Fantasies & Hopes

After that idiot Peter Jackson seriously screwed up Lord of the Rings by making a mockery of it in his most pathetic and lousy excuse for a movie in ways that would make JRR Tolkien cry out loud in his grave, I've never quite really been able to take up reading fantasy again. I almost keep thinking how another moron with the IQ less than that of my shoelaces such as Peter Jackson would screw things up and spoil it all over again. Peter Jackson did more than kill Tolkien's works, he desecrated them and spat on them in the ugliest of ways - he could have shot Tolkien dead, and that would have been a lesser crime. He not merely killed the books, he killed memories of it, too. I shall forever regret having seen the movies, since they went everything against the pleasant childhood memories I had of reading Tolkien. I had almost lost hopes of finding another book that would captivate me thus, ever. And lo! I found one - Susanna Clarke's captivating book, "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel" - to be simply spellbounding and absolutely fabulous. She combines a rare mix of classical British humour in a way that is quite unique. It almost reminded me of Tolkien in The Hobbit, or how he described Tom Bombadil in the Lord of the Rings.

Some passages reminded me Douglas Adams; while the story has been set in the early 18th century and Clarke's description of the British society has a strong nostalgic feeling reminiscent of PG Wodehouse. Passages, such as this one, are simple yet funny that's such classical British humour - "The intention of the French was to cruise about the Bay of Biscay looking for British ships to capture or, if they were unable to do that, to prevent the British from doing any thing which they appeared to want to do." Truly brilliant, truly inspiring. And after a long long time, it's given me hope - the kind that I had lost for a long time. I can only hope that some fool of an ass fool like Peter Jackson does not screw this up, too, by trying to make a movie. Somebody please make sure that idiot does not lay his hand on this book? Or better yet, just make sure that he is incapacitated in ways that would prevent him from screwing up precious memories of people by making movies out of books. Anyway, that out of the way, here is a list of things that are coming up -

• Work has started on the visualization + glove research project
• Indian office is almost done setting up
• A few small projects are in the offing, but we would need to do some groundwork
• Highbrew is gaining momentum in terms of certain large corporates taking notice.

Well, like I said, hope springs eternal. And thank you, Susanna Clarke!