Five Years of Solitude

This week I read One Hundred Years of Solitude once again. More than five years after my first time. And yet it was like a first time. I read it in three days and in those three days I could do nothing else. I was bound to my room and my brain was whizzing around in Macondo. The Jose Arcadios and  Aurelianos danced around me, in their fierce, weird madness and quiet strength. Ursula Iguaran sat in the corner, seeing me through her opaque eyes. And the four years of rain, and the many years of sunshine all went through me, like a flood.

Some pictures speak a thousand words. With Marquez, each word shatters into a thousand pictures. The mind is lost, wondering which way to take - this or that? There is no way to describe the sensory explosion that accompanies while you read Solitude. It is orgasmic, and sometimes beyond it. Every bit is precious. Marquez surprises us in the narrative, in the narration, the working of his characters, the lunacy of their thoughts and actions, the weather, the everyday regularity of miracles and the sudden surprises of reality. Time moves fast and slow as he pleases, and the world swivels around his thumb. Such letters!

Will such words be written again? Will a work of art move me ever so much? I wonder, I wait.

Ramblings

Perhaps the smell that comes

from within, is more of fear

than of truth. I wish I could

guess what it means, this odour

that pervades every composition,

this scent distilled from within,

that which floats above in the sky

along with the moon and all the stars.

I see a purple globe

hanging in the sky. Far enough

to twinkle, but close enough to

touch. What is it, is it a future sun?

Or a moon from the past? Or a dream

of delicate dessert to be had

after spoonfuls of  dreary poetry?

Hope, lost in its incandescent thoughts

shining through purple glass,

the perplexed memories of  forever?

This is not a Scarecrow

Three years and running

Three years of PhD over. How many more to come?

It's like being in the middle of the ocean on a scrawny little boat. Plus, the boat is leaking and the compass is not working (Though, to be fair, someone did warn me that the compass was a bit rusty). There are occasional storms and the like, but most of the times it's just unbearably sunny.

Sometimes big ships pass by. At other times there are the aeroplanes.

On some days I wonder if I'm rowing around in circles. Who can tell?

On the positive side, I love the starry night and the blue of the sky and sea. Was it just to see this sight that I came so far from the shore? Perhaps.

A Sign

Here is a sign.

Make what you will of it.
Take what you will.

I shall pretend as if
nothing was ever said;
and you, have never heard
nor read nor seen nor smelt.

With this I give meaning
to a blank page, a yellow wall;
With this I breathe life into
my wings and fly tall.

With this I add colour to
a glass of water bland;
With this I create of the
water another land.

The world will roll on, nothing
has changed. Yet we know
that something has changed.
There was no fire, yet it burns.

Said, unsaid; between the eyes,
passed in glances; like a sigh.
You may have heard it, it was
not the wind: it was a sign.

Spammer Spammer

Spammer spammer full of grace;
Why you keep posting comments
in my place? Thanks for the kudos
And the funny worded praise,
but I know you are a robot, a code
that runs like a rat in a maze.
Spammer spammer full of grace!
If you do it again in my space,
I'll throw a a spanner in your face.

Dedicated to the spam comments on my last few articles.

Chairman Mao's Little Mistake

Sometime in the late 1950s, the Sparrow Campaign took place in China. It was part of a larger effort called The Four Pests Campaign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign) to eliminate four pests: rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were to be killed because they ate some of the grain from the fields, reducing the overall throughput.

 

And what happened?Locusts and other insects, whose population was kept in control by the sparrows, suddenly had a boom in numbers. Down they went with agriculture. Famine, starvation, and a complete mess followed.

Not understanding the interrelationships between things is not a mistake of Mao Zedong alone; all of us do it all the time. What prevents us from thinking a bit deeper, from understanding things from different angles, and in detail? I have no idea. IISc has taught me that no amount of education can instil this quality in you(if we assume that what happens in these places is indeed education; that in itself is debatable).