Misunderstand Me Correctly ...

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Misunderstand me correctly…

Misunderstand me correctly…

Music begins where words cease.

When music ceases, silence!

When all arts aspire to

the condition of music;

What does music aspire to?

Silence.

The logic of music leads

eventually to silence!

Music must come from silence.

Come from it and return to it.

Perhaps everything will end in fire.

Fire, then silence.

That is how everything ends, after all.

But, misunderstand me correctly.

I do not choose silence,

silence chooses me.

Anyway, I’m not taking any chances.

For a moment I savour the silence.

I listened until my ears could hear no more,

and silence resumed.

and I wrote this.

*****

This is a kind of a ‘magpie’ poem…my recent visit to the Best Books’ second hand books exhibition at YMCA Secunderabad yielded two (only…unfortunately…) good books…one of them was Granta 76: Music…I picked it up as soon as I saw it, being a music nut and all that…anyway, it contained a good collection of fiction and non-fiction…I started reading Julian Barnes’ ‘The Silence’ and the sentences and words from the piece and the idea of silence re-arranged themselves into this piece…I am only the arranger…

NO, U R ENGLISH

Those of who lived in the CIEFL Hostels during the years 1995-96 would have been witness to a great revolution among the participants in the form of an in-house participants newsletter called /InsaIt/ initiated by Srinivasa Prasad, Rita Ghosh and John Varghese…(remember them, guys?) it was very good while it lasted…I think it ran continuously for one year successfully and slowly faded out…I managed to save all my copies and it is in these pages that I wrote some of my humour stuff back in those days of innocence…and I thought, why not reproduce some of them here in my blog…I have already posted some pieces…my poem which appeared in the very first issue and my spoofish take on the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy…and the one which appears in this post is a humourous take on … what? (come on guys…I don’t have to tell you this…) anyway…read on and if you liked it…please leave a comment…and there is more to come…

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Hi Pops!

Hello Sonny, any interesting questions today?

Oh yes…one Mr Roman Claudius from Copenhagen asks, ‘What is hamlet?’

Let me see…yeah…here it is…according to the Sow and Pig Handbook, ‘hamlet’ is the Danish name for the young one of a pig, otherwise known as ‘piglet.’ The Handbook says that it is derived from ‘ham,’ which as we all know is ‘pig’ and therefore, ‘hamlet’ means the young one of a pig…

Surprising… coming from Denmark, Mr Claudius doesn’t know the Danish name of ‘piglet’…

Indeed, I think something is rotten in the state of Denmark…!!!

That means ‘chicklet’ is the young one of a chick, no?

What son? Yeah, elementary, my dear…next letter, please…

Mr Kang Fu Shan from ConFuJing is confused and wonders if you could help him…

What a strange combination! No wonder he is confused. What does he want to know?

He says, “I read a book on English grammar and it says that the plural of ‘mouse’ is ‘mice’ and that of ‘louse’ is ‘lice’ and I want to know whether the plural of ‘house’ is ‘hice’ and that of ‘blouse’ is ‘blice.’ You see, I am an English teacher and my students asked me this question. I am confused.”

Voila! His deduction and derivation is exact to a T. Congratulations, Mr Shan!

Popsy, does it mean that the plural of ‘spouse’ is ‘spice’?

Absolutely!

Then, if there is no ‘spouse,’ there is no ‘spice,’ no?

Automatically, my dear, automatically…

Aah…this is interesting…Ms Poe-Duvall from Baltimore wants to know the meaning of ‘gruesome.’ Popsy, could she be related to Edgar Allan Poe, the great American writer?

If she is, then her question is wasted here. She’d better ask her legendary ancestor. Anyway, since she has asked us, we’d better give her an answer. The Dictionary of Growth and Death tells us that ‘gruesome’ actually means ‘something that was shorter earlier.’ Sonny, I am really famished…I could eat a whole hamlet. These language lessens are really gruesome. I have to meet a couple of people in their hice…and pick up some blice for my spouse…I have to hurry…otherwise there will be less spice in my life…!!

