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It`s so hard being a Meticulous Meenakshi. Or a Prim Parameshwari.
But you know you are one of that brigade ...
* when you read `she lived- in with him` and your hands shake. You live with someone, you don`t live-in with them. Unless you are some kind of kooky recluse, never venturing outside your door.
* when you hear someone say `he is based out of Mumbai` and you have to suppress a steely glare. If he is in Mumbai, he is based there. If he is based out of Mumbai, well...you get the idea.
* when people use `chat up` for `chat with` and you come over faint. As in, the cop chatted up the suspect. The journalist chatted up Amitabh Bachchan. The drunk chatted up the bouncer. The last scenario, though, is a plausible one.
Okay, rant of the day over.
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feeling happy.
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`Why are our houses whitewashed clean after every monsoon? Not because Rajasthan is so warm or because white reflectes the sun away. Because it is the guest who must bring in the colour.`
Homes with too much colour and art are spaces that residents design ...to show off their variegated lives. They are not necessarily aware that if a guest wore fuchsia to their home, it may clash with the red.
From Aman Nath`s Beauty in India, in the otherwise uneven Travelling In Travelling Out edited by Namita Ghokale.
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A book, Kafka is said to have written to a friend, must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
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On William Shakespeare's 450th birth anniversary.
No snaps, snapped the curmudgeonly Keeper of the Grave at Avon. Then he saw my crestfallen face and murmured, oh alright. Make it discreet, make it quick.
Happy 450th, Master Wordsmythe.
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Your mind is the ocean of life
It can throw up an angry tide
of fire-harpoons that stick in the flesh
But weight them, and they weigh nothing.
Lal Ded, Kashmiri poetess/mystic.
(From the collection of her poems titled `I, Lalla`)
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Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke? Too much (553 pages) of a good thing, alas. Never thought I'd say this about any book, leave alonethis writer's book!
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Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.
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English continues to be an alien language.
They say `double whammy` for two good things that happen in sequence. The term is bonanza.
They say `the murder weapon was found in the loft during a dust-up.` They
They say `double whammy` for two good things that happen in sequence. The term is bonanza.
They say `the murder weapon was found in the loft during a dust-up.` They
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So, while you had `adamantine` and `laceration,` you also had the strangely worded `the incident that rails against all we believe in.` Can an incident rail like a person? And then, another strange usage of a common term, in `I stand wrongly defaced.` Then of course, the ubiquitous horror, the use of the word `post` for `after.` As in `Post this...`
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I really must learn to give up on books that fail to hold my interest. Been plodding through a brace of highly recommended books. The one with stories from the north-east had a deliberately distancing tone that troubled me...it became a reader vs character divide. And the one with quirky love stories is all narration, no conversation, and much of a sameness all through.
Antidote? I`m going to go delve into the small pile of the latest Vogue (US) and Glamour (US, again) magazines. I hear Calvin Klein has brought back the incomparable Christy Turlington for their underwear ads.
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Some (of us) writers tell our tale competently, in spare fashion. Others embellish it with adroit wordplay. Still others, they weave gossamer delights into their story and then, let it float into the stratosphere.
After reading `Punnu's jihad` a short story by Nadeem Aslam.