Framed...

I don't have a display picture on Facebook, or on any social networking sites. And I can become quite a pain in the behind when someone wants to click a picture of me. I don't allow them. I could count the number of people I have allowed to take my pictures, I could count them on my one hand now.

Everyone asks me why I don't like getting clicked. Yes, partly that.

But the real reason is that it's too much of a personal commitment for me. When I let you click a picture of me, and let you keep it, it means I want you in my life forever. And there only a handful of them I want beside my bed-side when I breathe my last.


Save that picture of me you have, I might need to borrow it sometime. 

Sunday Reading #4

From a finance illiterate's view, this is a wonderful article about the people who ran Goldman Sachs. Almost reads like a story.

Steve Friedman’s decision to quit as chairman of Goldman Sachs, in 1994, during one of its darkest hours, stunned and angered his partners. And despite Friedman’s maneuverings, it created a leadership crisis as the mismatched team of Jon Corzine (future New Jersey governor) and Henry Paulson (future Treasury secretary) took the helm. In an adaptation from his book on Goldman, William D. Cohan reveals how secret merger discussions put the expansive trader and the hardheaded banker on a collision course, setting the stage for the firm it would soon become.

About the Jan Lokpal bill, Of the few, by the few & At the Risk of Heresy: Why I am not Celebrating with Anna Hazare. Both good articles.


Next on my bookshelf, Why Loiter?

"Even in a city like Bombay, the so-called 'friendly' city, women have to strategise how to access public space. What will they wear; how long will they stay out till; who are they going out with; will they need to carry a shawl or a jacket if travelling by train, these are all methods of strategising," explains Sameera Khan.


Khan believes that one of the reasons women are given conditional access is the notion of 'virtue'.
"A woman has to establish 'respectability', [since] only if you're a 'good' girl are you worthy of 'protection'," she says. And 'good' girls don't loiter.
If they could, why do they still carry pepper sprays, safety pins and knuckle dusters in their bags, ask the authors.
"Women are having to constantly censure themselves, and are always in preparation of an 'attack'. Men don't carry that burden," says Khan.

Want to get something done? Help with work, a date or just wish to communicate better perhaps? Touch.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears. Touch is a sense that's often forgotten.
But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world. Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think.

How language heals.

All couples play kissy games they don’t want other people to know about, and all regress to infants from time to time, since, though we marry as adults, we don’t marry adults. We marry children who have grown up and still rejoice in being children, especially if we’re creative. Imaginative people fidget with ideas, including the idea of a relationship. If they’re wordsmiths like us, they fidget a lot in words.”

And last, Amartya Sen on Rabindranath Tagore. 

Deep Crust...

"The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or a woman, it's what we lack in ourselves."— Anaïs Nin

*****
And when will women realise that her biggest enemy is not man, or any institution, but woman herself?

Good Morning, My dear!

Surprise! - short film by Veit Helmer

Naina...

To know there is a person who knows everything about you. Who knows your deepest fears, the pain that was born in the dark and never saw light...till now, who knows your crushed dreams...to feel such lightness...weightlessness...

Like the tumour that had been growing in you, has been cut, removed.

To give your hurt, your fears, your broken dreams-a voice. To thread them into words and to have them turned into a garland of sweet-smelling flowers, by a gentle hand, a loving soul...like walking into bright sunshine.

A Literate Passion-II

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book...or you take a trip...and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."  

— Anaïs Nin.

*****

"And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.

What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world."

— Anaïs Nin

A Literate Passion-I

"I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you."

— Anaïs Nin

*****

"Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry?

This: For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark--my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become an exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking--passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still...only a Woman!"

— Anaïs Nin