Sunday, August 31, 2008

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....

Saturday, August 16, 2008

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.

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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....