The Little Prince

There are certain stories so full of beauty that they wring all the unexercised joy out of my heart into the wind such that all I can do is dance and quite forget that I don’t know how to. So haunting that they bring to life a primordial exultation embedded in the very marrows of being. So throbbing with the unadorned energy of existence, bursting at the seams with such a sense of wonder, that they make me regret that I am neither the nightingale nor the rose.

I am deeply humbled on being invited into a few of these tales as if I was one of their own – for being permitted to hide in the grandfather clock, share crumpets, hew logs and be tamed by the boy from B-612 with the laugh like tinkling bells. And I am grateful for being allowed to sneak a few hours of these stories’ lives into mine.

And hence, for today, I was Betty Foy:

for today, I was a believer.

In Memoriam

Memory jumpstarts at the oddest of times. Today in Labour Law class, I thought of my grandfather for no earthly reason whatsoever. And I remembered a story he would always tell me… about a swami and a snake and how the latter eventually became a reformed character… unfortunately, then as now, the world hadn’t much use for a reformed anything, let alone a snake, and so people threw stones at him and beat him with sticks… and when the snake went to the swami to tell him that the swami had it all wrong with his rest-in-peace-thingummy, this chap tells the reptile-wonder that he had told him to stop biting, and not hissing…
Now of course I must have been a rather obtuse kid to have fallen for this tale… remarkably ignorant of poststructural and neocolonial streams of thought, not to say Marxist critiques, deconstructionism or even good ol’ feminist jurisprudence… at all times that this tale got told… and I remember making sure that it did get told quite often… I lapped it up like a camel readying for a two-month-trek into Havana…

But that is not what I thought of today… I thought today of the way grandfather would hiss… technically there were only two places one could logically work the hiss in – the scene where the snake first meets the swami and the place where the swami tells the snake to hiss… but I would desire a constant background refrain of hisses in various pitches… mostly in the wrong places and in the wrong key… a hiss when the swami met the villagers, a hiss when the weather changed, a hiss in the middle of quite, quite different stories… sometimes even while having lunch I’d walk up to him and ask him to hiss… and he would… the something-year old man would hiss in a high or low key for his granddaughter… and before today, I never quite comprehended the sheer sumptuousness of the scene…

Like I said… I must have been a very obtuse kid.

A Misnomer Perhaps?

There are good days. And there are bad. There are days when the sun is shining and my nose isn’t, my socks match, classes get cancelled and the lunch is edible. There are days when there is no electricity, water and my laptop is charge-less. There are days when I’m so down in the dumps that I’m sure the dump-keeper must be Australian. There are days when it kills me to not waltz into the honcho’s den and sashay around his hideous-desk-like-thingummy.

There are friggin’ good days. There are friggin’ bad days.

I wouldn’t mind either variety. But what I usually get are the in-betweeners.

For someone trying to live up to Betty Foy, I don’t seem to have grasped the trick to lifting the sash of the kitchen window without leaving footprints on the ledge and fingerprints on the flower bed. Whenever I try, I always wake the baby. Oh well.

Reconsidering 'X'

"She was too busy examining this new world into which she had been abruptly cast, this world where dolls had souls and jokes lost their point."

To think Wodehouse had such unplumbed depths to his soul... and I always waved him off as a frippery fellow... the kind who is good enough for an icecream or two but not devout enough for the soup...

Maybe I should have married him...

Stop Press!

In law school they teach us to make like chefs and question everything that moves and if the salt be just right, then even flick a passing query at things that don’t so move. And hence, this is what we had for breakfast today…

If the fertility rate in the State has decreased, why are school children celebrating… no one ever told me they are the segment most affected by fluctuations in fertility rate…
Also the following excerpts had us intrigued (of course they also had us rolling in the aisles… but it was intrigued mirth, who is the first cousin, never removed, of tears of joy)… the fertility rate has come down due to – and this is right off the presses – “concerted effort by the government at the highest levels”… I wonder if they really meant to write that?
And before I forget, there is further cause for the kids to bring out their Pokémons (or whatever it is that they play with these days) and wave them about joyously… the Maternity Mortality Rate and Infant Mortality Rate has also slumped since the Ministry for Health and Rural Affairs issued 8 lakh bus passes to pregnant women – bus passes today… free bibs tomorrow… “down with the IMR we say… shut down the penny stores… free liquor for those above five-and-a-half feet…”

Once in a while the perspicuity of politics renders even me speechless…

The Word 'Trite' has Potential

Today, I

• Finished the entire Hindu crossword
• Submitted two projects
• Did not sleep in Labour Law class
• Cleaned my room

I will now go jump off the ledge… all my property is hereby bequeathed to Manpreet Juneja… the only one who really understood me and is not yet in a psychiatric ward.

The Weakening of my Moral Fiber

I used to be sure about not wanting anything I hadn’t earned. I am not as sure now. The rabbit lost to the tortoise in the ‘lal batti’ a minute and a half back… perhaps our fairytales were all wrong… these new-fangled Japanese cartoons seem to have got the right angle on reality…

I have semi-seen the outside world and, for today, I firmly suspect I’m allergic to it… maybe I’ll retreat to the Himalayas and breed exotic fungi… just me, my fungi and the voices within my head… and maybe one day when I’m trying my best to potter about in my snow garden with arthritic joints and a whopping cold, it’ll rain chocolates…

‘Jade’ the Poodle

I was Frederick von Trapp’s poodle today… the one with the pink ribbon… no, not the poodle with the pink ribbon… I meant the von Trapp with the pink ribbon… it’s a clique-thing he likes to do each time his nanny leaves…

Mere mortals apart… like I said… being a poodle is not very easy as everyone knows… not you of course… you wouldn’t… but everyone else knows the immense responsibilities, not to say the colossal obligations, attached to the station of ‘le poodle extraordinaire’… one must stand on two and three-quarters of one’s five legs and recite a nursery rhyme known only to the sixty-year-olds in the 18th century… each poodle family has it’s own conductor… ours has been Wagner since the 1300s… and so today I sang the Nibbledlungs… or something similar which I can’t spell… from 2.17 in the morning till 2.15 of the same morning… and I am now wheezy because of the harpsichords… excuse me while I roll over and play dead for a while and maybe we can have this board meeting the day after my birthday… may your collar never straighten and tail never curl… or is it the other way around… one never does know… all one is safe with is chocolates… they never bit my father and they’ll never bite me…

(Back to environment law now I suppose… oh well… perhaps tomorrow I can be Bertie Wooster… oh and Banquo says hello)

The Might-have-been

The myriad images smoke unfurls into atop chimneys and elsewhere have always fascinated me like a song I knew but couldn’t remember… today as I gaze across the lake, a smoke-rabbit-with-a-patch-over-an-eye indicates a chimney, and I may have been quite content watching it twitch its tail if my environment law project had not been air pollution…

If it must be a choice between Charles Dickens and Mary Poppins, secret ballot is a prerequisite… so that I don’t discover where my loyalties lie.