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!

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 heart

And 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"

A bit of breathing space during lunch today finds me listening to Schubert's "Trout", reading essays on Saul Bellow's excellent middle period novels and on the uses of reading poetry (h/t Swami), and then reading sections from the latest volume of Galway Kinnell's poems that I had bought this past weekend called "When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone" (very appropriately titled I think given my states of being have been slowly shifting from solitude to socializing). Here is an excerpt from the eponymous sequence of poems:

"When one has lived a long time alone, one falls to poring upon a creature, contrasting its eternity's-face to one's own full of hours, taking note of each difference, exaggerating it, making it everything, until the other is utterly other, and then, with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out, going back over each difference once again and canceling it, seeing nothing now but likeness, until . . . half an hour later one starts awake, taken aback at how eagerly one drops off into the happiness of kinship, when one has lived a long time alone."