notes from a small room by Ruskin Bond
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...