In writing you most often try to communicate a message or a feeling. You want your words to be absorbed by the reader, and hope that you’ve been clever enough with the words to create the exact reaction in the reader’s mind that you had hoped for. Of course, such reactions can never be predicted perfectly, but we all share enough common patterns of thinking and belief to make this attempt at connecting with the reader not wholly a fool’s errand.

(Read more…)

The last time I tried to draw seriously was well over a year ago, and I was drawing with a pen to clear my head. This time was no different. I have a few projects on my mind at the moment, including the ever-postponed redesign of this site, and just planning out the various aspects of the many projects was getting tedious and jumbled. I’ve written before about how procrastination can be beneficial, this was one of those occasions. If you must procrastinate, you might as well get something done while you’re at it, so after a long hiatus, I decided to take up my pen and draw.

(Read more…)

The air in our apartment was still, when we walked in after our month long trip to India. The luggage was dropped on the floor, the footwear was discarded in neat bachelor stacks, and I walked up to the window to pull apart the white curtains. There on the narrow window sill, a mostly leafless basil plant still held on to life in the dying sun of the evening.

I was quite surprised it had survived over four weeks. No one had been watering it during that time, and yet it had weathered the dry spell. I was sure that with a little care, it would spring back into as much of of bloom as you can expect of a small herb growing in a small pot, indoors in a desert.

Thinking back, I realised that we had done some things to prepare the basil plant for our long absence, and we had cared for it quite well even before the trip was imminent, all of which are sure to have contributed to this survival story.

(Read more…)

Impatience is a bad thing. When it’s a general impatience, directed at the nebulous World, it appears to be a more socially acceptable frustration, but a true, deep impatience with yourself is a sure sign that you’re slipping.

Impatience with yourself makes you do all sorts of stupid things to break the dead-lock. You take rash decisions and force progress, or at least what you think is progress, in the hope of pushing the cart that is your personal existence forward ever so slightly.

(Read more…)

The shared wisdom used to be that if you didn’t have something nice to say, you didn’t say it. I believe that rule has now been rescinded by the United Nations. At least I assume it has, because what I see most often is the opposite. People who have nice things to say usually keep it to themselves, which is fine, but others rarely spare the effort to tell you how you’re wrong.

(Read more…)

As human beings, we remember a surprising amount about the lives we have lived. As human beings we also have an astonishing ability to forget. We forget all manner of facts and events, happy ones, painful ones, and many which never make enough of an impression to stick. And then there are things we forget for convenience, a deep-seated need to avoid discouraging ourselves with memories of that which never came to be, the things we never did, the people we never became.

It doesn’t take much to refresh your memories of these matters. A casual afternoon reverie, thinking back to long lost friends, absent comrades, and fading conversations, and you will suddenly stumble into it, that vast graveyard of your abandoned plans.

(Read more…)

Director Rajshree Ojhaa’s Aisha, a modern Bollywood take on Jane Austen’s Emma, puts the froth in frothy. That can be a very good thing, or a very bad one; Some would bemoan the insubstantiality of froth, while others sell it at hundreds of dollars a plate as molecular gastronomy. On the positive side, Aisha is neither of those things completely; On the negative side, it is a little too much of both.

(Read more…)