The thing is, sometimes i hang on to old memories because i don't have any new ones to replace them with. i don't linger on them or suffer at the loss, but i would like to just store them away in my memory. a friend wrote so beautifully: "It's like unstringing a pearl necklace. Slowly, one by one, you remove the swollen white pearls from the string and place them in a wooden box. It used to be a beautiful necklace but what good is it when the string is cut. The pearls, each on their own now, still look as pretty, if not better. And I'd rather save the pearls than throw all of it away. Snapshots safely stored for posterity".

 went to the book fair and got a hindi book of Harivansh Rai Bachchan's poems. i have some weird and inexplicable aversion to most poems, but his are one of the few  exceptions. Madhushaala and Jo Beet Gayi So Baat Gayi have been my sources of strength in many of my moments of despair and doubt.

was reading a chick-flick book at a bookstore the other day. as usual, it had its say about the travails of being a single woman. but this had me laughing out loud and others giving me strange looks. : "The older men get, the bigger the dating pool. it works just the reverse for women. we come attached with a 'best before' tag. and if - God forbid - we reach the expiry date while still being single, it is downhill all the way from there."  well, then i would say, why not date a younger guy ? it is happening everywhere and it is a whole new demon to deal with. ;)

Was catching-up with some  articles on kafila.org - my fix for the leftist in me. i am not a die-hard leftist and sometimes the thought processes of my friends who declare themselves as the "left of the lefts" can exasperate me. i don't see faults in everything the government does. frankly, i feel we are lucky to survive as a democracy, especially after the state the British rulers left us in and given the kind of precarious geographical location our country has been 'blessed with'.  so sometimes i feel like saying: "give the govt. a break and see the good things that have happened to the country. so they must have got something right ?"  i came across two beautifully written articles in kafila.org about Binayak Sen and the one piece of writing that stood out beautifully was from an article written by Shiv Viswanathan: "We often define as sedition what we can’t understand or can’t stand. It challenges our sense of security, the security of categories." when i come across such writings in the midst of the all the cacophony and ruckus, my heart affirms my leftist orientation.