I am moving

I am moving to Bangalore. I have got a job there. Today is my last day at work. I will miss this place.*
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*I know this entry is backdated but what's the fun without chronology?

Vincent

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Chorus:
Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen
they did not how
Perhaps they'll listen now.

- Folk singer Don McLean in a musical tribute to Vincent Van Gogh.

You can listen to the song here.

A wind has blown...

A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.

e. e. cummings

Hope

Hope is a good thing - maybe the best thing, and no good thing ever dies.

- The Shawshank Redemption

Some days

And some days are even worse.

---

Life is not fair. - Stephen Hawking

What are we?

We are what we try to become not what we are born with.

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Somedays are bad.

Trip to Pondy

On an impulse, I decided to go to Pondicherry this weekend. I had company. So we took the bus to Pondy on Saturday afternoon. 4 hours, cramped legs, and a sore back later, lo behold, we were in Pondicherry.

My mind was very unsettled (my mind is still unsettled but the reason is different) and I wanted to go to the Ashram, which is the only place in the world so far in which I feel at peace. So we went to the Ashram first, saw the Samadhi and then proceeded to the Ashram's Guest house. It was a beautiful early 20th century style bungalow done up in white and black. The medium-sized room was comfortable. We had to settle for it since the large rooms were taken. I wanted to buy their leather shoes but Aurofurn that shop that sells them closed at 5:30. It was 6 when we landed in Pondy. And 7 by the time we checked into the Guest house. So, after dumping the bag at the Guest House, we went to the Ashram again and this time, it was out of the world. At night, the lights right above the Samadhi illuminated the flower arrangement on it. The rest of the courtyard was in darkness. The perfumed fumes from the agarbattis swirled about in the air all around you. The stillness in the atmosphere was palpable even though there were enough people around. I was stunned by its beauty, grace and spirituality. We sat there for a while and then went shopping mostly for clothes. After a light dinner at Le Café (there was nothing French about it except the name) we went back to the neat comfort of the Guest house.

The next morning after a nourishing breakfast at the Guest house, we went to get Bengali sweets. The checkout time was 12 noon. So, we rushed back to the Guest house packed our bag and left to take the return 3 hour Express bus back to Chennai.

Bengali cartoons - 6

November - Left/ December - Next

Bengali cartoons - 5

September - Anger / October - Danger

Bengali cartoons - 4

July - Miss you / August - Kiss you

Bengali cartoons - 3

May - Chatting / June - Dating

Bengali cartoons - 2

March - Gift / April - Lift

Bengali cartoons - I

January - Rose/ February - Propose

Language turtles

I am in a mood to coin terms. From the top of my hat, here's one: language turtle. A language turtle is a person who is slow at crossing the language road!

We all have out moments of frustration when it comes to the English language. Spellings are the first stumbling blocks and then come various other nearly nonsensical rules of grammar. I AM a stickler for correct grammar and spelling but that doesn't mean that I think they are logical.

I learnt about the rules of grammar and how they developed in one subject in college very grandly called The History of Language by F.T Wood. Almost every English literature student had to go through it. You could call it an initiation of sorts. The orange coloured tiny tome - I call it tiny because the size was small but they made up for it by making it thick - paperback was stuffed into our bags almost everyday. The most exciting thing inside the book was the Norman conquest of 1055 B.C. My professor almost went into semi drug-induced highs when describing this chapter. If the Normans hadn't conquered England in 1055 B.C, I wouldn't be writing this post! That's when the spread of what-would-later-be English started.

Why am I writing about all this? Well, to be honest, I started to write the above with the intention of posting something about how English is a funny language but ended up coining terms!

Power couple: a new take

I found this really funny article about how this writer found the actor-director team of Aishwarya-Gurinder Chadda as a version of the stereotypical "power couple."

READ ON.

Is it okay?

Sometimes you want something, you get something else. Sometimes you make your peace with something, and then something else appears. What do I want? I want the best bit of this and the best bit of that. That apparently is too much to ask for. But then as I say, what is life without an impossible dream?

Is it okay to want to earn money so that you can enjoy the things you like? Is it okay to pursue your dream but in a roundabout way? Is it okay to like so many different things in life? Is it okay to compromise now so that later things work out? Is it okay to be confused?

Thanks Soumyadip!

Soumyadip surprised me with this bit of news. That I have been mentioned in this article from the Indian Express. You will fine me mentioned on page 3 of that article. (No connotations please!) The article is about using pseudonyms on the net. Thanks so much, Soumyadip!

Tintinitis

Sometimes, I think I suffer from Tintinitis, the state of being perpetually obsessed by anything relating to Tintin! To aggravate symptoms, I joined this new group of Tintin lovers on Orkut and this is what I found: a fabulous Tintin site called the Unknown Tintin. I am reading Tintin and the Alph-Art online there. Now, you guys can too. :)

My neighbourhood

I took this photograph using my friend's SLR.

