Saada Haq, Aithe Rak

The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

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AWOL

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel

This is how I choose to spend 2012, being indifferent. kthnxbai.

p.s. giving Scrivener  a spin; may result in a book.

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2011. A retrospect.

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery. ~ Kilgore Trout

A year I came into without much expectations. 

And that’s how it will end. 

Of letting go. 

Of putting heart over mind. 

Dint try to seek ‘the purpose of life’ hence no disillusionment. 

Slacker mode full on.

Read / watched / heard riveting works. 

Friends were made. 

None were lost.

Love is blossoming again. 

Life looks good.

Uncertainty  lurks like a beast. 

Like it always has.  

The placebo of insurance.

Hope it holds. 

Much wasn’t written or blogged.

A lot was clicked and mused upon. 

Packing up. 

unpacking. 

Dirtying up.

Cleaning up.

Picking up and moving on.

Twenty twelve, I Welcome you in, with open arms. 

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homeboy – alien

I was just another vermin living in the margins of a totalitarian society’s consciousness.

The regime of the land dint bother with our types for we for a better part of a century had relatively been trouble free. 

The trouble began with me. 

I broke ranks and ventured out into the world. 

I discovered societies and systems far more advanced and sane.  

I came back excited.  

I told my brothers of the sights I had seen and the knowledge I had gained.

They said I was a traitor for deserting them by not staying and stagnating.

They drove me away with sticks, stones and knives. 

The regime is now aware of my feeble failed attempts at rabble rousing and has put a hit on my head. 

The word on the street is that an assassin is rapidly approaching my hideout. 

I do not fear death. I fear that my ideas will die with me.

So weary traveler if you have felt the angst, followed the markers and have found this tablet; you have come seeking for clues and inspiration; I have failed and the regime reigns strong.

Do not lose hope for  the future of our people depends on you.

Save yourselves to save them.

 Know this, that your strength is theirs.

 Arise and awaken.  

 __

Don’t make my mistake, kid. 

Don’t follow orders your whole life. 

Think for yourself. 

- Barbatus, Antz

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potential

There are so many ideas swarming in my head at any given point of time and each of them  has a potential blog worthy appeal to it. But the operative is potential for many times an idea that seems good while shooting between neurons doesn’t translate well when put on paper.

–

I’ve been making a conscious attempt to move away from my quotidian english but seem to fail every time. Of course to put wonderfully complex ideas into simple words is a skill perfected by Hemingway / RK Narayanan.  Simple is not so simple.

–    

I’ve had a chance to  read blogs by people younger to me  and i get a complex, for their language is crisp and the expression is fluid. All I want to do is read their words-works and forget mine.

Does each passing generation always yearn to belong to the following generation ?   

–

Anna Margaret Ross (née McKittrick; 8 December 1860 – 2 February 1939), known by her pen-name Amanda McKittrick Ros, was a Northern Irish writer. She published her first novel Irene Iddesleigh at her own expense in 1897. She wrote poetry and a number of novels. Her works were not read widely, and her eccentric, over-written, “purple” circumlocutory writing style is alleged by some critics to be some of the worst prose and poetry ever written. 

Aldous Huxley wrote that “In Mrs. Ros we see, as we see in the Elizabethan novelists, the result of the discovery of art by an unsophisticated mind and of its first conscious attempt to produce the artistic. It is remarkable how late in the history of every literature simplicity is invented.” 

This is how she informs the reader how Delina earned money by doing needlework: She tried hard to keep herself a stranger to her poor old father’s slight income by the use of the finest production of steel, whose blunt edge eyed the reely covering with marked greed, and offered its sharp dart to faultless fabrics of flaxen fineness.

Her novel Delina Delaney begins: Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness? 

(The sentence approximately means, “Have you ever been to the part of Ireland studied by the government with the aim of modernizing its agriculture?”)

The Oxford literary group the Inklings, which included such luminaries as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, held competitions to see who could read Ros’ work for the longest length of time while keeping a straight face.

Northrop Frye said of Ros’ novels that they use “rhetorical material without being able to absorb or assimilate it: the result is pathological, a kind of literary diabetes”.

–

Of course when you are these fucking people (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Nick Page, Northrop Frye) you can get away with bloody criticizing anybody.

