Monday Cup Of Links #74 - 1855 England Trip, Google Reader II, Two-Headed Snake Mosaic.
Adipurush did the Ramayana bad.
Good Morning!
How are you this week?
I can’t get the teaser of Adipurush out of my head. It is so, so, so bad. It is the Ramayana for Gods’ sake! Somehow, they managed to piss off the people of India, Srilanka, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia with one trailer. With the graphics that are possible today, and the fact that the script was already written for you thousands of years ago, it shouldn’t be hard to do better. But here we are.
Onto our links!
Dadabhai goes to England! A small excerpt from a book titled Naoroji - Pioneer of Indian Nationalism. Dadabhai Naoroji went on to become the first Indian MP in the UK. In this excerpt, there’s reflections on his maiden voyage to England in 1855. Somehow, it’s not that different from the trip Savarkar took in 1906! Same old going to Aden from Bombay, then Suez, and then Marseilles. The condition of Somali laborers in Aden, the modern buildings contrasting with calls for “baksheesh!” from beggars in Suez, and his amazement at the high traffic in the Mediterranean compared to the Arabian Sea.
SUBSTACK BROUGHT BACK GOOGLE READER. As a 2000s blogger, Google Reader and RSS feeds were the main ways I kept track of people and topics I was interested in, and was quite mad when Google killed Reader to wrap it into Google+ (and then killed Google+ too). I’m quite excited; I can put all my email subscriptions in one place now, and it won’t be my inbox!
Norah Jones has a new podcast! It’s called “Playing Along”, and it’s what she does best, talk to other musicians while playing music together. I don’t follow too many musicians these days, but with her, she’s always tried to learn new forms of music by performing in public. That’s such an admirable trait, and something to learn and be inspired from.
Artifact of the week: Aztec double-headed mosaic of a two-headed serpent, worn as a chest ornament during ceremonies. The other side is hollow. There’s a lot of word salad about its significance, but those at the British Museum now (where it is housed) don’t really know. All we have is “Snakes are a symbol of renewal and fertility because they shed their skin.”