Words are Weariness

                                   

Imagine you are standing in the bus stop and a leading Kollywood director calls you up, “Come for the shooting next new moon day”, or the lottery ticket you bought gets the highest prize.  Will you not be propelled to instant fame?  That is what happened to me, when I was bitten by a horse! Before you exclaim “Horse?” let me introduce myself and then the horse.   My name is Krishna swamy. Shorten it to “Kichamy” and conjure up a face, you have my character and front elevation clearly mapped out.  I am ordinary, both in my vocation and looks.  Morning coffee, newspaper, some household chores, running to catch the morning bus to work; that is all to my daily life, a dissipating grind of an ant. Wife, child, father-in-law, rented house, bathroom singing, a few flower pots and a radio purchased on installments; you have got a full picture of my unremarkable existence. It was so, till the horse bit me! The horse was also commonplace; just the one at the ‘jutka’ stand. On our way fro

Do you know Felix Salmon? No, it is not a variety of fish with orange-red innards that is a delicacy in these parts.  Felix Salmon  blogs for Reuters on financial matters,  one of the few I admire for  clarity and judgement in the blogging world. In one of his earlier blog posts which I had missed reading till recently, he has confirmed what I feared the most; that in internet sheer quantity beats quality.  Unlike the past when the newspapers appointed a battery of experienced journalists as sub-editors to re-work articles before they were sent to the print shop, the trend seems to be to ‘throw up’ more on the online format so that ‘more’ is shared and searched for; to hell with all aspects of good writing - accuracy, logic,  graceful turns of phrase, wisdom and insight, puns and punctuation. When I see the quality of blogging in our mainline newspapers like Hindustan Times and Times of India or the quality of e-zines, this trend seems have caught on here as well.   Publishers see