Me and my cell

I do way more things for my cellphone than it does for me. I use it to receive the daily call from home (a purpose that can be very well served by the landline phone as well)....otherwise I look for it after having forgotten it at someplace, I move to go somewhere and then come back to pick it, put it in silent mode prior to every meeting and charge it before the battery gets drained.

I wonder whether it serves me or .......

You name it and it has been captured in a book

There was a quote in the end of Fight Club (the book) saying, "There is nothing a blue collared nobody in Oregon with a public school education imagine that a million people haven't already done". And I find it to be extremely true.....name anything however crazy, however perfect, however whatever that you have done, experienced or whatevered.....there is someone who has written a book about it.

PS- I am just done reading a book called "Keep the Change".

Begin 2010

It's really cold and foggy these days. I actually witnessed a less than 1 m visibility yesterday. I really love it when it gets cold like this. My life as ever is uneventful and today was another of the days when I tried to shut it off by refusing to wake up to the reality of it. My refuges are the sitcoms, movies, some books with a philosophical bent, some pulp fiction and a lot of sleep. I am really amazed at my ability to sleep and dream. I dream almost like some TV series...come sleep and they start...pause if the phone rings and start again as I doze off again. All the time I fantasy about some alternate form of living (like raking leaves in the backyard of a monastery).

Ajaan...

I am sitting here in my room. I didn't sleep the entire night because I had slept almost the entire day prior to that. I am done with all the arbit stuff that I can do on the net. I thought of studying French but doing something (especially the things which I associate some aesthetic value with) with an immediate purpose usually oozes out all the gumption in me. So French was out for tonight. I started reading a book which has diary entries by Sartre but then gave it up and took up another which I read almost as fetishly as a staunch catholic would read the bible. I was revelling in it when I heard this ajaan from some mosque nearby. My thoughts went to the person who would have got up at this hour for morning prayers and I just thought, " .....if only, I also had something like that to get up for...."

Why???

"When you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind."

Zor se ignore

Another completely innovative and "bang on the target" slang by one of my friends. Two of the people from our gang had just started seeing other. As they were walking hand to hand in some mall, they chanced upon a colleague and ex-collegemate (guy's). Explaining the encounter later, the guy from the couple said, "Usney humein dekha aur itna zor se ignore mara ki...."

Beautiful ironical slang. Kudos Stinky!!

My old book shop...

I went to my college time book shop after long. It is a place where I have spent many of my evenings sitting on a stool between the racks and reading, sipping the coffee which they used to serve as a gesture of hospitality. As always, it didn't disappoint me this time either.
I thought that I might find their collection small after my tryst with the OMs, Odysseys and Teksons in the NCR but then, there it was with the small yet enticing and beautifully organized collection of books. And the best part is, on asking about some particular book by say Galbraith, you get an informed suggestion about some other books by the same author ("JK Galbraith ki yeh book out of print hai, waise 1929 ke depression par unki book is topic pe likhi gai sabse easy read hai.") and also books by other authors along the same lines instead of awkward looks (read with no ideas whatsoever about the book or the author) with mipronunciations of the author's name. That's the kind of difference which comes to things when people care about the work that they do.