517

-
Source: www.pexels.com
A friend had come over for coffee last night. Among the many things we talked about, he quoted Carl Sagan, “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create a universe.” I loved it.
He recommended Robert McKee’s ‘Story’. Although it’s a manual for screenplay writing, he mentioned that it might help me with plot my stories as well. I ordered a hard cover version from Amazon which will reach me in the New Year so yay!

We discussed ‘Signature of All Things’ by Elizabeth Gilbert and just how marvelous she is. She is. She really is. Her work has some kind of patient unknotting, you know, that is difficult to articulate. It is a beautifully plotted book.

I bought a packet of ‘thetcha’ which is a very, very delectable chilli and garlic paste you get in Maharashtra. It’s had as an accompaniment with chapatti and stuff. I love it. I absolutely love it. It’s just that I’ve always had it when it got made in my friends’ houses and stuff. But now that it is available in a friendly packet that I can pick up from a store and have it whenever I want, life is good.


I bought Maggi and had it at midnight. With a generous dollop of the thetcha in it and a spoonful of rice. (I like a rice and noodle mix.) Maggi is so wonderful. I missed it so much. It felt like the return of true love.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei
Read more