A humming word

The abstract noun "genius" is commonly misused. "You're a genius" is a common derisive remark. Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius. Ramanujan was a mathematical genius. The lists of Genuises cannot be complete without the mention of painters like Van Gogh. Edward Hopper. And poets like Li Young Lee. Roger Robinson. And then, there are sparks of genius. A genius is the purest form and the most intense application of the mind and heart. For me, sparks of genius, were in movies like The Devil Wears Prada, where Meryl Streep says "that's all" with a soft yet stern tone that shakes institutions. Or Kangana Ranaut in Fashion. Her poise and her attitude was a spark of genius. And, then, there are books like Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The plot is simple: to solve the murder of a neighbour's Dog, Christopher resolves to find the crime-doer. Christopher has Asperger's Syndrome. It is mentioned nowhere but only in the blurb of the book....

A collection of seven stories, Men without Women by Haruki Murakami isn’t different from his other books, yet it is! The book revolves around relationships, supernatural phenomenon, love, deceit, but the translation in this book lacks the poetic depth that one yearns for in a Murakami book. Few stories are exceptional—it is a habit now for Murakami (genius dripping out at the top of his hat). But a few stories give a Deja-vu feel. Nevertheless, give it a try. The stories that I enjoyed were: 1.        The Woman Driver which starts with the common sentiment that women are bad drivers, it progresses onto a deep friendship between the two protagonists—a woman driver and her employer. Their camaraderie doesn’t translate to any physical relationship and that’s comforting. 2.        Scheherazade, inspired by a character in the Arabic folklore, is about a kleptomaniac, narrated by her paramour. The intricacies of the theft a...

There are some days when we want to turn to the familiar and ensconce in that familiar song whose lyrics run on our tongue like butter. One such familiar space is Ruskin Bond (atleast for me!). I don’t want to read about plagues or diseases—nor do I want to escape what’s happening around. But what if you could turn into something familiar such as chewing the edge of your grandmother’s saree or just resting your head on that old cot. It just calms you down from this overload of information of Corona! (Yes, Karthik Aryan, we get it! No more outings and eating comfort food or icecream, outside!) If you could bring the outside, inside, then pick this book—The Road to the Bazaar by Ruskin Bond. There are a few familiar stories such as The Tunnel. Ranji’s Bat, The Great Train Journey, The Long Day but re-reading them makes it an enjoyable read. Bond paints a picture of Dehra with oil paints that it sits eternally in the heart and in the head. Mukesh Starts a Zoo was one of my favour...

Farewell Song is a translation of Shesher Kobita by Rabindranath Tagore, set in the backdrop of Calcutta and Shillong.  Amit Rai, a city-bred boy, belongs to an aristocratic family. A polished man, Amit is well versed in the poetry of Robi Thakur and N. Choudhury. Labanya, whose home is the deodar trees and her house library at Shillong, has dedicated herself to learning and is sunk deep in philosophy, literature and her father’s wise words. Amit courts women and like a petals of flowers, he makes a pot pourri of the women he likes. While, like Arjuna, the Pandav price, Labanya doesn’t waver from her thoughts painted with her morals. She rejects advances of any kind from her father’s students, too. However, when Amit’s haughtiness brushes against Labanya’s simplicity, he is soaked in the hills and trees of Shillong, and she is painfully drawn to him.  They weave their love story with their conversations, rather, beads of literature, and that gravitates them...

Nadia is tempestuous and independent. She lives in a war-stricken country, in the top floor of a two-storied building, alone. She enjoys the texture of her independence. Despite being stuck in a finance job, her creative outbursts seeps into margins of a notebook during a course in Finance and Corporate. Saeed is pursuing the same course. Saeed is calm and conservative. He lives with his parents and enjoys doing so. He works in an advertising agency and to augment his career, he takes the course. And this story is about these two individuals. In a hushed corridor, Saeed asks Nadia for coffee. She refuses initially, but after Saeed’s persistence, she agrees. In a war-stricken country, there’s space for bombs, and hate, but love is dismissed to tiny corners. They meet in her room and smoke marijuana. And this is how Saeed enter Nadia’s room: The bag landed beside Saeed with a muffled thump. He opened it, found her spare downstairs key, and also one of her bla...

Location: your room, somewhere in India Time: early morning Shut your eyelids and place your palms over it. What do you listen to? Rumbling of the monkey mind? Pressure cooker whistles. Whirring fan. Vociferous gargling of a neighbor. The running tap. The rustling of the newspaper. Now, stand in your balcony. You might hear a parrot screech or a sparrow chirp; the wind blowing past your eyes; the cacophony of the street. Perhaps, these are the notes from your room. Now, go into the lanes and by lanes of your surroundings and record what you write. These could be the notes from your room. Ruskin Bond, the master storyteller, chose a familiar fabric of his surroundings and stitched 39 beautiful and colorful notes with them.  The 171-page starts with “It’s the simple things in life that keeps us from going crazy.” The things we oft ignore are magnified and you cannot help but observe the small things around you. Like the red ant that lands o...

Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder And stories lie in the words of the narrator There's something about Ruskin Bond's stories that make us pick his book again and again. Having read his two books, Delhi Is Not Far, and Railway Stories - a collection of stories around the Indian Railways, I wondered why and how does Ruskin manage to weave the simplest of incidents into a fantastic paragraph that makes the reader seem he is reading a fantasy book. In Delhi Is Not Far, Arun, a struggling writer, befriends the barber, Deep Chand, a leper, Suraj, Pitamber, wrestler and a prostitute, K, and like a colorful mural, he paints a mosaic of stories around them. The Mohalla, a chowkidaar, Arun's patience with Suraj's fist and his deep affection for the prostitute. Arun's life at People-nagar (Pipalnagar) is far from interesting. The dusty roads where people exist comes alive in these 100 odd pages. And in the Indian Railway Stories, Ruskin makes us fall in lov...

After a baseball match, Murakami picked his pen and began writing by the kitchen stove; since then he has been weaving magic through lucid narratives making pedestrian events phantgosmagorical. Reading the twin novel “Wind/Pinball” which spans from 1969-73,   will make one realize there’s magic around us if we pick up a magnifying glass and carry it with us – or have a keen writer’s eye. Murakami adheres to   style which requires love for lyrical prose, music and nature and in this novel: The Pinball. It was a Sunday morning and the sky was piercing blue. The grass beneath our feet was filled with the premonition of its approaching death until next spring. Before long, it would turn white with frost, and then disappear with a blanket of snow. The snow would glitter in the crytal-clear morning sunlight. The pale grass crunched beneath our feet as we walked along. Back to novel one, it spans for eighteen days and it takes us through the life of the narrator ...