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, May 11, 2004
 
The Don

It is high time I introduced to you all another person from my wing - The Don. Before you start frisking away in terror, let me clarify - short for Don Quixote! But I must affirm: he is not quixotic in the least. He makes the most sensible of decisions and clings on to them like a leech to a wall. Till the last second. When he abruptly turns a somersault and does the most inane things ever. With time and experience, it has become almost customary for us to be strictly contrarian in principle whenever we lend him our ears!

This is an excerpt from a mail I sent to our wing egroup last semester:

It is, I'm afraid, impossible for me not to write about The Don - the person who as, almost casually, stolen the spotlight in the wing. He has been enjoying quite a windfall this semester. Two of the highest paid jobs and a girl now to call his own – even the avaricious will only dream of the above two. But our man attempts to handle all this with composure. He sure attempts! An overdose of Tamil cinemas sure has had its repercussions on The Don. It is not very tough to imagine our guy as the uxorious householder, bringing home a packet of Thirunalveli halwa and well-strung jasmines every evening to elicit a blush out of the bashful bride's cheeks. It is also not very hard to imagine The Don having a traditional meal on well spread fresh banana leaves while the doting wife first serves and then helps herself to a few morsels on the same leaf. You must forgive the exaggerated caricature that I have ended up sketching, but The Don already appears to me as the archetypal householder of Tamil Cinemas. His romantic allusions are getting worse by the passing minute and so are the songs that he lets blare on his 60 W contraption. I have begun to disbelieve less and less that he is visualising a romantic scene in a mofussul lorry or in front of a remote Dhaba with the songs playing in the background. Ratanji of the Gandhi Redi seems to play better songs these days. In fact, these days the boys going to the mess stop by his room (which, unfortunately for them, is on the way) listen to the strange gurgle of sounds stifled by the poor quality of the tape (not to speak of the tape recorder), repeal in a mixture of dreaded horror and heartfelt sympathy and, as a token of their solidarity towards his mental well-being, drop in eight annas into his room! (The canard floats that he has begun to use this regular accrual of funds towards the payment of his Redi bills.) And then they all trickle out in a file, uttering, punctuated by shudders, under their breaths incantations of pious goodwill for him to get well soon.

- posted by Dileepan @ 5:00:00 am
Lampoons:

 

Vista © The Jack