07.05.09
If Nothing Else, am Well Read
Saw this tag on Xeb’s blog and thought I’d get to it some day… the spiel is that:
1) Look at the list and highlight the ones that you’ve read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon.
60 Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Hmmmmmmm…. 75 out of the given 100 is not so bad me thinks.
06.26.09
In This Place You’ll Feel There’s No Hurt Or Sorrow
“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”
So said Michael Jackson and I hope in his passing he found the peace that eluded him in his life.
Michael Joseph Jackson – August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009
So, Michael Jackson’s Dead. Kind of hard to believe. I didn’t track him career like a hound but he was hard to ignore… The ever changing skin colour, the physical transformation and yes the scandals of child molestation. There were other things too, which I’m sure will be fed to us by the foaming at the mouth media till its all but coming out of our ears and nose and but cut the guy a break. It’s bad enough to have every facet of your life examined to the point that your body being taken by paramedics outside your home is captured by the papparazzi of all things… And then in death, every person deeming it their right to talk about you as if you were their best friend… Yet death comes to you alone. I always feel sorry for all these stars… sorrier as they become more famous because suddenly they are public fodder. They’re not allowed to be human, to be flawed or insecure or to hurt. Plastic!
It takes death to humanize them but we don’t let them have that either… They are now angels, fallen or otherwise, glorified in death and made a spectacle out of… Their life and death sold on the streets… Like 20 dollar t-shirts with the king of pop’s picture on it selling outside the UCLA medical center where he died within hours of his passing! And it’ll go on… His albums, songs, videos, his life… Items he used, his home and whatever his last rites may be.. will be catalogued, labeled, valued and sold and resold like so many trophies… and will make people rich!
There was a time when I thought that there only was one singer in the world and his name was Michael Jackson. As in ALL songs were only ever sung by MJ. And his videos are still fun to watch. Who hasn’t watched the boyfriend turn to werewolf to boyfriend to amazing dancing zombie in Thriller. I know as hell that I did. And tried to copy them too. The moon walk, the pelvic thrusts, the spin, the twitches and grunts and shouts and the “Ow”… all of it. I still know the words to Beat it, and Smooth Criminal and Billie Jean… All the rest… Dirty Diana, Remember the time, Black or White, Heal the World, Man in the Mirror, Who is it, Give in to me and They don’t care about us…. Oh so many!
I hope you find the care in the other world Michael Jackson, that you didn’t get here….
Salute!
06.22.09
Broken
It’s like splintering into pieces from within… Shards splitting from the center into slivers fine and sharp… The kind that burrow in and make you bleed and you can’t get them out. The fine edge just slides over your skin, through it leaving a sting sharp enough to make your breath catch… Imagine thousands of those shards slicing through you inside out at the same time… so you don’t quite know where to hold the pain first…. you don’t quite know how to make the blood stop… even as you fade… all you feel is the agony… all you see is the red… all you feel is the helplessness of knowing that all that waits is darkness…
My Little Lost Boy
What do you do when you realize that the man you love is just a little lost boy?
It was agonizing to watch him break down that way.
I don’t mind saying that I am always cynical in the face of his declarations of love and devotion. I return them but I try and keep it real. Injecting doses of reality into romance kills it but at least it keeps one grounded. Or so I tell myself.
Yet, tonight, I was helpless in the face of his misery. It’s a little daunting to watch a six foot guy dissolve into tears in front of you and you being helpless to do anymore than just hold him.
My own grief? That comes later. His tears did more than tell me that maybe the love he says he feels for me is real.
His tears also told me that the time when he could maybe take a stand for me is not too close. And even when the time comes, there is no guarantee of him and me being any more than what we are today… unnamed, unrecognized.
His tears told me that for all we mean to each other, we may never be.
His tears told me that for all I may do to have him with me, at the end of it, I may be alone.
His tears today may very well be my tears tomorrow… Except that I wiped his tears away and kissed his brow and held him as he tried to gain control… I doubt anyone will be there to wipe my tears away…
For one who believes as strongly as I do in being the mistress of my own destiny, it stuns me to see my greatest defeat in the eyes of another…
06.17.09
Of Senses, No. 1
She hated this feeling of nothingness that wasn’t quite nothing… It was a great yawning, gaping emptiness inside that she could physically feel. She had gone into it knowing all the NOs that would echo around, thinking she could handle it, keep her distance. After all, she had been burned before and yet, she was here again, waiting an endless wait…
The cold and fear and insecurity still crept through, raising goosebumps on the arms she had wrapped around herself. The breeze coming through the window caught her hair and sprayed the rain on her face. Her eyes weren’t on the lightening that lit the sky just as her ears were deaf to the rumble of thunder.