(Excerpted from Language Lessens and Plays by Bhiktri and Sunny. Amnesia: Apprentice Lyceum, 1982. First published in Tongese by Mepolalynesia. Neduqsowzxijkyl: Tonga, 1975)

Another poem...

I would like to call myself an occasional poet, who writes poems sporadically… at one point of time, I used to write poems regularly…general amateur poems…but as time went by, I was fascinated by the process of writing poems itself and tried to write ‘poems about writing a poem’… and I go back and edit or change or add a phrase…and so there are different versions of the same poem… I have already posted two poems in this blog…here is one more…

it is a tale…told by

Once upon a time

long long ago,

I felt

a tingle in my loins;

snakes slithering in my heart;

monkeys marauding the silence

of my mind.

Today, as I remember these,

the mind struggles to go back.

The tingle has left behind a searing pain

and an ugly scar.

scattered blood.

Snakes have vanished leaving behind

their venom.

Monkeys have abandoned the inert

mind to its frozen silence.

Exhausted, unable to think,

blood, venom, and thawing silence

coagulate and meander along

my veins;

laboriously metamorphose and

flow into this page.

The books I bought and read in the last six months...

This is an exercise that I carry out semi-annually ever since I started this blog; making a list of books that I purchased every half year…it helps me keep track of what books I bought and how many of them I read …they are roughly in the order that I bought, I sort of remember the order because this time, I bought more than 5 books at a time more than once……so, here goes…

• The Girl who played with Fire – Stieg Larsson (read)
• The Girl who kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson (read)
• Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino (unread)
• Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings – Italo Calvino (unread)
• In the Castle of My Skin – George Lamming (read)
• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle (unread)
• The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (read)
• Dave Barry Does Japan (read)
• Dave Barry Turns 50 (read)
• Dave Barry – Greatest Hits (read)
• Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (unread)
• Penguin’s New Writing in India (1974) – Adil Jussawala (ed.) (read in parts)
• The Englishman’s Cameo – Madhulika Liddle (read)
• The Curious Case of 221B – Partha Basu (read)
• The Switch – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Tishomingo Blues – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Pagan Babies – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit – Elmore Leonard (unread)
• Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin (read)
• Strange Pilgrims (short stories) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read some stories)
• The General in his Labyrinth – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (half-way through)
• The Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
• The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – Lynne Truss (read in parts)
• Yakada Yaka – Carl Muller (read many times over…this is my replacement copy, I lost my first one…hilarious…inimitable…)
• The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Tears of the Giraffe – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Morality for Beautiful Girls – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• In the Company of Cheerful Ladies – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
• Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Songs of Kabir – Linda Hess (read)
• BPO Sutra: True Stories from inside India's BPOs & Call Centres – Complied and Edited by Sudhindra Mokashi (read…hilarious…)
• India: A Wounded Civilization – V S Naipaul (started reading!)

A good haul I suppose…there could be a couple of books hiding somewhere…or maybe not…

Deccan Retro Series Fountain Pen - A new FP model from Deccan Pens, Hyderabad

This time I am showcasing a new model by Deccan Pens, Hyderabad…called the Deccan Retro series by them… Made of ebonite, it is light brown in colour with prominent black streaks, a natural design that ebonite lends itself to. It was very difficult to capture the pen in its right colour while photographing as the light brown would turn into dark brown in the photos and the first photo is one of the three photos that show the pen in its correct colour. The rest of the photos that follow that show the pen as dark brown…the photos are sharper though and the pen looks beautiful in dark brown too…

The pen is an ED filler and pen connoisseurs would recognize many influences on the design of this pen…the flat conical cap and the ball clip reminds us of Bexley’s ‘America is Beautiful’ model (as noticed by my friend Hari), Montegrappa Extra 1930 model, and some Eversharp models as well…the distinctive feature of this pen is the curve at the cap lip, not a straight horizontal cut…Deccan Pens have fitted this pen with a Swan Oxford fine tipped nib… the line is slightly finer that I normally would have liked, but the ink flows well and writing is a pleasure… I filled it with Chelpark turquoise ink and didn’t like it at all, mostly because the ink itself was light…I emptied the barrel and refilled it with Camlin Royal Blue and it writes like a dream now… and as always with Deccan Pens (IMHO&E), no starting problems… and for the statistically minded, the pen is approx 5 ½ inches capped, 6 ¼ inches posted, and 5 inches uncapped…

As I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts on Deccan Pens, when you see a new Deccan model, pick it up immediately, because it might just not be there the next time as all new models are made as limited editions initially…and they are all handmade, so the pen-maker himself has to make these pens…there is no assembly line process here…and this pen was no exception…but one of the second generation brothers alerted me when this model was being made and I told him to keep aside two for me…one for my use and another for my friend Hari…

Thanks for watching...

