Monday, June 18, 2007

Great Movies

English Movies
  1. Kramer vs Kramer
  2. Philadelphia
  3. The Shawshank Redemption
  4. Million Dollar Baby
  5. American Beauty
  6. Finding Nemo/The Incredibles/Cars/Kung-Fu Panda/Horton/Ratatouille/Wreck-it Ralph/Brother Bear/Monsters Inc/Ice Age/Shrek/Toy Story
  7. Star Wars (almost all 6)
  8. The Rainman
  9. Pulp fiction/Reservoir Dogs
  10. The Return of the King
  11. Chariots of Fire
  12. My Fair Lady/The Sound of Music/The Wizard of Oz
  13. Shakespeare in Love
  14. Gangs of New York
  15. Scent of a Woman
  16. Dead Man Walking
  17. Sex Lies and Videotape
  18. The Pianist/The Piano
  19. A Perfect World
  20. Mrs. Doubtfire
  21. Dead Poet's society/Mr. Holland's Opus/The Freedom Writers/To Sir with Love/Coach Carter/Miracle/Glory Road/McFarland USA
  22. Leaving Las Vegas
  23. Taxi Driver/Raging Bull
  24. Amistad
  25. The Truman Show
  26. Phone Booth
  27. Being John Malkovich
  28. Network/Good Night and Good Luck
  29. A Man for all Seasons/The Lion in Winter
  30. Amadeus
  31. Out of Africa
  32. The English Patient
  33. Dances with Wolves
  34. 12 Angry Men/The Breakfast Club
  35. Unfaithful/Little Children/Eyes Wide shut
  36. Glenngarry Glenross
  37. Cat on a Hot Tin RoofAmmores Perros/21 G/Babel/Cidade de Deus
  38. The Motorcycle Diaries
  39. Little Miss sunshine/The Descendants
  40. Appolo 13
  41. Ray
  42. About Schmidt/As Good as it Gets
  43. Sideways
  44. Sling Blade
  45. Forrest Gump
  46. Ordinary People/In the Bedroom/Rabbit Hole
  47. Hotel Rwanda
  48. Castaway/Kon Tiki
  49. The Big Chill
  50. Easy Rider/Reality Bites
  51. Guess who's coming home for dinner
  52. All that Jazz
  53. The Queen/The Young Victoria
  54. American History X
  55. North Country
  56. City Slickers
  57. On Golden Pond
  58. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolfe
  59. Quills/Caligula/The People Vs. Larry Flynt/Kinsey/A dangerous method
  60. One flew over the Cuckoo's nest
  61. Lawrence of Arabia
  62. Brokeback Mountain
  63. Little Women/Pride and Prejudice (new version)/Sense and Sensibility/Jane Austen's Book Club /The Women/Beautiful Girls/The Traveling sisterhood of pants
  64. Mississipi burning
  65. My best friend's wedding/When Harry met Sally/Indecent Proposal/Pretty Woman/You've Got Mail/Chocolat/Ghost/Falling in Love/9 months/Moonlight and Valentino
  66. Blood Diamond
  67. The Perfect Storm/Twister/Dante's Peak
  68. Lorenzo's oil
  69. Waterworld
  70. The Panic Room
  71. Enemy at the gates
  72. Crimson Tide/U 471/Hunt for Red October
  73. Coyote Ugly
  74. Trainspotting/Requiem for a dream
  75. Groundhog Day
  76. Monster's Ball/Monster
  77. The Good, Bad and the Ugly
  78. Dr. Strangelove
  79. Thelma and Louise
  80. Escape from Sobibor
  81. Billy Elliot
  82. The Full Monty
  83. Fight Club
  84. Frida
  85. Gone in 60 seconds/The Fast and the Furious
  86. Husbands and Wives
  87. The Prestige
  88. Frost : Nixon
  89. Revolutionary Road
  90. The Verdict/The Chamber
  91. Jugement at Nuremberg
  92. Avatar
  93. The remains of the day
  94. Snatch
  95. Inglorious Basterds
  96. Up in the Air/The company Men
  97. The Constant Gardener/A Mighty Heart
  98. Master and Commander - The far side of the world
  99. Sin City
  100. Death at a funeral
  101. Intermission
  102. The Guardian
  103. The Damned United
  104. 25th Hour
  105. Children of Heaven
  106. The Help
  107. The Descendents
  108. The Dark Knight/The Dark Knight rises
  109. Election
  110. Crazy Heart
  111. District 9
  112. Lincoln
  113. A Separation (Iranian)
  114. The King's Speech
  115. Downfall (German)
  116. Goodbye Lenin
  117. October Sky
  118. Das Boot
  119. Starting out in the evening
  120. The Warrior
  121. Spirited away
  122. The Lives of others
  123. The Great Debaters
  124. Gravity
  125. Rush
  126. Captain Philips
  127. Her/Ex Machina
  128. Birdman
  129. Mad Max Fury Road 
  130. Inside out
  131. Ponyo/My neighbor tomorrow
  132. Interstellar
  133. Zootopia
  134. The Martian
  135. Spotlight
  136. The Revenant
  137. Inception
  138. Dallas Buyers Club
  139. Nebraska
  140. Django Unchained
  141. Moana
  142. Manchester by the sea
  143. Boyhood
  144. The hateful eight
  145. Captain Fantastic
  146. The best of men
  147. Primal Fear
  148. The darkest hour
  149. Three billboards outside ebbing missouri
  150. Hacksaw Ridge
  151. Snowpiercer
  152. Stuck in Love
  153. Hidden Figured
Hindi/Bengali Movies

