Frank's the man...

After revamping my blog, I tried to write a meaningful and deep post -- FAIL. Did not work. Pleased as I am with the casually abstract and slightly winsome look my blog now has (not contrived at all), I'm all out when it comes to the written word. So, here I share what's occupying me as I sit, sick, in the middle of this balmy, mosquito-infected Colombo night:

1. Reading this. Discovered on one of those late, not-doing-much-here-boss nights at work. Turns out Gaius Vallerius Cattulus was an ancient Roman orator, philosopher and poet. Tidbits of knowledge like that always make me feel hopelessly ignorant of everything else I do not know.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/advice-to-himself/

2. Also skimming through this. Found through a friend's Facebook post, and I must say, it seems sensible.

http://www.trulybuddha.com/

3. Also reading Sophie's Choice. Brilliant and almost done with it!!

4. And finally, listening to this man -- nearest thing to chocolate that I can stomach right now. Ah...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7GHgE8fylQ

A long post by an indecisive individual

Decisions -- they make us. They take us to where we are going. And often if we have a real problem with the way Life has turned out, or the hand Life has dealt us, or the way People possibly view us, it's good to just look at decisions, because there you'll find your answers and an admonishment for blaming Life and Other People. I admire people who are decisive. They seem to be the type of individuals who go through life with so much grit, always knowing which way they are going (though not always sure if that is the right way). They make choices fully aware that these may screw them up -- but they don't, because they make them with real conviction. Never half-baked ideas or "OK let's try it like this this time." They waver, but momentarily; purpose follows them like a puppy with an affection complex "pant, pant, here I am, I'm cute, pick me up." :P

How do these people do it? I find myself floundering over the slightest thing, and worst of all, making decisions and then thinking "well, I'm sure that was for the best anyway," when the choice seems like the easy way out, the path already trodden by a million different others, the boring choice, the safe choice that's completely normal and expected. You see, there's nothing wrong with the choice, but it's just so not-happening. In The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, a book that got under my skin in several ways and made me think about my life (not in the most pleasant way), the protagonist Tony Webster talks about how he had lived a perfectly acceptable and "peaceable" life-time...but how little he had made happen in his life. The whole narrative seemed to me like a eulogy for settling, ordinary decisions, and mediocrity more than anything else.

How decisions mould us, though. Makes you think about the series of events that has led to this point of life and time, and what could have been (to be avoided at all costs), who is in your life and who has had to leave it, who you have cut out for various reasons. But that's change, and another story all together. But I do, I do admire people who can make spot decisions, who do not think that OK is all right, and that maybe that could be done next week...because the thing we do not realise is that this particular moment in time is never, ever coming back again. This chance is critical in that the ripples this stone's-throw cause can be caused by no other stone thrown at any other angle. I wish I was like that. Instead, life for me seems to be a series of "maybe-next-times", something that can get tiresome when you're not tired enough to think of nothing.

“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?"

All these thoughts, however, come on the back of a really good day, so the vagaries of life is another thing to think about. Brings to mind what my mother had recently said to a friend who had hinted at the futility of life; that, in the words of Lord Buddha, nothing is permanent -- not the good times, nor the bad.

They're confused

They want to know why I prefer
To read
And miss the dazzling fleshy
Make-up pretty men and women
In orchestrated beauty
Onscreen
In CGI! With tigers and
Soundtracks and action and
Noise and vivid sex and
Blood-red blood and made-up
Glory.

But in my pages, the browned
Worn, ratty pages, my people
Live.
They breathe -- the dwarves and
leather-clad sex gods. They mimic
The voices inside my head.
The prancing young girl
Grows
In my mind's eye
To dazzling young woman, to mother,
To crone.
The men -- they're mine, they're created
But I give life
like God!
I draw breath from my being and
In my pages
They live.

And nobody else see them
Like me.
They know them, but my people
They're difference from other people's people.
My places are the same, but different.
My moats are bigger
My meadow is a different green and my busy sidewalk
Has different faces, holding coffee cups,
Striding busily.

