Elémentaire Docteur Watson II.....

In my last post, I had a trivia question and one of my friends did get it right. W. G. Grace, the father of modern cricket was a victim of Sir Arthur's bowling. Unfortunately, there are no prizes for guessing the answer :), but Nitin you do get a mention in my blog. I don't regret this (prize part of it) because I heard that this friend of mine did win a bet as he thought I was smart enough to figure this out (thanks for his trust on my abilities) when some of them didn't agree with him and I was smart enough!! (how modest). This friend of mine smartly put the words "With God's Grace" as he didn't want to spoil the fun by giving up the name. Don't mystery novelists use some of these techniques to baffle their readers? The 2 most common techniques employed by these writers are 1) Hide as much information as possible about the truth. 2) Put the reader on the wrong track by pointing clues at the wrong suspect.

Whatever is said about these authors, I have always been fascinated by detective fiction. Hercule Poirot is my all-time favorite detective. I have read and watched a few Sherlock Holmes adventures but it fails to impress me as much as Monsieur Poirot's exploits. Agatha Christie has done well in blending intelligence, child-like humor and meticulousness into this short and rotund character with a bow-like moustache. The methods of Hercule Poirot are more of a mental exercise involving scene reconstruction and psychology in contrast with those of Sherlock Holmes. That makes him a classic. From the limited reading I have done on Sherlock Holmes, he seems to portray the image of the modern day detective and forensic expert with a magnifying glass looking for traces, fingerprints and what-not to solve the crime. Both of them have a lesser charismatic friend (Captain Hastings for Poirot and Dr. Watson for Holmes) to assist them in most of their adventures. These characters form the medium through which the detective disseminates his findings to the reader. The author sometimes uses these characters to contrast the thinking styles of geniuses and ordinary people.

Hercule Poirot, "the detective most unique" as he addresses himself is no symbol of modesty though he pretends to be one. But his gray matter is commendable. I was particularly impressed with some of his adventures like "The Murder on the Orient Express", "The A. B. C. murders" and "Evil under the Sun". His humor is very innocent. Being a Belgian who speaks French, he snubs at people who call him French and insists being called a Belgian. His accent and use of French words and phrases lightens up his adventures. His waxed moustache is his most priced possession and tends to it very often. His dressing sense is immaculate. These small eccentricities of his make him a very interesting character. Here is a link to a small article that talks about his character

Though Agatha Christie has come up with such a great character, credit should go to David Suchet who has lived it on stage. David Suchet acts as Poirot in the Poirot series that comes on television and he is absolutely brilliant. He has brought life into the character and immortalized Poirot. I have seen other actors act as Poirot, but none of them run close. I would highly recommend viewing the Poirot series where David acts as Poirot to get a feel for the real Hercule Poirot I adore.

Au Revoir!!!

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Elementary Dr.Watson...

Early teens is the age when kids start getting into the reading habit. Initially, reading starts with books describing adventures of youngsters and exploits of teen sleuths. My early teens were no different. I started off reading books authored by Enid Blyton. I remember my first book being "The Children of Willow Farm". The book was about a bunch of kids spending their holidays in a farm.

Slowly I graduated to reading other books by Enid Blyton like the Famous Five series, the Secret Seven series and the Five Find-Outers (interesting name). The theme behind most of these books was the same with a little variety, but still each book sounded interesting and new at that time. Though most of these books had banal themes, they did and do teach teens a lesson. One thing that struck my mind is that they do preach kids an approach to solve problems. Isn't the first and prime step in arriving at a solution to a problem gathering the facts about the problem? The commonality you would observe by reading these books is that the little heroes make an attempt to gather all the facts about a problem before they structure the solution. These facts are addressed as "clues" in these books.

The next phase in the reading timeline are American sleuth series like Hardy Boys series(Franklin W Dixon), Nancy Drew series (Carolyn Keene) and the The Three Investigators (Alfred Hitchcock). Did you know that Franklin W Dixon is the pen name of Edward L Stratemeyer (1862- 1930) ? His publication house (Stratemeyer Syndicate) hired authors to write both the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew Series. So to clarify any confusions, there is no such person as Carolyn Keene, but different authors working for the Stratemeyer syndicate under this fictitious name. Again Alfred Hitchcock is the pen name of Robert Arthur and is not in anyway connected to the famous movie director of Psycho fame (www.threeinvestigators.net). These series are mostly about high school teens solving more gruesome crimes instead of petty ones.

