“If I’m still looking, I’m blind.
If I’m still hopeful, I’m human.”

Some people just know what to say to make you smile. Chenna is my person.

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up a whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ or ‘how very perceptive’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”

– Neil Gaiman (from The Sandman)

I want someone to be vulnerable to me

What Chenna has to say about love.

Isn’t that all we want from love anyway?

Classic Schmassic

If there’s one thing that I look forward to and dread at the same time, it is shopping for books prescribed for a college course. The thrill of buying new books dies a slow, painful death when the bookstores gradually crawl into the picture. Don’t get me wrong; I love bookstores. They give an unparalleled sense of joy. A lot of people don’t understand how bookstores could possibly make anybody happy. Exactly how I feel about enthusiasm for cars. Or toothpicks. So maybe it’s not a love understood by all. But it delights me to walk into, what is essentially, a room filled with books. Shelves. Shelves. Shelves of books. Slowly pickling in little rectangular boxes of creamy yellow sheets are undiscovered stories. And, it’s these stories that excite me.

In spite of all the emotion attached with bookstores, shopping for books on ‘Recommended Reading’ lists can be a daunting affair. Not for lack of adventure. Quite the  contrary, in fact. There’s always the risk of having one too many adventures. It will never cease to baffle me, how some of these “books that changed the world” do not figure in the shelves of some of the biggest bookstores in Mumbai.

About a month ago, I walked into one of those enormous bookstores, the kind that make you nervous with their sheer size. I had a long, long list of the books that I would need. On that unpretentious, frayed sheet of now caramel-edged paper were titles of about forty books or so. Could be more, could be less. I went in with an air of confidence, knowing that I’d find almost all the books I required. Which is quite a silly thing to be sure about, considering my track record with reading lists. I looked through the numerous shelves, and I found nothing. I decided to hand over the caramel-edged paper to one of the people who worked there so they could find the books for me. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty. And, nothing.

She called out to me, and while forcing an embarrassed smile she told me that two books from the list were available. The rest, I would have to look for.

And, so began my journey…

Flip

“I know that books don’t save lives on the grand scale. They don’t end wars and such. They don’t cure cancer. But at the same time, books saved my life. And I know they’ve done that for friends of mine.”

— Rob Roberge in an interview with himself at The Nervous Breakdown

 

I’m a Cookie Virgin!

I have never baked cookies before. There, I said it.

Although, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t considered it. There’s something warm and inviting about the smell of bubbling vanilla and doughy bits of heaven all merging together and creating little discs of golden-brown, speckled with the tiniest chunks of melt-in-your-mouth mud-coloured chocolate.

I tried my hand at baking chocolate chip cookies today. It was all fun and games until the oven took over. There was crunchy chestnut on one side, and a gooey, stubborn mess on the other. I did what I could to salvage the cookie-shaped massacre.

And, these are the survivors of the kitchen disaster.

I must admit though, in spite of everything I put them through, they came out delicious. Maybe they’ll have something to talk about on the leather couch after all.

Farty Towels

This timeless little gem of a show is soon becoming one of my absolute favourites. ‘Fawlty Towers’ has made my dragonfly afternoons a lot less gloomy.

Of ‘Bringing Up Baby’ and ‘The African Queen’…

I could look at Katharine Hepburn forever. And never get tired.

How Not to Successfully Tick Off Everything on a Summer Reading List

The summer started on a rather sticky note. With way more enthusiasm than the average summer-loving person, I did the one thing I love to do. I made a list. Not just any list. No, no. A ‘Summer Reading List’. My relationship with lists has been on shaky ground ever since I was seven, and decided to include “Meet Dr. Seuss” on my list of things that absolutely needed to be done. To say that this has been an utter failure of a list would be an understatement. A gross understatement.

Here’s the list, anyway.
Some of these, I’ve read and loved. Others, I am waiting and willing to discover.

* Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
* Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
* The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
* Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
* Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
* Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
* Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
* Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
* The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
* The Hours by Michael Cunningham
* A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
* The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
* Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
* Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Maybe I’ll stop watching ‘Fawlty Towers’ now, and find myself a book to bury my nose in.

Exclamation Marks.

I know how first posts are supposed to be spectacular.

This, however, is not even trying to be.