The Looong road

Its only now, after a whole year, that I am finally listening to tracks from the new(not-so-new now) Eagles album and I am simply hooked to the title track, Long Road Out of Eden. Took me a couple of listens, and here was the nextgen Hotel California..haunting to the core. Kudos, albiet late, to the legends!

Moon shining down through the palms
Shadows moving on the sand
Somebody whispering the twenty-third Psalm
Dusty rifle in his trembling hands
Somebody trying just to stay alive
He got promises to keep
Over the ocean in America
Far away and fast asleep.

Silent stars blinking in the blackness of an endless sky
Cold silver satellites, ghostly caravans passing by
Galaxies unfolding; new worlds being born
Pilgrims and prodigals creeping toward the dawn
But it's a long road out of Eden.

Music blasting from an SUV
On a bright and sunny day
Rolling down the interstate
In the good ol' USA
Having lunch at the petroleum club
Smoking fine cigars and swapping lies
"Gimme 'nother slice of that barbecued brisket!"
"Gimme 'nother piece of that pecan pie"

Freeways flickering, cell phones chiming a tune
We're riding to Utopia; road map says we'll be arriving soon
Captains of the old order clinging to the reins
Assuring us these aches inside are only growing pains
But it's a long road out of Eden

Back home, I was so certain; the path was very clear
But now I have to wonder - what are we doing here?
I'm not counting on tomorrow and I can't tell wrong from right
But I'd give anything to be there in your arms tonight

Weaving down the American highway
Through the litter and the wreckage, and the cultural junk
Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda
Now we're driving dazed and drunk

Went down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay
Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way
He said, "It's hard to stop this binging once you get a taste
But the road to empire is a bloody, stupid waste"

Behold the bitten apple - the power of the tools
But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools
And it's a long road out of Eden

The day maxaud's photo got published in Nat Geo's daily dozen.

Thoughts

The sun shining outside does nothing to stop him,
And the light burning inside is barely a flicker.
He continues forth, wrapping all around him in bright darkness.
The flicker lasted, but a moment.
When he can envelop the sun himself one day, what are we mere mortals!

They say time heals it all!
But maybe time ain't that good a doctor; Or is it me who is a bad patient.
They say sorrows are to be divided;
But the pot still has remnants -
Crumbs that can only be nibbled, a tiny millionth of a morsel at a time,
wearing away a part of you along with it.

The land of the lion.

There are different ways in which people react to places. The mumbaikers I meet, for instance, either hate bombay vehemently or love it passionately, I havent met a neutral bombayite so far. Bangaloreans are different. They dont mind being neutral (if you choose to ignore the traffic aspect). But whoever I've met before going to Singapore had one of two things to tell me

1. Four months, what ever will you do there for that long? It takes just 4 days to see the place!

2. Singapore..There's nothing to do there but for the excellent food! And yes, the work culture isnt all that great, you'll end up being in office most of the time.

And with that notion in mind, I had embarked on a journey expecting to find a miniscule manhattan, full of skyscrapers, zombie-like office goers. That does indeed sum-up the whole city-country, but there's more to it than just skyscrapers. There is lush greenery around most of the areas. It is even one of the very few cities in the world, that has a rainforest right in the heart of the city. There are zombie office goers ofcourse, but they turn into normal people during the weekends, representing a molecule of whichever country they are originally from. Singapore made me feel at home even in the ultra modern underground tubes because one could hear the familiar "pazhanigal ..." announcements in tamil that I could rattle away by-heart after my year's stint in chennai. India is known for its diversity, where regardless of state or language, people celebrate festivals together. In Singapore, they are one step ahead; it is even beyond your race. You can see the ethnic chinese children dressed up in kurtis celebrating Deepavali, the ethnic Indian's eating mooncakes during the Autumn festival because for them dark-skinned or not, they are all singaporeans all speaking the same language - Singlish(which interestingly is very much like English. You just have to gulp down the last letters of most words and replace all harsh sounds with an "ah").

