LOL

Found this while trolling the net:

In an office:
AFTER TEA BREAK STAFF SHOULD EMPTY THE TEAPOT AND STAND UPSIDE DOWN ON THE DRAINING BOARD

-In an office:
WOULD THE PERSON WHO TOOK THE STEP LADDER YESTERDAY PLEASE BRING IT BACK OR FURTHER STEPS WILL BE TAKEN

-In an office:
TOILET OUT OF ORDER......PLEASE USE FLOOR BELOW

-In a Laundromat:
AUTOMATIC WASHING MACHINES: PLEASE REMOVE ALL YOUR CLOTHES WHEN THE LIGHT GOES OUT

-In a London department store:
BARGAIN BASEMENT UPSTAIRS

-Outside a secondhand shop:
WE EXCHANGE ANYTHING - BICYCLES, WASHING MACHINES, ETC. WHY NOT BRING YOUR WIFE ALONG AND GET A WONDERFUL BARGAIN?

-Notice in health food shop window:
CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS

-Spotted in a safari park:
ELEPHANTS PLEASE STAY IN YOUR CAR

-Notice in a farmer's field:
THE FARMER ALLOWS WALKERS TO CROSS THE FIELD FOR FREE ,BUT THE BULL CHARGES.

-On a repair shop door:
WE CAN REPAIR ANYTHING. (PLEASE KNOCK HARD ON THE DOOR - THE BELL DOESN'T WORK)

Singing for the lonely...

Saw Visconti's Death in Venice. Committed the sin of turning up for the movie an hour late. Covering a twenty minute road in forty five, I was thinking once in a while what it would be like if I went out and beat the living daylights out of the people manning the traffic. Then thought that was way too manic even for me. When got to Gorky Sadan finally, there was friend giggling away for some absurd reason. Felt strange: if I'm late, she may be pissed with me, but what pervert giggles when they are angry? Well, it was on Visconti's account
I am an absolute anari regarding cinema but I still say that the movie is weird. Aschenbach was weird, so was Tadziu. At times it seemed like a very sorry melodrama. Visconti must be greatly revered by film-makers but I shall have to watch better stuff of his before I can get close to liking him even rudimentarily.
Feel very lonely now. Went to JU today after, like, a month. Didn't go to the department. But there was an excuse-like thing for that. Had come for library clearance, then got into a hurry to go courier hunting with friend at Hazra. That was a tiny adventure which I think the friend felt more keenly, having left home at 7 in the day.
Anyway, I feel consciously lonely today after what seems like ages. Atodin, days were an endless routine of getting info., filing story. Today, I was at this beloved place, with much-esteemd friend, eating, lolling around, whiling time, like had done for the last five years.
Day's jaunt ended today with more of lolling. We walked from Rabindra Sadan metro station, beyond the momo joints towards this crossing (getting really vague now), turned right. After walking a little, we found this stone seat, slab really and sat there, under this orange street lamp. In front, on the other footpath, there was this building, and we could see inside the flat on the first floor- pink walls, ashbab, lamp-shades on wall, a trinket or two hung up. Quiet. Lots of bustle, but in that patch where we sat, it seemed really comfortable to me. Then some people passed by. They spoke loudly, even across us, but it didn't cut into our chat at all.
I wonder how frequently we shall continue to do this?
We are four of us, tres amies. And all on the brink, just starting out on life. And this tentativeness, poised in between two worlds, is so quiet, so nice. I love it for us, know that we'll make good. Yet there are these things that I have enjoyed so much, and I want to keep them. I fear that me being me, I won't somehow manage to do that.
Today was how I love it. Felt more alive today just hanging out in an environment that agrees with me so utterly, more than any coup I might affect for myself at work. JU one so often takes for granted. While you are there, it seems difficult to conceive a point when it will not be enveloping your existence.
Work's a high. but JU is like the assurance of home.

with this blogspot ban fiasco, i seem to have lost some of my posts. that's bloody disgusting, i tell you.

another day

what a day.
NOTHING HAPPENED!
save CONFUSION, CONFUSION, AND MORE CONFUSION.
Over job thingy.
Saw Visconti's White Nights. Some of it was nice but I am expecting better. There's a retrospective of Visconti on at Gorky Sadan, followed by Rosselini. Hope to catch Death in Venice. Found this good news site www.hardnewsmedia.com. Can we ever be writing like this? Say things for what they are worth instead of trying to paint an evenly painting a placid, toned-down picture of everything?

post

Wanted to put this down:

Chatwin's elusiveness about his sexuality appears to have had an impact on his writing style as well. As The London Sunday Times Books noted, "his polished prose subtly distanced him; yet their blend of intellectual passion and emotional coldness, the postmodern glitter of surface and patchwork, shorn of all authorial judgment, provoked widespread curiosity about his life."
The writer Salman Rushdie, a loyal friend, described Chatwin's complex sexuality as "the creature at the perimeter prowling around. All this fantastic entertainment and language and originality and erudition and display [was] a kind of hedge against not letting out the truth."

