On Writing…I think.

I found this little…something  in a forgotten word doc:

To write would be an awfully tiresome venture,

and yet to read and to know

that one has not written and has not even tried -

Slaughtered before utterance half thoughts of mine-

waiting forever for the other shoe to drop.

Perhaps it is the Cinderella tale all over again-

left with one shoe? What would you do?

For the other one, start a quest?

Or grumble at being an unlucky fool?

I think this was a result of reading a qoute by Henry Miller on writing  at the time and and hence the title of the post.

On & On…

Have you ever found, how, it is at the most importunate times that you are seized by the most wonderful of ideas? I always have the most awesome (albeit not the sanest) plot lines take hold of my head when I have exams. I start day dreaming scenarios and dialogues while my civil law module lies abandoned. Of course, by sheer force of will, I try and prevent furthering of these thought processes. funny thing is, the moment the exams over, the plots lose their sheer intensity in my head. weird.

but that wasn’t what I really wanted to blog about. (then again, the fact that it was the first thing that came out, kinda defeats the above argument) what I wanted to tell you about is how I feel like rambling on and on.

Yesterday, I made a new gmail account. I’ve had one before but it wasn’t the sort you give to possible short term employers (no it didn’t say flowerpower87 or bazooka900 but it still was not formal). The new one, has my college name attached to it. .NUJS it says and I will probably need another one, say three years down the line but it meant something to inextricably link my name to .NUJS, though it probably has been linked to it ever since I decided to come here almost two year back.

Of course, now I have to make the painful switch from my old hotmail account to the gmail account. My first and foremost plan, is to have my mail transferred automatically from hotmail to gmail via pop3 or the Mail Fetcher option. Only problem is hotmail for some reason best known to itself, allows pop3 only for users situated in the UK, Italy and other such places. No problem, a little google search for post office numbers in England, and a little tinkering with my personal info on hotmail and voila I am proud citizen of the Great Britain. This should have worked, as they seem to rely solely on the personnel info (and not the more tricky IP addresses) to allow pop3, but I still seem to be encountering an error, and probably will have to do more tinkering around. Any Ideas?

In other news I finally went to the Kolkata Book Fair, one terribly dusty event. The bigger names Random House, Oxford, Cambridge and Co were terribly disappointing, but the smaller shops had the sort of collection that fills you with the bittersweet thought that you can never have read enough. There was also Benfish apparently one of the best fish food people in cal but it only made me realize how much I miss my mama’s fish curry…sigh. Anyways, ended up buying way too many books and will therefore probably end this semester in near penury. More about the books later.

Also, I seem to have a writer’s block when it comes to writing for Writer’s Block. (Aha Aha truly contrived providential pun, but what the heck). I need all the points I can garner and yet the words refuse to come. I do believe blogging takes care of all my urge to write and thus have no ready prose available When I Really Need To Write. Gah!

Bunked class today because of itchy red spots on my body that itch. I seem to have the strangest luck with Docs. they usually are good at what they do albiet eccentric. this one has been inviting me to his daughter’s Bengali Wedding in November of 2009 ever since last year. He was terribly excited at seeing red itchy spots that itch and was convinced that it was a) Diabetes b) chickenpox. Later, I had him wittle it down to an infection/allergy and now am forced to take pills that cost a fortune. I googled it and was not very surprised to find, that there was a generic drug at half its cost. I think there is some provision in some law that lets me have the right to demand the alternative cheaper med, but I’ll probably  lose that wedding invitation.

I seem to have a small albiet regular readership (yes, yes, it’s all thanks to you, Sroyon). I keep thinking that people must end up on my blog by mistake, but how many times can people end up on my blog from the same set of urls, eh? at least, that’s what I’d like to think.

A Serious Discussion on Why Weird Awesome Things Will Never Happen To Us

Darshana and I had today (you guessed it!) A Serious Discussion on Why Weird Awesome Things Will Never Happen To Us. We realized in synchronized ‘enlightenment dawned on her’ moments that we were a little too perfectly wired toward appreciating the weird and fantastical to actually come in contact with anything that could really really fit the description.

What I mean is, imagine one day there is an actual real Zombie Attack…while everyone would run screaming through the city, we’d probably be giddy with delight at the fact that FINALLY it is actually happening. We’d kick vampire butt if ever called to do so, with our knowledge of n+1 ways of killing the bloodsuckers, or if an alien life form were to suddenly appear before me and ask my help to build a Galactotranspositer you can bet you’re arse, I’d be calling up my engineering cousin to enlist his help pronto.

And that is the problem isn’t it? Weird Awesome Things will never happen to us, because we’ve already imagined them happening a million times over. Not for us to see a compulsive cool samurai style fight between the two chaps on the metro, not for us a sudden mysterious blood soaked stranger pushing a dirty torn letter into our hands filled with war time codes. No, none of this is meant for us, because instead of fainting/screaming/going into hysterics/asking what, when, where and a million other questions, we’d be completely in our element and ready to go.

Telling us…me (Darshana doesn’t know I am writing this, though I have been using the collective for a while now) that the Weird Awesome Things …er…um…you see…oh! what the heck…DO NOT EXIST…does not in anyway reduce the gravity of our discussion.

Gods Behaving Badly

I had a gift voucher from my B’day left to kill, and to foil the dastardly plan of my friend, who’d got me the gift voucher in the first place and had therefore thought she’d escaped from going gift searching for me, I dragged her along. Ended up spending over two hours rifling through books at Starmark, before I decided on buying this particular book.

The blurb on the cover page of Marie Phillips’ Gods Behaving Badly calls it ‘very very funny and delightfully original’. I wonder how many people buy books because of these blurbs. I mean, it can’t possible say something bad about the book, now can it? like for instance ‘A sad attempt at humour but kids these days they’ll lap it up anyways?’

