In the end

nothing ever quite pans out the way you or I may plan it. Okay, so this post isn't about to be as serious as it was made to sound with that ominous start. But I thought I would document it here, anyway, that I am now the proud owner of both The Razor's Edge and The English Patient. And yet I brought neither along on my travel; the snippet about the former turned out to be very similar to Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund (both excellent reads by the masterful Herman Hesse, by the way). The latter, a hard-bound heavy-weight, (all puns intended) was too heavy to carry in flight. I did have very pleasant company in the form of a vibrant Parsi community living in Mumbai in the mid '80s, all on print of course.

In the end, too, Madras isn't quite the inferno I'd feared it would be. It has been raining the last few days and it is almost comic how breezy and pleasant it is. Also, this is the first vacation in which I've been able to visit the beach almost every single day. Ah, bliss! :)

Did I mention, how, also, in the end, after weeks of planning a mini ten-year high school reunion, one friend fell sick, another's child did and 2 others canceled their travel plans altogether? Yeah. So, that's that. What I'd envisioned as two weeks of frenzied social activity turned out to be the exact opposite. But, oh, well. I'm not complaining. Surprises of this kind, are not too bad. After all, there's much movie-watching, reading and writing, eating, sleeping and a lot of not-doing-anything to be done! :)
So long!~

a suitable choice...

Yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that Somerset Maugham (who, by the way, is one of my all time favorite authors) modeled the character of teacher in his novel The Razor's Edge after Sri Ramana Maharshi. This book (and practically all of Maugham's work) has been on my list of books to read for as long as I can remember and this piece of trivia does make it a very inviting choice for my next read. What's this post about then, you ask.
Well. Yesterday, I also found out that the Stanford book club is reading The English Patient this month. Also a book that hasn't budged from the same list for years. It was an entry made after an aggravating experience when the DVD of the movie version got stuck at what seemed like a pivotal point. Hmm...I must note here that I own neither the Maugham nor the Ondaatje. In hindsight, perhaps this was a question better saved for the Palo Alto Library to answer.
Oh, my dear blog! It must just be that I miss musing about all and sundry to you, then. Hey, there! :)

My 'Green' Library?

A few days ago E and I were talking about our currents reads and the books that we have on our ever-growing list of things to read. As I am prone to, I commented on the sheer joy it is hold a book and feel the pages between my fingers and he smiled and we observed a moment of silence, each imagining that irreplaceable feeling. He shook himself out of his reverie by suddenly remarking that he had tried Amazon's Kindle once. He had a sad faraway look in his eyes. And then as if to be fair to it, he added that they'd worked a lot on the interface by making it's look and feel match as closely as possible the real thing. The book. It can come close, but it cannot ever be the real thing, we agreed. The book is decidedly a superior object, grown epic in our minds, and reading it in that form a tradition almost, that is left to us to keep alive. We shook our heads on that.
I added, a little wistfully, that more than a year ago, I had all but given up subscribing to newspapers and magazines in paper and had switched altogether to online reading and borrowing from the library instead. The attempt to 'go green' though, had scrambled my morning ritual completely. I no longer relished reading every section, business and international, sports and editorials, from start to finish. Now that it 'sat' in my inbox, it pretty much did just that. I would catch the headlines until a flurry of emails caught my attention. Scrolling the New York Times to find the same article listed twice in two categories is rather irritating, not to mention a series of links on related articles that appears alongside the one you just clicked on, wickedly tempting you to be distracted. Is a person to read an article in peace or what? Now I don't know about all the rest of you, but somehow doing the crossword online, doesn't quite cut it. I still need paper and pencil to fill up the boxes just right. It wasn't much of a debate, we were clearly agreed on the virtues of paper and the evil-ness of its online counterpart. Truly!
And so it went, until I remembered my long-cherished dream of a library in my own home. And I shuddered. If you've read my feverish excitement for a weekend of reading, you would know what that library means to me. I have promised myself collector's editions and bound copies of precious novels. Shelves upon shelves of painstakingly sorted books of all categories surrounded by coziness itself. God forbid, I should come upon the day that this dream will be shattered by one Kindle sitting 'green'ly atop my table! Horrors!
And with that thought arrived our destination. A little rattled by this very real possibility, we bade one another goodbye, thinking to ourselves, I am sure, that perhaps, if we did everything in our power to save the trees and the environment; take our cloth bags to farmer's markets, sign in to the green utilities program, take the train come rain or shine, turn off the sprinklers and stay vegetarian...perhaps, we'd be entitled to our little library?

At long last...

At long last the day has arrived...the day I have waited for, for the last 7 odd years...it feels exactly like what I had dreamt for myself...a wonderful rush of exuberance, liberation sublime, a lazy summer day and an evening to kill...the day has arrived!la di da!~...glory be to God! la di da!~...I have a whole weekend and a delightful book to read! What's better, that's exactly how the week that follows it and the weekend after, and all the ones beyond it look! :) Oh joy!
It must not seem like a big deal to many. But allow me to describe why this is such a treat for me.