Going to Botswana - Reading Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

Some time back I got heavily into reading crime fiction… I like reading general pulp fiction, but ‘pure’ crime fiction was something I started reading seriously only recently…my friend Vinod was instrumental in introducing me to Elmore Leonard’s novels, and now I am a confirmed fan…I bought a couple of Indian crime fiction novels (The Englishman’s Cameo, The Curious Case of 221B) and liked reading them…Ian Rankin was in India recently and his interviews with a couple of ‘powerful’ people appeared in newspapers here and I was intrigued…I hadn’t read any of his novels…and as luck would have it when Best Books put up their next exhibition at YMCA Secunderabad, I managed to get the first novel in the Inspector Rebus series, Knots and Crosses…and I also got about 5 more Elmore Leonard novels…and in between all these I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (highly recommended!!!) … and so, I was hooked…and wanted to read other writers of similar ‘criminal’ persuasions…the name Alexander McCall Smith also came up while searching for crime fiction authors and the search said that he had written a series of crime novels set in Botswana…starting with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency … I thought I’d give the first one a try … and as luck would have it, I was in Bangalore some months back and there is this mall near my brother-in-law’s house which had a bookstore called Depot … I was delighted to find that all books there are being sold at 50% discount … something like a stock clearance sale … I went in and saw The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency on the rack and decided to pick it up…and then I saw two other books in the same series…Tears of the Giraffe and The Kalahari Typing School for Men…the discount being offered tempted me and I bought all the three…

I started reading the first one … I thought it’d be a tough cloak and dagger high adrenaline hide and seek between detective and criminal…and I was surprised...nothing of that kind…if at all one can use the word ‘gentle’ for a crime fiction novel…it should be used for this…it tells the story of Precious Ramotswe, who sets up a detective agency in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana … Precious Ramotswe tells her story of how she decided to set up the detective agency (the first in Botswana, mind you) and what attracted her to this profession … and a lot about traditional Botswanian way of life, their morals, and how these things are slowly changing…She says she loves Botswana and she loves Africa and wants to do something to solve the little problems that people have to make them live easier…how her father was one of the most upright and good persons who followed the traditional way of life and taught her the positive values … her failed marriage to a musician … and all these constitute the major portion of the first novel … and the initial skepticism among the local people about how a woman could fancy herself to be a detective and whether she could solve any problems at all … the cases she gets initially are ‘simple’ in nature, cheating husbands, car thefts, petty crime…and she solves them…and in the subsequent novels, the crime scene does get grittier, and slightly more dangerous than in the previous cases…

But most interesting are the people that inhabit her world…the kind and gentle Mr J L B Matekoni, mechanic and owner of Speedy Motors, B K, the beautician who owns the Last Chance Hair Salon, Grace Makutsi, the nervous and worried secretary of the Detective Agency, who has the distinction of scoring 97% marks (the highest in the history of the country) in her Diploma offered by the Botswana Secretarial College, and who also always laments that despite her distinction she was never offered any jobs at offices because she did not look or behave like many other young girls…Cephas Buthelezi (who grandly calls himself Ex-CID, Ex-New York, Ex-cellent!!), who sets up a rival detective agency, Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency…Note Mokoti, the jazz trumpeter, who marries Precious Ramotswe and then abuses her physically and from whom she separates…”Two Shots” Pulani, the local impresario, who organizes the Botswana Beauty and Integrity contest…and many many more…

I did not realize that I enjoyed reading the novel…no crime would be reported to the police because Precious Ramotswe believed in solving problems and allowing people to realize their wrongdoings and sort out the emotional fallouts themselves… soon I was reading the second and the third novels … and wanting more … and sure enough, when I visited Bangalore, I visited Depot again, and happily for me, I found two more novels of the series which were not there when I visited it first…Morality for Beautiful Girls and In the Company of Cheerful Ladies…and finished them soon enough…

Above all, Precious Ramotswe takes us on a tour of modern Botswana and one begins to almost smell the soil and become part of Precious Ramotswe’s world…go, read them and Enjoyment Guaranteed…

Swarna 'Sumo' and other Swarnas

The pattern on the barrel

All Swarna fountain pens

The cap

The whole pen...

