Tag: Books

  • Travel Gems

    Paul Theroux’s “The Tao of Travel” was a goldmine of perspectives on the subject. While I did write a review on GoodReads, I really didn’t stuff it with quotes as I would have liked. 🙂 But since this is more of a chronicle, I can afford the liberty here.

    “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” Paul Theroux

    “Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.” Paul Theroux

    “I think I spend more time thinking about what I don’t want to take with me: assumptions, iPods, cameras, plans, friends, (in most cases) laptops…… expectations.” Pico Iyer

    “Unfortunately, the sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger as well. This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually coms up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die.” Jon Krakauer

    “My own feeling is that city dwellers invent the cities they dwell in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind.” Paul Theroux

    “Travel is one of the saddest pleasures of life.” Madame de Staël

    “I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place..” Paul Theroux

    “It sometimes seems to me that if there is a fundamental quest in travel, it is the search for the unexpected.” Paul Theroux

    until next time, wanderlust

  • A momentous truth

    Joydeep Roy Bhattacharya’s “The Storyteller of Marrakesh” is not among my favourites, mostly because it didn’t deliver what I look for in  a work of fiction. But I’m a fan of it for a different reason – there is prose in it that will haunt me for a long time.

    The book’s narrator begins the tale with the statement that there is no truth, because the moment it is revealed, it is transformed into one of many possible opinions. A few pages later, he says “Our imagination spins dreams; memory hides in them. Memory releases longing; the imagination waters the rivers with rain. They feed each other.“

    In terms of memory augmentation, despite the best documentation, I’ve felt many times that there are moments that have not been captured fully, or perhaps not captured enough at all. A presence that is felt, but cannot be captured. It is humbling to realise that acts which we lay importance to, moments which we considered precious, will be forgotten altogether or remembered in a different way from what actually happened, not just by others, but by us too.

    Much later in the book, a character shares a wonderful story, “This professor while addressing a large audience on the subject of beauty, asked that a piece of ambergris be passed from hand to hand until, by the time it reached the last person at the back of the massive hall, it had crumbled away to nothing. But the entire hall smelled of ambergris, and every person there had been touched by its essence. The professor concluded his lecture at that point, stating that he had nothing more to say on the nature of beauty.”

    ..of life, I would say. The smell of ambergris would drift between memory and imagination. If someone found words to describe it, it would exist in the imagination of the reader, but probably in a much different form than it actually was. The moment was the truth, everything else would be an opinion.

    until next time, truth be told…

  • Mythistory

    Centuries apart, but both in The Wonder Eras and Irascible, I had written about the documentation of incidents that we now call mythology and history. (respectively) In the former, I had mentioned the feeling when I saw the place where Sita had been temporarily imprisoned in Lanka, and in the latter, a fictionalised version of an event that happened in 1919. Both a bit intangible – the first only because of the centuries that have passed and it was still difficult to believe that myth was just history but more ancient, and the second because I am not sure if it actually happened.

    Sometime back, I read William Dalrymple’s ‘The Last Mughal’, that uses Bahadur Shah Zafar as a ‘device’ to write about the events of 1857. The book is based on actual documents. As I wrote in my review (will share soon) what remains with me long after I have read the book, and something I went back to, almost every time I picked up the book to continue, is the photo of Zafar, lying with his face to the camera – the face of a broken old man who through his life saw the dominion of his ancestors taken away from him until all he had was his city and an empty title, who had just been made to undergo a trial and many humiliations before it, eyes expressing melancholy, and resigned to his destiny.

    Suddenly, the images that I remember from history textbooks were transformed into a real person, and history was somehow tangible, as was his plight. It was almost as though that if I could take a few steps more, I could somehow feel the same about our myths.  Have you ever felt that when reading/seeing anything?

    Perhaps it is that way in every age, when some things that were history move into legend and then on to a myth status. I am still debating in my mind whether the layering that happens, adds or subtracts.

    until next time, history repeats?

  • Book values

    Sometime back, a colleague excitedly pointed me to Bookshelf P0rn, and I remembered bookmarking it a year back. The room with massive bookshelves has been one of the key attractions of the ‘when we buy our final home’ thoughts. (‘buying homes for life stages’ is another post 🙂 )

    Yes, I’m still one of those who religiously visit Blossoms on Church Street, and get a high when I walk around shelves that house a musty smell of old books, when I run my hand through ridges and pages and discover stories within stories, when I read words that reach out to me from across time and space. And yet, with the reader and tablet explosion, I wonder how long these books will be around. Even if I stubbornly resisted e-books, would there be a market to support it? The economics just might not work out. These thoughts crossed my mind when I read this wonderful article on the process of book publishing – its past, present and future.

    On Brain Pickings, one of my favourite sites, I caught these words from Carl Sagan that completely resonate with me

    What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

    I’m just getting familiar with the idea of a book community thanks to Goodreads. The idea of reading books and seeing annotations left by those who have read it before me, ‘browsing their thoughts’, including, probably the author’s, and thus ‘traveling’ across time and space does seem fascinating, something that is provided by the current form of reading only to some measure.

    In the interim, I wish someone would build a white label e-book, that looks and feels just like a real book, one which I can really bookmark, flip pages etc, but one in which I can download a book and it would automatically change the cover, re-paginate and bring in all the benefits of technology. Best of both worlds to help me evolve! Maybe it already exists. 🙂

    until next time, booking the future

    “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” (Bill Gates)

  • 1, 2….34

    One of the characters in Preeta Samarasan’s “Evening is the whole day” asks, during a conversation, “Everyone is always so tired nowadays. I wish we could all be young forever, or whatever age we ourselves choose. What age would you be if you could choose..?“

    It made me think of what my answer would be. At first, I wondered if I would like to be older than what I am today – to sit back comfortably with the perspectives I have gained.  As the years pass by, and the memories accumulate, I seem to be viewing most phases of my life so far through a happy prism. Despite remembering a few specific instances that made me unhappy, and (paradoxically) being certain that I was probably frustrated/terrified/bitter on many occasions and would never want them to be repeated, I can now look back and smile at the overall scheme of things. Perhaps I am lucky or perhaps, this is the way it works for most of us.

    And yet, even happy memories, I have noticed, can evoke contrasting sentiments within me. When melancholy strikes, and I remember happy times, it’s a bit like what Alfred Tennyson wrote (in a context I have no idea of)

    “Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
    Tears from the depths of some devine despair 
    Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
    In looking on the happy autumn fields, 
    And thinking of the days that are no more.” 

    until next time, “I’ll spend my future living the past“