Entertainment
Jeet Thayil explains top 9 quotes from ‘The Book of Chocolate Saints’
By Saket Suman
New Delhi, Nov 24 (IANS) It has barely been a month since acclaimed poet Jeet Thayil’s “The Book of Chocolate Saints” hit the stands, but even in this short period, the novel has made a mark in literary circles.
Aleph publisher David Davidar was seen recommending the book to several Western authors at private parties of the just-concluded Dhaka Literature Festival. Instagram and other social media platforms are full of pictures of the book, often with a reader in frame, floating in their feeds. The publisher has billed it as the most awaited literary novel of the year and by its track-record so far, one cannot but agree.
In this novel, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author paints a hallucinatory portrait of an ambiguous soul: A self-destructive figure, a charismatic contrarian, and a tortured, damned artist battling with his conflicting instincts. Vividly set in both Delhi and Manhattan, “The Book of Chocolate Saints” explores our deepest urges in a novel that is sexy, dangerous, and entirely uncompromising.
It is a sheer pleasure to read fiction works by a poet because poets break the staid rules, they experiment and play with words. Thayil mesmerises his readers with the way he uses his poetic tools to structure the many lines of his novel.
Below are nine brilliant quotes from the book, explained in Thayil’s own words:
“Praise the broken world for it will vanish in a day and in a day be replaced by nothing.”
Self-explanatory. Get your praise in while the world still works; it may not be around much longer.
“In my experience it’s always the brightest that you have to watch. They cause the most trouble.”
The problem with intelligence is that it comes with unpredictable riders, including a tendency towards insurrection, interrogation, and self-destruction.
“In other words they were the kind of English poems that the English no longer wrote.”
In the mid-twentieth century, English poets stopped writing the kind of poems associated with a Romantic idea of English poetry. Indian poets continued to do so.
“The body is a cell and the soul a hermit who lives therein.”
We are trapped in a prison of skin, hair, and cranial geography.
“I remember the old days better, when we were young and the world was beautiful.”
Youth is wasted on the young.
“Words are cheap when you are talking to the press.”
Case in point: Me, now, talking to you.
“But what books they were! You will not see the like again.”
Once, Bardic utterance was the model for poetic speech. E.g. Homer, John Clare, Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Rimbaud, Ginsberg, Emily Dickinson, to name but a few. This is no longer the case. The reference here is to Newton Xavier’s first two books of poems, which fall firmly in the Bardic and prophetic mode.
“Everybody wants to know about writer’s block and how terrible it is. They love the idea of the tortured artist. Nobody talks about how super it is. How much like a paid vacation. You are giving yourself permission to not work.”
Adding to this would be like gilding the poppy. But here goes: Writer’s block is nothing more than the psyche repairing or recharging itself. Telling yourself you have writer’s block is a way of giving yourself a holiday.
“The only poem that matters is the poem that picks up a gun.”
In 2017 in India, literature seems irrelevant. What difference can a poem make in the time of hate, when the criminals are in government and the lunatics are in charge of the asylum?
(Saket Suman can be contacted at [email protected])
–IANS
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International online casino Casino Days has published a report sharing their internal data on what types and brands of devices are used to play on the platform by users from the South Asian region.
Such aggregate data analyses allow the operator to optimise their website for the brands and models of devices people are actually using.
The insights gained through the research also help Casino Days tailor their services based on the better understanding of their clients and their needs.
Desktops and Tablets Lose the Battle vs Mobile
The primary data samples analysed by Casino Days reveal that mobile connections dominate the market in South Asia and are responsible for a whopping 96.6% of gaming sessions, while computers and tablets have negligible shares of 2.9% and 0.5% respectively.
The authors of the study point out that historically, playing online casino was exclusively done on computers, and attribute thе major shift to mobile that has unfolded over time to the wide spread of cheaper smartphones and mobile data plans in South Asia.
“Some of the reasons behind this massive difference in device type are affordability, technical advantages, as well as cheaper and more obtainable internet plans for mobiles than those for computers,” the researchers comment.
Xiaomi and Vivo Outperform Samsung, Apple Way Down in Rankings
Chinese brands Xiaomi and Vivo were used by 21.9% and 20.79% of Casino Days players from South Asia respectively, and together with the positioned in third place with a 18.1% share South Korean brand Samsung dominate the market among real money gamers in the region.
Cupertino, California-based Apple is way down in seventh with a user share of just 2.29%, overshadowed by Chinese brands Realme (11.43%), OPPO (11.23%), and OnePlus (4.07%).
Huawei is at the very bottom of the chart with a tiny share just below the single percent mark, trailing behind mobile devices by Motorola, Google, and Infinix.
The data on actual phone usage provided by Casino Days, even though limited to the gaming parts of the population of South Asia, paints a different picture from global statistics on smartphone shipments by vendors.
Apple and Samsung have been sharing the worldwide lead for over a decade, while current regional leader Xiaomi secured their third position globally just a couple of years ago.
Striking Android Dominance among South Asian Real Money Gaming Communities
The shifted market share patterns of the world’s top smartphone brands in South Asia observed by the Casino Days research paper reveal a striking dominance of Android devices at the expense of iOS-powered phones.
On the global level, Android enjoys a comfortable lead with a sizable 68.79% share which grows to nearly 79% when we look at the whole continent of Asia. The data on South Asian real money gaming communities suggests that Android’s dominance grows even higher and is north of the 90% mark.
Among the major factors behind these figures, the authors of the study point to the relative affordability of and greater availability of Android devices in the region, especially when manufactured locally in countries like India and Vietnam.
“And, with influencers and tech reviews putting emphasis on Android devices, the choice of mobile phone brand and OS becomes easy; Android has a much wider range of products and caters to the Asian online casino market in ways that Apple can’t due to technical limitations,” the researchers add.
The far better integration achieved by Google Pay compared to its counterpart Apple Pay has also played a crucial role in shaping the existing smartphone market trends.
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