The Good Women of China

I simply cannot fall asleep. For here I am, drunk on excitement: mehendis, dances, giggles and girl-talk.

So I pick up the Good Women of China and read a few pages until tears start dropping by.

In a strange way, I am proud that N chose me to lend her book to. But to sign on its back cover next to women who have fought for great things is a responsibility too...

So I will myself to quickly fall asleep. For there is so much to do, to make the world a better place.

And your problems just shrink in space.

Mad and Silly

~~
There was no flowers, the stars didn't cross,
but giggle and gurgle, we whistled a tune,
madly, silily, madly-ho!

salt tasted sour, the bitter gourd sweet,
the sun went nuts and the moon stole treats,
but we were in love, madly, silily, madly-ho!

we lolled in the hay and lots and lots played,
sailed in the breeze and said go-ahead,
silily, madly, silily-so!

so one dozen people with two hundred heads,
said lets have fun, come lets fave hun,
silily, madly, silily-ho!

so clippity-cloppity, carefully tread,
with sandalwood paste on your forehead,
for there is a ring and lots and lots bling,
nitter-natter, in-laws chatter.

Mr. Footloose and Ms. Fancyfree
madly, madly, madly-ho,
will step into the typhoon to savour the brew,
silily, silily, silily-so!

so what is up is a storm in a teacup,
a raucous ruckus, a chaos insane,
call it fate or the engagement,
but the little devil found the perfect angel.
~~

- all rights reversed to The Tenth Rasa - An Anthology of Indian Nonsense.

though I put it together, lines and phrases are borrowed from The Tenth Rasa. It is truly a book to keep. I can never write something poignant when it comes to sis and nonsense suits her best. Btw, this goes in my sis' engagement e-mail invite and she is Mad and the Devil.

Clearing space in the head

work:
If the office felt like tundra earlier (Clean and I have always considered relocating polar bears and artic foxes here for conservation) it now feels like Pluto. Jelly legs, chattering teeth and raging viral fevers just added to our merry work atmosphere.

books:
Adiga's magnum opus, which was lying unread at my desk for weeks is now in hot demand. Too many mixed reviews and reverse snobbery makes me stave it off. I am meditating on a book about cats.

home:
At home, I am no longer the favourite grand-daughter, honestly when was I? But grand pa has been seething at me ever since I started telling him off to run his own errands around the house - like to the water filter.

It has been two-and-a-half years since his femur-joint bone surgery and high time that he is up and about the house. His paunch could also do without a few metres. I don't care if he laments loudly to the maid about lack of respect in today's generation or acts a bit stiff, I am gonna teach the Air Force man a trick or two of his own.

head:
And the only good thing about my delirious fever this week is that it kept folks at home too busy with my temperatures and pills, so busy that they forgot the "you over-work" bhajan and "erratic schedules" polambal.

And at moments like these, when the sun sneaks out after the showers and bright light streams through the windows, I know I love my family the most.

Book envy

The problem with me as a reader is that I get too involved with any book that I read - that is I cant put a book down - good, bad or cheap trash until I know what happened at the very end.

This irritating trait has forced me to read on shuddering PTC buses (Mango Coloured Fish); when I was having a bath - seriously, when I could'nt finish the The Order of the Phoenix after a sleepless night, I propped it on the washing machine; at my first shoot (Ponniyin Selvan) and at work (You are Here). So I simply avoid taking up a book if I can. Amazing excuse, right? right.

But really, when I start reading, I start living between the pages. And that is why I envy this best buddy of mine (eM), who can pick up a book at dinner time and put it down after her curd rice. Her reading list naturally is light years ahead of mine.

Anyways, here is the list that she sends, which has set my right hand itching towards that Ruskin Bond. Seventy-five books that a woman must read, and the roll call reads:

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• Earthly Paradise, Colette
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Property, Valerie Martin
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• Runaway, Alice Munro
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
• You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
• The Group, Mary McCarthy
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Three Junes, Julia Glass
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
• Sophie's Choice, William Styron
• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
• Spending, Mary Gordon
• The Lover, Marguerite Duras
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
• Possession, A.S. Byatt

I can proudly tick off - The Namesake (still reading), Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Wuthering Heights, Little Women, The Diary of Anne Frank, Frankenstein (I never realised it was was written by a woman) and The God of Small Things.

There is this list for men and it has some good ones like Haruki Murakami's books.