Day 11

-

 Here are a few things I am grateful for today:

1. Papa is well. 

2. Went to A's place to check on her because she was unwell. But we planned the children's birthdays instead and I had pizza. That was lovely!

3. I thought of taking her some attars as well. The Ajmal store on Linking Road is a happy place. Yes, the attendants are mostly young men who would rather be chilling in a cave than be selling stuff (which is the attitude of all salespeople in the shops in Linking Road now). But the cloud of scents is awesome. A customer tried out a scent called Raindrops and I immediate wanted to befriend her and tell her that my birthday is coming up. 

4. I wore a fluffy snow white cotton dress from Zara. So comfortable!

5.  Came across this poem and I think it's just lovely:

Before the Big Bang

there was no up

there was no down

there was no side to side

there was no light

there was no dark

nor shape of any kind

there were no stars or planet Mars

or protons to collide

there was no up

there was no down

there was no side to side

and furthermore to underscore this total lacking state

there was no here

there was no there

because there was no space

and in this endless void which can’t be thought of as a place

there was no time

and so no passing minutes, hours, days

of all the paradoxes

that belabour common sense

I think this one’s the greatest

this time before events

because how did we go from nothing

to infinitely dense?

from immeasurably small

to inconceivably immense?

but before we get unmoored from the question at the start

let’s take a breath and marvel

at when math becomes an art

because we don’t have to understand it

to know there was a time

when there was no up

there was no down

there was no side to side

~ Reina del Cid


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