To all my well wishers & Force senders:

After many long hand to hand combats with McKinsey & Company gurus, I have been deemed fit to join the dark (or is it light?) side. So as soon I get that sticky little PhD thesis out of the way, I am headed upto (the currently snowed out) CT/NYC/NJ area to give up my life for a whole load of training (for this I will be sent to Europe for 3 months!), crazy traveling work etc. I want to thank ya'll for your best wishes. It kept me going in that very long November.

Cheers! -Sashi

PS: And since all artists shouldn't forget to thank the muse(s) who give them courage as they wrestle with the angelic demons, I thank my muse too. poke poke

[1] The black tar road snakes like a tongue Between the icicled trees. This too is how I rove your moonlight body, disrobed and undulant Under a full moon.

[2] Ice boxes in the houses, and knives air hanging From the eaves. Love too takes possession like this: First glazing the soul, and then the sharp barbed Wire against some invisible figure walking in Those large empty snow fields.

[3] A weak sun visits the snow capped earth Like an old aunt who wears mourning black Attending a wedding. The branches bristle with Icy thorns outside a room full of shoes. Someone is walking barefoot across a frozen lake. Someone else is scanning the blue veins on a white page.

Life had been keeping me away from the soul business of reading and writing in the past few weeks, dear shadow (and now, perhaps, really imaginary) readers. And this explains the dearth of any oil spills hitting these waters.

In the past few weeks, I have managed to make a detour to San Francisco (photos here), that city which you enter by the way of the Golden Gate, and fuilfil my fantasy to pay homage to one of the demotic figures in my literary genesis - Vikram Seth, by reading his great Pushkin-ian novel in verse "The Golden Gate" atop the Golden Gate Bridge:

The surface of the cobalt bay Is flecked white. The moister, keener October air has rinsed away The whispering mists with crisp intensity And over the opaque immensity A deliquescent wash of blue Reveals the bridge, long lost to view In summer's quilt of fog: the towers, High-built, red-gold, with their long span -The most majestic spun by man- Whose threads of steel through mists and showers, Wind, spray, and the momentous roar Of ocean storms, link shore to shore.

• this by playing hookie at the conference I was at.

And now I may be getting to move to New York in a few months. So wish me good luck and godspeed. And oh, happy Thanksgiving y'all!