For years in school, I just had to begin the day with a book on my ride to school in the rickety school van. No matter that I had children of all ages eager to start another day chattering around me (and I joined in too), but I had a precious book in hand and a world within to retreat into at will and come back out for a change of scene. You see, it had to be read before the bell was rung for morning prayer. And then would come another book for recess, possibly the same to blot out dull lectures in organic chemistry, read ever more voraciously in the drugged silence that invariably resulted from hearing about the wonderful virtues of the carbon atom. And yet another one for the ride back home, to keep me company through lunch and bury my face into as Grandma's finger waved menacingly at me for the umpteenth time for not paying attention to food. A long story, a thick book, the smallest print it had to be... to recline with over my siesta and wake up to for the early evening and get a quick glimpse at before running for music lessons and run back to for dinner. And then came the minor matter of homework, to be quickly completed and put away, for what better way to fall asleep than over a tale masterfully crafted and cleverly wrapped up?

The end-quarter exam weeks were my favourite because that meant walking back home from school much earlier in the day, the day stretching out endlessly ahead, dear friends to muse with over all and sundry and a stop at my darling old Eshwari Lending Library on the way. A dimly-lit room filled with the smell of books, old and new, crisp and weathered, hardback and paper, hmmm...the feel of paper to skin, accompanied by the promise of a wondrous fantasy is the single most joyful thing ever imaginable. Ever. And a whole room full of it! (I shall have a library of my own one day. At home. With couches to sink into and lamps of wrought iron. A coffee maker in a corner somewhere. A window looking out at squirrels scampering up a tree...) At any rate, having 4 additional hours then meant a 4th book could be easily fit into a day's schedule. Perfect.

But then, sadly, school ended, and college began. (Not that I didn't like college, mind you. I loved it in fact.) And with it went my bus rides and stolen reads in class (the classes were facinating, yet a minor consolation, I assure you). More importantly, my vacant summer days of unquestioned freedom and abandon had been irrevovably snatched from me. Or seemingly so at least. It had to be filled with research breakthroughs. (In Biology that means sleeping and waking with the bug, mostly just waking.) And so, I promised myself, that one day, not far away, I shall reprise my summer of reading. It is wholly figurative, mind you. Come rain or hail, there will be reading for sure. I shall have merry rides on buses and trains, evenings to spare, weekends to sing and paint and hike about, but with hours to spare for the alphabet.

And so it was that yesterday a chance conversation with a friend while waiting for my bus (yay!) to work set the wheels in motion. He told me about the arrival of the hit Broadway musical, Wicked- The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, in SFO and that sealed my resolve for the summer of '08. It brought back the irreristible urge to get my hands on a book , in this case, the one the musical is based on. With a singular determination, I headed straight for the bookstore after getting off the train (yay! again) in the evening. To my utter astonishment and great delight I found three copies of it sitting pretty on a shelf, in the fanstasy fiction section (rightly so).

As I flipped through the pages, it struck me that the day I'd promised myself had indeed arrived! I realized that I did have train and bus rides to take into work. I did not have quite the madness of my first two years at work trying to get on board as many projects as one humanly could, while giving standardized tests, training new hires, applying, PT, and ...the list goes on. It dawned on me that this summer is my summer. I have an art class and a web design class to go to, Dhwani to sing sweet melodies with, the perfect weather to go hiking about on, and evenings to myself. All to myself. Free from PT, free from guilt of a nobler cause turned into a series of deadening deadlines, free from panic of missing any (metaphorical) buses. It is just free. Free to read.

And this is how good it gets. Now I have a list of what I shall read and a few in hand already. A couple books to quickly finish tonight (burning the midnight oil is well worth the effort for such a cause) and my new book to begin!

Life is just peachy. Sing Hallelujah to the Lord!

ps: As an aside- It has been a week of Oz! It started Monday listening to Judy Garland reminiscing her days during the shooting of TWW of Oz, and the music of course. Oh! the sweet melody. It reached its highest point yesterday, and it wasn't over with Wicked. The bookstore owner let me in on a sneak preview of a cherished treasure- 100 years of Oz in print, capturing the book, to the film to all kinds of memorabilia photographed and documented...And while I'm at it, I figured I may as well watch TWW of Oz this weekend! Somewhere o'er the rainbow...:) Just peachy, I say.