But beyond all, I loved the city for something else. Something that I would never be able to experience had i not accepted the trip. The feeling of being safe. That is inherent in the place. One can raise humanitarian concerns over the punishments dealt out to law offenders there, but ultimately the effect is the feeling of complete security. That which lets me go for a walk to the nearby lake on a moonlit night all by myself.. that makes it possible for me to walk back home with my roommate at 2.00 am in the morning after a late night show, kicking the stones along the pavement.. that makes me take lonely roads without being struck with the paranoia of encountering a creep in the next lane. So, the next time someone gets all whiny, blaming Singapore for being a nothing city, one without a heritage or a history, I'll think twice before nodding my head. For it was the city that made me experience all those things I wanted to do, but could never do before just because I was a lady. And "its never safe for ladies".

Majulah Singapura!

The view across the esplanade on National Day



Fort Canning

And finally... the web comes home!!

And these are a few of my favourite....

Am in the middle of watching two sequels, one after the other, back to back. Movies stuffed with food for thought. enough for philosophical ramblings.Before Sunrise and Before sunset. Both excellent ones, though one was slightly watered down by a mutilated cd.. But no, not delving into all of those, a dialogue from the movie struck me.. A portion where the character just feels scared that her life might not be long enough to do all the things that she wanted.. And it just set me a little thinking.. in the sense about what are the things that i would yearn to complete if someone suddenly gave me a timeframe to live. A few things I can think about on the spur..
1. Finish reading the entire set of books at home and read all of Kafka's and Murakami's works.
2. Visit the english countryside, scotland and wales(the blyton effect I guess)
3. Trek to wild destinations(inspired by the lil veteran amongst us)
4. Learn salsa..
5. Be able to bake rolls, all sorts of cakes, muffins. Hmm, i love the smell of bakes fresh out of the oven.. Its this nice warm feeling, envelopes the whole house.

Writings from Tokyo

Prologue: And after a really long break, (I live in a tranquil place away from the bust of city life.. to be read as a place with no entry to the cyberspace), I've decided to atleast relive my poor lil bluggie. There've been a couple of half penned write-ups that i've been scrapping in the back of books, pieces of paper so that some day i might be able to blog it. And now that i m actually able to blog i have no idea where to start from, do i continue chronologically... but giving time no heed, I decide to write about my latest awe..something i've been dying to write about.

"A dwarf came into my dream and asked me to dance. I knew this was a dream, but I was just as tired in my dream as in real life at the time. So, very politely, I declined..."

And so begins The Little Dwarf, from Haruki Murakami's repertoire of short stories. I believe(& I have mentioned this before) that narration is what makes up a good piece of writing. Creativity & fabrication sometimes just open the door and take a backseat. You can have an inborn talent that brings out vivid, colourful tales but unless there is an orator in you, I believe you are stunted. This is exactly what I think Murakami's works are not, atleast the ones I have read so far. An imaginative raconteur in the true sense of the word, the stories from The Elephant Vanishes make you lean back, close your eyes and soak up each of his lines, like relishing each spoonful of dark chocolate mousse. Kudos to the brilliant translation by Jay Rubin and Alfred Birnbaum. He seems to have inherited the forte and flair of the flamboyant(when it comes to inventiveness) Kafka and is very rightly dubbed as the protege of the brain that created the nonpareil Metamorphosis and similar stories.

The above quoted line was so surreal, i read it out aloud to max the other day. It was soo probable, so.. deja vuish. It was like someone had popped in to one of my dreams and recorded it and had actually edited & published the whole thing. All the stories in the collection are first-person accounts, "The Dancing Dwarf" has all the essence of a modern fairy tale, while "Window" is about a guy who works in a pen-club answering letters from lonely members yearning to get out of their mundane lives atleast through a few words. And then there is the title story "The Elephant Vanishes" about how an elephant and its mahout magically disappears one night from the elephant house. The others like "Family affair", "The little green monster", "My second Bakery attach" are equally impressive. My personal favourite however, is "Sleep".. about a wife, who loses herself & her priorities in her family without realizing so, and how she regains her hobbies when after a certain incident she fails to fall asleep in the night. During the day, she resumes her normal routine, while during the night she goes into her world, where she can go back to her books and resume each of her lost past times.

