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“If music be the food of love, play on,” says Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night. Music, pop music, certainly overflowed with love back in the 1960s and 1970. There was no dearth of love in music from the 1950s — I love songs like Walk the Line by Johnny Cash, Tennessee Waltz by Patti Page,…
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A Strange and Sublime Address vividly recalls Calcutta as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Amit Chaudhuri’s first novel, published in 1991, A Strange and Sublime Address tells the story of a Bengali boy’s visits to Calcutta. Ten-year-old Sandeep goes with his mother from Bombay (Mumbai) to Calcutta to spend his summer holidays at…
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There’s an amazing similarity in the accounts of the birth of Jesus and Lord Krishna (seen with Radha in the picture). I was suddenly struck by the similarity on Janmashtami, the birthday of Krishna, which was celebrated by many people on September 6 and by others on September 7 this year. Both Krishna and Jesus…
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Singapore is a ghost town in America. Mr Lawrence Wong, deputy prime minister and finance minister of the other Singapore, the thriving city-state in Southeast Asia, remembers the ghost town. “We know that it is very easy for small cities like us to fail. I had a very vivid reminder of this when I was…
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Cometh the hour, cometh the man. After recent controversies, Polling Day (September 1) was a breath of fresh air as Singaporeans came together to elect Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam as their new President. In the first presidential election broadcast by Channel NewsAsia, Mr Tharman and his opponents, Mr Ng Kok Song and Mr Tan Kin Lian,…
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Shakespeare’s heroines as summed up in the book, Shakespeare Basics for Grown-Ups, by E. Foley and B. Coates
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“I can hear music, sweet, sweet music,” sang the Beach Boys, and that’s what I am hearing, leafing through a marvellous history of pop music. Harvey Rachlin takes us on a spin down memory lane in Song and System: The Making of American Pop Music. Elvis Presley and the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan,…
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The historian Simon Schama is a wonderful writer bringing historical figures to life, vividly recounting the past. He humanises history. Like any good writer, he also has the gift of metaphor. Striking analogies are to be found in his writing. He finds inspiration in nature as he writes about history. As a historian, of course,…
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Books are like the web. I wanted to read more books by Clive James after reading one of his essays that led me to other authors. Along the way, James disclosed the secret of success in the arts. I will share it, too, but patience! James is celebrated for his style and wide reading. Both…
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Bing is no longer just a search engine. It’s also a chatbot which can chat with you and write email, blog posts and articles. The new Bing is powered by GPT 4, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Open AI, an American research laboratory in which Microsoft has invested billions of dollars. Bing can write…
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