I first discovered the sound of Midival Punditz, a New Delhi based electronic duo, in the summer of year 2001, when I was a fanatic ant digging tunnels through various kinds of music. At that time they were giving away mp3s from a makeshift website on the web, and were just beginning to collaborate with big name musicians on the Asian Underground scene such as Talvin Singh.

Since then, they have hit the big leagues, and have released two CDs worldwide on the Six Degrees label. Their latest CD "Midival Times" came out an year ago, and I heard it first in that giant Virgin Music store on Times Square really late one night in last summer about four times in quick succession; if you don't want to hit the bars, and are driven to insomnia by NYC, camping out at Virgin to sample music is a capital idea. I even wrote down some feverish lines on my hand on the subway back to the dive I was crashing at on the Upper Westside.

The most dangerous of the tracks on this CD were "Saathi" (on NPR!), featuring Ustad Sultan Khan on the sarangi and vocals, and "Rebirth", featuring Anoushka Shankar on the sitar - I suppose the presence of these Indian classical musicians explains my predilection for music that can seamlessly make the twain of East and West meet. You may listen to some of the Punditz’s tracks from Midival Times here, and their popular hit, "Bhangra Fever" here. Good stuff!

That afternoon he returned dejected to his office and consulted the dictionary with childish attention. Then he and I learned for the rest of our lives the difference between a dromedary and a camel. In the end he placed the glorious tome in my lap and said: “This book not only knows everything, but it’s also the only one that’s never wrong.”

It was a huge illustrated book, on its spine a colossal Atlas holding the vault of the universe on his shoulders. I did not know how to read or write, but I could imagine how correct the colonel was if the book had almost two thousand large, crowded pages with beautiful drawings. In church I had been surprised by the size of the missal, but the dictionary was thicker. It was like looking out at the entire world for the first time.

“How many words does it have?” I asked. “All of them,” said my grandfather.

The truth is that I did not need the written word at this time because I expressed everything that made an impression on me in drawings. At the age of four I had drawn a magician who cut off his wife’s head and put it back on again, just as Richardine had done in his act at the Olympia. The graphic sequence began with the decapitation by handsaw, continued with the triumphant display of the bleeding head, and ended with the wife, her head restored, thanking the audience for its applause. Comic strips had already been invented but I only saw them later in the color supplement to the Sunday papers. Then I began to invent graphic stories without dialogue. But when my grandfather gave me the dictionary, it roused so much curiosity in me about words that I read it as if it were a novel, in alphabetical order, with little understanding. That was my first contact with what would be the fundamental book in my destiny as a writer.

• from "Living To Tell The Tale"

Note: Don't all writers - by that I refer to those that take up upon themselves that sisyphean task of transmuting the ephemera of their minds into the more solid etchings on paper - at some point fall under a dictionary as under an avalanche, and surface holding fistfuls of words?