A flight from Hong Kong to Denver experiences an accident leaving three people dead and fifty six injured. The aircraft was made by Norton Aircraft and now their reputation is at stake. The company is to sign a deal to sell aircrafts to China and if the reason for this accident is not found, the multi-billion dollar deal could go down. So who is behind this accident ? Was it done by a competitor or insider ?
The burden of finding all this falls on Casey Singleton, a single mom, who is also the Vice President of Quality Assurance.
Compared to Prey and Timeline, this one is a slow one. The tension builds slowly. The characters are well developed. There is lot of information about aircrafts and the industry. There is also a sub story about how the media manipulates such accidents to boost its ratings.
This is a great read. OK, that’s end of Michael Crichton novels for sometime.

This is a story of time travel. An American company discovers a way to travel through a worm hole into 1357 France. They send an archelogist back in time, who leaves a message for help. This message is discovered by his students who are still digging in that area in present time.
The students use the time machine to go back to bring back the Professor. There are only a few problems in between. The day on which they land in 1357 France is one of the days of the 100 year war between England and France. On this particular day, one of the important English forts is to fall to the French. Also one of the companies employees who had travelled back in time previously is now an English soldier and knows the secret of the time travel.
So do the students get back the Professor ? What happens to the 100 years war ? Do they alter history ? What other secrets are waiting for them ? These are the issues in Michael Crichton’s novel Timeline.
This is an idea which has interested me for a long time, going back in time to a historical period. So I found the novel very interesting. It is a page turner, typical of Crichton. If you love history, and time travel, you will love this book.
Yesterday I saw the movie as well. Some scenes have been cut off (like the jousting) and some technology has been removed. The identity of the English Soldier who is a time traveler is revealed much earlier. This movie does not have a single hero, there are 4 students and the actors who portray them are terrible. No time was spent in developing the characters personality, as the script keeps jumping from incident to incident.
Between the movie and the book, I liked the book.

In this book Michael Crichton’s evil beasts are nano particles. This is the story of an experiment which went wrong in the Nevada Desert. In a secret lab which was supposed to develop cameras using nano particles, something goes wrong. The particles escape, and develop the ability to learn and decides to kill the scientists who developed the technology.
This book is a page turner, like all his previous novels. But somehow it all seemed like a rehash of Jurrasic Park. Even the scenes are similar. The way the dinosaurs walk around the broken down jeeps, the nano particles swarm around a car in which the scientists take refuge. After sometime, the whole story became predictable.
Still a good read.
Sandeep has a review of the book as well

This is a “book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300089023/jksobservat-20/103-6452404-6211035 is a comprehensive look at the Taliban movement, both in terms of their history and from the angle of various players involved in Afghanistan. The author Ahmed Rashid was based in Pakistan covering the region for many years and the book is the result of his interviews with various members of the Taliban.
The book covers the story of the Taliban from their origin in refugee camps in Pakistan to their takeover of Afghanistan, with some generous help from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. It details the autrocities committed by the Taliban against other ethnic minorities and is also very critical about the various edicts issued by the inexperienced Taliban like the ones which made women prisoners inside burqas.
According to the book, even though the Taliban implemented a strict Islamic Law for their citizens, they were involved in many anti-Islamic activities. For one, they revived the cultivation of Opium Poppy. According to Rashid, even though it is against Islam to consume or produce intoxicants, the Taliban justified it saying that Opium was consumed by kafirs and Afghanis consumed only heroin which was banned. Another point that Rashid makes in this book is that even though Islam does not allow a dead body to rot in public, the Taliban did not allow the bodies to be buried when they went around butchering people in various cities they conquered.
The last section of the book talks about the new great game in the region. The area around Caspian Sea has a large reserve of untapped oil. But that region is landlocked between Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian Republics and present transportation issues. There was lots of money to be made if the gas could be transported to the Arabian Sea. But for that to happen there had to be a regime in Afghanistan which would ensure safe passage of the gas.
California based Oil Company UNOCAL proposed the construction of a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan into Pakistan. Their competitor was Bridas from Argentina. Both the companies tries to woo the Taliban. The Taliban mullahs were invited to visit United States and Argentina. While in the United States, the Taliban also visited the State Department and asked for recognition of their Government.
UNOCAL would have gone ahead with its plan but for the feminist movement in United States. The feminists were opposed to the an American company supporting a regime which ill treated their women. At that time President Clinton who was having a large women vote bank also did not want to lose it. As a result the UNOCAL project fell through.
This is one book which should be compulsory reading for all Indian diplomats and media personnel. There are many points they can emphasize in their presentation of India’s case and to point out the specifics regarding the role of the Pakistani Government and their Intelligence Agencies in the creation of this monster. This is a book which should be read by any one interested in Afghanistan and the politics of the region. With so much money at stake, there is going to be lots of political re-alignment and action in this region for many years. This book will provide all the background information required for understanding the politics. I sure am going to buy this book.

