Alabala

This is what Shashi Tharoor's column had to say yesterday:

My mother always told me to spend New Year's Day doing the kinds of things I wanted to repeat in the remaining 364. Her assumption was, I suppose, that the first day of the year set the tone for what was to follow, so spending it in the sybaritic indulgence that befits a holiday — or even worse, sleeping off the sybaritic indulgences of the previous night — would guarantee an unproductive year ahead.

Going by his mother's words, the rest of my year will be spent in the bathroom possessed by a strong urge to throw up and an utter inability to do so. I had a bad, bad stomach upset.

What a welcome relief it was, to finally throw up after hours of endless waiting! If you're wondering where this is going, all of yesterday made me think - isn't it weird how enormously relieved you feel after doing the most disgusting things? Like puking ... or peeing ... or :D Okay, I shall stop this here.

Other observations ...

- Aunt from Pakistan is home. Yes, Mr. Wodehouse, you were right, aunts aren't gentlemen.

- New York mami was stunned to see the new year celebrations on the streets. 'I didn't know the new year was such a big deal here. There people just go out to one place, they don't run around on the streets shouting 'Happy New Year!''

- This is from a post that I wanted to make long, long ago. Its from a book called 'How Proust can change your life':

It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable neglected aspects of experience.

... he argued that we should be reading for a particular reason, not to pass the time, not out of detached curiosity not out of a dispassionate wish to find out what Ruskin felt, but because 'there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt'. We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel, it is out own thoughts we should be developing even if it is another writer's thoughts which help us do so.




- And this is a poem that I discovered lying in my login, Vikram Seth again :D

Sea and Desert

How do I merit such happiness? To have
The moon, the Pacific, and you beside me, waking
At three to sudden cold - dew, the stiff breeze
Along the headland; I have been watching you,
Your face lit in the full moon, restless, still,
As out beyond the strip of foam near the crags
Below, the moon lights up a calm yet shifting
Track on the ocean. Your face with its
Clean lines and tousled hair is beautiful
And it is hard to believe that even in
This stark and lovely place it is the cause
Of so much of my peace. You sleep again,
And I know this unusual beauty, that you've
Neither aimed for nor deserved, will recur
Again and again for me with sea and moon,
An image changing with these changing things,
Distracting me from neither, enhancing both,
A gift you could not help but give, something
I too have neither aimed for nor deserve.