The Golden 80s

Jyoti Sanyal was a former assistant editor and columnist for The Statesman. His book, Indlish, is an excellent guide to how Indians should use contemporary English. The book is an essential read for those in a writing career, including technical writers and journalists. The author identifies the four "grey" areas Indians fail to rectify in their writing. He also provides examples and tips on how these gaps can be plugged. The following grey areas pinpointed by Sanyal in his book applies to technical writing as well: Syntax : A primary reason why overseas clients dub Indian technical writing as bad is the writer's abject failure to understand the English syntax. Very few has a good understanding of the sentence structure and rules that govern sentence structure. Very few spend time to learn how English is used all over the world. Most of them consider writing long sentences as equivalent to their mastery over English. Technical writers argue with editors saying that a ...

It is interesting that the obituaries of Norman Borlaug contained barbs directed at environmentalists who have critcised his brand of intensive farming. While it is true that India benefitted from his "green revolution", the fact is that it was not just the lack of food that caused famines in India. It is for the historians to correct the notion in the western media that "famine and poverty" are always associated with the history of India. Somebody should correct the misinformation that India's progress is just a deceptive story, waiting to be dug out by western news and infotainment channels.   I found the Scientific American obituary a more balanced one, compared to others who portrayed Borlaug as an ardent supporter of GE crops and genetic engineering.    

Buoyed by Keith Solty's posts on science fiction, I was reading a bit of SF today. I started by reading a few stories and then downloaded Karl Schroeder's Crisis in Zefra. While SF has not been my favourite genre, I still remember a lecture I listened to a few years back. It was delivered by a well-known scientist as part of a science journalism workshop. The one-hour lecture was well presented and as a listener I was busy scribbling names of the authors I have not read. The list I prepared is still with me and my job is still unfinished. Reading Solty's tag on SF led me to Ted Chiang 's wikipedia page. Ted is a technical writer who has written 'speculatiev fiction'. Well, that sounded interesting. This discovery on a dull, cloudy Saturday has forced me to look for Ted's free SF stuff on the net. Looks good! PS: Read a few poems by Robert Penn Warren. I tried using Google images to really understand the 'depth' of the imagery in poems. That experienc...