Continuing with my explorations for handmade fountain pens from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, I came across the SWARNA brand of ebonite fountain pens…this was an unexpected lead given to me by my colleague, who I had infected with the FP virus. He had gone hunting pens in his hometown and hit upon a stationery shop which stocked these pens. He called me while still in the shop and told me about the pens and asked me whether I’d like to have them in my collection. The proprietor then took over and then I had a chat with him and decided to buy a set of whatever he had in all colours. After I had started collecting and using ebonite FPs, I had seen that ebonite FPs came in many designs and styles and sizes and colour variations. And true to form, the SWARNA pens that I received after a week were all different from the ones I had (i.e., Ratnam, Guider, Deccan, Prasad, and other smaller brands), but the biggest surprise was the biggest one in the gang. The object of my penfection here is the big ebonite ED filler pen from SWARNA. This pen did not have any name and I decided to call it the SWARNA SUMO…it is a solid looking pen, worth being mentioned along with the ebonite greats of AP...the pen has a very unusually shaped cap...we have all seen tapering down caps, but this cap has a completely black cap jewel...I think a separate part...not part of the swirling mottled brown ebonite body...and I think (again), for this reason, the pen maker decided to have a separate black part at the bottom too, to seal the barrel...normally the barrels of ebonite pens are stand alone single pieces, because ebonite for pens is available as rods and the rods are hollowed to make the caps and barrels...so, this design here is unconventional...the natural swirl pattern on the cap is really nice...and that is the beauty of ebonite pens...no two pens are alike in terms of colour patterns, whether mottled green or mottled brown...

an interim poem

Please find below a 'letting off steam' poem...

morning blues

trundling along with the uneven pulse

of dated buses on moonscape roads;

half sleepy head nodding in counter pulses;

half wake eyes trying to gauge the gaps

left to reach the impending destination.

dreading the mass of

sleepy heads suppressing yawns;

stunned looks and bus-lagged eyes.

shunned dreams or dreams shunted

of lives engineered to perfection;

and a teacher trying to teach

accent and rhythm and intonation and stress.

stress accentuated.

finished...

Marut and his Pens - Story 2 - Marut at the airport

Ever since I wrote the first Marut Pen story, I have been inundated with numerous letters from fans of my blog for more Marut Pen stories…

What?

Well…this I can say with confidence that at least 50% of my fans implored me for more of Marut…(!!)…

What?

Yeah…it is true…

How?

Let me clarify…ha ha ha…I know for sure that two of my friends read my blog…and one of them asked me, ‘when are you going to post the next Marut Pen story?’ See…50%, no?...ha ha ha…

Anyway…I enjoy recounting and writing about Marut, his pens and his face-offs with his missus because of his passion for fountain pens…so, here goes…

The other day Marut had gone to the airport along with his missus to see off his in-laws who were going to the US of A. Marut hails from a village and he attended school there and then went to the nearby towns for his college education…and he was forced to come to the capital city after marriage. He is distinctly uncomfortable when he is made to go out of his comfort zone. Poor chap…you should see it to believe his discomfort…he has to wear shoes and tuck his shirt in and all that everyday in the name of formal dressing…he just detests it…and for somebody like him, the airport is something way out of his league. He feels lost in such ‘posh’ spaces…He doesn’t want to go to such places, but his missus is a city person and on top of that is a strong willed lady and Marut’s wall of resistance crumbles after some time and so he has to willy nilly go to such totally alien spaces…

Anyway, and so, Marut goes to the airport. His missus’ father was once some grand panjandrum in some important government department and so, he was able to pull some strings and the see-off-ers were also allowed inside the airport…the inside of the airport was a mind-blocking experience for our Marut…and what happens once they are inside the airport?