–

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western promises

Ten years ago on an unremarkable wintry day I stood at the departure gate for a flight to JFK, NYC. Rishi saw me off. No one else. My decision to pursue greener pastures abroad with my mediocre skill-set rather than failed attempts at making headway into the den of competitive wolves  that was the workplace scene in my country dint seem very appealing or doable, was unpopular with my parents, friends and relatives. But Rishi, he knew. We were both mediocre and like how misery seeks company we sought each other out. I managed to rake up finances by selling some property and gold , bank loans and all, you know the drill.  Rishi hadn’t been so lucky. So here we were at the cafeteria, one last quick drag of the gold flake king, a 1/2 chai and a samosa we hugged and said our good byes. I promised to look after him once I  got my bearings. 

A lot has changed in ten years. I lost a lot of hair, still rocked the six pack abs courtesy my relentless training at equinox and Begumpet made way to Shamshabad.  Was in line at immigration when I saw a family cut ahead of me I was mighty pissed and asked the usher what the fuck was going on. He non nonchalantly replied, ” Woh MLA saab ke logaan hain. Special permission.”  I asked if the MLA was in the entourage. He replied ” No.” 

Out of customs I scanned the reception area and there he was as jovial as ever.  Rishi hadn’t aged a bit.

work in progress

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level at last

a stab.
a shrill scream.
gush of blood.

death.

level at last.

rest in peace.
you entitled fuck.

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inquilab

I am from the system.
I was one of them. 

Then, the event occurred. 
My eyes opened.

Now, I am one of the others.
I will fight them, for freedom, till death. 

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i am them.

I stood on the side lines an amused spectator as the picketing crowd walked by.

“Do you know what does Democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like.” , they chanted.

I shed my inhibitions. I became them.

 

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anatomy of an addiction

it starts with a bad habit.

you keep telling yourself, shrugging it away with brazen confidence, that  this too will pass.

over time the bad habit manifests into an addiction.

you try to quit.

successful for a day.

the addiction works its way into getting it’s fix at the slightest provocation.

rebound.

continue addiction.

realize it’s an addiction with a life of it own.

addiction twists your life to guarantee  it’s continuance.

all the while you are blissfully unaware of this organism that’s planted itself  waiting to spring a surprise.

failed attempts.

continue.

continue.

continue.

hollow promises and false hope.

rock bottom.

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The India series of books

Over the past 1 year I’ve read the following books that I would group under India Series. They made me realize how little I know about my country and it’s people and most importantly I’ve never lived in Bombay/Mumbai.  This list will be constantly updated as I keep discovering more books.

I call it discovering a book because I never read book reviews ever. I walk into the library/book store scan shelves, first read the titles, check out the author’s name; see if the name draws any recollections from memory, gloss over the cover art, read jacket-in flap, read 10 or so pages ( because it’s a very time consuming and deep commitment) if I like what i read, i pick the book. All books i’ve read have been hand picked in this manner; the selection never disappoints. 

Also, RIP Steve Jobs.

_____________

By Aravind Adiga

• The White Tiger
• Between the Assassinations
• Last Man in Tower

By Rohinton Mistry

• Such a Long Journey
• A Fine Balance

By Manil Suri

• The Death of Vishnu
• The Age of Shiva.

By Suketu Mehta

• Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

By Gregory David Roberts

• Shantaram

By Vikram Chandra

• Love and Longing in Bombay
• Sacred Games
• Red Earth and Pouring Rain

By Amitav Ghosh

• The Hungry Tide
• Sea of poppies

By Anand Giridharadas

• India Calling

By Shashi Tharoor

• The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone

By Katherine Frank

• Indira Gandhi

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Almighty Nature

So here I was at the Niagara falls finally. You would think for someone who lives in NYC i would have already been to the falls but you see expeditions like these need fortitude. Over the four years I’ve been in the city many people promised to include me in their entourage for a trip; no one did.

So here I was gaping in amazement at the sheer size of the falls when it struck me how minuscule man is compared to the forces of nature.
Man may be tiny compared to the falls but he did dam it and build a thriving tourist eco system around it.

also this is the first post via the blogger app for iPhone. Makes it so easy to post from the loo.

