Smaller than Life
Why a blog? Simple. Cacoethes Scribendi -- the urge to write! My literary pretensions and caprices bring me here. Like any writer I write to be read. All my posts, though fettered to my small world and trivially myopic, will live and yearn that somebody connects to them someday. Cognitive frenzies, sardonic musings, aimless banters, incoherent ramblings and trivial indulgences; this is simply an episodic narrative of my trivial world -- in a grain of sand… Smaller than Life.

Graffiti

When I am dead,
I hope it is said,
'His sins were scarlet,
but his books were read'.

- Hillaire Belloc

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me, --
The simple news that Nature told
With tender majesty.

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

- Emily Dickinson

The thoughts of our past years
          in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction

- William Wordsworth

Tuesday, March 09, 2004
 

This was a draft that I had saved, incomplete on March 2, 2004:

The past weekend saw my second homecoming since I have been in Bangalore. My indecision and improvident planning ensured that I shelled out quite a sum of money and travelled by Shatabdi. The travel itself couldnt have been more comfortable. The cushioned chair-car, snacks and food, the service and the little niggling guilt; my middle-class mind was quietly preponderating whether one really required this level of comfort to travel. No people thronging outside the window waiting to impregnate the asphixiating barricades of people whose heads alone are visible. No beggars, no children sweeping the floor and cadging for a rupee, no eunuchs; the travel was much different from my previous ones.

I was fortunate enough to meet up with Siddhartha. (Whenever I think of him, I see in my reflection Govinda of Herman Hesse's 'Siddhartha'). My post-justifying him is essential at this stage and I apologise for it; to introduce him will almost mean introducing myself to the readers and hence it will take up a whole new post. He was the support around which climbers of my childhood and youth luxuriously straggled... We met up on Saturday evening in the beach and spent an hour during which both of us spoke little. A silent shraddhanjali to the fourteen years that lie buried in our backyards. Ghosts of which have remained to haunt me at night. And day. Though the thought itself is very Victorian and fulfilling, realism and objectivity would probably attribute the silence to something else. Lack of a common ground. It dawned on me then that we were slowly drifting apart. He is too perceptive an individual to not realise it. But he has maintained a dignified silence. It is his greatness. He seems to have measured out his life in immaculate coffee spoons, a la Prufrock. Ergo he knows this is an obligation slated out for him by his childhood. And he complies by allowing himself to languish in my mediocrity for sometime. Yes, coming back to what I was saying, we are drifting apart. It seems inexorably inevitable. A cul-de-sac, so to speak. And the finality with which the situation looms is frightening. It has left me shaken. And deeply perturbed. I was nothing but an abject parasite, thiriving on his knowledge and vision. If the host and the parasite are separated, what does the host lose but the parasite?! And the parasite moves on, gasping for stale air, to embark on a quest for a new host; he knows it is ultimately a pointless odyssey - the next sojourn is bound to end the same way...

- posted by Dileepan @ 1:15:00 am
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