So my pages, my worn, ratty
Thumbed-through volumes, my dusty
Shelves of Annes and Aidans and
Janes and Darcy and Lalithas and
Ford and the Millenn
ium Falcon, they live.
They live and so I live to live
With them.

And everybody else remains
Confused :)

The trouble with love

The trouble with it, is that it whether at its best or worst, it tends to overcome you, to the extent that you lose sight of yourself. Your whole vista of thought and perspective fills up with one person, one idea and *bang* you've lost them: ideals, goals, self-motivational-guru-type quotes by Successful People, even, possibly your very carefully preserved mental restraint. Suddenly you're willing to imagine anything, fancy anything, hope for anything that will enhance that sweeping feeling, or just, make it all go away.

At times like this, one of my favourite quotes from possibly my favourite novel springs at me from nowhere, invariably, like a prayer;
" He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creature, of whom I had made an idol"
-Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte-

Dangerous at the best of times.

Weighty expectations much?

The Big Guy says today that I'm trusted like no one else before. Ideally, I THINK this should pressurize me but also make find some way of furthering my position here but strangely, I feel like someone put a damn paper bag over my head. Air cut off, HOLY SHIT! Aiyo, I just want to write and be loved for it. I'm thankful that I have the chance to do so in some way. Eh?
We had a conversation on writing today, too. It was interesting, Somehow what I feel slipped out, I generally try to keep it reined it, I'm safe like that. I told him that the spiel I generate on a daily basis is not me, that's not personal. What I write here, my poetry, the mumbling that go on in my head as I scrub my feet, that is real. That is me. Everything else is just the smart part of my brain, honed with the help of countless books and thesaurus.com

Proscribed art form,much?!

I paid a visit to my favourite place in Bangalore today : B Book Shop-home of the old and yellowed-page version of every possible book in history (except Catcher in the Rye which is always mysteriously “Out of stock, madame”).
Once immersed there it usually takes something a bit more urgent than a nuclear power-plant-explosion to remove me from said immersed state BUT today I went with a purpose.
My bratty younger sister (Who’s actually an OK kid J ) is another one of those 14-year olds who would leave their homes for Edward Cullen (Ok so I wouldn’t leave my HOME for him as such, maybe take the last year off college or something), and has been hankering after the 4 books in the quadralogy…which is not a word!!! But I still like it!!
Since books which are usually very affordable in India are usually even more affordable at this joint of mine, swipe-card ready I went.
However, spotting “Midnight’s Children” but Salman Rushdie reminded me that my Tranquil Roomie had asked me to pick up Satanic Verses by Rushdie if/when I went next to Blossom.
This being because when she requested it at some other bookstore, the man at the store had given the fish eye and told her in no uncertain terms that the book was unavailable, permanently
Now the book was banned in India following a HUGE controversy in 1989, and this was even before Khomeini in Iran and his fatwa against Rushdie, which since then has been removed, I think. I had thought by now the furore would have died down.

I went to the cashier and asked him if the book was there, although I have to admit I was a bit disoriented at first because he had the most fantastic squint and I thought he wasn’t giving me his undivided attention as such, poor man.

On hearing my words, he nods and does and 180 degrees, shuffles through some random papers and files in the messy steel rack behind the counter and presents with me with what looks like a sheaf of loosely-bound papers.

Looking closer, the book is cover-less, obviously to avoid detection and the pages have just been bound together. The last page is coming off. It really has the look of the proscribed book.

I say ahhh you don’t have it with a cover do you? He looks at me and the shelf behind me simultaneously and gives a sheepish smile, nope.
So I decide to give TR a call and we decide that she will pay a visit to the place herself to see if it’s worth paying Rs.500 for it.

When I go back to the cashier and tell him I don’t want it, HE gives me the fish eye. The kind of look a closet junkie would give a plain-clothes cop I guess followed by placing the book in its unobtrusive spot again.

Now that was interesting. You’d think the ban was lifted by now, Rushdie’s other book are bestsellers hereabouts.

Very, very interesting.
.