So Some Insomniac Blathering
What happens when you finally stow about the two laggardly-arriving boxes of books in a 9ft x 9 ft garret of a room[1] that already has four other boxes of books, stacked double high, along with a bed and a dresser/table?
You run out of free floor space, and and soon begin to master the flying-squirrely art of leaping into bed right from the door, and crash landing, of course head first, into a pile of books bought in the last two weeks[2] sitting on the bed. Then in the process of displacing them, you pick one of these new arrivals to read (Michael Ondaatje's memoir "Running In The Family"), and end up in this state of insomnia. And you do know that you have a 12 hour work day awaiting you tomorrow.
[1] You miserly wretch, you figured why get a bigger room when you will be spending 60% of your life in hotel rooms and airplanes, and so you didn't consider the times you may be spending at home base - you figured you were strange enough for anyone to dare pay you a visit anyway - or the fact that you have a severe mental disorder whose symptoms require both wall and floor space?!
[2] O! what itchy disease is this that makes you buy books even though you know that if you don't resist, very soon your room will resemble an igloo of pulp?
My Daily Notes
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Ah! Come Sweet Nostalgie
My blog forays today took me to Kalleda Village (h/t within/without ) in the Warangal District of AP: the state in India in which I was born, and grew up in. These photos taken by kids bring back to me many sweet memories from those childhood days spent romping in the villages of my farming grandparents.
On a related note, in the first chapter of "In Spite of the Gods" (I am planning to look this book up next time I visit a bookstore, never mind the weird title), Edward Luce, the longtime Indian correspondent of Financial Times, describes such juxtapositions of the hi-tech and the low-tech thusly:
"But it is at the side of the expressways in the glaring billboards advertising cell phones, iPods, and holiday villas and the shiny gas stations with their air-conditioned mini-supermarkets that India's schizophrenic economy reveals itself. Behind them, around them, and beyond them is the unending vista of rural India, of yoked bullocks plowing the fields in the same manner they have for three thousand years and the primitive brick kilns that dot the endless patchwork of fields of rice, wheat, pulse, and oilseed. There are growing pockets of rural India that are mechanizing and becoming more prosperous. But they are still islands. It is in this almost continuous contrast that you observe the two most striking features of India's early twenty-first century economy: its modern and booming service sector in a sea of indifferent farmland. It would be tempting, as you cruise happily toward your destination with a reasonable chance of being on time, to believe these features are from different worlds."
I, for my own selfish reasons, am glad that this other "indifferent farmland" India of toddy tappers, roadside vegetable hawkers, hand-powered water pumps, ox driving plough-men etc has not yet been swallowed whole by the silicon chip!
My Daily Notes
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On Repeat Today
is Sting's superb song "Shape of My Heart". Go listen:
"I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier I know that the clubs are weapons of war I know that diamonds mean money for this art But that's not the shape of my heart That's not the shape, the shape of my heartAnd if I told you that I loved you You'd maybe think there's something wrong I'm not a man of too many faces The mask I wear is one Those who speak know nothing And find out to their cost Like those who curse their luck in too many places And those who fear are lost"
Music Posts
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