And thus, you live thru each of his stories. You are there listening to the characters talk to you, feeling the same emotions, ready to speak those very sentences penned. Each story is a philosophy in itself. Content with my little appetizer, I reach out for the next book, 'Kafka on the Shore'.

Some More...
A few more snaps from that day with a lot of time. It's just struck me that i ended up taking photographs of just flowers, Probably because there were a lot of them in the room. This ones from the "uruli" in the centre of the room(TS, both are with ISO 400), I had to spent some time(and money) trying to find flowers for the uruli because it was already getting late and most of the florists had either closed for the day or had withered flowers... I did have this brilliant idea of painting those lil mud diyas and float them in the uruli, but somehow(read as lazy) ended up with the flowers.

It was one of those sleepy mondays where office is the last thing that you would like to see.(And yes ofcourse, i did have this severe back pain, which usually tags along with most of us in the software industry)

Well, coming back to the day, cooking and cleaning all done, i still had a lot of time to while away. That and the availability of a 512MB memory stick and a camera at hand, resulted in this photograph. Now I am not even anywhere close to an amateur here, so no expectations from the snap.

Home Rule..

An avid fan that i am of Shashi Tharoor, spared myself some time to read a few of his recent articles. Each one struck a chord and made me unconsciously nod my head to what he had to say, but a particular one, with a catchy title had me feeling proud. An article published in 2005, titled "Kalyanikutty's Kerala". He goes on to stress how the women in kerala were always educated and forward in their thinking even in the 19th century. Cant deny that the feminist in me wasnt evoked, but more than that, the article makes you feel good, proud of being born in a state where a woman ruler decreed that "the State should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment among them, that by diffusion of education they might become better subjects and public servants" and all the governments followed till date.

Painting our house.......... Part 2
Had mentioned earlier that i'd post a pic of the house once its done. For all those ppl who are wondering if the colors really went into the house, most of it still did. Not on the walls but more or less everywhere.

Classics from the land of the rising sun.

Got a chance to see Rashomon from home - My first Kurosawa movie, having missed the screening of "Dreams" at collective chaos. The film is about how a single incident is described by four different people with totally contrasting endings. A wayside robber, lured by the beauty of the young wife of a warrior crossing the woods attacks the couple and assaults the lady. Her husband gets killed. This episode has four different endings, as told by the robber, the wife, the spirit of the deadman and a wood-cutter passing-by, each one showing the warrior being killed by different people. The director has not revealed the actual event but just left it as four different versions. Each person chose to tailor the story to his/her vagaries. The movie has been taken without too many frills and the narration has not crossed that fine line which separates vivid portrayal from boring exhaustive detail.

What struck me most about the movie is the way it has brought out that unavoidable aspect of human nature, how each one of us consciously or unconsciously add on to or delete seemingly insignificant incidents that happen everyday. Be it typing something like i am doing write now to miniscule things like mentioning the time, we all do tend to lie..or rather to avoid such a strong word, formulate our own truths. All in all, the movie really set me thinking. Not a must watch, but if you are in the habit of exploring movies, it is worth a sitting.

Speaking of movies, I missed The Hitchiker's guide and The Schindler's list, both of which i really did want to see.

From the road...

