Muah muah

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point.

-Mistinguett, singer (1875-1956)

I'm a Mysterious Kiss, according to some inane quiz that I keep taking and D keeps laughing at me for doing so.

My thought for today

Isn't this a point to ponder?

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.

-Jean Arp, artist and poet (1887-1948)

Oh Gibran!

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

--Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist(1883-1931)

Can't you hear the sigh after this line?

There's something about Mamoni

I love reading anything that makes me laugh. So this is something that I have discovered on the net. And yeah, I will take credit for discovering it: it's a collaborative fiction called There is something about Mamoni. I thought that it was an Indian version of There is something about Mary. It is that and much more. I found that it was in the time-honoured and fecund imaginative tradition of Anurag Mathur (The Inscrutable Americans) and Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August). I was in splits after reading it. Which meant that I had to share it with the others. And they were in splits too!!! So this comes highly recommended by a very selective book reader with an eclectic taste in reading. That would be me :) . One word of caution though: since the background for this piece is in Calcutta (can't bring myself to write the "k" word.... reminds me of Ekta Kapoorish soaps!!), some or most of the dialogue is in Bangla. So unless you are familiar with it somewhat, the full potential for laughter is lost. But otherwise too, if you can skip the Bangla bits, the enjoyment is not completely lost.

Here is a sample passage to start you off:

"A Close Encounter Of The First Kind"

Mamoni hurried through her breakfast and went to her room. She moved around the bed with a pillow around her arms like Anil Kapoor in "1942: A Love Story", which was, incidentally, her favourite movie, but, to her credit, she didn't tear up the pillow. The more she thought of America the more she wanted to meet Ashes. She had always wanted to see falling snow. In dreams she often found herself in the place of Madhu in Roja and on the top of that the opportunity to go to America had come straight out of the blue. Instantly she started planning her first visit to the land of dreams. Suddeny she felt that she had to meet Robert. He knew a lot of geography and could tell her where exactly in America she would be able to see snow. But right at this moment Ashes was the key to her success and all other boy friend of the past and present faded away in the wilderness.

Rana Dasgupta Cancelled

Rana Dasgupta's "Tokyo Cancelled" is off my reading list as of now. No matter how good he looked on NDTV Profit's Just Books programme!! Just kidding. The real reason was that Arielle thought that Dasgupta's uber urban Boccaccio-Chaucer inspired collection of traveller's tales is not worth it. And I trust her instinct on books as well as people. The most controversial thing that I found about this nouveau writer was that he was supposed to have claimed famously "he was not an Indian." Well, okay, RD. You look like a freshly returned NRI with the sole purpose of making your name in India. Apparently, he has lived in NYC, London, and some other places all over the world. But then he gave it all up to make his living as a Indian writer in English in dusty Delhi. How brave!! And his Angrezi-mem-mom-Bengali-father origin explains why he said that he didn't consider himself an Indian. But then, if he wasn't an Indian, why is he here?

Eternal forgetfulness of the speckled mind

My latest books wish list has only 3 entries. For a compulsive bibliophile, this is a shocker. Only 3 books? Shouldn't I have more? I did and do. But I'm forever making lists and losing them.

This is my umpteenth list of books to buy ASAP:

1. David Crystal – The Language Revolution
2. Rana Dasgupta – Tokyo Cancelled
3. Arun Joshi – The Strange Case of Billy Biswas

Losing all the wish lists isn't very helpful. Some of those lists hold some precious reading gems that I may have come across them in my eclectic reading. For example, my previous (or not so previous list – I don’t remember) contained this graphic novel "The Bloody Streets of Paris." But this list doesn't.

I really want "The Strange Case of Billy Biswas" by Arun Joshi, but I can't seem to find it in any bookstore. I have meant to read David Crystal since he came to Madras last year but didn’t know from which book to start. After reading Sunday's Lietrary Section of the paper, "The Language Revolution" seems like a good place to start. [Aside: I'm not earning my millions yet so the price tag is a big consideration. All books that are ultra-expensive are reserved for when I earn my first million.]

Yoda Press, a niche independent publishing house from Delhi, is doing some good work on culture studies has come out with some interesting books like "How to be the Goddess of your Home" by Judith E. Walsh, which looks suspiciously like a self-help book but is rather a socio-economic commentary on 19th Century women in Bengal. Interesting nah? From the same press, I'm still waiting for the still to be published "Tramjatra: Imagining Melbourne and Kolkata by Tramways" edited by Michael Douglas (definitely not the actor).

My list doesn’t end there. I have half-baked collections of Haruki Murakami, Jasper Fforde and Philip Pullman. Murakami is a prolific writer so I have no illusions of ever having his complete works. But still "Kafka on the Shore" should have been a part of my collections by now. Instead, when I walked into the bookstore the last time (2nd March, 2005 to be precise) I picked up a travelogue by Vikram Seth "From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet" ignoring all the voices in my head which wanted "The Motorcycle Dairies" by Ernesto "Che" Guevara and its twin "Travelling with Che" by Alberto Grenado. What sort of a sane person ignores the 2 books that she has been eyeing for months and instead picks up a 3rd book that is completely out of her mind till the last minute? I have no clue. Some times even I can't fathom my own mind.

My Jasper Fforde trilogy is again incomplete. I have book 1: "The Eyre Affair" and book 3 "The Well of Lost Plots." I need book 2: "Lost in a Good Book" to complete the sandwich. Have I made an effort to get that? No. Another series of books that I have been meaning to get but have yet to get down to getting it is Philip Pullman's "His Dark materials Trilogy." I have read them and loved them. But I want to own them. All in the same edition. Yes, that's my condition. What's of small consideration is that I have the other trilogy "The Sally Lockhart Mysteries" - all the 4 books in the same edition.

The author that I like best when it comes to conspiracies is thankfully NOT Dan Brown but little-known Italian journalist-writer Arturo Perez Riverte. His "The Dumas Club" is a fantastic mystery that I still am yet to recover from. Again, I have read it, but I haven't bought that yet. This is only 1 book. He has written many other books. I haven’t read "The Fencing Master" yet.

Keeping Riverte company is "The Complete Poems of Vikram Seth." I have lost count the number of times that I have tried to buy it and have failed. The last time I refrained from picking it up because the cover looked hastily cut leaving a tiny fringe of extra paper and lamination forming a very pretty skirt on the 3 sides of the cover. That was enough to put me off. I mean, if I have waited so long for this book, I might as well wait for the frill-less cover.

To my credit, I did try to find one book on my t-buy list since last year. And that is "Kinki Lullaby" by Issac Adamson. To Odyssey's [the friendly neighbourhood bookstore] credit, they did not have it. That leaves me with the commercialized bookstore capital Landmark as well as the exact opposite Giggles, the biggest little expanding bookstore!

This one is for you, D :)

This is
D's
valuable suggestion: that I
try some linguisticacrobatics in my blog.
I
wanted
to ask,
"Why?
What is the point?"
But I refrained.
What
I did
tell him
though
was…
thatafterfiveyearsofliterarystudy,suchlinguistic

acroba
tics
is not impressive.
It
is very
exciting when you
first come across
it but

you
cannot go on
writing
like that.
e.e.cummings
was
an exception.

Pity

I bought a watch today because I took pity on the girl who was trying to sell it. She looked so expectantly at me that I decided to buy it. Hope she gets a slice of the sale she made.