WRITERS…

I recently read this somewhere… Thought I’d share it with you all :-)

This is what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:

a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.

b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.

c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.

d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie’. Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy.

e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.

f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’ books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears.

g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.

h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.

To Parul and Sabia...

Aubveeuslyyyyyyyy.... (OBVIOUSLY... ;) )

This is the one word which when uttered by different people refers to different people;)

Education...

Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
- Henry P. Brougham

Perspective. And a point of view I endorse.

The piece below is an excerpt taken from an article written by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar and published in The Times of India. It’s a fresh take on terrorism and I really liked it because it’s something that I myself have been longing to say for quite a while now but somehow I’ve always stopped short of putting it down in words. Anyways, read on…

“Cooler heads point out that “war on terror” is a meaningless phrase. Terror is simply a tactic used by certain groups, and you cannot wage war against a tactic. When terrorism arises from an ideology or set of grievances, imaginary or otherwise, killing one bunch of ideologues may simply deepen the grievances and create thousands of fresh terrorists. This has been demonstrated graphically in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Angry Indians say something must be done. True, but that something happens to be patient diplomacy and international pressure, which will take years to bear fruit. Ultimately, we need to change the mind-set of terrorists, and that may take decades.”

I’d also like to add more to this. The people who are waging this so-called “war on terror” have their own vested interests to fulfill. Why is the US so determined to “help India out” this time around? This is because the attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi also took away the lives of a few Americans. The US, which was until now, nothing more than the issuer of another statement whenever a fresh terrorist attack took place in India is suddenly keen to bring the guilty to book, to be the one who will keep a check on whether Pakistan is really doing enough.

Also, the United States of America which considers and propagates itself as the peace-maker, the Supreme Court and the Mr. Always Right should not forget its own shady past – how it itself spread terror during its “war against terror” in Iraq. I truly shudder whenever I remember the photographs of the atrocities committed on the Iraqis which were somehow leaked to the media. God alone knows what these people must have done in Afghanistan and places elsewhere. And who knows – maybe it is these very and other such similar grievances that the terrorists carry in their hearts when they set out to spread terror.

Lest the readers of this blog accuse me of supporting terrorism, I would like to make it clear here itself: I do not support terrorism… OF ANY KIND – Be it the terrorism wielded in the name of jihad, or be it the “terrorism” which America considers legal and is now supporting openly.

What I really want to say is that contrary to what we all sometimes believe – there is no absolute black and no absolute white. Almost all things, people, ideologies and beliefs lie in the grey area. It’s only that some of these shades of grey are darker than the others– and hence comes the need to view things in the correct perspective.

YIPPEEEE…!!!

There was a contest in Hindustan Times in which a clichéd line "It was a dark and stormy night" was tweaked a bit and thrown at us. And what were we supposed to do with it? We were supposed to come up with the first paragraph of an imaginary novel. Why? Because they say that the first paragraph of a novel is the part that an author is most finicky about.

The best 10 entries from all over India were to be published on January 11… I sent an entry in my father's name (he's lucky for me :-))… And I won!!!
Take a look ;-)

SINGH IS KING…!!!

Congratulations, Bhai…!!! You've done it and made everyone soooo proud… You deserved this and a lot more & now you’ve got this and I’m sure there is loads more in the offing…

Great going… Keep going… Love U Lots :)

P.S. I do wish you had provided them with a newer pic of yours :p

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!

A very happy and prosperous New Year 2009 to all !!!!


Till then, I'll just leave you with the magnificent fireworks at the Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year's Eve....