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Must read classic authors

After barely managing to scrape the 50 books challenge last year I’ve set my sights higher this time. I am embarking on a literary quest to complete reading 100 books between October 2011 to October 2012.
 

         image from mike faille illustration

This time around I will try to finish at least one book by the following authors available in the NYPL‘s ‘classics’ aisle . Will be listing progress here –>  http://read-ing.tumblr.com/

Chinua Achebe
Jane Austen
Sherwood Anderson
Isabel Allende
Margret Atwood
Albert Camus
Mikhail Bulgakov
James Baldwin
Honore De Balzac
Pere Goriot
Charlotte Bronte
Pearl S Buck
Miguel de Cervantes
Geoffrey Chaucer
Anton Chekhov
Willa Cather
Kate Chopin
Stephen Crane
Joseph Conrad
Truman Capote
James Fenimore Cooper
Charles Dickens
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
E.L.Doctorow
Theodore Dreiser
Daniel Defoe
Bram Stoker
Aurthur Conan Doyle
Theodore Dreiser
Web Du Bois
Alexander Dumas
George Eliot
E M Forster
Ralph Elision
Louis Edwards
William Faulkner
F Scott Fitzgerald
Howard Fast
Gustave Flaubert
William Golding
Nikolai Sogol
R L Stevenson
Jane Hamilton
Earnest J Gaines
Fred Gipson
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Thomas Hardy
Joseph Heller
Herman Hesse
Langston Hughes
Earnest Hemingway
Robert a Heinlein
O Henry
S E Hinton
Victor Hugo
Karen hesse
John irving
Henry James
Zora Neale Hurst
James Weldon Johnson
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Ken Kesey
Daniel Keyes
Sue Monk Kidd
D H Lawrence
Gaston Leroux
Sinclair Lewis
Jack London
Theresa Lewis
Nadezda Obradovic
Sir Thomas Malory
Herman Melville
Thomas Mann
Toni Morrison
George Orwell
Lucy maud Montgomery
Naguib Mahfouz
Somerset Maugham
Frank Norris
Baroness Orczy
Sylvia Plath
Chaim Potok
Alan Paton
Gordon Parks
Marcel Proust
Ayn Rand
Erich Maria Remarque
J D Salinger
Sir Walter Scott
Mary Shelly
April Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
John Steinbeck
Betty Smith
Gertude Stein
Stendhal
Harriet Beecher Stowe
William Saroyan
Ivan Turgenev
Theodore Taylor
W M Thackeray
Tolkein
Mark Twain
Leo Tolstoy
Jules Verne
H G Wells
Alice Walker
T H White
Edith Wharton
Virginia Wolfe
Richard Wright 

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Have a Nice Day

Greed.

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”  ― Mahatma Gandhi.

I see greedy people, everywhere. 

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kibosh.

May be someday when the spirit of writing smiles back at me I’ll visit this space again. For now complete focus is on making something meaningful out of  this. It may not grow up to be the mighty  banyan I’ve envisioned in my mind but will try nevertheless.

 

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my favorite comedy shows

I prefer TV shows with a running time under 30 minutes for I have the attention span of a flea.  

a constantly updating list…

30 Rock
Arrested Development
Blue Mountain State
Bored to Death
Bob’s Burgers
Californication
Community
Freaks and Geeks
Futurama
Greek
How I Met Your Mother
Human Giant
Men of a Certain Age
Modern Family
Seinfeld
Southpark
Scrubs
The Middle
The Simpsons
The Big Bang Theory
The Daily Show with John Stewart
The Colbert Report
Workaholics
Weeds

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A walk in the woods by Bill Bryson

if you know ‘yours truly’ on a personal basis and have been keeping up with my twitter and fb photo streams you should know how deeply i lust to walk the Appalachian trail, someday, in this life time or the next. So during one of my cubicle-life stress induced hiking wet dream i came across this post on reddit. And as is habit skimming through the comments section I saw someone mention the book that is the title of this post. A few nifty clicks on the NYPL site delivered the book to my hands in a day.  Neck deep into the book the yearning to walk the trail grows even more.

Bill Bryson is an amazing author. Funny, insightful and sarcastic. A win on all three counts.

sample this :

“Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new boots and come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head or dripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice, “Bear!” before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.”