Marut was minding his own business…kind of…and then Marut sees this tall beautiful lady walking towards him…(this is real, he was not dreaming and I am not making this up…!!)…Marut, not used to such direct walkings, looked around, hoping that she was heading elsewhere…but, no, he couldn’t see anybody behind him, neither was there anybody standing to his left or right…he was kind of paralysed…he just stood there, gaping! The aforementioned lady approached Marut…(tension…tension…tension…) and asked Marut of she could borrow his pen…phew…oof…Marut looked at his shirt pocket…yes…his trusted black ebonite Advocate fountain pen was peeping out…he recovered his balance…OK…she wants to borrow my pen…he took out the Advocate and told her hesitantly that it was a fountain pen and that she won’t be able to write with it if she is not used to writing with fountain pens...she gave him a disarming smile and said that she uses fountain pens and that she’d forgotten to bring hers and she would have no problems writing with the one that he had, provided he lends it to her…Marut couldn’t say or do anything further and gave her the Advocate fountain pen…

The lady took the pen and went to a desk and started filling out some form…and after a while she came back, returned the pen and thanked Marut for lending a fountain pen (Old Efpi saying: people who use fountain pens don’t lend it to others…)…and gave a nice smile…Marut smiled and took back the Advocate and secured it in his pocket…

And all this while Marut’s missus was watching the proceedings…wonder what she was thinking (!&?*%$)…GOK… from what Marut told me she was slightly disturbed, I think…

Marut’s missus is a beautiful lady, but another beautiful woman approaching her husband to borrow a pen was not to her liking…and Marut is no pushover in the looks department either …tall, well-built, with a nice guileless smile…and theirs was a ‘love’ marriage…so, I think, her thinking was…if I can fall for him, another woman too could and he fell for me, he could fall for others too…so, this could be the disturbed bee buzzing around her head…and after the deed was done and the pen came back to Marut’s pocket…she delivered her devastating one line judgement…she gave him a nasty look and said…

“Don’t ever use that pen again…”

Good catch at Best Books sale

Yesterday morning while on the bus to my college, I saw this banner at YMCA Secunderabad advertising a used books sale…I sat up… but, there was no name of the seller on the banner…is it a books sale by Best Books, I wondered? Because it is they who regularly have their books sale at YMCA and I had found some good wish-listed books at their sales on earlier occasions…I made up my mind to get down near YMCA on my way back from college in the evening and see what I can get this time…

As expected, there were stacks and stacks of books on the tables on shelves on boxes waiting to be unpacked…books books books everywhere…and it turned out that it was the first day of the sale…so I was in with a fine chance of landing a good catch…I checked my wallet and gave myself a tolerably good budget with which I could comfortably buy 3-4 books…

So, armed thus, I set out on my book seeking odyssey inside the sale hall…I was surprised to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin right away…this book has been in my wishlist since 1993(?!)…yeah, that long…I never thought that I’d encounter this book in a used books sale…I read this novel as part of the Commonwealth Literature syllabus at Pune University, and the unique narrative structure of this novel stayed with me and two years later I decided to work on this novel for my MPhil…I wanted to own a copy of the novel, but it was not available anywhere in India and I remember I had to make do with a photocopy. Much to my regret, I completed my MPhil thesis without owning a copy of the novel that I worked on. This regret remained and I ventured many times to buy a copy, but getting one from abroad would be an expensive proposition, and so, this wish remained just that…a wish…until yesterday when out of the blue I find a copy and that too for maybe 10% of the price of a new copy…cool…I clutched it tightly…

