Sunday, April 25, 2010
five o'clock in the morning....
woke up at 5 am today. it's a rare occassion that i go to sleep early. early for me means around 12 mid night. and last night i went to bed early and so woke up early which is also not my usual habit. i usually sleep around 2 or even 3 am. not that i do anything useful. mostly watching animals on national geographic or animal planet or news on aljazeera or one of those late night shows with jay leno or letterman or conan o'brian (not anymore now that he's gone from nbc) or reading light stuff or surfing rubbish on the net. no i don't mean porn either. if you're living in any asian countries you'd be an idiot to surf porn. apart from all the hassle with unwanted pop ups, spywares and add wares and viruses that create havoc with your PC it is likely to happen that you'll find your better half suddenly standing behind you unnoticed while you're deep in concentration on close-ups of er...a russian lolita's beaver for example. not a good situation to be in. and as i say if you're in any big asian city, for a few dollars you can buy a cd-rom of all the downloads you want. and that is not counting all the normal dvds of all sort of porns that a perverted mind can think of. the world is getting really crazy and i quite like it.
but as i was saying, i woke up at 5 am this morning and feeling rather alert and so i picked up max brod's Franz Kafka's A Biography which i just started a few days back after i finally completed Ahmad Ali's sombre "Twillight in Delhi" a novel about old delhi's moghul life in decline . but at five in the morning reading a 'serious' book about a surreal person didn't do it for me. so i scanned the rows of books at the foot of my bed and picked Robert D. Kaplan's "The Ends of The Earth" A journey to the frontier of anarchy. It's the kind of travel book that you can start anywhere as each chapter is a neat article by itself and so i read the chapter Laos, or Greater Siam? lately Laos facinates me more than most south east asian countries may be because i've traveled quite a bit in the rest of SEA but not laos apart from a day visit to vientiene a few years back. but Kaplan's chapter on Laos is rather dissapointing. it's a bigger picture kind of story and did not really get under the skin of common laotian psyche. this is not to say that the writing isn't good but it's not 'personal' enough. and about four pages into the next chapter "Cambodia, back to Sierra Leone?" i fell back to sleep....
but as i was saying, i woke up at 5 am this morning and feeling rather alert and so i picked up max brod's Franz Kafka's A Biography which i just started a few days back after i finally completed Ahmad Ali's sombre "Twillight in Delhi" a novel about old delhi's moghul life in decline . but at five in the morning reading a 'serious' book about a surreal person didn't do it for me. so i scanned the rows of books at the foot of my bed and picked Robert D. Kaplan's "The Ends of The Earth" A journey to the frontier of anarchy. It's the kind of travel book that you can start anywhere as each chapter is a neat article by itself and so i read the chapter Laos, or Greater Siam? lately Laos facinates me more than most south east asian countries may be because i've traveled quite a bit in the rest of SEA but not laos apart from a day visit to vientiene a few years back. but Kaplan's chapter on Laos is rather dissapointing. it's a bigger picture kind of story and did not really get under the skin of common laotian psyche. this is not to say that the writing isn't good but it's not 'personal' enough. and about four pages into the next chapter "Cambodia, back to Sierra Leone?" i fell back to sleep....