One way of looking at things.

Laughter and Forgetting

My friend was using my cell with her sim card, so ended up losing some messages which I'd stored so I could always have them. Since they are no longer there, here's the best place to transfer them.
My fav. fantasy once used to be how it would be if a dear one died. Since baba, I live in fear. Death isn't something you play around in your imagination. I don't get it at all, and if I have to talk about it, I shall do so with respect. Wish it wasn't that, that you mind your way out of fear. Coz the frivolity about death is only a way of dealing with the fear and incomprehension of it, and even grants a more genuine respect than fear ever could. But I'm a little bogged down by what happened. It'll take a bit of time, I guess.

Well for the sms es:

"There's somethung about the continent that's just akin to Bruce"- I sent that one.

"Si si"- that's her, going into paroxysms of approval


It had occurred to me while reading The Songlines. Was reading Utz and looking at Chatwin's pic yesterday. He looked so beautiful, fragile and self-contained. And kinda peeved. Jerry Bauer's photograph. Wonder who he was.
And again you have to wonder why he had to die at 49. There's no logic to explain this. But what am I saying. And it's a totally ruthless platitude to say that his, or baba's or anybody else's for that matter, that there work in this life was done and so they, so to speak, bowed out of life. In my fallen intelligence, this doesen't console. And sure, despite the blah that faith is that which you don't understand. Dear dear A.da

theoutsider

I think that the fact that i have to access themoon through another domain deserves a rant. But I'll pass it up. My point is the same as the others. Who do you think you are fooling if you think you can stop terrorist activities by muzzling public opinion? Do you think people are such fools as to be taken in by this? Anyway.
i had this to blog:

Fragmnents of Latin conned off my friend:

"cum dustro necavit": killed by a (a blow from a )duster.
"semi-vivo relicto" : literally translated, leave somebody half dead, off the good samaritan parable in the bible.

I used to learn Latin once, spurred by the sudden bursts of enthusiasm I keep getting for things that seem really distant to me. Then I left off in the middle (something I don't like doing), somewhere things were not functioning. With studies at an end, Latin once again seems suitably distant for me to want to take it up again. Well, on a more rational note, Latin is one of the things you better do even if u don't feel the immeiate urge for it cuz u're too stupid to realise how glad u'll be later when it actually opens up to you. And anyway if u plan to make your living off words, it'll stand you in good stead.
And regarding the professional update, potential employer has put himself in doubt regarding his own status as a potential employer.

I am lonely on the Net.

theoutsider

Well. I got the dressing down of my life from this extremely peeved gent on the Net. Which brings you to wonder. I hate writing the way I have been doing recently, in a way, it's a desperation to see how much you can get by. Also that often when you write something you really care for, no one else seems to bother about it.
The guy on the net, though, seems to have fun just to let himself go, and I don't care for that. I don't care much for what I have been writing either, but that's another story.You are writing about something that means much to you, but there isn't time to read up on it, and anyone who thinks that Google is a storehouse of information if you are trying to probe anywhere beyong the surface is sadly mistaken.
It's a mad world when you are running a deadline. I wish meeting it did not involve doing such violence to yourself or to others.

theoutsider

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered, 15
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand, 20
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

The last twist of the knife.

ELIOT, this

le desert

a penny for my thoughts. Anyway, did manage to listen to a lot of pink floyd today. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is really so good.
Some Chatwin that I've been meaning to put up for a while:
"'Alone and amid the nations', masters of the raid, avid for increase yet disgusted by possesions, driven by the fantasy of all travellers to pine for a stable home- no people but the Jews have felt more keenly the moral ambiguities of settlement. Their God is a projection of their perplexity. their Book- the Old Testament and the New- may be read, on one level atleast, as a monumental dialogue between Him and His People in the rights and wrongs of living in the Land."

