When I want friendly and learned voices to give me advice...

...on which book to read and why I should read it, I turn to my two prized possessions:

and

• CLIFTON FADIMAN (May 15, 1904 – June 20, 1999), co-author of, and the motivating force behind, The New Lifetime Reading Plan, was an American intellectual, author, editor, radio, and television personality. Here is an excerpt from his obituary in the New York Times:

He lost most of his sight as a result of acute retinal necrosis in his late 80s. But according to his daughter, Anne, also a writer, he continued to vet manuscripts for the Book-of-the-Month Club, as he had since 1944, by listening to unabridged tapes of the volumes in question especially recorded for him by his son Kim. He dictated his assessments to a secretary. He continued to participate, by way of conference calls, in the club's editorial board meetings until March.

While blind he brought out a new edition of The Lifetime Reading Plan, a guide done with John S. Major that was intended to introduce Americans to the classics of civilization, and he was the general editor of World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse From Antiquity to Our Time.

Late in his life the book world honoured him for his love of the printed word by awarding him the 1993 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

• MICHAEL DIRDA, author of Classics for Pleasure, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World. For more details, visit his home page on the Washington Post website. And here you can access the Goodreads synopsis of Classics for Pleasure.

• Coincidentally, a book written by Clifton Fadiman's daughter, Anne, At Large and At Small, is another cherished possession in my library. 

• ALSO READ: "Lusting after books? Let this librarian help".

• ADDITIONAL READING: "Why you must read".

When you have two hours to shoot ace director James Cameron...

...for a National Geographic magazine cover, how do you do it?

This is how Marco Grob did it:

Read up on the fascinating details here: "Behind the Cover: June 2013".

• MORE FROM THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC:

A tribute to an amazing photo editor

Photography buffs will go nuts when they read these tips on the NatGeo website

How to get people to read — and appreciate — your Facebook posts

PLUS: Check out the National Geographic style guide, which comes highly recommended by  Mark Nichol, editor of the Daily Writing Tips blog: "This free online resource from the National Geographic Society doesn’t show up high in search rankings, but it’s an excellent resource. (And, seriously, have you ever seen a clumsy sentence, a grammatical error, or even a typo in National Geographic?) Unusually terse but clear entries are organised alphabetically, and the site includes a directory of new and altered entries and, especially helpful, one of terms and rules that contradict other authoritative resources or are exceptions to the norm."

"If you need me to motivate you, I probably don't want to hire you"

A few months ago, my good friend Monica Chauhan gave me a wonderful book as a gift. Drive, by Daniel H. Pink, offers the most cogent explanation of motivation I have read in a long, long time.

Here's an important excerpt from the book:

As organisations flatten [in terms of hierarchy], companies need people who are self-motivated. That forces many organisations to become more like open source projects. Nobody "manages" the open source contributors. Nobody sits around trying to figure out how to "motivate" them. That's why Linux and Wikipedia and Firefox work. ... One business leader, who didn't want to be identified, said it plainly: "If you need me to motivate you, I probably don't want to hire you."

Watch Daniel Pink expound on his theories at TED:

And, afterwards, think about buying the book. You can also visit Daniel Pink's website and sign up to receive his free e-mail newsletter (which is what I have done).

• ALSO READ: "How's this for INITIATIVE?"

What a great intro!

Only a journalist well-acquainted with the tools of her trade could have come up with this opening paragraph for a feature on rock 'n' roll's new rule book:

Roll over William Strunk, and tell E.B. White the news. The music business now has its own grammar guide that might have had the "Elements of Style" authors singing the blues.

Combine that intro with a headline to match and you have a winning combination. Who will not want to dive in?

Check out Hannah Karp's brilliant piece in the Wall Street Journal here: "Grammar Rocks: These New Punctuation Rules Are fo' Realz".

• Who are Strunk and White? Learn more about the style gurus here: "If you're serious about improving your writing skills...".

How does a cartoonist get an idea that will strike a chord with people everywhere?

Here is the cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Liam Walsh that quickly went viral:

And here's Walsh discussing, in a New Yorker video, how he came up with the idea:

CLICK ON THE PHOTOGRAPH TO ACCESS THE VIDEO LINK.

Also read:

• When furniture get nightmares

• Telling it like it is... with cartoons

• One of India's most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. (Scroll down to read the item on Morparia.)