She saw only those leonine eyes smiling before his lips did as he watched her, she could hear only the muted sound of his heart as it beat next to her, she could only feel the warmth of him wrapped around her as he held her in his arms. How to explain the feel of it? It’s not the physical sense of him that she missed although she would be lying if that wasn’t a part of it… There were things associated with the strength of him and that golden skin that were so much more potent in their absence… things that went beyond what he looked or felt like.
It was warmth and heat and scents… mysterious… associations… like walking though narrow cobbled streets of a small town in the Meditteranean in the heat of summer where the smell of the surf and sun mingles with the aroma of fresh summer fruits… or the shadowy streets in Arab where dark skinned peddlars sell sultry, dreamy spices that carry undertones of magic…
It was that scent of deodrant and shaving cream; and dust and sweat and below that something essentially him that made him burrow into him when he held her (oh how he laughed when she did that)… It lingered in her hair, on her skin along after he had gone… Her fingers tingled with the sense of him. The scent that drove her to smother her face in the pillow for hours at a time…
Referencing kills
All those people who invented bloody styles of thesis writing and referencing, should be thankful that they’re dead… Because they would surely be dead now if I ever laid my hands on them…
Aaarrrrgggghhhhh.. khud mar gaye and museebatein hamare liye chhor gaye!! Ufffff!!!
06.10.09
Cleansing
I cried today, long and hard… Sobbing till I was aching and hollow on the inside.
I’ve prided myself always on being a strong individual. And part of my strength has always come from my faith in Him. Not just in Him knowing best, but also that I have no need for any but Him because He grants me all I ever need and beyond, whether I ask for it or not. At the risk of repeating myself, in spite of offering prayers 4 out of 5 times a day, I feel that faith has been lost somewhat.
That guilt plus pressure for studies plus issues at home shook me enough to break down in front of my mama.
My mama is one of the strongest people I know. Her childhood stories sound like something out of a historical novel, yet all true. The 4th daughter of the 2nd wife of a landlord who migrated from Iran, and settled in a village in Punjab, who lost her mother at the age of 2, gained a step mother and lost a father at the age of 12. She grew up with step brothers and sisters straight out of a fairy tale with cruelty and property wars. And the years in between had her and the other sisters who were unmarried, being shuttled from one married sister’s house to another’s wherever a baby sitter, a washing/cleaning/cooking person was required.
Fell silently in love with her sister’s brother in law at the age of 16 and touchwood is very much in love with him still after 32 years of marriage. 
And she survived it all! And is surviving it still! Seen so much; the death of parents, and the death of a child; her children’s successes and their failures, personal and professional; lived in luxury in a house of her own and living now in a rented portion and through it all, thankful to Him and all He has given her.
As I cried today, I felt hopeless and despair and all my mother had was hope. She said that His forgiveness, His mercy is far far beyond the sixty-seventy years of sins that we have to our name. Where He has given so much before without asking, how can you allow yourself to even think that He won’t grant you something when you ask for it?
She reminded me of how when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old, I saw my papa offering prayers. Papa got up leaving the prayer carpet where it was. When he came back, I was there on the carpet, with my back towards the ka’aba, in my little dress, asking the Almighty on a one to one basis for a brother, a car and a house. My mama said that every prayer that little girl offered was accepted because it was offered with timeless, innocent faith in Him, offered with unconditional love and ownership of Him being the one who can grant her everything.
Who knows, maybe this bout of tears, will allow me to find that girl within myself again…
06.08.09
Yay Me!
First three chapters of the paper written and e-mailed to supervisor… Waiting to see how much of the copy paste can actually be detected although am hoping that the English switching I did all over, will get me through it…
Actual findings and discussion still to be written though… But mind has shut down and going through 6 pages of statistical results is a bit much! Will have a day that’s going to drag in the morning… work day segmented into small slots of actual productivity and hell of a lot of lean time to waste in between…
Eyes burning… Sleeping!
06.07.09
Deadlines
Everytime!! For all my protestations to the contrary and resolutions to refrain, every time I have to work on a research paper, I end up thinking about writing it the week it is due and then spend the night before it’s to be submitted swearing, sweating and typing my way through it punctuated now and then with screams of absolute agony…