I saw a lot of interesting books... I picked up a couple of them tentatively and continued to walk around…I then came upon a stack of books on humour and located some Dave Barry books…wow…wonderful time pass books…Dave Barry became one of my favourites ever since Vinod gifted one of his books to me when he first visited us…I picked up three Dave Barry books…Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry Turns 50, and Dave Barry-Greatest Hits…I had reached my budget limit and decided to jettison one of the two books that I’d picked up earlier after I found In the Castle of My Skin…I retained Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle…enough…I was moving towards the cash counter and I turned and saw a book by Italo Calvino…can’t leave a Calvino behind, can you, even if you have to breach your budget? I hadn’t heard about this book earlier – Hermit in Paris-Autobiographical Writings and as the title says, it contains autobiographical essays…good one…and good that I found it, but I am certain it was not there when I passed by that stack before…I hungrily added the book to my growing stack, not without a fleeting thought at my breached budget limit…this book was more expensive than the others…because it is a Calvino? I gave myself a budget raise…what to do…

Good, I thought and then I thought I spied a familiar name…one of which I already had in my hands now…another Calvino, a thin one, was hiding between two fat books…Invisible Cities…never thought I’d find this masterpiece in a used books sale…but I know now that nothing is impossible…I found three such books in one evening…needless to say, my budget exploded…couldn’t keep any of these books down now…at least 3 books more than I thought I’d buy…I then carried these small treasures to the cash counter and requested the proprietor to give me a small discount…he graciously did…maybe he saw a pleading book lover’s face or maybe it was a largish enough purchase on the first day of the sale and he didn’t want to say ‘no’…can’t say…

The sale is on till 24^th January…I might visit once again…ha ha ha…

2009 - Books I read

What else happened in 2009? Well, I read and read a lot and bought a lot of books. I don’t remember the names of all now and must remember and make a list. 2009 ended with my reading the first novel of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the new year began with the second, The Girl who Played with Fire…real crackling stuff…the most thrilliest(!) page turners that I have ever read in a long long time. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the third one. This one will arrive by post, because I realized that I get a good discount when I order these books online and in most cases there is no postage, so I get to gain both ways.

I located and bought some wonderful books on music – Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music (Peter Lavezzoli), Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ed. Amlan Dasgupta), and Mixed Tape: The First City Interviews 3-Music. And along the way, bought some English translations of classical Sanskrit plays by Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti; these were to help me identify and annotate some Sanskrit verses used in an early Kannada novel that I was translating into English. And then I ventured into the Bengali literary territory to read English translations of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s and Mahasweta Devi’s short stories (I also bought these books published by Thema, Calcutta).

Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Beach is the other book I bought along with Larsson’s first of the Millemmium Trilogy. 2009 was also the year when I tried to read a bit of western philosophy and bought quite a number of books and the funny part is that I am still trying to read them; not easy reading at all… Derrida, Adorno, Horkheimer, et al. Pablo Neruda’s Isla Negra was one book that was a long pending purchase and the good old book store still had it on its shelves…thank god for that. I wanted to read something non-fictional by Umberto Eco and it was a slippery watery ride with Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.

The book exhibition at YMCA, Secunderabad yielded a good catch of 3 Dave Barry books (Dave Barry turns 40; Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits; Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need) and an Elmore Leonard novel. And I also found a refreshing stash of Asterix comics at a used book store and got them at a very affordable price…nothing like an Asterix for a dull or boring day…

There are some more books out there…I know…but all in all, a good productive year as far as reading was concerned…good only…

New Year - Bringing up Father

Wishing you all a Happy New Year and all that jazz…

The past year has been as eventful as the ones before it…but 2009 had one major life changing moment…the birth of my daughter made 2009 into an unforgettable year… I am still tongue tied…can’t say how I feel even now…happiness, joy, et al, are OK, but don’t capture how I feel…so, I am just allowing myself to be carried away…my precious now smiles freely and openly and I just feel like I am melting…I try to be as useful and helpful as I possibly can at home, I carry her around when she is in a cranky mood or when she just wont lie down on her bed…I prepare her feeds…I play music for her and sometimes dance holding her…I can generally look after her, and the other day, I tried diaper-changing and felt that I can do it…but I still can’t feed her successfully and dress her up or give her a bath…but I think, I can do all of these eventually…and the political developments in December here in Hyderabad inadvertently, but pleasantly, gave me lots of time to spend with my little one...I think, I can interpret out some of her baby-talk...and when I make this long chirping kind of sound to draw her attention, she gurgles happily, says "hakkoooo" and gives a twinkling and uninhibited toothless laughter...and her hands and legs are just going up and down in pleasure...and my day is made...