Come on in, it's Kool inside

While flipping through the pale red book of course descriptions that LUMS provides with a prospectus, I'd decided enough SS units to have been a double major. All sorts of Literature courses - courses I discovered wouldn't be offered for the longest time, if at all; all the Philosophy courses; some history, sociology looked interesting, and oh, can't miss political science. I even attended Intro to Philosophy with a lot of optimism, when I did manage to take it. That was until I realized that I was unwilling to share, or change, and that this, for me, wasn't the liberating exercise I'd imagined it to be, but rather an exercise in a lot of knowing and a little bit of analyzing. I realized that my mind was stuck somewhere halfway - deeply rooted to the philosophies that I adhered to, and at the same time unwilling to share the experiences that those philosophies had brought me. I couldn't be like the people who'd learnt the ideas (and names) for the first time...

Go click on the image on Google's main page! It was a nice surprise in the morning, seeing it. Considering I never go to Google anymore, and just use the Firefox toolbar, I'm glad I stumbled on it.

I woke up with crusted blood on my face the second day in a row. It's not a good way to wake up. I felt immobilized and my mouth felt dry. It took a few minutes to shift into a position that wouldn't soil everything. Then I managed to find a sink, but not before a drink of water. I dabbed and patted it's remains with tissue paper but there's still a little bit of it left. I'm afraid it'll burst tomorrow morning and I'll wake up like this again. I never was queasy with my own blood, until now. I suppose I'm growing up, in some strange way. I think it's the involuntariness of the process. Except it doesn't feel out-of-my-control. It just feels like someone punched me in the face and I'm waking up after having passed out from a fight.

I'm an arsonist at heart. I light fires tentatively, with much trepidation and little tolerance for heat. I shy away from the ensuing flame, and usually panic when it reaches my hand. I've only let a matchstick burn to my fingertips once, and that was just to find out how it felt. But I'm an arsonist at heart. I look at the oil slick, curving its way from the car. Its bends are lazy, pronounced. Like a section of a river that flows slowly over the ground, knowing its reduced speed, almost enjoying it. The slick is thick in clusters, where the bubbles inside the oil almost threaten to burst. The oil dries away before it reaches me, its riverbank a small lump of gravel that the oil bubbles collect against, rising in number, like a protest that goes on eternally. I just stare at the oil. It looks so inviting, so delicious. A matchstick might be enough, a box of matchsticks better. A lit up Zippo might have been perfect. I'm scared of flames. I've sprayed deodorant at c...

It's strange watching a movie with someone who's watching it for a completely different purpose. I watched A Clockwork Orange without knowing anything about it, except that it was a classic . It didn't help - I was slightly confused, and extremely disappointed. I didn't realize then, but part of the reason was that we kept being interrupted, all three of us. It's all right if you're interrupted, but not if someone else is. I don't still understand why. All I know is that I kept being bothered by the term 'Orange' everytime someone came in and asked what we were watching - and there was a lot of them. To one of my friends, it was just a classic: it couldn't be wrong, even if it felt wrong to him. It wasn't just a movie, it was an item on a list: things to be done, songs to be downloaded, things to be struck off. I was just watching a movie after a long, long time. I watched it again at home, alone, with headphones on, my chair comfortable and...

I ripped Wild Strawberries from DVD during the summer. I hate idle PCs, and there were two sitting in my room. I completely forgot about it until I woke up itching one day a year or so ago. After the usual token attempt - tossing and turning in bed, shifting around the room, pacing the wing corridors - I decided to do something. I chose Wild Strawberries. I'm glad I did. It's one of those films you like instantly - it's almost impossible to dislike casually if you're thinking, unless you have a bone to pick with the nitty gritties of film-making. I'd heard about art films since the time I was five or six. Nana Patekar only acts in art movies. Art movies - the term signified some sort of movie in which you paced art galleries and commented on them. I know the first art movie I saw must have been Rashomon, which was fantastic, but the whole concept of a 'thinking' film only became clear to me after Wild Strawberries. With Magnolia, I wasn't sure if I like...

