Words are Weariness

How could you call a house without a chair a home? So it struck all of us in the house the same time. This issue was immediately placed on the agenda for family discussion. Just the day before we had a family friend visiting us. He was a sub-judge and as our luck would he have it, he came not dressed in Veshti and Shirt but fully suited and booted. All we had in our house was a three-legged stool, which was itself just three-fourth of a foot high. Our grandmother used to sit on it when she whipped curd. Since our grandmother was a little 'broad at the bottom' our grandfather had asked the carpenter to make it a little broader than usual. For want of any alternative we had requested his good self to take his seat on this three-legged affair. The sub-judge himself was a little thick-set; that caused him to place one hand on the edge of the stool before setting himself down on it . The problem with the stool was that if the weight fell on it not in line with...

Exora  Asokamitran recently passed away. He chose writing for a living and suffered the economic consequences of it.  Have you seen the Exora flower ?  When I was young , we had an Exora plant ( or bush ?)  near the steps at the front of the house.  If you pluck a few flowers with their long stems in tact from a bunch and reverse them and put the stems in the mouth and gently suck them by pressing your lip to the palate, you will get a fleeting taste of sweetness, of its nectar. .  Asokamitran handles subjects the same way.  His approach to the subject and writing style is as gentle as  the butterfly settling on a flower and the effect on the reader is just as subtle.  Not for him the the heavy handed stuff, not for him the harangue  Nobody captured  the ordinariness of life  like him. Nobody understood the mental make up of middle-lower middle class urban dweller like him.  He saw life as a progression of ...

CRIKEY “England and United States are two countries separated by the same language”, this wisecrack is credited to George Bernard Shaw. Now with English as the language of Global business, IT, Science  & Technology , Air Traffic Control and many other things where people across countries have to collaborate to deliver , more countries are separated by the same English than ever before! I clearly remember my time as an offshore Lead  for a support project for a client based in USA. We used to have our routine weekly status updates over the phone with the client’s Project Manager on site. Even if his American drawl was tolerable, he always had me scratching my head with his slang. One favorite exclamation of his  used to be “it’s a curved ball !”.  Exasperated, I called up an Indian in his team to ask what this darned  ‘curved ball’ was.  I was told that this was akin to our “googly” or the “wrong’ un” and is drawn from baseball lingo!!. Hand...

My niece wanted me to write/translate a story for her 4-year old daughter; the little one whose voracious appetite for reading and stories should be daunting for her mother. Immediately I remembered one of the Russian tales of Arkady Gaidar whose story of ‘Chuck and Geck’ I had read some 40+ years back in Tamil. Those days, the soviet communist propaganda was allowed free reign in India under the Indo-Soviet co-operation, Our CPI cadres were running a publishing house ( I think the name was NCBH)   where they printed translations of Russian publications from Progress Publishers or Mir Publishers, Moscow.   While a good deal of them were pure propaganda with titles like “How Socialism settled the question of sub-nationalism in USSR” ( the fact was that they only exacerbated and never settled them)   or “Scientific Socialism – Empirical criticism” , there were also excellent children’s literature in the form of folk tales and songs all rendered in highly readable Tamil. ...