What have I been doing?

I took this blog off line for a while. Below is a short summary of what I have been up to:
Movies

1. I am irrevocably submerged in the Japanese classics. So far I have seen Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, The Seven Samurai and The Lower Depths. All of them are superb classics of their times, which redefined the art of movie making. It is said that the sun sequence (the popular way in which the film camera travels under a canopy of trees while at the same time it is pointed straight at the sun) was invented in Rashomon. I have seen this sequence countless times in Bollywood movies.

Later I also picked up Kagemusha, one of his later movies, but did not have the patience to go through it. Maybe some other time.

2. I also watched Kinji Fukasaku's 1975 Japanese classic 'Kenkei tai soshiki boryoku' aka Cops vs Thugs. Its one of the films of the Japanese Yakuza genre. I always like the rugged 1970's action flicks.

3. Yesterday I watched Wong Kar Wai's Chunking Express - a movie from Hong Kong presented by Quentin Tarantino. Contemporary cinema from east - it was good.

Books

1. In November I picked up Kiran Desai's Booker Prize winning An Inheritance of Loss. Good job here.

2. Recently picked up Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. This is a book which is in effect a (semi) scientific history of the human race. Still working through this one.