The first few steps were always measured and slow, so he didn't find them hard to manage. Slightly tipping over on either side, groping the sofa and the dining table, almost tripping over the power plug. It was a small room, cramped with a dining table that was too big for it, and as he got older his slow, practised walk across the room appeared more dangerous each day. His hands scraped something; it turned out to be cream from the half-eaten doughnut lying on the dinner table. He rubbed it off with slow despair and kept on feeling his way across the room. The maid only came once a week now; standing here, feeling as soiled as he could ever remember being, he couldn't understand why he had asked her to do that. He finally made it to the cage. He fumbled his way around the lock until he found the latch; when he jerked it open, he heard the splash of the little water bowl being turned over. He felt through the numerous things in his coat pocket, things he'd been instructe...

The music is clearer, richer. The bass is more pronounced. The speakers are placed from left to right, and of course, there are more of them. There is a small walk to the bed; there's a little cost to not having the volume just right, or the wrong song in your playlist. Its wider, and somehow more cramped here. The walls seem to be collapsing into each other; there's this restless feeling of energy, of having to do something that makes me roll off the bed every five minutes; a force that drives, and somehow also enervates. Everything ends up in this eventual state of flux, where I can pick up books and read them for a good 20 minutes, maybe even half an hour. Then the bed that slopes upward in the middle becomes more pronounced. And my head starts sloping back more, even though I know it can't be possible. And in this half-sapped, half frenzied state I go to sleep again. If the music is still on, it seems like its coming from a long distance. Anyway, its too late to turn of...

One short sentence followed by several others sometimes gets irritating. It breaks the flow of your reading and it makes paragraphs feel hollow. But Oates' did it exceptionally well in Beasts. The beginning of the book was strewn with short sentences that never allowed any rhythm or flow to emerge. What it did do was make me sit up and take notice of each sentence in a way that other books rarely do. What I thought was a lack of artistic flair turned out to be a precursor to a wonderfully crafted sequence which makes the short sentences worthwhile. Plums deify. Stephen King says that makes perfect (grammatical) sense, and that short sentences should suit authors who're not as much in control of their sentences as they'd like to be. But I think he's missing the kind of usage that Oates has, the kind that sometimes brings flair simply by delaying it.

When I read Jeffrey Archer, I decided I didn't enjoy his books because his writing style wasn't good enough. Which is why I took a slightly better liking to Forsythe. It makes me wonder though. What right do I have to not read authors who do not "write exceptionally well"? Or at least far above average? I don't think I'm so affected that I read them for the mere fact that they're written well; I know I enjoy good writing, possibly more than a good story. Probably more than a good story. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby, and sometimes for the language. In that book, The Lord of the Flies had both. I hope there's many many more of those books to explore.

Suffocation seems to be the only word that fits. I heard Ted Hughes say to Sylvia Plath to write about "anything . . you know your subject, you're just skirting around it" and it was obvious he knew nothing of suffocation. I feel like I have something inside me that suffocates and chokes on the lack of colour I provide to it. It seems cruel to murder again and again but murder is what worked for her. She's as crazy as any other poet and yes, she's very stylized, but she knew what it meant to not have the words you have come outside where you know they belong.I read Daddy again and its impact is still incredible. Its a rollicking, speeding train of anger and metaphors, reaching its terrifying climax like Blaine The Mono reaching Topika. Blaine The Mono, the insane train which flew worlds in seconds and crashed its passengers on a fight about a riddle. Blaine is a pain and that's the truth. Daddy builds to its climax like that, only it is more menacing, and far...

Its all alone in the world, this light. It shines and it tries to make sense of the way. It shines alone. Will you ever see it? Will it even stay with me once I've forgotten it once more, this sense of loneliness? How long can a light shine all alone, without having its friend? Can a light shine alone forever, if it never had its friend to remember when its alone? I don't know. I swear I don't know. I know that when they shine together, shine once, shine once and for all, then I can rest peacefully because I know those lights will always be there. We had lights of the prettiest green and blue once. Spinning tops sinking to the bottom of the ocean, like being hypnotized deeper and deeper. Maybe they'll never brighten together; but they will brighten together, in a way. Two lights at the other ends of the ocean, you wouldn't imagine one light reaching the other end. Except it will. They will.