Calcutta again

On the streets of Calcutta - 3

On the streets of Calcutta - 2

On the streets of Calcutta - I

Why do we like the people we like?

Why do we do the things we do?

10 best reads I have ever come across - II

Slightly late but continuing the post about 10 best reads I have come across.

6. Anything written by Haruki Murakami. Murakami is like the God of fiction for me right now. His writing is very unusual, magical, but all the same ring true. For example, a rain of fish in Kafka on the Shore seemed like the most natural thing to happen. I encountered Murakami thanks to a review of his by a Tibetian writer whose name I forgot. For a long time, I didn't know if I should get a Murakami at all because I couldn't determine if I loved the review or the recommended book more. Anyway, I took a chance with Norwegian Wood and there has been no looking back. Norwegian Wood is one of the most lyrical books about growing up and accepting loss. After NW, I read his other more fantastic works. To read Murakami is lose yourself in a landscape of an unpredictable science-fiction with philosphical overtones. There is an intuitive logic to the seemingly out-of-the-world experiences his characters undergo. My favourite remains Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I can never forget the unicorn skulls that contain dreams in the other world that he described. He actually created the profession of dreamreading in the other world!

7. Isaac Adamson's The Billy Chaka series. Adamson admits Murakami among other writers influenced him a lot. To me, where I first encounter a book leaves a lasting impression. On one of my more generous days I offered to buy my brother anybook he liked. He picked up this book called The Hokkaido Popsicle by Isaac Adamson. The neon green cover with a funky guitar and Oriental charaters reminded me of Manga (Japanese comics). On reading it, I realised what a find it was. The Hokkaido Popsicle, I later found out was Book 2 in the series. Book 1 Tokyo Suckerpunch and Book 3 Dreaming Pachinko were found at a sale in the neighbourhood bookstore. Book 4 Kinki Lullaby is yet to reach India. All of them bear the same stamp of the writer - an erratic but lethal mix of martial art movies, manga, detective fiction, especially the Sam Spade-ish character, the lone detective at loggerheads with the law himself but excellent with cases which are very exotic because it happens in Tokyo both during the business days and neon nights. Most of the time, Billy Chaka, the detective and lead protagonist gets into trouble for his unique investigation methods and a rather odd set of friends who include fisherman warrior poets, one armed wrestlers, incredibly stupid but gargatuan twin bodyguards, dangerous and charismatic Geishas, recluse cult filmmakers who turn up dead, and many other characters that you thought were too fantastic to be inside a book. Reading Adamson's books open up your mind the way hallucinogenic drugs do but legally.

8. Pablo Neruda's poetry. Neruda came quite late into my life. But I am glad he did come at all. I kind of knew that Neruda was like a great poet when I was growing up but to come face to face with greatness was something else altogether. I must admit I haven't read everything that Neruda wrote but to me - romantic that I am - his love poems appeal the most. I can read his poems again and again and would love to read them out to someone in the future. The poems ooze beauty and have a rare soul that not many poems evoke in the reader. Reading Neruda is like getting lucky with lottery albeit a poetry one.

9. Arun Joshi's The Strange Case of Billy Biswas. Way back in college this was one of the books prescribed on the syllabus. Now, usually any book prescribed on the syllabus has to be shunned. But this one was an exception. The story certainly was. The author Arun Joshi was one of those unrecognised genuises. The story of Billy Biswas who goes to America to ostensibly to study medicine but shifts over to anthropology without the knowledge of his family. After 4 years he is a changed man; he comes back home only to himself a misfit with nothing to look forward to. His anthropology background leaves him unprepared to earn a living in India. On a trip to a forest, he is strangely attracted towards a certain tribe. Soon after, he goes missing leaving his wife and family. Years later some people find him but he has by then become a tribal himself. I found this novel to be a very different. The idea of going ahead and doing what you want to do despite of family and soceity opposition appealed to me then and even does now. Beyond that, the theme to me was a human being looking for himself and his identity. So what if he found it in the middle of the forest far away from civilization?

10. Vikram Seth's writing. I say Vikram Seth's writing because almost ALL what he has written has appealed incredibly to me. I mean his prose and verse. I know I have raved about A Suitable Boy before but I'm saying it again: Seth is great. I have read his travelogue, his poetry, and even tried writing something on those lines. I haven't read Two Lives yet but I hope to soon.Seth's classicism is very old-school and yet it feels incredibly post-modern. He can be very witty and amazingly sophisticated with his writing. To read Seth is to constantly challenge your ideas about everything. And he does that without lapsing into fantasy. He glides into genres like some literary Superman and works his magic in it. And best of all he can laugh at himself. In A Suitable Boy, he created one character who was just like him: Amit Chatterji the poet and one of the suitors. It's difficult to think that he is Mathematics student who left his Ph.D midway to write. Well, thank god he did! The world is richer for it.


That's it! My completed list. This is not a tag but if any of you want to list your favourites, go ahead.