Lone on the Range


Despite my best intentions I never do manage to update this blog on time and I somehow think it's not nice to neglect it - not sure why, not sure if others feel that way about their blogs. Yet Facebook has become such a default page and often you leave out friends who aren't on there in your news and sharings. I really don't like that - conformity to an interface should not determine social exchange surely.

And there is a strange passivity about all that social networking stuff, whereas somehow this requires a little more involvement. You have to at least MAKE a post, and there is something meditative and respectful about that.

Meanwhile after a very very very very hard working year I took a small vacation (much to everyone's shock). Just 4 days on a quiet beach. Slept a lot, swam a lot, read a lot. I'd like all of life to be like that.

So that weekend the column was obviously about the pleasures of traveling alone - the necessity too maybe...




And here's the blissful place I was in




(What, you thought I'd go without MY COMPUTER????? You think I'm a freak or something???)





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bois Locker Room case underscores vital need for radical, political reimagining of an education that liberates us

Image
This essay was first published on First Post Paromita Vohra • May 14, 2020   The Bois Locker Room and the crisis of our society in its current breakdown have a lot to say about each other. Both of them tell us that we have reached the limits of the system we live in. If the way out is together, then we need an education on what it means to do that. In 1984, Delhi’s St. Stephen’s college was in the news for a time-honoured tradition: chick charts. Tradition is such a flexible word — making a practice sound unchangeable. In fact the college started admitting women students only in 1975 (it had been co-ed in the past, from 1928-1949). The nine years that women had been attending the college, was enough to term tradition, the frequent posting on the official college notice board, of Top 10 charts, made by male students, rating women on their breasts, butts, legs, mouths — and sometimes maybe, smiles. Smiles were what most women apparently used to mask the discomfort of t...
Read more

ladies and gents

Image
This last month I watched three films that I've been thinking about for various reasons (instead of work) -Sex and the City by ( I had to google this) Michael Patrick King - I Am the Very Beautiful by Shyamal Karmakar - Sherman's March - Ross McElwee This is a rambling and maybe unclear post because I'm still sorting through the jumble of thoughts in my head.  Again it felt to me that while there's a cliche about how women are obsessed with love and romance (thanks for nothing Byron) they don't or can't seem to create works around this. Obviously I am not talking about Mills and Boons - nor am I dismissing them. That's just a separate discussion. I mean that Sherman's March and I am the Very Beautiful are obviously abiding, strong, resonant films about love and men - this is a very masculine perspective (and I am not in complete agreement that the women in this film - Ranu in IATVB and the 5-6 in SM are allowed to construct their own realities alone wit...
Read more

Bas ik jhijhak - to Papa on his birthday

Image
Since my father passed away in 2005, I’ve tried on his birthday to write something for him, to remember him in. I haven’t always managed to do it here – of late it has been small things on Facebook I guess. Today too, it is almost the end of the day when I have the opportunity to write this, a fact that as usual would have made him tsk tsk about my misplaced priorities, my lack of real discipline. There were many things about my father, which, as time has gone by, and as I too am older, with a head and heart more weathered than before, I see now, were truly special things. One of these was his love of poetry, especially Urdu poetry. As a child in Lahore and even after moving to Delhi during Partition, he had studied only Urdu and English. I am not sure where his great love for Urdu poetry came from actually – whether it was part of the cultural milieu or whether he had acquired it from some friends. But I knew it was always there. Ghalib was his favourite poet. I did not understa...
Read more