  1. Chupke Chupke/Golmaal/Jaane bhi do yaron/Angoor/Baawarchi
  2. Masoom
  3. Mirch Masala
  4. Sholay
  5. Bandit Queen
  6. Anand
  7. Chalti ka naam Gaadi
  8. Pinjar
  9. Khosla ka Ghosla
  10. Dor
  11. Ek Chalis ki last local
  12. Rang De Basanti
  13. Paromitar Ek Din
  14. Ganashatru
  15. Agantuk
  16. Shakha Proshakha
  17. Shatranj ke Khiladi
  18. Doshar - Rituparna Sen
  19. Peepli - Live
  20. Shubho Muhurto - Rituparna Sen
  21. Trikaal - Shyam Benegal
  22. Mirch Masala
  23. Masaan
  24. Titli
  25. Aligarh
  26. Queen
  27. Pink
  28. Dangal
  29. Newton
  30. Unishe April
  31. Baishe shrabon
  32. Iti Mrinalini
  33. Meghnad bodho kabbo
  34. Guptodhoner rahosho
  35. Hemlock society



Sunday, June 17, 2007

Lists of influential books

Non Fiction
  1. An Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
  2. The Mind of God - Paul Davies
  3. How the Mind works -Stephen Pinker
  4. A Brief History of Time - Bill Bryson
  5. The Corporation that Ruled the World
  6. Ideas : A History
  7. Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
  8. Before the Dawn - Nicholas Wade
  9. White Mughals/From the Holy Mountain/The Age of Kali /Nine Lives- Willam Darlymple
  10. Curry (history of) - Lizzy Colinwood
  11. A War of the World - Niall Fergusson
  12. Critical Mass - Philip Ball
  13. The Keys of Egypt (story of the Rosetta stone)
  14. In Cold Blood -Truman Capote
  15. Wild Swans
  16. Myth=Mithya
  17. The Man eaters of Kumaon - Jim Corbett
  18. Roots - Alex Haley
  19. The rise and fall of the third reich - Willam S Shirer
  20. Man's quest for meaning - Victor Frankl
  21. Confessions of a Thug - Philip Meadows Taylor
  22. The Knife Man - Wendy Moore
  23. The Discovery of India/Glimpses of World History - J L Nehru
  24. Indian Mutiny, French Revolution - Christopher Hibbert
  25. The first three minutes - Steven Wienburg
  26. Freakonomics, The Tipping Point
  27. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations - David Landes
  28. The Origin of Wealth
  29. The Code Book/Fermant's last theorem - Simon Singh
  30. The Six Wives of Henry VIII - Allison Wier
  31. Elizabeth - Allison Wier
  32. Portrait of a People - Sudhir Kakar
  33. Yakuza - David Kaplan
  34. A Brief History of Medicine - Paul Stathern, A History of Money - Niall Fergusson
  35. The Black Swan - Nissim Tayeb
  36. The Human Instinct - Roger Winston
  37. India after Gandhi - Ramchandra Guha
  38. Peoplewatching - Desmond Morris
  39. Liar's Poker/Flashboys - Michael Lewis
  40. Phantoms in the Brain - VS Ramachandran
  41. Bringing down the house - Ben Meriz
  42. Lost world of Hindustani Music - Kumar Prasad Mukherjee
  43. Genome - Matt Ridley
  44. Mahabharata - Kamala Subramanian
  45. The Looming Towers - The road to 9/11
