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…