As I read Shalimar The Clown

Had been reading Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown.

More than the book its the epigraphs that seem to have settled in my mind.

Shakespeare (specifically Romeo and Juliet)anyway seems to be in thing in my life. In 2 days flat i come across his lines straight offwhen i did not expect them.
After the roses lines ( in my prev post)You come home open your next fiction read and the epigraph says "A plague on both your houses"

Now i i feel like using it oh so many times when i am so very irritated with life or caught between two people who want to see no sense which is quite often these days.

Even the simple act of getting a learning license becomes a nuisance for me. I managed to get a leave after 3 weeks of cancellation and got the learning license and then that envelope got lost in 15 minutes flat never mind how.

Fate as much as i like to wish it away seems to just catch up in amazing ways. Now this is not some huge issue, it simply adds to the irritation factor in my life.Every little thing seems a huge road block and i am worn out with this.

"It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out; it's the grain of sand in your shoe."

Neverthless getting back to the other epigraph taken from from

"The Country without a post office" by Agha Shahid Ali
Its quite lovely in itself cause you could almost feel it

================================

I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves…

I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.

There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.

I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to
myself.
There is everything to forgive. You can't forgive me.

If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not have been possible in the world?

===================================

As for the book in itself its not ingenious or anything . It just shows some good research and linking up of facts and fiction with brilliance and brilliance is Rushdie's trademark.Though i never love his books one simply has to say that whole idea he scripts in his books is sheer brilliance. How he develops his script  sometimes irritates you.

 Every word esp in the introductory parts of the book alludes to something more. India is named to represent something …Kashmira represents something.

Though cannot say liked the book much it seemed quite better than "The Ground beneath her feet" which left you quite a bit unstable may be.The book when it looks beyond the revenge storypoint presents different facets of the same thing well……like the point wherein the Gen Kachhwaha thinks how the Kashmiris are not thankful about being defended and how he himself degenerates into savageness. The Kashmiris villagers though have their owm version as all the other characters define it.

The nuggets Rushdie inserts have their own significance like the story  about the "Room of Power" which he ends with the lines "Freedom is not a Tea party, India. Freedom is war"

Rushdie somehow lets one down badly when presenting a female standpoint and his sketch of Boonyi Kaul seems so messed up and confusing sort.
In fact the character he completely fleshes out i felt was only Max Ophelus. All the characters were set to represent something in the macro plot(Kashmir India and Pakistan) and never clear into the micro plot(the revenge drama).

Through out there is the description of a paradise called  Kashmir which probably was and which will never be even if peace returns.It is here that to some extent Rushdie succeeds.

Neverthless its an addition to Rushdie's brilliant plots set in tumultous times and full of human greed for power of various kinds manifesting itself in various ways.

Hope, deceiving …..

Unspoken Kindness in faces scares you

when you know you are not destined for such.

Some moments are destined to break your heart

Life has a way of scraping the wounds

"It could have been" is such a deceiving phrase in the realm of existence

When you reach the end of some horizon

you know it in the heart - the end that is

and yet…you wish

you had that betrayer of a friend , called hope by your side

for as they say

"Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route. " Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A feel of the days

There's a feeling of being akin to sand
Broken into grains of nothingness
Can hold no water
drifting away never finding any roots
just slipping away to nothingness
even the sea throws you far off itself

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When nietzsche said "The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time" he was right but thats for sweet memories.
Bad memory brings its own troubles . You never seem to be become immune to the bad things when they occur over and over again.You seem to hurt yourself for the same things over and over again.

I have a strange memory blackout problem amplified by a low confidence in my memory and my tendency to remain obscure.
When in a training class someone said SWOT analysis. All i remember is O and T expanded.It took me 30 mins to finally remember the S & W expansion.
And so i've never understood why i never trust my memory well enough .
There was a quote on the slide in today's training …a quote i easily know to be from Romeo and Juliet( Where else can one find a rose by any name) but i never respond on being asked.

When another class they ask if anyone has read "World is Flat" i find it prudent not to talk though i read it long back.
Then when someone puts across that poem i love "The Road not Taken" on a slide and tells that its an amazing poem and strange no one has read it and proceeds to read it, i find it unnecessary to comment.

I'm drifting back to a quiet nothingness i hopelessly prefer all over again.

I look back at anything past  and it seems something like this lovely Calvin stuff

Here's a picture of me when I was three. Look at that smile! Ahh, the arrogance of youth! I thought I knew everything when I was three. ….. Now, a lifetime of experience has left me bitter and cynical.
Funny how you miss out on things. Watched Sweet Home Alabama again.

A lil over 5 years ago we watched it at the end of a training program wherein we had to give opinions and all that stuff.
In my evergreen cynicism i found only one point  - The other guy in the movie who was being nice throughout anyways ended up a loser and hence it shows that most of the time you just accept that Life is unfair.

This time when i watched i pondered over a line i seemed to have missed last time.
"You cannot have roots and wings." The saddest part though is when you cant have both

I was searching for the exact quote and it seems someone else too has thought about the same…Funny some coincidences are just that but yet they i guess make you feel sane.

Last month i had taken two books which are not much in circulation at the Library - "A corner of a Foreign Field" and "The Brainfever bird" . When i returned them finally after nearly 2 months with me and a girl after surfing through all the library again picked those two I was a bit reflective , curious and sort of possesive too funnily of the books. And then she sees my pick for the recent month and enquires if i am taking it  or can she have it.

I'd have loved to talk more but she was with a chirpy crowd and so i am left to myself believing in my own normalcy as much as weird i seem to many these days.