Total Number of Books I Own

Plenty. I do not have a count as both my father and myself buy books separately and the collection just keeps growing.

The Last Book I Bought

Last Sunday – Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons
Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone

[...]

Sitting in the plush environs of the restaurant at Radisson, Kathmandu, with the head of our company’s advertisement agency, I casually enquired, Why do Nepalis hate Indians? At first he evaded the question with an incoherent mumble. I laughed. He couldn t fool me, I informed him. It was evident and there was enough documentary proof available for this. On a small persistence, he opened up, and what he told me was something that I was aware of, but that day it hit a bit harder. What he said can be paraphrased as such: Nepalese are not born hating Indians, certainly not the way we do our other neighbor, but there is a significant number of Nepali students who go to India for studies. There, they are subjected to ridicule, called unfriendly names like Bahadur and chowkidar and they return with a strong and seething resentment. (This is a simplistic view, without taking into account the political policies, but still it is a strong ground).

[...]

When the landlady’s bitch (ok, she-dog) started barking again today afternoon, I had thought she was at her vocal best again; she often goes into a hyper-module even if she sees someone climbing an electric pole on the other end of the compound wall (apart from a variety of other inexplicable reasons). Generally, from a back room window, I stand and shout, and she is positively scared of me from there. In a normal course, immediately she would quieten and retreat to her kennel.

Today, it was different. It did not seem a normal bark of a bored canine. There was an urgency, a snappiness, a shortness. Peering out, I noticed her body was stretched like a tense bow, and her eyes were concentrated on the main gate. At first an irritaton swept me; barely a couple of minutes ago, I had walked in from the same gate. From a side window of the same room, I looked out towards the gate; the latch was securely tightened, as I had only done so before entering.

[...]