The book is littered with such many gems. Totally worth your time even if hiking the AT is not on your bucket list.

‘…When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the four aces diner talking about fearsome things done out-of-doors, i would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly sniff ” Yeah, I’ve shit in the woods.” ‘

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on books and dad

The other day dad was clearing out our old apartment to lease it out when he chanced upon my treasure trove of books. Instead of selling them off to the raddhi wala along with the newspapers he stacked them neatly into cartons and shipped them off to our native place in Srikakulam. He then called me.

“ You read so many books ?”

that should explain why I knew jack regarding kinematics and dynamics of machines or the whole sea of mechanical engineering for that matter.

“Reading books is a very good habit, I agree. But why are all those books novels/comics/fiction ? aka not even anywhere close to work or life skills ?”

dad… they appeal to me more than gears or friction between ball bearings.

“ Do you write as well or only read ?”

mmmm….

“But, but, you should write no ? Why read all those books if you cant write meaningful inferences from what you’ve read? Write research papers/editorials/Wikipedia articles, create a niche for yourself  no ? ”

Let me think about it.

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Shakespeare in the park

After an online lottery system proclaimed m and me lucky winners of two tickets to SITP and an evening fraught with transit woes and wrong directions I finally made it to the open air theatre. Now the New York Shakespeare Festival is a tradition as old as the the first published issue of Sports Illustrated magazine.

This was my first time at a play and I walked in with zero expectations.

I was blown away.

Measure For Measure.

You know fine, no, brilliant acting when you see it. All the actors were brilliant in their Respective roles ; even the guy masquerading as the devil and prancing around in black hot pants. A special mention about the monologue where the magistrate talks to his inner devils us a class act. A measure of measure has been copied tirelessly in many of our desi films. If you are not well grounded in Shakespearean English like me Wikipedia is of immense help with regards to understanding the synopsis.A special mention about the background score and lighting which just added to the finesse.

At the start if the play we were all told to switch off our phones and that no photography or video recording was allowed. And strangely the audience predominately made up of locals fell in line. This was an important aspect in order to have the undivided attention of the audience towards the happenings on stage.

I muse how this play must have been when it was first dramatized during Shakespeare time when most of the special effects bling we are so used to now dint exist. Special effects are in my two cents worth opinion are tinsel or specious. The real life and soul are the actors. Each scene was so perfect. The ability to emote mannerisms and voice modulation.

Kudos to the directors .

Exposure to different tenets of culture like these is one more reason to <3 NYC.

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Better to die in the flower of youth, on the chance of winning a noble name, than to live at ease like the sheep, and die unloved and unrenowned.

“I am Pallas Athené and I know the thoughts of all men’s hearts, and discern their manhood or their baseness. And from the souls of clay I turn away; and they are blest, but not by me. They fatten at ease, like sheep in the pasture, and eat what they did not sow, like oxen in the stall. They grow and spread, like the gourd along the ground: but, like the gourd, they give no shade to the traveller; and when they are ripe death gathers them, and they go down unloved into hell, and their name vanishes out of the land.

But to the souls of fire I give more fire, and to those who are manful I give a might more than man’s. These are the heroes, the sons of the Immortals, who are blest, but not like the souls of clay. For I drive them forth by strange paths, Perseus, that they may fight the Titans and the monsters, the enemies of Gods and men. Through doubt and need, danger and battle, I drive them; and some of them are slain in the flower of youth, no man knows when or where; and some of them win noble names, and a fair and green old age; but what will be their latter end I know not, and none, save Zeus, the father of Gods and men. Tell me now, Perseus, which of these two sorts of men seem to you more blest?

Then Perseus answered boldly: “Better to die in the flower of youth, on the chance of winning a noble name, than to live at ease like the sheep, and die unloved and unrenowned.”

For my mother, the silver-footed goddess Thetis, tells me
that two-fold fates are bearing me towards the doom of death.
If staying here I wage battle around the city of the Trojans,
my return home is lost, but my fame will not perish;
but if I go home to my dear fatherland,
my noble fame is lost, but long-lasting my life
will be, and the doom of death will not soon find me.

- Homer, Iliad 9.410-416 (spoken by Achilles)

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