2007 or something like it …

I might spread a new bed sheet on my bed … I might redo my room… I might get myself a new wardrobe... I might even delete all those mushy e mails to my ex from my system…
But these lil exercises won’t make the year looming large at us new …indeed the year we are all so eager to welcome might only end up being an irritating thing to get used to while writing cheques…

What I need is a miracle to help me welcome the New Year with unbridled, innocent anticipation…

So here is to miracles…

Happy New Year folks …

Or if u are me welcome to another year in limboland…

and for u the suckers for mush ...

525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.

525,600 minutes - how do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.

In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.

In 525,600 minutes - how do you measure a year in the life?

How about love?

How about love?

Measure in love.

Seasons of love.

525,600 minutes!

525,000 journeys to plan.

525,600 minutes - how can you measure the life of a woman or man?

In truths that she learned, or in times that he cried.

In bridges he burned, or the way that she died.

It’s time now to sing out, tho the story never ends let's celebrate remember a year in the life of friends.

Remember the love!

Remember the love! Remember the love!

Measure in love....

(from the OST of the lovely "Rent")

somethings in life are best left unsaid...

From the archives...

this is one of my favorite posts...not because it's a well written one (modesty be damned) or because it elicited an all time high of 22 comments ...but because its me ....

On September 3 1973 a blue fly capable of flapping 70 beats a minute landed on St.Vincent Street in Montmartre. At that moment, on a restaurant terrace nearby the wind magically made two glasses dance unseen on a table cloth. Meanwhile, in a 5th floor flat on Avenue Trudaine, Paris 9 returning from his fiend’s funeral Eugene Colere erased him from his address book. At the same moment, a sperm with one X chromosome belonging to Raphael Poulain made a dash for an egg in his wife Amandine. Nine months later Amelie Poulain was born …Amelie who likes looking back at people’s faces in the dark in the cinema …Amelie who likes noticing details that no one does …Amelie who cultivates a taste for small pleasures like dipping her hand in a sack of grain (cold and grainy) cracking crème brulee with a teaspoon (the blob sound is so satisfying)…Amelie who wonders how many people are having an orgasm at this very moment (72... on second thoughts make that 36).On honeyed afternoons when the world seems to be bathed in the most cheerful of yellows I try and invoke the Amelie in me…Amelie is my Movie of the Week.

Carcapades

Disclaimer ...to some this post may seem to be a bit too explicit by my hitherto staid standards…

“We made out in the car and that’s a wonderful way to start a festive week don’t u think??” he said … blink blink …( ok its not as if I am entirely unexposed to the idea of ppl makin out in public places and stuff …but this is a frnd for chrissake … u don’t think of friends as lean mean sex machines romping about the Delhi suburbs …they are ppl u share benign cups of coffee with and discuss love lives antiseptically unless its Ugly girL who regales us with the nitty grittys of her sexcapades )
and yet I kept probing further …
asking him about almost everything… the sights, sounds, smells … and like all men he was only too happy to oblige… it was not as if I was sexually aroused by the narration of his amorous exploits… I was plain curious… so I asked him irrelevant questions like if there were dogs barking nearby (yes there were, in fact three dogs creating a ruckus outside) … did he have his car light on? if he didn’t how did he manage to see the person he was making out with ( he didn’t have to see the person he said …that way it was more kinky ) cud he hear the hawkers (there weren’t any hawkers around , he had slyly parked his car in a secluded spot in the JNU campus)…even as I was prying I declared myself a voyeur…but no, there was something vicariously moral about my queries … I think I have finally managed to detach the titillating element from sex …and see it simply as an act …
or maybe I haven’t …
but I sure was not jerking off after the tete a tete...

My Happy Dog Eared Bookmark…

Left from AJC Bose Rd. Crossing, next to Bhawanipore College is the bookshop your dreams, points out the book mark in grids of arrows and lines…sigh…in this word of ready- to- eat Dal Bukhara and online bookings, bookmarks aren’t bookmarks anymore …nor are books books… NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE cries the cover of a recently adapted popular novel …as if the adaptation was the other way around…but this isn’t a post on the commercialization of books and bookmarks in specific, and reading habit in general, at least that’s not what I mean it to be, if it ends up being a comment on the phenomenon then it is entirely incidental (but my saying so defies the statement doesn’t it?)

This post was supposed to be a part of my musings on little things like browned saucepans (I love my tea post) and dog eared bookmarks…how I love talking about them … these little things which makes me feel at home by simply being… so familiar…

My Dog eared bookmark has for months yearned for the warmth and embrace of pages …a self imposed sabbatical from working life (read joblessness) has ensured that it gets a lot action …

Yay for my dog eared bookmark…

Sigh… am losing it …

My tea…her tea…

Kiran Desai’s Booker acknowledged Inheritance of Loss opens with a quaint chapter on the ritual of afternoon tea…the lighting of the stove…the gurgling of the tea kettle…and the obstinate but lazy need for boiled camellia leaves… Kiran Desai captures it all and more, and in the process makes me romanticize a daily ritual which probably doesn’t deserve the dignity of the written word…but yet when I picture myself bending over the humble browned sauce pan adjusting the flame, adding a dash of sugar and pouring the whiteness to the golden brownness (it always breaks my heart to see the golden hue of unpolluted black tea disappear in the muddiness of milk infestation), I smile…
I smile at the fundamental difference in taste between a mother and a son ….she likes her tea with milk and I like the homogenized version…
I smile at the magic that these humble leaves create when they blend with water ….oozing out a subtle and aromatic flavor that has pleased discerning taste buds for centuries…
And more than anything else I smile at the chipped cup which i refuse to throw away coz i have grown up drinking tea out of it ...