Had been to my Uncle's house last evening. Knew they had a young guest when I saw a gleaming thunderbird, literally tethered to the gate outside, unless ofcourse my "in-their-late-sixties" uncle and aunt decided it was time to exhaust the remaining adrenalin in their bodies and freak out! The truth turned out to be less exciting as usual and I met the visitor, their son's friend,a British guy of Indian descent, with a very "propuh" accent who was out to explore India in an Enfield. Reminded me of Che and Granado on their Norton(Ref-1). This guy started out from Kashmir, journeyed across Leh, Himachal, Punjab, Haryana covering almost all the states in the western half of the country. These adventures always sets me thinking. I would love to travel,given an opportunity which again brings me back to the same question, don't v have to create our opportunities?? Y is it that abroad ppl follow their dreams..Y is it that you can take out a car and set out in the US but not in India? Is it just my perspective? The first answer that comes to my mind is ofcourse, the basic of all basic necessities,the pieces of processed papyrus called "money". But very honestly, is that the only factor or are v just not too certain of getting out of that warm cocoon? I really dont know.

Ref1 - The Motorcycle Diaries. I have been totally fascinated by that book!!!

Note1 - Also came to know that Dec 26 is "Boxing Day". My benightedness made me wonder if that had anything to do with Boxing. Fortunately, it doesn't say that here.

Painting my house.. Yellow, green, blue, red...

First things first, the title should have been "our" and not "my".. Apologies, max!!

Spent the whole of today afternoon wasting company bandwidth and resource in doing exactly what the title says..trying to decide colors for our flat.

Wanted to post a pic of it - a raw structure of bricks, mortar, cement and paint, as it looked the first time we saw it. But due to lack of space in a 16MB memory stick, i am unable to do so. Hopefully, by God's grace, i'll be able to post a pic of the flat, when it is no longer just a flat but a dear lil home!!

The roots..

Had been to school last weekend. There is a plethora of emotions lost in that one word - School, to be more precise Chinmaya Vidyalaya, Kannur. Spent my adolescence there, the latter half of my teens, witnessing my idiosyncracies, my change from a whimsical teenager to a person caught between adulthood and teenage, petrified yet inquisitive and eager to face the world. The Class of 98, as one of our teachers very sweetly remembered us as, was one of the best batches the school had(is that a compliment, hmm... :)), she said not because v were academic oriented or anything but because we had our share of fun which they still like to talk about and reminisce.. and believe me, those words touched the soul. Thank you my dear miss rasika. We enjoyed your classes too, the debates, the discussions .. on topics ranging from school shoes to beauty contests anything anything but studies!!

Being a saturday there were not many teachers, but that warmth, that wholehearted smile, that cheerful wave on recognition brings back so many memories. The petition that all of us had signed against the introduction of wednesday uniforms, the arts fest, the children's week, the "house" spirit,those huge gatherings at our houses, the days when i had literally burned the midnight oil practising for the orchestra at vij's place..oh yes, we had a great time.

Our visit was however earmarked with a not too pleasant one hour tour of the new tech campus inside the school premises. We were compelled to hear about the servers and the softwares that they used, the head of the tech institute started switching over to stronger technical terms as he was talking to "software engineers from infy and wipro"(kinda reminds me of the sentence CID's from India..:)), little did he know that the firewalls and the software and the protocols were not even grazing my head!!! But other than the forced tour which made us forget to go see the new swimming pool(yes, max i did want to see that), it did turn out to be a pleasant trip, not as embarassing as i expected it would be. A day well spent!

And before i conclude, chinmayites, another piece of info - the entire school campus is now Wi-Fi!!! I tried to find out a link on the school but could just find this instead. http://www.chintech.ac.in/

Avenues left unexplored..till now

Read the book "entuppuppaakkoraanandaayrnnu" by Vaikkam Mohammed Basheer.. Dont consider myself worthy of giving an opinion about it and there are several reasons for this; the foremost one being the shameful fact that this is the first book in malayalam that i've read, inspite of being a malayalee and being in kerala for almost the whole of my 9000 days on the planet and the second, as a corollary to the first, that i would not be capable of judging a letter written in malayalam leave alone a book(I can feel the contempt on the faces of people when they read this.)