• A Commits alumna's long-drawn affair with illustrations

If great stories bring people together, then Wattpad helps people bring great stories together

Wattpad, the app I discovered on Amazon and installed on my Kindle Fire last week, gives writers (well-known and unknown) a ready-made platform to publish their stories.

Canada's most famous author, Margaret Atwood, is a Wattpad fan. Not surprising considering Wattpad is based in Toronto, Canada. But it is surprising considering Atwood is a writer with considerable gravitas and an unlikely champion of an online story-sharing site that is, as she put it herself in a piece she wrote for the Guardian, "heavy on romance, vampires and werewolves".

Let Atwood explain why she is all for Wattpad:

On Wattpad — using your computer, tablet or phone — you can post your own writing. No one need know how old you are, what your social background is, or where you live. Your readers can be anywhere.... You'll have readers who leave encouraging comments on your message board, thus boosting your morale.

Atwood then tells us what it was like for young writers of her pre-internet, pre-Wattpad generation:

We put together little booklets with our writing in them — our handwriting — for a readership of two: our parents. We went on to place an ill-advised poem or story in the school yearbook, to the secret derision of our classmates. We had to use our real names, which meant that many of us hid our most heartfelt writing in our sock drawers.

Atwood also dispels the notion that young people aren't reading but playing video games instead:

You don't get that impression from Wattpad, possibly because the site emulates features of video games: participation. Like Dickens during his serial publication of Pickwick, Wattpad writers get feedback from readers, and may shape their stories accordingly.

Read Margaret Atwood's article in its entirety here and then head on over to Wattpad to discover the kind of stories that you love to read. And if you're a writer or harbour hopes of becoming one (as do a few of our students), let Wattpad help the world discover your talent.

• ADDITIONAL READING: Wattpad in the Washington Post: "Wattpad gives writers a place online to tell their stories".

• UPDATE (June 13, 2013): Commitscion Ashwin Shanker (Class of 2015), an avid storyteller who read my post on Wattpad, has drawn my attention to another story-sharing site: "I checked out Wattpad and I have created an account," Ashwin wrote in an e-mail. "I felt it's more like Readwave, which I'm a member of. I have published all my work on Readwave and keep getting good response from the international community. My Readwave profile can be accessed here. All my short stories and a few poems have been published on this site."

• UPDATE (June 21, 2013): Here are two other short-story websites I discovered recently: East of the Web and Five Chapters.
  

How to spot lazy a.k.a. mediocre travel writing

Travel writing seems easy: Go there, do that, write about it (and don't forget to sprinkle the superlatives among the facts and figures).

But there is good travel writing. And there is lazy travel writing.

Now Peter Greenberg, travel editor of American broadcaster CBS News, has helpfully provided 10 top tips on how to spot — and avoid — lazy travel writing. Here they are in bullet-point form:

1. Most Travel Writers Are Not Journalists

2. Most of Them Aren't Good Writers

3. They Are More Focused on the Fact They Got to Travel Than Why They Are Traveling

4. They Are More Focused on the Destination Than the Experience

5. Most of the Pieces Written Are Based on Price, Not Value — or Cost, Not Worth

6. So Much of Travel Writing Reads Like Bad Brochures

7. Most Travel Writing is Obsessed with Product, Not Process

8. Tell Me Something I Don't Know

9. Introduce Me to Someone I Don't Know, But Should

10. Stop with the Lists!

Read Greenberg's trenchant post in its entirety here: "The 10 Problems I Have with Lazy Travel Writing".

• For what it's worth, here's the link to one of my travel pieces, which was published in the Khaleej Times after my return from a visit to Malaysia: "Blast from the past: Travels in Malaysia". I shudder to think what Peter Greenberg would have made of it.

• And, again, for what it is worth, the two most absorbing travel books I own and have read are Travels with Herodotus, by the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who began his life as a foreign correspondent in India, and Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific, the only travel book I have read twice.

"If there’s any degree employers should value when hiring for a writing or editing job, it’s one in journalism, or mass communication"

Mark Nichol, editor of the Daily Writing Tips blog, has expressed surprise, in a recent post, over a job listing that "[perpetuates] the absurd notion that a degree in English — or literature, for God’s sake — is the ideal preparation for work as a writer or editor".

There can be some merit, Nichol writes, in having earned an English degree, but English majors do not necessarily master composition, much less the finer points of grammar, syntax, usage, punctuation, style, and the other components of writing, and revision of assigned papers is of little use in acquiring editing skills.