After a long time I finished reading a work of fiction — “Tricky Business”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0425192741/jksobservat-20 by “Dave Barry”:http://davebarry.blogspot.com/. This one was very engrossing, even though it was whacky as usual, and I am sure it will soon be made into a major motion picture, like his previous book “Big Trouble”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587889285/jksobservat-20
This book is the story of a bunch of odd people who get on a ship called Extravaganza of the Seas to go off the Florida Coast to gamble. It is also the story of how this gets messed up with a drug smuggling operation. Then it gets all crazy as people start shooting each other on the stormy night and there are naked people running in between. It is one hell of a ship ride. You have to read it.

“Bernard Goldberg”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060520841/jksobservat-20/103-3604793-4877406 saw an item on the CBS evening news with Dan Rather about Steve Forbes. The news was presented by one of Rather’s reporters about Steve Forbes flat tax plan. Mr. Forbes was running as one of the candidates for the post of the Republican nominee for the President of United States. The piece was very critical of Mr. Forbes plan and the experts who expressed their views criticized the plan. According to Goldberg, this piece was biased, not objective and should not have been aired.
Goldberg wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal pointing out a liberal bias in the media. If Goldberg had been any other tax paying American, it would not have mattered. But he was one of Dan Rather’s reporters and that too for almost two decades. After this Goldberg became a non-entity in CBS. Dan Rather stopped talking to him (after saying, You were my friend and will remain my friend for ever), so did most of his colleagues and he was taken off the air.
The piece on Steve Forbes was not the one that triggered Goldberg. He had been watching the liberal slant of the media for many years and had complained to his bosses at CBS. Even though his bosses agreed with him in private, they refused to say that in public. Goldberg then tells us various stories and the angle with which the media cover them. One of them is the way how people are identified on television. Anyone from a conservative organization is identified as a conservative, but liberals are identified as just “experts” implying being liberal is normal.
The problem according to Goldberg is that producers enforce their liberal values on the story. It is not like they come in the morning and say we will slant all stories to the left today. According to Goldberg, it is something that comes naturally to them. But the same media which likes into poke into other people’s lives could not take it when someone did it to them. Dan Rather said he would never read that book. But I found this book very fascinating and worth reading if you are a person who gets his news from the American news channels.
After reading “this book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060520841/jksobservat-20, I was thinking, it would be nice to write a book which looks at the bias with which the media here covers international news. (What international news ?) Rajiv Malhotra had an article on this issue titled CNN’s Pakistan’s Bias. It would be nice to hear what people from other countries think of the coverage they are getting in American media about their countries.

Few months back, browsing in a bookstore, I saw a book “Pakistan”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374528861/jksobservat-20 by Book Review: PakistanWeaver. I looked up in my library and put a request for the book. Till that book came, I thought I would read some other books by the same author and that’s how I picked up “A Portrait of Egypt”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374527105/jksobservat-20
The subtitle of the book is “A Journey through the world of militant islam” and the author travels to meet various islamic militants who want to bring Egypt under Shariat. The politics becomes interesting, something similar to Pakistan, where military rulers use the help of fundamentalists to remain in power without succumbing to their influence.
Continue reading “Book Review: A Portrait of Egypt” →

25 years back Mohanlal acted in his first movie, “Thiranottam”, which was released in one theatre. Now he is one of India’s best actors.
bq. Malayalam superstar Mohanlal rode a bicycle on the road leading to his house in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday to recreate his first shot before the arc lights 25 years ago when he made his debut as an actor. Almost all the artistes and technicians who were associated with his first film ‘Thiranottam’ were present for the rare photo session in front of the Poojappura-Mudavanmughal residence of the versatile actor.
Update: Rediff has a “special feature”:http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/sep/03mohan1.htm on this occasion
[Source: “Sify”:http://sify.com/movies/malayalam/fullstory.php?id=13232877, “Srijith”:http://www.srijith.net/trinetre/archives/2003/09/03/index.shtml#000412]

Who would have thought that a book on fast food would be so interesting. “Fast Food Nation : The Dark Side of the All-American Meal”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060938455/jksobservat-20 is part history, part investigative journalism. On the one hand there is the story of the various people who started the fast food revolution from South California. Then there is stomach churning details on the state of the various factories where fast food is manufactured. There is also the human interest story on the various other cogs in the fast food wheel, such as the ranchers who do not make any money to the illegal immigrants who work in dangerous conditions risking their lives to produce fast food.
The story, starts with the people who started the fast food revolution in United States, people such as Ray Kroc the founder of McDonald’s, Carl Karcher the founder of Carl’s Jr and JR Simplot who became rich selling frozen fries to McDonald’s. These people identified that Americans were a bunch of people who would want to eat and not dine and made their restaurants a place where one could grab food and be on the way. This was at a time when conveyor belt production was becoming popular in industries and the founders of the Fast Food industry decided to apply the same concept to their kitchen as well.
Continue reading “Book Review: Fast Food Nation” →

Hollywood has finally discovered why movies are failing, why people are not thrilled by Charlie’s Angles and Terminator 3:
bq. The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films – sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching – and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.
It is time Hollywood took this seriously and started taking steps to ban text messaging.
[Source: “Independent”:http://news.independent.co.uk/digital/news/story.jsp?story=434778]