  46. A natural history of Innovation - Steve Johnson
  47. The Great Game - Peter Hopkirk
  48. Kipling Sahib - Charles Allen
  49. Justice - By Michael Sandel
  50. The Crusades - A concise History (Thomas Madden)
  51. Following Fish - Sumanth Subramanian
  52. Aurangzeb - A short history (Jadunath Sarkar)
  53. Endurance - Shakleton's Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing)
  54. On the Trail of the lost river (Michael Danino)
  55. On the corner of a foreign field (Ramachandra Guha)
  56. Genghis Khan - And the making of the modern world
  57. The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt
  58. The Righteous Mind -- Jonathan Haidt
  59. India - A sacred geography - Diana Eck
  60. Beautiful Thing - Sonia Falerio
  61. Them - Ron Jonson
  62. The Opium War - Julia Lovell
  63. Philosophy for Life - Jules Evans
  64. Hiding the Elephant - Jim Steinmeyer
  65. Cows, Pigs and Witches - Marvin Harris
  66. The philosopher at the end of the Universe - Mark Rowland
  67. Thinking fast and slow - David Kanheman
  68. Into thin air - Jon Kaukauer
  69. Curfewed Night/A Free Man
  70. Battle Cry of Freedom  - US Civil War - James McPherson
  71. The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
  72. Jack the Ripper - Philip Sugden
  73. The Omnivore's Dilemma - Pollack
  74. The Antidote - Oliver Burkeman
  75. Devil in the white city
  76. Beyond the Beautiful Forevers - Katherine Boo
  77. Partisans and Patriots - Ramachandra Guha
  78. Asoka - Charles Allen
  79. After the Prophet - Lesley Hazelton
  80. The Age of Wrath - Abraham Early
  81. The Skeptical Patriot - Sidin V 
  82. Empires of the Indus - Alice Albion
  83. The world without us
  84. Rubicon - Tom Holland
  85. Persian Fire - Tom Holland
  86. Brahmins and Bungalows - Kavita Watsa
  87. River Dog - Mark Shand
  88. Bol Bam - Shradha
  89. Jaya - A retelling of the Mahabharat
  90. Emperors of the Peacock Throne - Abraham Eraly
  91. The Unspeakable -the killing of JFK
  92. Unbroken - Laura H
  93. Ancient Rome - Simon Baker 
  94. The Signal and the Noise - Nate Silver
  95. India Discovered - John Keay
  96. Serial Killers - Peter Vronsky
  97. The art of thinking clearly  - Rolf Dobelli
  98. The Last King of India - Rosie Llewlyn 
  99. God's Terrorists -Charless Allen 
  100. The birth of the pill
  101. The story of earth -the first 4.5 billion years - Robert Hazen
  102. Cosmos - Carl Sagan
  103. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire - Eugene Rogan
  104. Ka - Robert Calasso
  105. Nurture shock - Po Bronson
  106. Midnight in the garden of good and evil - John Brenda
  107. The tiger - John Valliant 
  108. Tuesdays with moorie- mitch ablom
  109. The lost city of Z
  110. Into Africa 
  111. Being Mortal Atul Gawande
Fiction