" Jahweh, in origin, is a God of the Way. His sanctuary is the Mobile Ark, His House a Tent, His Altar a cairn of rough stones. And though he may promise His Children a well-watered land- as blue and green as are a bedouin's favourite colours- He secretly desires for them the Desert."
What is it about the desert that is so mesmerising, or is it the authors? There was Thesiger, who was happiest when he was crossing the Empty Quarter with bin Ghabaisha, and bin Kadina(?). And Ghabaisha was so beautiful. Thesiger must have loved him. Bruce too read Thesiger, not quite sure how he felt about him.
Then there's Ondaatje's English Patient, who personalised Herodotus' Histories(?), keeping the relevant pages and sticking in his own stuff in the others. Also that whole horde of European women, often cross-dressing as men (Vested Interests) who dissapeared into the desert. Many didn't survive. Bruce is a part of this lot. He calls himself 'the sterile wanderer', that post-war despair, looking for answers at cultures that had been subtexted by the West.
That's just by way of remembering facts. Yet I say it cuz I am wondering really at myself. What is it that one loves so much about all of this? can you at all want something that you do not have the potential to achieve? Dream dream dream dream dream- thare's a song that goes this way. and I am thinking all the time how life will shape up to me. When I get my two penny worth of the world's beauty, will I remember to appreciate for what it is worth?
'REGARD THE MOON,
LA LUNE NE GARDE AUCUNE RANCUNE...
THE MOON HAS LOST HER MEMORY.'

To Eliot.

untitled

Met potential employer yesterday. might become an actual employer so that's good. in fact, I quite liked him, now that he has potentially offered me a job. Hope this thing shall work out.

quotes to be remembered

my friend a said "i like my lemons squeezed" or probably "i can squeeze my own lemons"
I said "Will someone hold my banana? I just want to peel off one side."
My friend said, "You both have violent metaphors with fruits."
we stayed over at a's yesterday.

i feel it in my fingers...

I have SENT OFF MY ARTICLE, one hour late, if I may add. now I am going to vindicate my condition by listening to lots of Pink Floyd and trying to open the cd which my friend's written for me. the problem, u see, is that there were two cds in the cover.after she wrote the cd for me, i put it back, without marking it, with the one not written on. Now the cd won't play. my cds usually do after some coaxing. But rite now, I don't even know which one to coax. And it has Jim Croce, Lloyd Webber, Indigo Girls and all those lovely songs from Travis. Also Sisai, which I'd like to get a taste of. So I've reason to be frustrated.I shall try to watch Chamber of Secrets again today. Just some fun. Or else, there's Clockwork Orange waiting for me, or Songlines, and Utz. Hah, I am rich.
More sombrely, will meet potential employer today. Only time will tell where career will go. If only I were sure enough. And that research thingy. Not everyone has something they want to study about. And since I do, can you afford to let it go?

since it's 2a.m...

right. I've scouted blogosphere quite thoroughly (my purview of it, anyway), I have a deadline to meet by 10a.m. tommorow (an article I haven't thought anything about), amar pithe jhijhi dhore gachhe, so I am just in the mood for a post. Why is it that you get this critical urge to blog just when you should not be doing it?Dunno. Who cares. I spoke to this rather famous bangali shahittik today who turned out to be full of himself. Sigh, a chink in every armour, I guess. No one's perfect. Didn't get through to this other famous director, 'not easily accesible', my superior said. Which translates into "will play song from 'Guide' at you& will then switch off phone just when you've started getting your hopes high that u've tracked down the elusive guy after all. (And all that after you've chewed off your nails in apprehension thinking that you'll forget to ask ethng u meant to ask if he picked up the phn so why call him anyway)
Well, a day, a day. no probs. okey-dokey.
Got to read about 4 lines of chatwin's songlines today. wow, great. if that's how life's gonna be as a scribe, I can forget ever sitting down to read anything ever. All I'll be doing is researching stuff on google for absurdities to shore up my art.s with.I am afraid I'll even forget to miss JU.
Oh JU.I love you so much.Haven for misfits is so right. And it also gives you a kind of pleasure to see all the strait-laced ones who give you such hell in their kind of environments getting to see the other side of the coin. But it's sad really. Coz JU really takes everybody in and makes it a kind of home. All it asks for is a kind of basic honesty to yourself.I didn't give it all of mine. That's the only pity. And quietly, the biggest one. Coz it's just my size.
And another reason to crib. I haven't got anti-spam thng. on my comp. So keep getting these 'Crazy Girls' adverts. i am sick to death of seeing immense boobs. Really.
Have an interview where, a friend tells me, I'll be asked strange ques.s.

Shine on, You crazy Diamond

Day ended on a nice note with my three friends calling up to ask(as they do every year, it seems), whether I had remembered to read up Tintern Abbey (that mighty poem of the worthy Wordswoth) on the eve of this July the 13th. Apart from that, visited dadu and stuffed myself on fried rice and chicken prepared by one who loves me a lot.
Haven't yet called potential employer. Will have to set up date for interview with another potential employer by tommorow.
My friend is on a ball, what with teaching French and dear A.da 'loose in the department', as she calls it.
And Syd Barrett died a few days ago. It shocks me to think that David Gilmore too won't be around at some point of time. there are some people whom you can't bear to imagine life without. My friend would say A.da. I agree.

