Wednesday, October 27, 2004
- William Gibson
"The future is already here. Its just not uniformly distributed."
- William Gibson
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
A few weeks ago, heard a song by Reba McEntire. She was on 'The Tonight show with Jay Leno'. She has an amazingly beautiful voice.
I suddenly thought about this song tonight and dug up the lyrics. All the associated sentimentality apart, it re-affirms the sprit of Country Music...of essentially wanting to tell a story.
His early mornin' attitude:
You have to drag him out of bed.
Only frosted flakes will do,
He gets that from me:
Yeah, he gets that from me.
His curly hair and his knobbly knees:
The way the sun brings those freckles out.
Talk and talk, never miss a beat,
Yeah,he gets that from me:
He gets that from me.
He looks at me with those big brown eyes:
He's got me in the palm of his hands,
And I swear sometimes it's just like you're here again.
He smiles that little crooked smile:
There's no denying he's your child.
Without him I don't know what I'd do:
He gets that from you:
Oh, he gets that from you.
How he loves your old guitar:
Yeah, he's taught himself to play.
He melts my heart: tells me he love me every day.
And cracks jokes at the perfect time,
Makes me laugh when I want to cry.
That boy is everything to me:
He gets that from you:
He gets that from you.
Last night, I heard him pray:
Lord, help me and mama make it through.
An' tell Daddy we'll be okay:
He said he sure misses you:
He sure misses you.
He really misses you:
He gets that from me.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
joy-to-stuff ratio n. The time a person has to enjoy life versus the time a person spends accumulating material goods.
Sunday, October 17, 2004
I really know what feeling “screwed over” means. I really do.
This is as low as it gets. It doesn’t get any lower.
But I swear I will “Live Stronger”.
I realize today, really really realize why Lance Armstrong is the super hero that he is.
But I swear I will “Live Stronger”. I swear I will.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Today is my last day in Germany, I am heading home early tomorrow morning. In time for the Pujos!
I am looking out of my office window, my office a nice little room which has been mine for all of three months. The first day when I was shown into this office, the large windows had seemed very thrilling. The hills extended themselves all along the horizon and the white windmills almost seemed a slow hypnotic swirl. The hills were tree lined, and their color had struck me as odd, it was a somber black green, its shade seemed cold and bleak.
As I look beyond the window today, the hills have streaks of dull ochre. Its autumn, the leaves are turning various shades of yellow. It’s almost symbolic of my time here, the weeks and months spent at an Aluminum plant in the middle of nowhere. The wind is cold now and the sunshine seems distant. The windmills continue to lazily swirl in the late afternoon breeze, as if nothing ever really happened. Maybe nothing did.
I am happy to be going home but at once I am sad to be going away.
Monday, October 11, 2004
About ten minutes back, I was at my office window. Having a smoke, and looking at the scenery generally. And I saw a hummingbird!
It flew slowly past the window, about 200 meters away. It flew hypnotically, slowly…straight first then left, coming closer to the window. Then up a bit and it flew away…
Hey that was really really cool. I am thrilled to bits!
Thursday, October 07, 2004
Yes you remind me of Mildred.
I don’t say this from a self-congratulatory ethical high ground. Please believe me, I am not being patronizing, I am just a normal human being and a good friend.
The whole way you look upon the world, as if you stand at its center. The way you cut off lives and people, based on your whims and fancies. The impudence with which you expect, people to keep at abeyance all that they feel, just because you now don’t find it convenient to feel likewise.
What really strikes me as odd is this, for all your study of philosophy, for all the books you have read, for all the doctrines of life you have analyzed…don’t you see something which is so close to you. Don’t you see yourself? The world around you, the men who swoon over you, see your luscious red lips, the lively laughter, you’re smooth as silk skin. But don’t you see that in your wonton disregard for other human beings…you look so abhorrently ugly?
“Now that he could think it out more calmly he understood that in trying to force Mildred to love him he had been attempting the impossible. He did not know what it was that passed from a man to a woman, from a woman to a man, and made one of them a slave: it was convenient to call it the sexual instinct; but if it was no more than that, he did not understand why it should occasion so vehement an attraction to one person rather than another. It was irresistible: the mind could not battle with it; friendship, gratitude, interest, had no power beside it.
She had a genteel refinement which shuddered at the facts of life, she looked upon the bodily functions as indecent, she had all sorts of euphemisms for common objects, she always chose an elaborate word as more becoming than a simple one: the brutality of these men was like a whip on her thin white shoulders, and she shuddered with voluptuous pain.”
Friday, October 01, 2004
That’s what the guy had told me in the train. I was ‘doing’ Berlin, crisscrossing the city with my day pass on the S-Bahn, Berlin’s very own local train network. Which Berliners insist is far better than the famed London Underground albeit less glamorous.
I alighted at Alexander Platz, once downtown Berlin, part of the erstwhile Red East, but now transformed into one of the ‘new city centers’. The train was surprisingly empty for a Sunday evening; a guy across me was busy on his cell phone, trying to figure out which station he should be getting off at, all this in fluent German. He didn’t look and sound like a tourist, but definitely behaved like one.
He was soon done with his cell phone bit and bent forward, hands folded in an elaborate namaste. It transpired that this guy had apparently spent four odd years in Western India working with a NGO. An architect by profession, he had joined a NGO in his early twenties, which had shipped him out to India with a backpack, a small budget and big dreams. Somewhere on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border his NGO had adopted a village. Over the next half decade they undertook rural development projects, aiding small entrepreneurial ventures, irrigation projects and other welfare schemes. The man turned out to be quite a polyglot; he spoke a smattering of Hindi, Marathi, Gujrati and Kannada!
His Indian sojourn though, was in the 1980’s, after which he took up employment in Portugal, where he is now an established Landscape Architect. He has bought a house there and lives happily with his wife and kids. His extended family still lives in Germany, whom he visits once every few years. So that explained the whole looks like a Berliner-behaves like a tourist paradox.
Since the 1980’s he has visited India once, in 1998, the liberalization triggered mini economic boom hit him instantly in the face. The 90’s saw India emerge as a potential economic talking point, so the 80’s and 90’s are quite stark ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures.
We spoke about economics, politics and religion. The schism between the Occident and the Orient, where upon he said "Men have always formed gods in their own image…in India you just believe in the more picturesque." It brought a smile to my face, firstly it was true. Secondly, because it’s approximately what Somerset Maugham said in ‘Of Human Bondage’, when the American scholar Weeks, in his acerbic tongue in cheek way derides Philips friend, for his fascination for all things Catholic as opposed to the more understated ways of the Church of England.
"Men have always formed gods in their own image," said Weeks… "He believes in the picturesque."
We talked about this and that, about how economic power, not race, not location, not history, not politics, was the only delta in the modern world’s social calculus.
It was a wonderful experience, a train hurtling through suburban Berlin and a white man recounting his years spent in a nondescript Indian village. The whole juxtaposition of time, space and culture, would have seemed ironic at most times. But oddly it gave me a feeling of the ‘great wide open’.
A self confessed Indophile, he could never reconnect with Western Europe after returning from India. The East has energy he says, the west has decadence. He is planning a trip back to India this winter taking with him for the first time his wife and kids. “They like the sun, like me they will love India …”
Its vaguely ironic, I suddenly had this mental image of blonde haired toddlers walking of a Lufthansa flight and immediately falling head over heals in love with India, like their father expected them to do.
Westerners have always come to the East, wanting something, Vasco Da Gama wanted spices, the hippies wanted Nirvana, I don’t know what he wants but I hope gets it...
Bon voyage!
Labels: Fiction
