The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #3

Dead pigeon on window sill.If only the freak rain could have poured a day earlier.Fourth dead bird seen this summer.Ironically it died directly underneath an air conditioner. Ah Delhi Summer, thou art unforgiving.

The Stolen Project 365 - A Photo a Day for a Year #2

Janpath, New Delhi on a Saturday morning.

Janpath,in my opinion has become far too organized.It's starting to look like it's lost a bit of it's chaos, what with the new, numbered shops.Then again,it was only 9:30 am.Skip to 12:00 pm and I'd be jostling for space,trying to keep my bag from being robbed and looking for junk jewellery all the same time .

The Stolen Project 365 -A photo everyday for a year #1

I have finally decided to start the stolen project.The one I talked about earlier.



Durrell's 'Corfu trilogy' which I'm currently reading and a dainty, empty cup licked clean of butterscotch ice-cream.Here I must add that the weather is getting ridiculous as it usually does at this time of year and the ice-cream supply seems to be forever dwindling, despite it being procured in copious amounts at regular intervals.

Murmuring Furniture

Most of the furniture at my place is inbuilt.It is mostly full of books.Rows and rows of them.Old ones,new ones,on just about any subject.My family hoards them.So about five years ago,I noticed a strange sound from a book cupboard as I passed it, this faint pitter-patter, a bit like when you tap your nails against a wooden surface,only much fainter.You could probably hear it only in the dead of night or really early in the morning, it was that faint..Anyhow, after much standing against cupboards with ear pressed to them, my fam decided, much to my indignation that I was imagining it, our furniture was not really murmuring.

That is, until the day we came home to find one of the doors of one of the book cupboards collapsed.And rows of old books in it stuck together with some sort of soil like goo.It was official.Our house was infested by termites.Rows and rows of books were taken out,glued to each other ,their pages weirdly fused together with whatever it is that termites produce.They were put in the verandah where they lay for a while before being thrown away, because of the emotional attachment, Some of them were only partially damaged, I mean you could still open them, though they were falling apart at the spines.In fact I saw one ,lying in the verandah in a metallic container the other day.I have no idea why it is there (eccentric fam) .It looked so out of place ,open at a page about a fungal disease, in a metallic container which had last night's rain water in it.So I clicked a photo.

Oh and also ,the eccentric family tried to salvage the dying furniture by injecting turpentine into it.I mean literally injecting , with a big needle and syringe. Hahaha. Didn't help.

What I ate Today

A melon,3 mugs of water,cooked beans and potataoes with a tomato,cucumber,egg,garlic salad,a mug of south indian coffee,chocolate flavoured soan papadi.

What Makes me Love a Book

BEAUTY OF PROSE.

There are many authors who tell a good story,but simply don't have a way with words.Take Dan Brown for example.I remember not being able to put down 'Da Vinci Code' .I enjoyed it enormously at the time.The facts!I had me opening up dusty old art books from the top shelf to take a close look at 'The Last Dinner'.It is only later that I actually thought about how it was written.Was there a beautiful flow to the sentences? Did I stop and re-read a sentence simply because it gave me pleasure? I didn't. I gulped it down.

One book,while reading which I clearly remember constantly stopping and re-reading a sentence here,re-reading a sentence there was Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things'.Many sentences gave me goosebumps because of their sheer beauty.There is poetry in her prose.The characters she describes conjure up detailed images in my head.

Another author I love who, to put it mildly, has a knack of stringing words words together,of creating the weirdest characters,whose appearance and idiosyncrasies she describes in delightfully intricate detail is Zadie Smith.She Owns the genre of hysterical realism so to speak.

I'll confess there are times when one feels like reading what is popularly known as 'chick-lit' (chick literature! really? but let me not go off on a tangent here).Reading them is just plain entertaining,in a mindless sort of way.Like watching television.

...To be continued...

The Indian metro ( a fellow blogger's story)

Do I write?: In her own words