I miss you already!

I'm blogging after some 3 weeks I think. Been fairly occupied with all sorts of things in this time and then ofcourse there was the lack of constant and free net access later. So I was on campus for about a week, met people, watched movies, and left wondering (not for the first time) how swiftly days go by in that place. Was still more amazed at how familiar everything was and yet not the same. It wasn't home anymore, not the way it had been for the last 4 years. Each time I entered the corridoor of my ex-wing I tried to recapture that old feeling of homecoming, in vain. I was well aware all the time that this was my last visit of some length to the place in a long while. Bye Bye IITB.

I came across the term 'graphomania' which means a mania for writing books in 'The book of laughter and forgetting' by Milan Kundera. According to the author - "Graphomania is
not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles,.. but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)...
Graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions -
(1) an elevated level of general well-being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
(2) a high degree of social automization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's social life."

What I was wondering about is - Is blogging a form of graphomania?

Was talking to a friend the other day, who recently visited Kota after some 4 years, and she was saying how the place has hardly changed in all this time. Inspite of consciously trying she was able to spot only one change, a new flyover, which after an unusually short flyover gestation period of 3 years, is now complete and open to traffic. I had one more change to add to the list- there are no crocodiles in Chambal Garden anymore. They had to be released into the river because the shallow, murky water of the croc pond was bad for them. Good for the crocs, sad for Chambal Garden.

Morning walks are bad for skin

While everybody was talking about sunsets and I was talking about Wodehouse, I was reminded of his poem Caliban at Sunset. Not that I have anything against sunsets. They can be really beautiful and infact I kind of specialize in painting them (in five strokes with a size 10 brush. Very helpful when you have your painting homework submission in another 30 minutes), although mine tend to come out bright orange and red with the sky looking distinctly angry. Must be the red fixation or all the hidden existential angst. Some people might say that those are the only two colors I bother mixing (apart from the blue for the water ofcourse), I'd go with the existential angst however.

Coming back to the poem, I like funny, witty poetry best. The shorter the better as well. If its too long, I often don't get to the end of the poem only. Haikus are good that ways, for example you definitely can't complain about length here (which happens to be a double dactyl actually as Lakesidey pointed out).

Higgledy-piggledy
Ludwig van Beethoven
Bored by requests for some
Music to hum,

Finally answered with
Oversimplicity
"Here's my Fifth Symphony:
Duh, duh, duh, DUM!"

-- E William Seaman.

I do like other kinds of poetry. Its just that I think that usually there's enough sadness in life anyways to be generated internally, so one should take external doses a little sparingly.

So much traffic! I had to walk some 3 kms today in the morning, wading through all the vehicle fumes, to get an auto to work since no auto wallah was ready to drive through the traffic-jam on airport road. Hopefully now that the flyover construction has been resumed, once its over the traffic situation on airport road should ease a bit. Meanwhile I rejoice at my whim which made me splurge on buying shoes which I didn't really need at that point of time.

I came across an extremely talkative auto driver, Murti, yesterday. He asked me the time somewhere in the middle of the drive (later on he explained that if I hadn't answered him then he would've insisted on my getting off his auto), and then once satisfied that I didn't mind him talking, spoke non-stop for the rest of the journey. It was a little difficult to understand everything he said since his Hindi wasn't very good and I couldn't ask him to repeat himself very often since he would turn around, away from the road, to patiently explain what he was saying. He assured me (every 5 minutes) that every woman who sat in his auto was his sister and even if Aishwarya Rai was to come and sit in his auto, he would treat her like a sister. I received some friendly advise that I shouldn't spend too much in Bangalore, should save everything and take it back home. When I was getting off his auto, he shook hands and told me how he had met a new sister today and then promptly asked me to give him ten rupees extra.