the content of my days...

Don't quite know how, but I've managed to fill my days with so much of doing not much. would like to post more...

Main yahaan ajnabi hoon...

...and maybe the sense of being foreign to a place is really not that foreign. :)

It doesn't have to be a country, it could just be a roomful of "friends" that aren't quite that - but uncanny faces that you just did not anticipate. The familiar turns unfamiliar.

Perhaps it is good for the eyesight. Perhaps it is a reminder that you are not blind - that things you see are not even.

As a result, I approach strangers cautiously now. Even I am turning unfamiliar to myself.

I bought a book on psychology, presumably to understand minds better - but I think the mind that most fascinates me is my own. I don't know it at all.

afterthought...

...come to think of it, that moment of articulation was actually in an online conversation, which involves written as well as 'spoken' speech.

that is where the catalyst kicks in then.

***********

on another poetic note, i read ondaatje again after a long, long while..


The Cinammon Peeler
By Michael Ondaatje


If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.


You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

say what?

because for hours now, and for the past two posts, i have been skirting around the issue - and i should just say it.

i'm a good evader.

but Brian McFarlan's Drop the Pink Elephant, which is devoted entirely to correctness in one's spoken interactions, has had me thinking. I can be unkind in speech.

I remember this allegory someone sent once. A boy's father tells him to hammer nails into the fence every time he feels angry. The boy starts out with many nails a day, and slowly there are less nails in the fence. Then for every day that he isn't angry, the father asks him to remove the nails.

Each nail, the father points out, is like a harsh word said in anger. The hurts go deep, and what's worse is that you cannot really take them back. When you remove the nail, the hole is still there.

And I've said harsh words in complete jest - because I find it makes one tough - what with one's British education. And I often find that among journalists - a clique to which I do not entirely belong, but to which I often aspire - snideness is the rule of the day; it's what sets you apart.

Because saying, "You're smart, aren't you?" is just so much more of a sharper nail than "Stupid."

My bookshelf

1. Drop the Pink Elephant
By Bill McFarlan. This erstwhile BBC-walla will now tell us how to get the fat, unnecessary stuff out of the way in conversations, and perhaps get to the bone. I'm on chapter 3 - what I have learned so far seems insightful.

2. Not Buying It
Judith Levine goes on about a year of not shopping. Her style is known for engaging political, cultural and economic macro-concerns into daily life. I'm looking forward to being intimidated and enlightened in equal measure.

3. Eat That Frog
and once you get that over with, metaphorically speaking, says author Brian Tracy, you can spend the rest of your day working in the relief that the worst is over. The run-on title is "21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time."

4. Your First Novel
by Ann Rittenbergy and Laura Whitcomb - self-evident as to its content (another how-to guide), but has been lying around and been renewed for too long. Apparently someone at British Council Library wanted "How to Mind Map" by Tony Buzan and had it reserved, so I had to return it. It is both with relief and disappointment that I realised it wasn't the write your novel book they wanted but an organising tool. sigh.

5. Shantaram
by Gregory David Roberts, a tale of Mumbai's world of crime, sex, drugs, and anything else that sells I suppose. It's about a 1000 pages, and I've perhaps read 10, but hope springs eternal. The only element of fiction in my collection of self-improvement-centered reading. :)

Also:
Am watching a josei manga anime on youtube (thank you, youtube!).
and fawlty towers also sits on shelf waiting patiently to be viewed, and perhaps reviewed.

Isn't it ironic?

The titles of my blogs...particularly the last three ones go.

"Let's not talk."
"Why this is hard.."
"Talking makes it easy."

Talking makes it easy....

Last week, when I was writing a review on this musical performance of oud (stringed lute), these are the words that i wanted to articulate. I didn't arrive at them for purposes of the article, but tehy came much easier when i was talking to a friend:

one of the functions of music may be to point to silence, to elaborate on it, like lace.

Looking back at many conversations i have had, i find that they act as catalysts to thoughts, even the articulate ones. But strangely enough, I've been told on more than one occasion that I articulate myself better in writing than in person.

I have many an msn chat, however, that is full of amazing repartee that I don't think I could duplicate in writing, should I be writing with me, myself, and pi. :)