Dream on....

So, what is it about writing?

Really, what is it all about?

I read moving stories, i feel extremely touched by it, you can even find me weeping in a corner with a book in hand, trying to hide the tears but i will never ever be able to write a sentimental story or anything sentimental for that matter.

Just can't.

Not that i want to. Although my love of writing goes very far, too far sometimes.... ummm.............

I don't think i'm making any sense. Let's try that again people....

I hate reading newspapers. I hate it. When I was student of literature, i could never pick up a newspaper and read. Not even when i became a student of Journalism! You would think that one who loves to read would do it, but not me. No.

I tried several times, i keep trying but i know i am just pretending to be interested in NY Times while all i want to do is run as far away from reality as possible. I am not just the kind i suppose. Anything that reminds me of the reality that surrounds me can be uninteresting. I don't like conversations surrounding the sale at Macy's and JC Penny's. I would automatically tune off. Why? I do enjoy a good buy but hate to talk about it. Isn't that odd?

Forget the buying, it is the reading that really bothers me... 'Bothers' might not be the right word, it is the reading that 'irks' me. Are irks and bothers the same? I don't know, but I'm sure you get my drift.

So, here it comes, no realities, no newspaper, probably includes a lot of magazines, many novels, short stories.... all thrown out of the window. Lets see, what am i left with? Some Period Drama, Sci fi, Supernatural, sometimes even religious stuff if it carries some intrigue, sometimes a good mass fiction, yeah, that pretty much sums it up. But the only problem is, i like to read a well-written book. In these categories, period drama is easy, you'll find a lot of good material but in the other two categories, it could get challenging. Loved / love J.K. Rowling, like Asimov, Jeffrey Archer was interesting but what about a zillion other new/ old authors. Tried Salman Rushdie, couldn't go beyond 100 pages. maybe because, he talks about Indian history that is too close to my reality, tried Gabriel Garcia Marquez, started with 100 years of solitude, didn't like it. Eventhough it has a lot of aspects that i like, quirky stories, supernatural stuff, out of reality etc. etc., it still didn't cut it. Oh, did i say that i despise Dan Brown's books. Da Vinci Code was tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me. Yes, love Jane Austen. I truly enjoyed Hitchhikers guide....... it was such a laugh. It had something very special. And surprise surprise love Arundathy Roy's, God of Small things. Me, an avid Indian writer hater, loved Roy's work, forgot the story completely, read it some 8 years ago, i just remember liking it so much. Her style of writing was awesome. I'm yet to come across a more original style. She truly stood apart. This you see defies my earlier theory of me not liking stories placed in the real world. God of Small things is very real, yet i loved it. Again liked kite runner and a thousand splendid suns. All very real. Alchemist was just okay. So you see my difficulty here, i find it extremely difficult to pick up a book to read. So damn hard. I end up reading the same books again and again, but then there is this element of fear that i should not end up being bored with the books i once loved. So i try not to over do it.

Is there a solution? Oh just remembered loved The agony and the ecstasy. That's it. Now that i have my dislikes and likes in dear old words, i want to pick up some 10 books and curl up in a corner and read. But i can't seem to find any that fits my bill. What do i do?

You'll find two big open cupboards in my rented apartment filled with books. Not one serves my purpose. maybe i should throw them all out you say? Nah, presents a great image of myself to my visitors so i tend to keep them all. How vain? I know. That's the absolute truth, stacks of books make me feel so good about myself. And everybody knows i enjoy reading but they should not think of gifting me with one, too complicated!

Well, suggestions, if people still pop in here now and then, are welcome! :)

Fighter jets over my head!

Calls for an immediate post. I was an eyewitness to yesterday's 3 low flying aircrafts over New York and New Jersey fiasco that resulted in panicked staff being evacuated from the buildings, running out and finding a safe place to stand and wait. 

And where was that place? Right below my building at the edge of the water! Yes. 

The whole crowd from Goldman Sachs and other folks from the Jersey City's Financial district flowed this way as the planes started circling and i thought somebody has decided to bomb them all and put an end to the financial crisis!! ..... Ok that was a PJ i admit but i cannot deny that the thought did not cross my mind as it did to about a few hundred of them i'm sure who had lived through 9/11 and were standing right now looking up and down wondering what to do...

