One spring morning...the winter-silent wisteria awoke and I saw this outside my window. It had been brown and bare for three months and I'd wondered if it was dead. Watered it occasionally, constantly thinking of revival possibilities.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
California Poem: Robinson Jeffers
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from
Robinson Jeffers
Book update-1
Yes, it's true. I'm writing a book. Actually, its a huge reason why I started this blog in the first place - so I could sort of use it to warm up, get the juices flowing and then switch to the book. The book is also a significant reasons why my fair and faithful blog-readers are subjected to periods of silence - I'm either too busy @ work or too busy @ work on the book!
And now, after thinking it over, I believe its time to use the blog to tell everyone how far things have progressed too! So the first update is, I've done over 50,000 words i.e. about 200 pages and I'm a couple of chapters away from completing the first draft. That, as experienced writers tell me, was the easy part!
Thoughts?
Japanese Maple Revival!
It's back. Or rather, the brother of the one that died is thriving again...! So that means I did manage to save one...with huge doses of sulfur powder and other fungicides over 3 months...
Cultural Imperialism...or global meltingpot?
Recently while in India, wandering around old bazaars and new malls, I chanced upon this...Indian Barbie! Now, normally I'd dismiss this as one more sign of cultural imperialism (American consumerist icon etc) flowing into ye olde country from the West, but then I noticed that:
a) Barbie was in a sari i.e. traditional Indian attire, complete with jewelry etc
b) Barbie had black hair and considerable amounts of Indian-style makeup (no blondes!)
So...is this cultural imperialism, signs of what happens in the global meltingpot and/ or clever 21st century marketing? And what happened to all the Indian doll characters? Were there ever any? Requesting anyone who played with Indian dolls to comment!
Zooming back with Mumbai taxi art!
So there's this agency in the UK called Creative Review and they're fascinated by the stuff stuck onto taxis in Mumbai! Urban art...they've interviewed a couple of the sticker-wallahs...to understand what goes into transforming a mundane black and yellow mode of transport into a hopping, vibrantly colorful personality with a mind of it's own!
Watch the artists' interview after the jump!
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