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Showing posts from July, 2020

The Creaking Chair - Part XVIII

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24th August  1999 Today evening was a surprise for me Kamal came and sat besides me on the sofa  and slowly he rest his head on my lap and lay down there Though he makes it a point that he spends at least an hour with me daily either during my morning ritual of reading the newspaper  or the evening time when we have the badminton matches  he rarely shows any sign of such sentimentality To start with I was worried  I did not know what was going through his mind but I knew he was tired, I could sense that in the way his body weighed on my legs it was as if he was letting go of all his the weight he was carrying  I started to speak, but then I saw his eyes were closed  like he was in thinking of something old  reliving a memory I should not infringe on He has been troubled for sometime now  I guess its been a couple of months – it shows on his face  and the way he goes inside his shell when he is troubled even as a child he used to be highly impressionable  but selective on whose impressi

The Creaking Chair - Part XVII

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12th November 1999 One of the first books I picked up as a kid was a random cover about the Greek Gods – and I was hooked It was my first tryst with books other than my school books and I was only a 11 year old kid, so obviously I was excitable I used to go around asking people in the middle of a conversation  ‘what is your favourite book?’ – more like a hook for them to ask me the same thing,  irrespective of whatever they answered  And I would go on describing how I had found this book which described the history & mythology of Greek Gods and how they should definitely pick it up – of course I don’t remember the author ! The sheer pleasure of getting hooked to words, I guess coupled with the innocence of a child  But somewhere my love for mythological characters, superheroes, Demi-Gods & super-villains with mythical powers originated from that innocent choice of book And this is one of the reasons that I went to the Norway well the allure of ‘Northern Lights’ came much later

The Creaking Chair - Part XVI

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The Creaking Chair – Part XVI 15 th  June 1999 I have not been writing for the last 2 weeks It is not the pattern I generally follow  The last time I stopped writing my journal was when I was in the prison but I had a sharper memory at that time  so could remember all my thoughts to be filled in the journal later The last 2 weeks were different though I caught some infection and felt horribly weak  it started as a throat infection & then started having chills & fever lasted 2 weeks, but now I feel better  but these days took me back to the times when I was writing my PhD thesis There were so many topics I had shortlisted and one of them which I had let go was “The true value of time” But had done quite a lot of work around the topic I found the entire idea of having a currency called ‘time’ quite absurd and fascinating at the same time how it controls everything we do – it has possibly the most control over our lives than anything else does We invented time to ensure we have mo

The Creaking Chair - Part XV

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   30th November 1986 I like Suzanne But the only thing which we can speak of now-a-days  revolves around politics and the shift in world power  discussing if it is for the good or bad ; of the country, the people and more importantly world in general Now you would think that this is good  Conversations with substance and not just idle love making  That sounds like a relationship to look out for Well if I were to compare myself and my interest in politics to any species in the Animal Kingdom apart from the Homo Sapiens I would come closest to a Panda or a Polar Bear  And she would be the Chimp or the Bee or the Ant   So it’s not really a fair match And well to be frank, I am not apolitical I am aware of the nitty-gritties’ of the left wing and the right wing ideology And all that rhetoric which falls in between  I also have a well defined process of assimilating the political opinion  and the art of political warfare  But what I am not comfortable with is carrying my political belief o

The Creaking Chair – Part XIV

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11th July 1999 “I am writing to you in a state of unbridled passion I have intoxicated myself on poetries from Pablo Neruda  and the 90’s Bollywood love songs  Remember how you found my love for ‘Zara Zara’ from RHTDM  to be hopelessly romantic ! I am in one of those moods right now  And it’s pouring outside completing the setting for reminiscence It’s funny how in spite of calling myself a poet, I have never written many letters to you  That is supposed to be the thing with lovers who are poets, right? Wasn’t that my biggest pull when I tried to woo you?  Oh those were the days ! The butterflies in the stomach, the incessant checking for text messages Do you even know how many times, I wrote an entire poetry  just because I wanted to tell you something  and was too shy to speak to you directly How far have we come from there From writing messages through my words  to concealing messages between my words  and you