I saw atleast 2 of those airplanes and heard all three. Boy oh boy it made such a huge noise and the whole crowd looked helpless and wanted some explanation. I was looking from my balcony down below and saw many things, calls were flying, people were taking pics. and the mood was so serious. I didn't know, the crowd didn't know and the people who were witnessing this fiasco from our apartment building and other buildings did not know that IT WAS JUST A DUMB PHOTO SHOOT! duh! How can they scare people that way? I have to now tell you that Jersey city is not a place where people are not used to flying machines over the buildings, infact most of the CEO's here i presume travel by helicopters or small aircrafts, i see atleast 50-60 such pick ups and drops everyday since my building overlooks Manhattan. So it was not that people were not used to that noise but the noise that 'Airforce 1'(apparently) made and the two fighter jets made were HUGE to say the least. Anybody would think we are being attacked. And trust me it is an unnerving feeling. And just as we were all standing, rooted, there comes a mini van with a mike announcing that there was nothing to worry and it was a sanctioned photo shoot!

The crowd was relieved, i was relieved and then people became angry.... why did they ever make them all go through this shit! (Excuse my french!)

Well, here is the CNN story link, in case my post did not make any sense to you whatsoever...

PS: You see the blue building in the pic, i'm right behind it....

You Tube Video- Fighter jets and people's reaction.

The 7 minute walk.....

I pause and see,

observe

think, 

not the hurried sort of way that i got so used to this past year,

i mean, really think.......

and i hear

my neighbours,

'the hudson' by the window

the stillness in the air,

the rain,

the light rail that passes by every few minutes,

watch the sun set

once again

every day

sipping coffee

thinking..........

I missed you life, i missed me........

I'm enjoying taking tanya to school nowadays, you see we walk to her school and just by taking these slow walks i have come to realize that she's so much like me in so many aspects, we have both started to observe how slowly a blade of grass grows compared to Tulips that were planted at the sidewalks at the dawn of spring, we watch the birds, pausing enough to feel the pinch of forgetting to carry a camera every single day, she tries to guess the names of the birds, maybe it's a 'robin' amma, and i say 'maybe' (Got to mention here that she has a better knowledge of birds, animals and things that crawl around here than me!) I no longer make her cry asking her to hurry up when all she wants to do is kneel down and watch the Squirrel family, I don't tell her to not talk to me because i'm running late to office, I relish walking at her pace, she has so much to say and she sees so many things, she has an opinion on everything nowadays. Maybe she always did i just didn't notice them as much...

(BTW she has insisted on growing her hair long! She looks like the hippies of the 80s !!)

Hmmmm.....I have more to say about our walks, maybe with a few pics next time, stay tuned and take a walk with us......... you'll get to know a thing or two about dandelions, robins and a grey owl that never flies....

Of everything 'New' and a lazy day at NYC

Today as i was flipping through the 'Book Review' session of NY Times i came across a title, that at this very moment stands in No:3 position in Trade Fiction - 

'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Description: The classic story retold by "ultra violent mayhem". 

My heart sank to the deepest level it possibly could and i wondered who gave him permission to do this? How dare he put his name by her side?...... if by some miracle my blog gets followed by my old blog pals they'd know the high esteem i have for Jane Austen....

Jane Austen you see wrote her novels at a time when women were not accepted in the literary circles! She was a rebel in her times. Audacious and smart and witty....... 

But that got me thinking ...... who am i to stop this new method of writing that seth grahame-smith has followed, maybe he is the rebel that Jane Austen was in her times. So how do i see new things nowadays? have i become old(too sad to contemplate ;))? have i fallen into the circle where i'm no longer open? or is this book just junk? Don't know, and i'll never know 'cos i'm never ever going to pick that book for reading.... but that's just me...... now we come to the 'Lazy day at NYC' (as my friend put it:) ) 

You see bad economy finally knocked on my door and i'm not working at the moment :( But not to worry i'm taking this opportunity to enhance my skills.... and to just laze around  :) loving every moment of the immense amount of time i have on me and relishing it ... on that note i went for a mini NY city tour with a good friend of mine who knew a lot about the city although he's originally from LA.  After several stops at various queer spots, we hit the elite spot - 'Christie's' (the world renowned auction house like Sotheby's) 

So what has this got to do with the book review i had mentioned earlier in the post? 

Well we happened to be at the Christie's when Betty Freeman's (a Collector) collection were on display. She had collected various contemporary art work by various artists and i was shocked at the collection and the pricing. I thought they were ridiculous. It didn't make sense to me. 

A set of tubelights, yes, you read it right 'tubelights' put together is priced $400,000 - $600, 000! Why? She is an old, kind woman, respected among the elite circle who apparently brings hidden artists to spotlight by patronizing their art. She likes all that is new! She accepts them.... so where do you draw the line between new and ridiculous? Maybe I have a closed view about things or maybe not. Maybe i need to travel more, see newer things, pick up books that aren't my style. So will that make me a new person or will i be faking the whole damn attempt? I'm bringing in some pics and a link to Betty Freeman's at Christie's.