Nichol then asks an important question:

What academic preparation, then, should students — and employers — value?

Read Nichol's post in its entirety here to know the answer.

• ALSO READ: "Media education: From course structure to quality of students, the challenges are immense".

Suck it up!

Two years ago I had a blackout after waking from a nap in the afternoon (yes, I like my Sunday snoozes). The fall resulted in a dislocation of the collar bone in the left shoulder and the doctors at Apollo Hospital, where I was driven by my cousin, put my left arm in a sling.

But my right arm was free and my mind was active as ever, so I spent my time reading, replying to e-mails — tapping away with one finger — and even playing Scrabble on Facebook.

(Bear with me; I will come to my point soon.)

Two of my students had come home a couple of days later to shoot pictures for a story about home libraries in a soon-to-be-launched books magazine — the sling is at a comfortable angle in the photograph below and I can afford to smile.

But two days after their visit, I went back to the hospital for a check-up as advised. The orthopaedist then ordered me to have my arm "locked in position" for the next 4-5 weeks — he referred to this phase as "commando training" — and the sling was then attached at an "acute" angle:

I had to lie down every now and then to relieve the pressure of the strap on my neck.

But life went on.

What can you do with one arm bound in a sling?
 
I discovered you can...

    ...make (tea-bag) tea

    ...take out the garbage

    ...bring in the newspapers

    ...wipe and put away washed dishes

    ...fill water in the purifier, fill the water bottles

    ...make simple breakfast (toast, cheese, jam) for yourself and your spouse

    ...correct answer sheets, evaluate TV news bulletins

    ...hang clothes to dry

    ...slip your legs into shorts or trousers

    ...walk with your spouse to the neighbourhood store to buy groceries

    ...take the (automatic) car for a drive in the safety of the basement parking area (to keep the engine tuned)

    ...read, watch TV, answer e-mail, update your blogs, play Scrabble on Facebook

    Any wonder, then, why I was counting my blessings?

And now to come to the "message" of this rather elaborate story. It's very simple, three little words that I always utter in class when I meet our new students for the first time:

SUCK IT UP!

***
SLING? WHAT SLING?
Commits alumnus Dipankar Paul, a brilliant photographer himself, did some nifty Photoshopping to transform an injury-hit teacher into an able-bodied warrior:

 

• AND, IN THE SPIRIT OF "SUCK IT UP!", I GIVE YOU... "EAT THAT FROG!"

25 books that will give you a better perspective on life and also help prepare you for the workplace

1. How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen, with James Allworth and Karen Dillon

2. How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere: The Secrets of Good Communication
by Larry King, with Bill Gilbert

3. The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction

by P.M. Forni 

4. This Is All I Have to Say

by Swapan Seth

5. Howard's Gift : Uncommon Wisdom to Inspire Your Life's Work

by Eric C. Sinoway, with Merrill Meadow

6. The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude

by P.M. Forni

7. The Last Lecture: Lessons in Living

by Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow

8. Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor E. Frankl

9. Kiran: The Power of One

by Umesh Aggarwal, Sabiha Farhat, and Venkatesh Rajanga

10. A Complaint Free World: How to Stop Complaining and Start Enjoying the Life You Always Wanted

by Will Bowen

11. Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times

by David Viscott

12. The Professional

by Subroto Bagchi

13. Unusual People Do Things Differently

by T.G.C. Prasad

14. Working with Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman

15. Letters to Sam: A Grandfather's Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Gift of Life

by Daniel Gottlieb

16. Jack: Straight from the Gut (What I've Learned Leading a Great Company and Great People)

by Jack Welch

17. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who's Been There
by Cheryl Strayed

18. A Fistful of Rice

by Vikram Akula

29. Jonathan Livingston Seagull

by Richard Bach

20. The Secret
by Rhonda Byrne

• ALL 20 BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE IN THE COMMITS LIBRARY

***

THESE BOOKS ARE NOT (YET) AVAILABLE IN THE COMMITS LIBRARY

1. Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

by Shreyl Sandberg

2. Tuesdays with Morrie

by Mitch Albom

3. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: Practical Guide for Improving Communication

by John Gray

4.  Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers

by Lois P. Frankel

5. Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives
by Laura C. Schlessinger

• UPDATE (June 15, 2013): All five books have now been ordered from Amazon.in; two have arrived already and the rest should be delivered in the next few days. All five will then be placed in the Commits library.