NavDharmyug

This is a beautiful, beautiful book. I came across this book through a review on The Guardian . The book is Memoirs of Joanna Rakoff, taking the reader into her life in “The Agency” - a literary agency which represented J D Salinger, standing on the cusp of a change as the Agency moves from the age of Typewriters and Dictaphones to Computer.  The perspective of the story is very new. It doesn’t rely on the typecast characters where the young woman is either a world-changing activist or a hopeless romantic or a soul-less woman. She is as real as a woman (or a man, for that matter) can be. She has many things to do, to build a career, to write poetry, to fall in love. Not one of the things, not many of the things, all of the things which engage the mind of young people. She joins the Agency expecting to slowly slip into a literary career. She writes poems in the morning and like an ill-paid apprentice deliberates about the lunch to be had. Her sense of description and observation...

Image courtesy of winnond / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I write. I blog, write poetry, tell stories, in essence, I write. When I sit down and watch the world around me, I try to interpret it in words. When I am sad, I recoil into words and when I am happy, I soar high into the sky on the beautiful wings of words. Words follow the emotions and sometimes fall short of them. But, I try to ensure that they never lie. The beauty of a word is not in its sound, nor on its hallowed origin. The beauty of a word lies in the truth it represents. The truth is always an uncomfortable thing, for the writer and for the reader. It always ruffles the feathers. In fact, the discomfort that the word brings is the measure of the truth it contains. A tame, timid truth serves no one and is merely a camouflage of the truth. Truth is outrageous by its very nature, primarily because we are so conditioned to ignore it and secondarily, on account of its tendency to stick to its shape, ignorant of any pressur...

We like to believe love to be just and uniform. But it isn't. We do not love all the people. We also do not love those we love, equally, at all the time. There is some kind of grading system in love and we love different people differently. It may depend on our general outlook and the way we look at various relationships at one point of time. There are some relationships which emerges out of nowhere and overwhelms our being and all the other relationships. Fatherhood has been one such love for me. Before we had my daughter, six years back, I never could have imagined myself of ever being in such a love. Many things have been said about love. In love, one person loves and the another allows to be loved - wrote Somerset Maugham .  I loved, I loved with vigor, with an angry, audacious passion, but I never could give my last inch into the love that I had begotten into, ever. That one last inch, that last bit of me,  always remained. And then I became a Father. Unlike any o...

My writing life has had its own heights of ecstasy and depths of depression. Very usual, it happens to all writers. There are moments of extreme confidence when we believe that the creator Himself speaks through us and through our pen flows his words, and then there are fog-ridden days when nothing seems to be going right and one is filled with self-doubt and one believes this claim of being a writer is nothing but fake. Summers in Delhi are characteristically excruciating.  I remember, when I first wrote a collection of essays with strange sense of urgency- If Truth Were To Be Told, as if, if not written then, it would go wasted with a dying man's last breath. No, I wasn't dying then and am still alive. You would have guessed it anyways by now. But then that was a huge sense of urgency there. I was scared every moment if the book would ever be written. Anyway, the book did not sell a lot, in fact, sold very few. But then it was followed by stories, and collection of poem...

The long dance-duel of democracy has finally ended. The rulers and wanting-to-be-rulers have now decided to rest after a no-holds-barred battle is over. The unapologetic political parties and apologetic, righteous neutral commentators, jumping in and out of the discourse. In fact, the case for the commentators was the most curious, under the thinly wrapped veneer of neutrality and forward-thinking lurked the opportunity to shoot and scoot.   This was a campaign which made people see through the charade of intellectual bourgeoisie, who pretended to be neutral but treaded the thin line between the public and private. Thankfully, the campaign ended and hopefully we are left with few things still left to believe in.   Narendra Modi has a task cut out for him. Swearing-in happens tomorrow evening. My view he has things to do, new paths to tread.   He has invited the SAARC countries, all of them to attend. That to me is a good be...

This is a terribly confused weather at this time in Delhi. The summers keep on attempting to make way into the scenario but are ousted by adamant rains twice every week. Last week saw one such rain lashing out on in its fury over the capital. The following morning was blessed with the cold calm of dead devastation in the park, with fallen trees and broken branches. The jogging track was full of broken branches and dead leaves. A cold, encouraging wind saw people turning up in the neighborhood park. I finished my five-miles run which I was pretty happy and contended about, even going half a mile beyond the targeted five. It isn’t an easy task from long out-of-activity body, but then, exercising at young age has probably helped. That and some hard-headed stubbornness of character. The tired heart leaps up and rises to the calling. I have to fool it at times in to believing that I will give up after two miles and then I cajole it to go another one mile and then anothe...

Fatherhood is not an accident of nature. I had once posited on my Facebook page and many friends seconded that opinion. You do not become a father by having a progeny. It slowly dawns over you as you struggle to understand what all it entails.  You rush to the airport as the flight is about to close, and your five year old wanders like a little rabbit from the bedroom, eyes still closed and you forget the work, forget the flight. You walk to her and kneel down on your knees and kiss her on the still-closed, sleepy eyes with the sacred dedication of a worshipper. You start to understand fatherhood at such moments. It is not a truth like Newton's apple which falls at some recognizable moment on your head. You learn it slowly. It is a series of moments when you do things which never imagined yourself to be able to do.  I remember the cold chill which ran through my spine when my seven-month pregnant wife tripped while getting down from the car. I almost wept but there w...