Sorry about the pic being blurry folks.

There you go, the pic, price and the thoughts...... There are many paintings in her collections that are truly wonderful, you can find them in the link below

The Betty freeman video with her byline 

"I have always been interested in everything new and don't know why others aren't"

PS: Finally to all of my dear dear blog pals who consistently visited my page and left comments that encouraged, reprimanded and reminded me of my duties towards maintaining this page, thanks so very much..... even though i could not respond or visited my own page too late to respond, it kept the fire alive, hoping to add a few pounds of coal for it to roar again :)

Thanks again folks.....  

Of sins, canyons and poetry

So what does it take to be not tempted in the city of sins?

Blind eyes and deaf ears?

Well, what are all those women doing selling their bodies everyday?

doing the pole dance?

'All naked'... 'totally nude'..... these are the few adjectives used while describing a woman on the floor in Las Vegas...

Are you now curious to go to Las Vegas or are you totally disgusted??

Me? I feel neither.....

I accepted at Las Vegas that women here are there to entertain ...... and all those mexican looking men and women were having stacks of naked women's pictures in there hands on the road and showing it to all men walking single just to lure them to enter the "Gentleman's" club right behind the door.

I wanted to stand there, pick one card and enter that forbidden club just to see what it was all about .....

But what about my disgust for it?

Will i deal with it tomorrow?

Is this how men walk into those clubs?

deal with guilt tomorrow?

Will there be any guilt?

Why should one feel guilty?

Is it bad?

Is it really a sin?

It is just a feeling..... one is just gratifying one of their senses....

there... do you see the grey shades now?

Do you see reasoning fade away?

Do you see the line vanishing?

That is what Las vegas is all about...... a place where people let go. Where there is no right and wrong. Where everything is ok.....

Where the thick line becomes thin and then vanishes a little bit and probably reappears tomorrow when you have come back to you nest .....

This is what i saw in Las Vegas....... apart from the grand structures and tons of money spent on building a city that glitters ..... all that lingers in my mind are men on the streets selling women. No judgement here.......

Anyway i was on a road trip for the past 8 days .... Las Vegas, Grand Canyon, Antelope Canyon, Bryce canyon etc. The trip was awesome.......

But i'm not going to write a travelogue now, because most of my thoughts cannot be put into words, they stray, move, linger, die and rise again.... so am just going to give bits and pieces of this trip....

Grand Canyon of course was breathtaking and all other canyons were too but what is shocking is the totally strange landscape...... there i feel the earth has worked differently, as if another part was attached to it. Because land, mountains and canyons have grown in different shapes and sizes, almost alien. And me being an Indian, it was hard for me to see miles and miles of land on both sides with no people. Absolutely no one. I could not see an end to all those lands on both sides of the road and again and again the one single thought kept coming back, that someone had taken the efforts to lay roads, with warning signs, with maximum miles per hour laid at all the right places, so it wasn't wild at all. Infact it was a well planned tourist spot with 16 million acres of desert, canyons and just plain land with only 300,000 of the Navajo tribe covering the whole of it and the tourists of course. Mmmmmm......

That apart Tanya had a lot of fun in the trip. All she ever wants to do is climb on things. So mountains, canyons were her turf now..... she had a lot of fun and i noticed something else on the last day of my trip, she has totally shifted to speaking in english only. She doesn't speak her mother tongue anymore! I was totally shocked when i realised it. Now i'm working on talking to her in Kannada only! Extremely difficult for me too. You may think i'm lying when i say i did not notice the transition but i really really didn't....... I will keep updating all you guys on her language skills......

Well now comes the whimsical part..... as we were traveling to 'monument valley' in Utah i saw poetry on road. It was the name of a restaurant. It was right near the corner where Highway 160 and 163 met in a place named Kayenta in Arizona. It was named 'The blue Coffee pot restaurant' . It was coloured in blue, dark blue, white and red. There was something strange about the board, it looked as if it did not belong there. It cannot just stay on a highway! The name i thought is meant to be elsewhere with its colors and the way the board stood on the road....

it looked like the line had been plucked out of a poem to be discovered by me on a highway to be described about on a blog post. And i also intend to create a blog page by its name....

"The blue Coffee pot"........

Can you see what i mean? Don't ask me how i'm going to maintain 3 blogs when i don't seem to do justice to one. I don't know but all i know is i want to own this board in someway.....
There ......... that's how my trip ended..... with a feeling of a poem conjured but not delivered, yet....

