denny’s. There she meets Takahashi, a trombone-playing student who loves Curtis Fuller’s “Five Spot After Dark” song on Blues-ette; Takahashi knows Mari’s sister Eri and insists that the group of them have hung out before. Meanwhile, Eri is in a deep sleep. Mari crosses ways with a retired female wrestler, now working as a manager in a love hotel (whom Takahashi knows and referred to Mari), a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten and stripped of everything in this same love hotel, and a sadistic computer expert. Parts of the story take place in a world between reality and dream.

“After Dark” , is a streamlined, hushed ensemble piece built on the notion that very late at night, after the lamps of logic have been snuffed and rationality has shut its eyes, life on earth becomes boundariless and blurred. Individuals who were separate during the day begin to lose uniqueness, to leak distinctiveness, melting into a soft psychic collective. As the hands of the clock slice deeper into the shadows, physics weakens, yielding to metaphysics, and the rigid you and I of things breaks down. During the wee hours, we’re all in this together, our spirits spooned like lovers’ bodies. – WALTER KIRN (The New York Times)

Some good lines from book:

• That people’s memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn’t matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They’re all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed ‘em to the fire, they’re all just paper. The fire isn’t thinking ‘Oh, this is Kant,’ or ‘Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,’ or ‘Nice tits,’ while it burns. To the fire, they’re nothing but scraps of paper. It’s the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there’s no distinction–they’re all just fuel
• “It’s not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There’s shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort.
• ‎In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.
• If you really want to know something, you have to be willing to pay the price.
• A reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.
• Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.

Very small and amazing Novel. Get it and Read it.

About Author:
Source [Wiki]: Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer and translator. His works of fiction and non-fiction have garnered him critical acclaim and numerous awards, including the Franz Kafka Prize and Jerusalem Prize among others. He is considered an important figure in postmodern literature. The Guardian praised him as “among the world’s greatest living novelists” for his works and achievements.Murakami’s fiction, often criticized by Japan’s literary establishment, is humorous and surreal, and at the same time digresses on themes of alienation and loneliness.Through his work, he is able to capture the spiritual emptiness of his generation and explore the negative effects of Japan’s work-dominated mentality. His writing criticizes the decline in human values and a loss of connection among people in Japan’s society.

Enjoy Reading !!!

Today Hitting counter on my blog reach to 20,000.

Current State of My Blog: 20,360

Busiest Day: September 13, 2011 (677 Hit)

I hope, you will like my blog same way…. Thank you all…

!!! Keep Visiting !!!

Amazing.. Check it out once…

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In this whole year if knowingly or unknowingly with my deeds, words, or behaviour if i had hurted u, then I am folding my hands 4 forgivenes…MICHCHAMI DUKKADAM..

Michchhami means, “to be fruitless (forgiven)” and Dukkadam (Dushkrut) means “ bad deeds”. Therefore the meaning of Michchhami Dukkadam is:

“My bad deeds (with you) be fruitless“.

So concept behind saying or writing someone “Michchhami Dukkadam” is that

If I have done any harm to you then those bad deeds to be forgiven (to be fruitless).

What do we mean when we “ Michchhami Dukkadam”?

“I forgive (from the bottom of my heart without any reservation) all living beings (who may have caused me any pain and suffering either in this life or previous lives), and I beg (again from the bottom of my heart without any reservation) for the forgiveness from all living beings (no matter how small or big to whom I may have caused pain and suffering in this life or previous lives, knowingly or unknowingly, mentally, verbally or physically, or if I have asked or encouraged someone else to carry out such activities). (Let all creatures know that) I have a friendship with everybody and I have no revenge (animosity or enmity) toward anybody.”

|| Jai Jinendra ||

Are you fan of Football? Are you fan of Argentina or Venezuela? Then here is chance to watch Fifa International friendly match between Argentina and Venezuela which will held on 2nd Sep 2011 at Salt Lake Stadium, Kolkata, India. For more details and ticket booking, visit BookMyShow.

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Event Details
Date : 18^th September, 2011,  11 AM Onwards
Venue : Emerald Greens, Palace Grounds, Bangalore

For More detail visit La Tomatina official site.

You can book Ticket from here. Hurry Up!!

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