untitled

I have lost a post in cyberspace

shah of blah

Isn't it absurd that you must to connect anew in virtual space with people you speak to everyday? Nope it isn't. we straddle multiple identities, and blogging is another act of self creation. The I which meets A isn't the same I which touches A over the Net. This isn't even the'medium is the message' thing.It's what Sukanta da says in his 2005 intro. to Infirm Glory. Knowledge is of necessity fragmentary. you begin to come even the least bit closer to knowing yourself when you realise that you will often find yourself(& by corollary others)acting in ways you hadn't thought them capable of. latent human possibility and all that. when you can accept that of yourself, that your mind, identity, psyche, is a gypsy thing, you shall probably be at peace with yourself and the world.
These are very precious musings, and at the same time very banal, in that you are actually going into the trouble of voicing inplied things- khanikta nijer monke kochlanor moto. they are ideally better off in a story, or may be as funda for life's fabric.

Blather.

memory and forgetting

Today is the 13th, unsurprisingly, of July. The rituals of grief are necessary, even for people like me to rail against. No one mourned for him that day. We went away one man less than we came as and nobody bothered about it. He was only a body, disposed of after the life was no longer there, not a person who had always been. Now I realize the importance of mourning, why a person should not go away unlamented, why there are social taboos attached to it. Why it was so important to sing for Lysidas, to state ‘Lysidas is dead’, and why it’s so good that it was Milton who sang for him. Baba went away unlamented, unmourned for. The world did not break apart for him. Only in a in a tiny corner of tiny me, he lives. I say it without any pride, any vanity. I wish his memories shone brightly in the hearts of many others, and shone brilliantly in a way it doesen’t in the dark mustiness inside me coz I’ve devoted myself to not being horrorstruck by that time, to ignore if need be, in order to go on. Cuz there I feel the irony and indeed, the kindness of it all. He perhaps came the closest to being the best man he could be as my father. These are solipsistic musings and in his quiet way, he has probably cared for many others about whom it would not occur to him to mention since he wouldn’t have regarded them as in any way out of the day’s job at all. To baba, you have my everything.

sigh

sigh
Well, went to cover the book release today with my friend. As usual, with her around, I had fun. they are such people, my teachers, although I made a crass fool of myself before one (and HE was most understanding, as he usually is). SHE was as lovely as ever and I conversed like a normal human being with my teachers (a rare occasion), without going into convulsions of stupidity induced by a kind of pathological shyness. Really really hope will not make a hash of the art.
Apart from that, another gent I'd written about kept messaging again and again.
Another day passed on a worried note. A potential employer hasn't replied to my mail. Am really quite desperate to get started. preferably with something that I will like doing. If this ain't gonna work out,I'd like to know soon so that I can go aheaf and try to shape some of my other plans.
Am I really such a pathological fool? looking at me, you probably would'nt know. Or may be you will? Which is the really scary thing.

baba

theoutsider
He came back to me today.Baba. Can't say much more. Save that he is not with me. I don't get it. Don't get me. Only that I miss him. Very very much. And 'miss' is too reductive a word.

the rant

ami khubi dukkhito. only time will tell what bloody shall happen. meanwhile, my favourite topic: i don't think we are ever gonna be sexually liberated, or whatever the heck you care to call it, as long as we stick to restrictive labels like 'gay' and 'straight'. If you call yourself straight, can you say that you'll never be attracted to anyone of the same sex as yourself, and vice versa? if you are, will you start calling yourself bisexual? what if you aren't attracted to anyone of the same sex ever again (in case of the so-called straight person)?Will you then call that incident of same sex attraction a one-off, an aberration from your 'normal' orientation?
this obsession with naming, labelling and limiting, fore-determining your sexual destiny, is utterly stifling. i understand we are subjects of a capitalist society which cannot allow for such freedom if it is to survive. Yet, I dunno. I hope there will still remain such a thing as volition,(which will itself still be determined by the economic process), to atleast try and walk against the tide. that you will make mistakes, but that you owe it to yourself to try. This is probably too idealistic, but what else can I say?

theoutsider

theoutsider
hmm. Journalism. Do you give people what they want, pander to the lowest common denominator, or do you make an attempt to shape a reading standard? Is it possible when there is this huge mass of people who want a quick-fix version of everything (including me). if you still hang on to your standards, don't you run the risk of losing your audience altogether, and the whole project backfires? I dunno. I am gonna look for a middle path somewhere.

theoutsider

theoutsider

finally...

Phew. I have it at last. A blog, i.e. No more pussy footing around in orkut i.e. can doodle all I like here. But seriously, I don't think blogging satisfies the exhibitionist fetish much y'know: "Hoo hoo, now everybody can see what I am up to and think I am so wonderfully eccentric". Deep down, I think I am a conventional sod anyway. So what the heck, you are gonna die anyway someday.