Slipping down stairs is as humiliating as its usually harmless. You slip, you land on your hands and your knees, you look around furtively to see if anyone saw, and then you just walk down the rest of the stairs, looking for a way to wipe the grime off your hands. And you feel stupid for not being able to do something so simple. Its such a small and disturbing thing.

Just spent 45 minutes reading a Forsythe short story. I have to say it was well worth it even though I was terribly sleepy. Nice, easy, understated plot, good writing and description and just a great story overall. And its only the first one. I have to say easy reading has its merits.I wish I could say I read a lot. Maybe I will be able to; its not such a hard wish to fulfill. Coetzee, Forsythe, Brearley, Myers, K&O . . I suppose I ought to start very, very soon.

There used to be a shop near my house called Cash Stationers. Actually, its still there. I once saw a 3" x 5" rectangular notepad there that I decided to buy. I used to carry it around in my pocket, to school mostly, in case I thought of a poem and wanted to write it. When I stopped writing poetry, I just forgot about those notepads until I got another notepad a few months ago as a gift. Those notepads were the only place I ever wrote spontaneous poetry in. They were just the right size to carry and the red ink always settled very nicely. I think I'll love red on white, slightly smudged, slightly absorbed, until I die. I never found the one with the art paper again though. Only cheaper quality notepads that I had to make do with. I think I got through a dozen.

I read Ibsen's "A Doll's House" last night. I admit I've never enjoyed plays the same way that I enjoy prose, but it was fantastic. The freedom that comes from developing characters through their own words made it seem a lot easier, but I'm sure a play is harder to write. The characters, his portrayal of their relationship, and most of all his description of guilt is so suddenly universal. In one minute you're moving from an Act of a play to a very real, very common household situation that seems could be your own. He describes Helmer's complete misunderstanding of Nora's charachter so brilliantly. The patronage. The anger. The expectations. The loss he is at when he sees her change. And I admit, I've come to appreciate strong endings by realizing how terribly difficult they are to write.Fantastic play. And I got it for only 30 rupees too. I've always wanted to read Ibsen since Ayn Rand mentioned him in The Fountainhead.

The sun was fading, shrinking slowly through the dark, tinted windows. The people walking around me were sombre, almost funereal. They were going about their own work, deliberately, slowly, almost trying to avoid eye contact. I think I was the only one who was shocked, the only one who showed the mildest surprise. Everyone else seemed to have accepted that the end of the world was eight years away. They seemed to have altered their behaviour altogether; their way of looking at me, their way of smiling patiently, like I was a small child who had to be looked after. I don't remember screaming, just looking around, dazed and very worried.Sadaf* came and smiled, as if she'd won a moral victory. I think she had. I listened to her with more patience and less disdain than I ever had. It seemed that she wasn't lying, for once. Babar* came and told me that it was true, and showed surprise that I didn't know already. He was patient too. All this patience had me at the end of my o...

Trying to appear cultured, or intelligent, I'm really not sure which one, I pretended to myself that I liked the Manic Street Preachers' "A Design for Life". I used it as a title for a daily schedule, I heard it several hundred times and I genuinely fell in love with the music. But I never understood it, and its confusing to see that I love the song still. I'm not sure if its still pretense. And it does make me wonder. "We were told, that this is the end"

Trying to appear cultured, or intelligent, I'm really not sure which one, I pretended to myself that I liked the Manic Street Preachers' "A Design for Life". I used it as a title for a daily schedule, I heard it several hundred times and I genuinely fell in love with the music. But I never understood it, and its confusing to see that I love the song still. I'm not sure if its still pretense. And it does make me wonder."We were told, that this is the end"