About the book.. I would probably not do it enough justice if i gave a preview here, it has to be read to be enjoyed. About the author, well, he is known for his brash, bold and blunt colloquial writing and I must admit it is pretty amusing to read malayalam the way its actually spoken in North Kerala. Witty and acerbic in his real life as well, Mohammed Basheer or the 'Beypore Sultan' as he is fondly remembered had dipped his hand in the freedom struggle as well, which again is an act very much attributed to his contemporaries like Vayalar Rama Varma, P Bhaskaran, Thakazhi Sivasankaran Pillai, who characterise the crux of Malayalam Literature.

Signing off here, hoping that sometime i would be eligible to write a few words on other great books written in my "mother tongue", the word we indians very often use to refer to our native languages.

The Bells start to toll..

Wedding bells.. what else. Just a lil more than 5 weekends and lo, the day arrives. (Err, max.. maybe u ought not to read more, not good for the heart i say :), the "lola hridayam" )

And how do i feel?? Let me be try to be true to myself here. Anticipation..Yes, that was the mood this weekend, that is till yday. The spirit of the whole affair, the fanfare, the streamers, the works came swooshing down the moment i stepped into dear 'ol kannur. The cards, the flowers, the decor.. Colourful clothes, glittering accompaniments and what not. The planning, the ordering, the list just goes on and on and on. The girl in me ruled over the woman. But yes, you did read it right, i did write "till yday". Because last nite, a cold night up in the hills, nerves came on.. breaking the speed limit knocking me off totally!! That feeling, when reality pops up suddenly, your sensiblity gets aroused and you begin to wonder "what the hell is going to happen??". The sanguiness just disappeared round the bend that the bus took. The house, the wedding, the money all shrunk into my head spinning it on and on and on.. (Max, smelling salts???)

And then you realize why you need to work.. to pay the bills and loan ofcourse!!!:) No, not just that.. I can crib about work for hours on, but sometimes it does do wonders. It takes that dark cloud away from your head. Puts you in a space where its just you, your cubicle and an annoying piece of code, alienates all other hustles that kept you occupied, troubles you through the day with phone calls and specs. But at the end of the day, it makes a difference, it makes every little thing, that past weekend at home, the book left unfinished, that long deep sleep and the tingle of excitement at tying the knot seem so much more dearer, so much more treasured..

Before i start my first blog here, it is fitting that i do give a small teeny weeny little prologue, atleast to be true to my blog title.. My first blog is about one of my fav authors. I was browsing through that ocean of optical fibres and communication channels, or the internet as it is known to us, on one of those many jobless days when i came across this particular review and the moment i read it, i thought i must blog abt this...i happened to have a newly created account in blogspot and so here it goes...

No "Clowning" affair...

A writer’s brilliance, without saying, goes in his ability to arouse the reader’s curiosity. Each page should tell you "hold on, there's more". The one person who has somehow unceasingly never failed to invoke my interest with his narrative skills is Shashi Tharoor, be it his books or his reviews. His non-fiction seems to have a created a deeper impression. Some of his fiction works, Riot for instance, doesnot have an out of the way plot, but as I said before he has this knack of just letting you flow along with the book. Sometimes that is the very reason why you do need a book, to just transport you, for a moment into that place, that incident, in an otherwise prosaic day.

The latest work or rather article of his that I have come across is his review on “Shalimar the Clown”. It would be an understatement to say that Tharoor is pro-rushdie. His revere for Rushdie is clearly transparent whenever he mentions the “Booker of all Bookers” winner, the "fatwa"ed writer. And it is pretty much inescapable in this review as well. To add to the fact that this is the first favourable review of the latest edition from Rushdie’s pen. Tharoor has successfully managed to outline the better angles of the book- "Shalimar is a novel of mourning, not least for the loss of the Kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness), which Rushdie so lovingly evokes in his portrait of idyllic village life..