Ah well, as for me – I picked it up because it seemed to be an attempt at bringing two of my favourite genres – mythology and urban fantasy together. Think about it, greek gods from the past living right across the street or jostling for space with you in a bus. You gotta admit, the idea has potential.

And I have to say, the book ain’t bad. It’s funny in parts, moves at a decent pace, and as a whole is a good read. I love Eros’ conflicting faith in Christianity, love that the mere presence of Ares is enough to stir trouble between two of the most saccharine sweet characters in the book, or even the fact that Apollo tries to break into stardom by acting in a third rate TV show, that specializes in foretelling the future happiness of old women and their cats. Sometimes when it hinted at the greater fears of the gods – about dying, about living forever in bad company, about being too inconspicuous in the modern world it showed real promise.

Then again, there is characterization that is so run of the mill – Aphrodite as the slutty conniving sexy goddess, Artemis as the  uptight goddess of hunting, Hades, Persephone etc etc who don’t seem to have picked up any character since the bygone eras. I am not saying that the intrinsic characteristics that the Greek myths present should be changed but surely they can be developed upon!  Then again, I am not quite sure I like it when she changes things around. for example, when she says that wisdom and clarity don’t go hand in hand when it comes to Athena (who basically is a twenty first century nerd) it doesn’t make sense. Isn’t the whole hoopla about wisdom that it’s about saying the right thing at the right time and being able to get it across which may not be found in intelligence? Weird.

The  human characters in the book Neil and Alice are terribly sweet and terribly in love which can get terribly boring after a while. I get it, you’re trying to show how the average sweet, nice human is just a pawn in the games of the gods, but give the average human some more credit. We aren’t all that nice!

The ending again is a little too concoted. ‘Faith keeps the gods going!’ the revelation lacks punch, it has been said before loads of time in a much better way (Go Read American Gods, Now.)Also, the author stops just when it gets a little more interesting and of course a whole lot more complex. Suddenly you have tons of people believing in the Greek gods again. Now what? Does the Church declare war?Do the aethists societies go dunk themselves? Do the Americans have Artemis endorse their right to carry arms stand? Do the Greeks charge royality for worshipping their gods? Okay, so my suppositions get crazier by the sentence, but that’s the point. I like endless possibilities at the end of a book, I do, but here it just seemed that the author knew she couldn’t tackle all the wacky possibilities and therefore left her readers with an open epilogue. It would have been awesome, I think, if the book had actually begun at its end point and worked its way through all the tangled compex problems that come with having a sudden renewal of mass scale faith in ambiguously intentioned gods.

I liked the book though, mainly because like I mentioned earlier – I love mythology and urban fantasy. Where else, I ask you, will you get to read the following sentence “I’ve got a god passed out on my kitchen floor and I think the world’s about to end”?  Nope. Nowhere else.  Also, I liked the book because it figured Greek gods who are some of my favourite gods; for I have always thought that if you actually believed in them, then you’d never be surprised when bad things happened coz you’ll realize that as gods they’ve got better things to do than bother about your temporary existence. Gives you a wondeful perpective on fate and stuff.

Also, for those interested in worship of Greek gods in modern times: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/05/greece

On Recession, Recruitment and Reasons Why

We had a treat last night; one of the fifth years who’d got a job decided to let the whole lot in campus gorge on Rosogollas, and ice cream at his expense. Second senior to do this, in a week; damn sweet, I hope it becomes an instant custom.

Of course getting a job is always a big deal in college – campus recruitment remains one of the most gossiped events of the year – who got in where, who didn’t, how many recruited in percentages and so on, but this year getting a job took on a gravity quite unsurpassed with the oft quoted and much abused phenomena of recession hanging over everyone’s head.

It became quite common to walk into conversations where everyone was discussing statistics – so and so firm promised to take so and so number of people, but they didn’t – the bastards; or so and so college had a better track record with recruitment this year, even though it couldn’t hold up a candle to our college, you get the drift. Most felt sorry for the fifth years- some genuine, some patronizing…some in a way I don’t quite get.

Take one of my friends…she sees the poor track record this year as some sort of threat to her own personal recruitment which is two to three years in the future. She is frustrated by it, angry almost, asking why she should spent five years away from home, doing this back breaking course when in the end it may amount to nothing. She could, she says perhaps not in her strongest moment, have just chosen to study at the tacky place near her home, if in the end this is the only sort of result she is going to get. I snap at her to quit worrying and she quotes ILO’s expected figures of job loss at me. I think of my father and am suddenly, powerfully worried. I quickly perhaps even unkindly ridicule her and the figures and brush it away. I refuse to be worried, perhaps unwisely.

And these sort of odd disconnected snippets go on and on; one fifth year who, when she saw a group of pesky second years staring said with very little heat, quit staring, yes we are unemployed, and another one who I overhead on the phone talking airily about how her dad was worried about her and wouldn’t let her sit jobless at home.

My mum called me up a few weeks ago and because I sounded upset launched into speech on how it didn’t matter much – about recruitment or grades as long as you are safe and happy and it took me almost fifteen minutes to realize that she’d freaked out on my regular petty problems because she’d been reading about some chap who’d killed himself at IIT coz he didn’t get a job, due to you guessed it, recession. I told my mum in no uncertain terms that a) she was crazy and b) she was crazy. I think, strangely enough, she felt much better at being told how ridiculous the connection was.

And that’s what I hate about recession. The genuine effects of it are there for everyone to see and to be worried about- job loss, unemployment, loss of a lifetime of saving, the whole nine yards. But what I hate more is how much it is affecting people – the fears it’s creating sometimes to the point of utter ridiculousness.

I know that you can’t ignore recession, you shouldn’t but I wish it wasn’t turning into everyone’s personal bogey man.