It's Been A While. So What?
Eavesdropping on kids, notes on grief, a book recommendation, a song recommendation.
Eavesdropping On Kids
I sat down on a swing nearby. 4 kids had made the jungle gym their battleground arena. As soon as I sat, I heard
Enemy on the swing!
The flâneur in me kicked in me. I kept swinging and eavesdropped on them. Read the blog post to listen to what they said.
Notes On Grief
I recently read Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In the book, she tries to do two things –
Remember her father. As you'd read this tiny but profound book you'll live memories of difficult, shocking, sudden, chortling, sarcastic, innocent and humorous times. It's so heartening, and at the same time not so surprising, to see so much humour filled in a grieving book.
Grieve, feel and write out of urgency.
It kick started me to start writing everyday, something that no amount of motivation and dreams could. It might be a coincidence – this attribution. Like when a person on the ground sees a bird fly as soon as the twig it sat on breaks. But when, actually, the twig broke at the same time that the bird flew. But who cares about the cause. I started writing daily. Do read a little bit about the book here.
Book Recommendation
If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino. The story makes the reader a protagonist of the story, and guess what? The protagonist of the story – you – is also a reader in the book who has a heck of journey to try to figure the mystery behind wrong books being published in the name of the correct ones. It’s a wild wild book of literary and plot genius.
Song Recommendation
11th grade. Last class before summer holidays. Our maths teacher asks a rhetorical question
What will you do in these summer vacations?
The class erupts in an acrimony of spread out unharmonious shouts
Study!…Revise!…Do all the Daily Practice Problems…! Do all the chapter sheet problems!
Our maths teacher with his peculiar, cool style shakes his head and says
Watch as many movies as possible.
Silence in the class, everybody deadpan. After enjoying the pause he continues
So that you become so saturated that when you come back you wouldn’t feel like watching one.
We were baffled by the logic. On the whiteboard, he wrote some of his favourites. One of them was Real Genius ( 1985 ). I downloaded a torrent, watched it, and loved most of its tracks, especially the one featured in the last scene:
Everybody wants to rule the world by Tears and Tears
A beautiful rendition of the same song by Pomplamoose is also nice
It has been a long while. Some of you might be seeing this email suddenly and not even remember having subscribed to this newsletter. I only have one thing to say. So what? Same thing I say to myself on numerous occasions. So what? keeps mind sane like sliding butter over any and all hot food items.
Until next time, hopefully really soon.