Words are Weariness

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...