To the world of worms who live in books!

I was tagged by 'Shalom'.
Love anything and everything to do with the books. Especially few suggestions when you go to a book shop and don't really know which one to choose...... anyone who drops by here, kindly take up the tag if you feel like it or if you want to write reviews on books here or otherwise and think is worth reading..... ADD ON PLS...

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you really love (and strikethrough the ones you hate!).
I'm coloring the books i love in yellow and keeping the ones i hate in red. Couldn't find underline and strike on my blog page!!
4) Reprint this list in your own blog.

----------

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (Started it, didn’t finish!!)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - I have started this twice and just could not finish!
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Absolutely loved it. You’ll laugh your guts out!)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (loved the movie!)
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (bleak bleak stuff!)

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Naboko
v63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnights Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (about to finish it)

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( a part of it was prescribed for my frech class, weird stuff!)

I have read 17 of these. I think it is disturbingly less!! I counted at least 3 times... man! one good news though is there is so much more to read....

Drink and be merry!

The reason for me to have not written for so long I think is because I have not read anything of any interest to me in a long time now. I'm still working on being normal while on a job. mmmm........

Now, getting down to today's topic......
I'm what you call an absolute novice when it comes to the world of Wines, Names of the wines, Wine tasting, Vineyards, names of the countries that produce good wines so on and so forth...
And what's with this swirling of the wine in the glass before taking a sip and what exactly are they looking for when they smell the wine? - A daffodil? It all just alcohol buddy...
Yeah, I've been doing a lot of wining and dining lately and hence the topic.

Oh, I must've tasted many different types of wine. Here is how i go about it - go to a restaurant, ask for the menu card, choose a red or a white wine (desperately looking for a description underneath each one of those!) Look confident after you've pronounced the bloody french-dutch-Italian wine in your mind at least twice or thrice before spilling it out with a dazzling smile on your face all the time hoping that the guy actually buys it!! That's me people. The vain Me.

Yesterday I put an end to this by doing some research / some reading!! Here is what I found. If you guys are coming here after so long you might as well learn something with me and perhaps leave some of your wisdom in the comment box!

Let's drink to that folks.....

Here are a few extremely basic facts:

There are 6 different types of wines
Red Wine
White Wine
SparklingWine (in other words - Champagne!) Ah, I bet some of you didn't know that!

Rose Wine
Dessert Wine
Fruit Wine

The Last 3 as usual are not considered very special. But lets begin at the beginning.

Red wine - Made from red or black grapes. Names of the wine are based on the names of the grapes they are made from! ( I didn't know this, never thought of the 'WHY' factor)
Some popular grapes and hence the wines are - 'Pinot' family, 'Merlot' family, Australian Shiraz etc...... My personal favourite - Pinot Noir.

White wine - Made from white or light coloured grapes. Like other wines, white wines can be made from either one single variety of grape or by blending several. 'Bordeaux' is one variety that's well-known among the blended ones. I have not tasted enough in white wine to find a personal favourite yet! Still a long way to go.....

Sparkling Wine - Champagne Folks!!- Interesting stuff here!
Any wine with bubbles in it is a sparkling wine. Champagne is the most famous of all the Sparkling Wines. Apparently how the fizziness in the wine is brought about determines the texture and the taste of this wine. The name 'Champagne' is because of a particular variety of grape from the Champagne region in France that undergoes a process called champenoise that gives that bubbly effect.

Rose wine- No, no. It is not produced by blending red and white grapes sillys!!
Infact it is produced by crushing red grapes. Interestingly enough by not letting the skin of the red grapes be in contact with the juice for long, we can produce rose/pink wine. Howzaat? and believe me folks the pink wine looks so pretty but tastes very dry and very acidic.

Dessert Wine or sweet wine - It is produced not by adding sugar but by halting the fermentation of the grapes by adding a particular fungus that stops the fermentation and increases the sugary, fruity flavour in them. They were considered cheap! But I seriously feel every wine has a particular character that will have a following.

Fruit Wine - made from fruits i suppose, didn't bother read about this.

And yes, 'they' swirl to test the heaviness of the wine. The lines that the wines produce by the side of the glass and the time it takes to dribble would say how old the wine is!! I'm gonna try this folks! The smell ofcourse depends on our imagination! Apparently, the smell can actually remind you of a particular fruit, flavour, an emotion. Not sure about trying this!!

All this sudden knowledge has made me more curious about so many other things.
So I made a mini list of things i would like to know more about...... Islands, Kings and queens. Well, please feel free to add to my mini list.....

PS: One thing I'm least interested in knowing about is Flowers!