As I grew up, I started reading detective stories like Sherlock Holmes adventures (Arthur Conan Doyle) and other stories from Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series). More about this in part 2 of my current posting. I plan to contrast and compare methods of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes in my next posting.

Until then a piece of trivia I remember from a long time. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was apparently a county cricketer who has one wicket in first-class cricket? Can you guess who the batsman is?

Answer in the continuation post.... until then... ciao

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Chantico - Goddess of beverages?

Recently, Starbucks has introduced a chocolate beverage branded as Chantico (pronounced as Shan-TEE-ko). A few weeks back I decided to give it a shot. The rest is history. I have really taken a liking to this new drink, that I no longer order my Mocha at Starbucks. Priced at $2.85, a short cup of Chantico is nothing but a melted bar of chocolate served to you in a cup. Absolutely delightful....

An article on usatoday concisely reports the difference between Chantico and hot chocolate. According to the report, "Unlike hot chocolate, which is made from cocoa powder, Chantico is steamed with cocoa butter and whole milk. It's no diet drink: A 6-ounce cup has 390 calories, 21 grams of fat and 51 carbs". Hmmm.. may be this is not for the diet conscious folks out there (I know quite a few :)).

Chantico is the name of an Aztec goddess. Her name means "She who dwells in the house" and she is the goddess of hearth in Aztec mythology. Legend says that she broke a fast and was turned into a dog by Tonacatecuhtli the god of fertility and food.

So what about the health benefits or losses by drinking Chantico (or any kind of chocolate based drink). Is Chantico - drinking chocolate also cursed to cause ill-health? My research on the web yielded this page that gave a summary of the effects due to consumption of chocolate/cocoa based products. The biggest health loss is that chocolate is calorie rich than most foods. The good news is that the saturated fat in chocolate is stearic acid that doesn't increase blood cholestrol levels. Catechins present within chocolate helps the body protect against degenerative illnesses and catalyzes oxidation of cholestrol.

So happy 'Chantico'ing.....

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Hey Madhusudan.....

Off late, I have gotten into this habit of watching episodes of Mahabharata (an hindu epic). When I was back in school, this epic was made into a series and was being shown on national television in India. It was one of the most watched TV series in India back then. The King County Libraries have DVDs of this series that I borrow and watch.

This series in my opinion was far ahead of its times. The screenplay, script and dialog delivery was excellent. The sets during the war were fantastic too. Most of the actors are quite impressive. Mukesh Khanna (as Bheeshma), Gufi Paintal (as Shakuni), Pankaj Dheer (as Karna) and of course Nitish Bharadwaj (as Krishna) stand out for their acting and they suit their roles very well. Kudos to B. R. Chopra and Ravi Chopra for their excellent direction. The script writers have very clearly made an effort to limit the words used in the series to Sanskrit derived Hindi words.

I was recently looking for the DVD collection of this series. The price seems to be around 150-180$ for the entire set (16 DVDs). I have added this to my wish list now.

There were many other mythological TV series like Krishna, Vishnupuran, Jai Hanuman... and none of them seem to have worked out well. Were they badly directed? Or was it that the advent of cable television opened up viewer options and caused the distribution in the viewership numbers? I guess the answer is both. Ramayan (by Ramanand Sagar) was one of the earliest attempts of making a series out of an epic and it did have quite good viewership numbers because people didn't have cable television to split the viewership. In my opinion, the direction and popularity of Ramayan was not good enough and it would have been slotted among the less popular epic series if it was screened in the post cable era. The demand for the Mahabharat DVDs (which is more than the Ramayan ones) in libraries suggests that Mahabharat was really well directed.

Here is a link to the B. R. Films site that gives details about this series.

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My first post...

Weblogs came into existence in the late 90's. The word was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. So am I too late for this? Anyway, it is better late than never. A search on google gave me several links to articles describing the history and timeline of blogging. But not all of them concur on the facts.

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