  1. Kafka on the Shore/Norwegian wood - Haruki Murakami
  2. The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
  3. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
  4. 1984/Animal Farm - George Orwell
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  6. 100 Years of Solitude / Chronicle of a murder - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  7. Beloved - Toni Morrison
  8. English August - Upamanyu Chatterjee
  9. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
  10. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  11. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
  12. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  13. Run Rabbit Run - John Updike
  14. Filth - Irvin Welsh
  15. The remians of the day/When we were orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
  16. It was 5 past midnight in Bhopal, Freedom at Midnight, City of Joy - All books of Dominique Lappiere/Larry Collins
  17. Mila 18, Exodus, Trinity, The Haj - Leon Uris
  18. All books of Arthur Hailey, Robin Cook, Michael Chrichton, Jeffery Archer, Issac Asimov, Dan Brown
  19. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
  20. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
  21. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Thorn Birds, Gone with the Wind - Romance
  22. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
  23. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
  24. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
  25. Babbit - Sinclair Lewis
  26. A House for Mr. Biswas - VS Naipaul
  27. Ratime - E L Doctrow
  28. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  29. The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
  30. The world according to Garp -John Irving
  31. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
  32. One flew over the cuckoo's nest - Ken Kesey
  33. Posession - A S Byatt
  34. All Quiet on the Western front - Eric Remaraque
  35. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
  36. The God of small things - Arundhuti Roy
  37. Short stories : O Henry, Somerset Maughm, Anton Chekhov, Guy De Mupassant, Saki, Ruskin Bond, Roald Dahl
  38. Tom Sharpe, Ben Elton - Hilarious comedy
  39. Shogun - James Clavell
  40. Things fall apart - Chinua Achebe
  41. True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey
  42. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
  43. The Calcutta Chromosome/The Hungry Tide - Amitav Ghosh
  44. The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  45. Even Cowgirls get the Blues - Tom Robbins
  46. Dr. Zhivago - Boris Patersnak
  47. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
  48. The Outsider/The Plague - Albert Camus
  49. Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha - Roddy Doyle
  50. Jeeves Series - P G Woodehouse
  51. Ramayana series of Ashok Banker
  52. Sherlock Holmes - Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle
  53. Feluda series - Satyajit Ray
  54. Harry Potter Series
  55. The Ramayana Series - By Ashok Banker
  56. Hindi books - Gunahon ka devta, Raag Darbari, Munshi Premchand short stories, Bhishma Sahni, Amrita Preetam
  57. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  58. My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
  59. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
  60. The Millennium Series : Stieg Larsson (3 books)
  61. The Ring / The Spiral : Koji Suzuki
  62. The Shadow of the Wind
  63. Sidetracked - Henning Mankel
  64. The Wandering Falcon - Jamil Ahmad
  65. Picture Imperfect - Byomkesh Bakshi
  66. Ender's Game
  67. The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
  68. The Grasshopper's Run (Siddharth Sarma) /No Guns at my Son's funeral (Paro Anand)
  69. Jo Nesbo - The Snowman
  70. The Fault in our stars
  71. Nineteen Minutes - Jodi Picoult
  72. Sabriel
  73. The Wildings - Nilanjana Roy - Good one
  74. The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashimo
  75. The Black Echo/The Poet - Michael Connelly
  76. Killing Floor - Lee Child
  77. Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn - good one
  78. The Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey - very good
  79. The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl
Hindi Books to Read


  • Kitne Paakistaan – Kamaleshwar
  • Dharamputra – Acharya Chatursen
  • Chitarlekhaa – Bhagawati Charan Verma
  • Giddh, Surya – Vijay Tendulkar

Books that I would want to re-read

Unfortunately though I love history, none of it I guess is somethig I want to re-read.



  • Thinking fast and slow - David Kanheman
  • The Ancestor's tale - Richard Dawkins
  • The Happiness Hypothesis - Johnathan Haidt 
  • Justice - Michel Sandel
  • A Brief History of Time - Bill Bryson
  • Before the Dawn - Nicholas Wade
  • The first three minutes - Steven Wienburg
  • The Code Book - Simon Singh
  • Portrait of a People - Sudhir Kakar
  • The Black Swan - Nissim Tayeb
  • Philosophy for Life - Jules Evans/ Antidote - Oliver Burkman
  • The story of earth -the first 4.5 billion years - Robert Hazen
  • Being Mortal - Atul Gawande 




  • Great Authors of a given genre

    • Tom Holland - Ancient Rome
    • Charles Allen - The Raj
    • Eugene Rogan - The Arabs
    • Peter Hopkrik - The great game
    • Toni Morrison - Black America
    • Allison Wier - The Tudors
    • James Clavell - Japan and China