The Giving Club

A chance conversation one morning, many months ago at the bus stop, introduced me to one of my neighbors who commutes to work- a very earnest, curious and magnanimous spirit. This morning chat soon became a staple for me; my dose of enthusiasm for the day, my cup of purpose refilled. We would discuss everything from the addiction that living in the Bay Area is, to Broadway musicals, public health and epidemiology to Farmer's Markets. In one such conversation, E told me he was spending his evenings co-authoring a book! I was intrigued.
He went on to tell me all about the project. He and his friends had started a club they call the Giving Club. Its mission- to put together a book that could serve as a one-stop shop for anybody interested in donating their time or resources to charitable causes but clueless as to how to go about it or whom to approach; the causes range from care-giving at hospitals, environmental protection, education, empowerment of low-income illiterate communities, and many more such.
The idea behind it is at once a simple and noble one. There are many many issues plaguing the world today and the inequities glaring. Deep down, we all want to do something to help remove those inequities and lend a helping hand to someone in need. But which cause to support? What action to take? Is there an organization out there that could use our specific skills or talents? Is there a group out there looking for a voice to carry their message outward? Yes, many of us are indeed a little lost and caught in this web of ignorance. How nice it would be to have a neat little road-map telling us where to head to help illiterate tenants file a petition against exorbitant rents in a supposedly low-income housing tenement. How wonderful it would be to know the 5 organizations in the Bay Area working with poor children in middle school to provide after-school tutoring.
That is exactly what their club set out to do. The members represent a diversity of interests, educational and professional qualifications and affiliations to organizations. So, each member took on the responsibility of compiling a list of programs and organizations, sorted geographically and demographically, for a given area requiring our collective attention. They would meet every two weeks to brainstorm about meaningful causes that they have missed, identify outfits for financial givings that people like you and me can work with to reach out to the needy, and ways to enrich the book to be with their personal insights.
What I found most inspiring beyond the club and the tool that will result from it, was the thought behind it. Beyond engaging in service oneself, to find the means to enable others to serve. Oh! What a supreme act of generosity! What a marvelous idea and what a wonderful fraternity!
The Giving Club. Are you a member yet?

On reading ‘Dreams from My Father’

I picked up this story of Obama's mixed inheritance to read on my flight to India. The longest transit of my life notwithstanding, I only managed to read half the book. That, however, is not the point; I had resolved to read nothing more intense than Calvin and Hobbes and perhaps a Wodehouse or two, just to recover from the trauma of back-to-back reads of first the God of Small Things (yes a decade late) and The Kite Runner. (Don't get me wrong; reading, I love. Human misery and the darker side of life, depicted in excruciating detail, leaves me reeling and yearning for balloons and blossoms) And so, I was half expecting to give up after the first chapter under the weight of the matter and could see myself desperately reaching for an escape- book when I packed this one into my carry-on. But that didn't happen. I am not making any claims as to to the read-worthiness of the book, nor to my skills on reviewing such. But I did feel the irresistible urge to share some (his) words of wisdom, all too familiar, but lost somewhere in the crevices of our memories, with anyone who might chance upon this blog.

In the last weeks leading up to the conclusion of the Democratic primaries, the media was cashing in on every aspect of the protagonists' public, publicly private and privately intimate lives. Not to be left behind, Costco had slashed the prices on 'Dreams...' and 'The Auacity of Hope...' Between his dreams for himself and America, and the dreams handed down to him from his father, I picked the latter. And I'm glad I did. What struck me was the ease and simplicity with which he peeled away the layers of human emotion underlying inexplicable behaviour, his understanding of the veneer of arrogance for what it was; a shroud covering fear and diffidence deep beneath it. But mostly his empathy and above all his honesty were deeply moving. This paragraph in particular hit a nerve somewhere and made me sit up straight as I read through. It hit hard especially because I had just returned from India, with a million thoughts about home, family, the ever-widening gap between between those reaping of the burgeonining economy and those to whom it made the mockery boom louder, flitting in and out of conscious thought; mingling with observations of common courtesy that was indeed quite common to see aboard Caltrain and wondering why it was painfully lacking back home on a similarly sweltering day, on a very similar train. It had captured in a few words the essence of what had happened to the many many faces that we collectively label 'bureaucracy'; it had summarized the resignation that we categorize as indifference, the same indifference that we were ourselves sucked into at one point, I was for sure, and that freshly shocks me everytime I return.

But before I rant on and on, the passage mustn't be lost, and here it is. The context, if you had not guessed already: his observation of the apathy that preachers, aid workers, men and women in public service, and sadly those needing the service themselves, inevitably slip into.
'....The three of them reflected the attitudes of of most of the people who worked in Altgeld: the teachers, drug counselors, policemen. Some wre there only for the paycheck; others sincerely wanted to help. But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage.'

A loss in the capacity for outrage is a great loss indeed. A loss that can strip one of accountability, the accountability for our own complicity in having stood by.

However, as I am prone to, I searched for hope to make a comeback soon and that probably increased, briefly, my average reading rate (which in the last decade has fallen appallingly). And I arrived at this passage. Again, for context: it describes a scene at a public elementary school.
'... As the teacher tried to direct them up the stairs, I thought how happy and trusting they all seemed, that depsite the rocky arrivals many of them had gone through- delivered prematurely, perhaps, or delivered into addiction, most of them already smudged with the ragged air of poverty- the joy they seemed to find in simple locomotion, the curiosity they displayed toward every new face...'

Ah! Isn't that joy the birth right of every infant born into this world? And to keep that smile on every child's face from fading not a worthy cause to strive for? It reminds us of why we are here, why we cannot resign as if it were a day job and what purpose we have been called upon for; It reminded me that there is always hope, when there is a willing spirit.

ps: technically this should have been my second post since the Rising...just for the record.