Harris Blogs

    The recent Terra UST crash, one of the biggest crypto crashes, has shaken the trust of investors and changed their notions about crypto coins. (Image source:  Techstory ) The crash of the stablecoin TerraUSD, or UST, on the Terra blockchain, and LUNA, the governance crypto token of the same framework, is disconcerting news for many in the crypto world these days. UST is pegged to the price of the US dollar. It means that its value only fluctuates as much as the dollar does. And the dollar cannot undergo a drastic shift in its value as it is regulated by the government which has reliable mechanisms to keep it stable within affordable limits, as a significant level of volatility can adversely affect the economy of the country itself. In other words, TerraUSD or UST must be as stable as the USD. However, what was thought impossible has happened now. A stablecoin has proved unstable for the first time with the plummeting of the TerraUSD price. Can Stablecoins Become Unsta...

                                                                                                                                             The Runaways The Runaways   by Fatima Bhutto is a story mainly revolving around three young characters, Sunny, Monty, and Layla. It has a simple plot yet involves some complex themes and is narrated in a captivating language. Sunny is from a Pakistani family in the UK. Monty and Layla are from Karachi. They go their own separate ways and reach the Islamic terrorist camp in the ...

                                                                          Delhi: A Soliloquy (Malayalam) Delhi Gathakal  portrays the lives of ordinary people in Delhi beset with the turmoil of Indo-Pak and Indo-China wars and their aftermath, the Emergency, and the anti-Sikh riots. The novel progresses through the stories of a bunch of protagonists, especially Malayalis living in Delhi from the early 1960s to the present. The work is important in that it records, using the tools of fiction, a certain period in the history of a particular region. However, a major disappointment was that the narration was purely linear following a traditional storytelling style and hardly using any modern techniques of fiction. The novel is almost entirely set in Delhi and hence...

  ( Purchase book at Amazon ) ( Watch film on Amazon Prime ) Delta of Venus  is a collection of erotic stories. In the preface of the book, Anais Nin has mentioned that she wrote these stories around 1940 for an ‘anonymous client’ of a book collector she knew. It all started with Henry Miller, her famous friend, who wrote stories for the ‘client’ for money. Gradually, he involved her and their other friends in the project. They all set their wild imaginations free and started writing stories of lust and desire to order. And the stories Anais Nin wrote were what later became ‘Delta of Venus’. It is obvious that these stories are less literature and more porn. Because the anonymous buyer of these stories kept telling her to dump poetry and philosophy and focus more on raw sexual descriptions. It was not an easy task for the writer, though. As a consequence, you can see the unpleasant tension of a fight between poesy and porn throughout the book. The struggle between her poetic i...

  Eleven Minutes  by Paulo Coelho In 2002, the author Paulo Coelho met an old gentleman in his seventies with his wife and granddaughter at the Grotto in Lourdes, in France. The man embraced him and told him about the importance of his books in his life. They made him dream. The words frightened the author because he knew that his upcoming novel  Eleven Minutes  dealt with a subject that was supposedly coarse, decadent, shocking... Coelho has dedicated this novel  Eleven Minutes  to that old gentleman, Maurice Gravelines, nevertheless, with these words: “I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.” After finishing reading the book, I was convinced he has indeed kept his word. He has been totally h...

                                                              The author, Azar Nafisi, and several of her girl students who formed the clandestine book discussion group to discuss some of the forbidden classics in the revolutionary Islamic Iran were relating themselves to Lolita where there was a Humbert in their lives in one form or another, restricting the freedom of their lives in some way and taking control over them in a manner that was loathed by them all. The Humbert could take any form, from the uncle of one of the girls who tri ed to molest her in her childhood to the ‘Philosopher-King’ Ayatollah himself who, according to the author, tried to build up his dream kingdom by imposing the strictest rules and restricting the freedom of the subjects, especially women. In a country devastated by the so ...

                                     While reading Murakami’s books, I have felt (rather suspected, as I am no authority on Japanese things) that his words weren’t representing the Japanese society or the Asian-ness that was before his eyes, but was trying to live the Japan that is in his mind and dreams. But it’s okay. It’s a manifestation of fiction. Moreover, it happens because he’s a global citizen, a wild soul, a free spirit, that violates artificial borders and belongs to the human culture. Picasso has said, “I paint things as I think them, not as I see them.” Murakami is a modern artist ❤

 Rearranged books by colour. The same books, the same shelf. Only a bit more colourful :)

  This is not so much a film review as a tiny attempt of mine to express my happiness in being fortunate in having such a sweet viewing experience as well as to shout out to all those movie-loving people who, despite being aware of the existence and importance of this movie have been keeping postponing watching it to tomorrow that never came: “Stop delaying anymore.. enough procrastinating!” as well as to spread the word among those who are not aware of the beauty and value of this movie or even its existence but may watch it and thus be saved from missing out on such a delicious treat for the eyes and heart when I tell them just because they relate to me in some way, just because their tastes rhyme with mine. People who are really interested can go  here  for a simple and brief review of the movie which gives a clear idea of the plot too. Even at the beginning of it, I knew I was going to love this movie like crazy, just for its cinematography, if not for anything else. ...

                                                                    The thing I loved most about this book,  The Blue Bedspread  by Raj Kamal Jha, is its overall structure. The entire book is designed into stories. Each chapter is told as a different story. What better way to express the facts of life when the audience is only a child — a two-day-old child. The storyteller writes down the story of his life through the wee hours of the night as the tiny girlchild lies fast asleep in the next room, hoping that someday she will be grown up enough to read those truths that are in some way connected very deeply with her. He doesn’t speak out the story to her. Instead, he sits silently at his desk and writes. He writes, not only because she is not old enough to understand the spoke...

  Irrfan, the great artist passed away. And you see all around mentions of his movies, especially  𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ𝑏𝑜𝑥 , which went to Cannes,  𝑃𝑎𝑎𝑛 𝑆𝑖𝑛𝑔ℎ 𝑇𝑜𝑚𝑎𝑟  that earned him the national award, and even  𝐿𝑖𝑓𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑖 . However, the films that came to my mind were different, for personal reasons. One is  𝑆𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑎𝑚 𝐵𝑜𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑦  made in 1988 by Mira Nair which I didn’t see most mentioning. She is the director that discovered this gem of an actor for the Bollywood moviegoers. When he, in his late teens or barely out of them, approached her with his aspirations, she wanted to make him the major protagonist of the movie. However, it was a movie about slum children where the characters where children (who were real slum children) of a much younger age group and he wouldn’t fit in. She was sorry about it; she was desperate to have him in the movie somehow. So she offered him the minor role of a scribe stationed at the passageway in...