Red...

"Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its colour."

— W. S. Merwin

Fly Away, Little one, Fly Away...

Been caged too long. 

The Quiet World...

In an effort to get people to look

into each other's eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear

without saying hello. In the restaurant

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,

I know she's used up all her words,

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line

and listen to each other breathe.

- Jeffrey McDaniel

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