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…