From "In Treatment"- my favourite show at the moment

Just watched episode 16 of Season 3 where Adele beguiles Paul with her analysis of his situation. The scriptwriting in this series is so complex and nuanced that it takes my breath away.

Adele: "The first day I met you, you insisted that you and Gina had it all figured out, that your need to save people started with your mother's illness.."

Paul: "..and does that seem far fetched to you?"

Adele: "It doesn't. But I think caring for your mother was also a way of saving yourself. It was miserable, yes.. but it was also safe and familiar and it kept you from having to find any real connections elsewhere, from risking yourself in the outside world..
And it also had the convenience of allowing you to blame it all on your father.
And it's really not so different to what you do to this day, is it? You cloister yourself in your apartment or your burrow-like office, you convince yourself you're sick, you'll accept a growing paralysis rather than taking a risk and finding where or towards whom your real passion lies.
And is it any wonder you haven't found what drives you yet?
You're 57 years old. And at some point you're going to have to move past the stories you've assigned to your life. These steadfast explanations you've settled on years ago. You have to look at yourself again. For real answers, you have to take that risk."

This is so true for all of us at any age...maybe particularly our mid-thirties and forties. We need to move beyond the stories we have assigned to ourselves and our lives and take at least a few risks all over again.

Found online in a comment thread....

"To be whole, let yourself break.
To be straight, let yourself bend.
To be full, let yourself be empty.
To be new, let yourself wear out.
To have everything, give everything up."

Godawful Poem#2

Thanks to Peter and his 'Godawful Poetry Fortnight' , I'm here again with my sickly second offering.


I wandered lonely as a status update
I surfed, I liked, I borrowed.
In Twitter, I found a rowdy crowd,
In blogs I drowned my sorrow.

Before I knew what hit my soul,
I surfed, I read, I borrowed.
RSS feeds told me all I need,
Now I can’t tell today from tomorrow.

So oft upon my couch I lie,
I surf, I chat, drink Bordeaux.
I melt into my glowing screen,
The real world turns to shadows.

Our digital selves are quite complete,
We post, we like, we follow.
We haven’t met and yet we’re friends,
You should know by now I'm shallow.

Terribly bad, truly awful poem

It's Godawful Poetry Fortnight and this below is my contribution!

Inventing places

I read The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and wanted to preserve this bit: " I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more not less true, only very far apart. It was not her fault that she could not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all"

On writing - Elizabeth Lowry in Granta 103

From an excerpt in my favourite literary magazine:

"There’s a sense in which writing is simply scar tissue, the attempt to create a meaningful self out of a compromised one, and in my case this damage was caused by the constant move from country to country, which made for radical instability. J.M. Coetzee once characterized South African literature in the era of apartheid as ‘a less than fully human literature, unnaturally preoccupied with power and the torsions of power’."

Super Duper Blockbuster Thriller

"Super Duper Blockbuster Crime Thriller" -- these screaming superlatives usually advertise Tamil crime fiction stacked in tea stalls in Chennai. They may have well led to the formation of Blaft - an independent publishing firm in Chennai, started up by a mathematician and a fashion designer who thought it would be good to translate the books and find out what the hell they were about.

I met them both at ScRipt, a mini-feature of the Singapore Writers Festival -- providing a platform where emerging writers from South Asia could promote their work in Singapore.

I went for a few sessions and they were great but the Blaft session stood out with its bizarre posters and tales straight out of some Coen Brothers' film.

The Blafties translate pulp fiction in Indian languages to English as well as publish original fiction in English. They veer towards experimental fiction and what Rakesh Khanna (one of Blaft's founders) calls 'Irrealism.'

"Maybe its like surrealism, I don't know," he said. Kaveri Lalchand, who also makes clothes and acts in theatre and does all sorts of other things, talked about convincing Surender Mohan Pathak, a prolific Hindi crime fiction author, to let Blaft translate his work into English.

Rakesh and Kaveri tracked Pathak down to his house in Old Delhi and the man whose books have sold over 150,000 copies (each-see comment below!) in Hindi was understandably amused by their proposed print run of 5,000 copies. Still, they persisted and so their catalogue of books and translations keeps growing in direct proportion to their tenacity.

It's wonderful to see current, surreal or irreal work out of India exploiting the immense diversity of Indian languages. It was also just fun to hang out with people who are so passionate about what they do and do it alongside other full-time jobs.