Someone landed on this blog after googling for “sorry for affair poems“. Ah, someone’s had an affair and now is resorting to finding a suitable poem to apologize with. I am afraid my poems are way too cynical for such lofty purposes. However, one wonders, what exactly was this person searching for. Though affair obviously has a wide range of meanings, I can only thing of the amorous kinds right now.
1. This person is sorry about having an affair, and hence want to mollify the person he or she is probably in a relationship with. (Bleedin’ obvious, I know.)
2. Person X decided to have an affair, and made a bad choice - let’s say Person Y. The said Person Y lacked passion, time or suitable inclination. Or became too clingy. Person X googled for the phrase attempting to pacify their own heart. (What, you don’t read poetry to tide over a certain mood?)
3. Person X decided to ask Person Z to have an affair with him or her. Person Z, who didn’t want to do a very harsh job of rejecting the affair-seeker, wanted to send a poem that said, Sorry babe/ dude, no affair possibility.
4. A person wrote a poem about having a torrid affair, and the poem wasn’t really appreciated. This person is trying to figure out how other affair-poetry-writers manage to get out of murky situations.
None of these circumstances appear particularly pleasant. Whoever you are, I hope you find the right poem. Ahem, but if you did cheat on someone, a poem isn’t really going to the trick. I think.
Long time readers of this blog may know of my obsession with hair and hair styles. Well, as of today I am going to go out and obsess about how people part their hair.
…hair raising observation among corporate America that most of the successful CEOs including Pepsico’s Indra Nooyi part their hair to the left, says US business magazine Fortune. Legendary investor and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon of investment bank J P Morgan Chase are among the others joining Nooyi in the club of highly efficient CEOs who comb their hair to the left side.
… Interestingly, a cursory look at the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies reveals only three among them of top 50 firms, part their hair on their right side.
Please excuse me while I get myself a new hairstyle. Perhaps that will help me tide over the exams. Though I am going to run out all my hair soon if I keep tugging at it while I study. Though I wonder what bald CEOs do? Use a marker pen on the right side of their pate?
Posted on May 12th, 2008 by Neha Viswanathan
Filed under: Funny | 7 Comments »
Pangea Day! A day devoted to films. Four hours of film screened at various locations across the world. Paula (of GV) and I are in Somerset House (the main screening venue at London) and I am twittering this as it plays along. The wifi, as always sucks, so am not sure I can get the photographs up. But hopefully some of them should show up here.
After half a year of heavy jackets and coats, the whole idea of being able to walk out of your house in a linen shirt is a little weird. It’s wonderful, but at the same time, every time I get into the lift, I get this crazy feeling that I’ve forgotten something. I also feel absurdly under-dressed.
But summer is wonderful. SZ (a classmate) commented that I looked happy these days. I didn’t realize my face gave away that much. But yes, the sheer joy of squinting one’s eyes against the sun makes me happy. Summer tends to make me pensive and happy all at the same time. On that note, this is a photograph of a woman that I saw along the Southbank. Summer brings out all these stripey, dotty clothes. Like I said, to see all these people, devoid of their winter clothes almost gives you the impression that the city is walking half-naked. It’ll take sometime to get used to it, and by then the bloody weather may get cold again.
The heat in the afternoons in London isn’t enough to lull it into silence. Quite unlike the summer afternoons that I am more familiar with, when all is quiet, all is heavy and all is hot. No, the afternoons here are quite lively. But if you’re like me, sitting and studying for exams, you don’t notice the liveliness. Which in its own wonderful way, (sometimes) takes care of homesickness. And for some reason that brings to mind the wonderful Janis Joplin singing Summertime. I have no idea how, but the first twenty seconds of the song drown me in everything summer. I discovered this song, aptly and obviously enough in some teen summer.
Summertime is a fantastic song with a curious history of arrangements and genres. Originally composed by George Gershwin in 1935 for an opera, it found its way into even more jazzy circuits. The original by Gershwin sounds somewhat like this. And this fabulous 1968 video of Ella Fitzgerald singing the same number is absolutely wonderful.
The mind is rather drawn to Joplin today. I’ll just give in.
Yesterday we went skydiving. To be fair it was a tandem skydive. Which means you can let go and someone else is in charge. But it doesn’t change the sheer thrill of jumping out of a tiny plane from a height of 12000 feet. We wanted to go solo skydiving, but the sheer commitment involved in signing up for the entire accelerated freefall course is a bit much, and I think we need to tandem skydive a few more times before we can make up our minds about it. But now let me take you through the day.
The first thing with skydiving is that you need to wait. Especially in a country like England, where the skies like to crap all over your style. But the sun finally made its appearance near brunch time, and we were kitted, fitted and harnessed. We rushed into the a small aircraft. We didn’t get any photographs of us while we were up in the sky, but that’s on the cards for “next time”. Pretty soon, the aircraft had become a tiny speck in the sky. To appreciate just how tiny, take a close look at the photograph below. If you look real hard, you might see a small white speck where I’ve indicated it. That’s how high up we were.
Even as you are harnessed to the instructor, you can’t see his face in the time that you’re doing the freefall. It’s impossible to remember the exact the feeling once it’s over, leave along recreate it. You jump! And freefall. You dont feel cold. You don’t really feel anything but a loud WHOOOOOOSH! through every damn cell in your body. Since we had the stomach for it, our instructors decided to do a few spins. The freefall lasted for about 30 seconds in which we fell through some 6000 feet. The parachute was deployed. At this point, I felt a tug. It’s sharp. Remember, the speed at which we’re falling is about 120 mph. But once the parachute opens up, it’s like floating. Yet, it’s not slow. You’re swooping into the air. My guess is that Sri had far more presence of mind that I did. I almost froze for the first few seconds. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
The parachute is incredible responsive. Sri and I both were lucky enough to get instructors that allowed us to steer the parachutes. At one point, my parachute crossed paths with Sri’s, but I was around 1000 feet above him. The parachuting bit lasts about 7 to 8 minutes. Come to think about it, the whole experience isn’t exactly time-intensive. But we were thinking about it for hours. The exact feeling of falling from the sky is incredible. It was beautiful, calming, adrenaline pumping all at once.
I can’t quite figure out why this film got such bad reviews. I actually enjoyed parts of it. The real star of this film is Akshay Kumar. As long as he’s on the screen, you don’t feel bored or annoyed. By now, you might have already read about the high levels of style and attitude quotient in the film. Which is all very fair. Everything about this film is attitude. Which does mean that there isn’t too much of a story.
The trouble is - that a style overdose works only if you have characters that are so well established that you don’t look for more hints. The film’s fundamental premise probably should have been revenge. For some reason, I got the feeling that they were trying to make a Kill Bill out of this one. True, Kill Bill has a wonderful sense of style and attitude to it, but that’s because it backs it with a strong, dark but absurdly funny undertone of tragedy and revenge all the while. This film focuses quite a bit on the characters that seem colourful but a few more shades of black in their characters couldn’t have hurt.
As for the reviewer who said the music in this film wasn’t good, I suggest she get her ears cleaned. I quite liked some of the tracks in the film, and they’ve sounded even nicer on a few replays that I hit. Currently, given my mood and the dire need to get some schoolwork done before some deadlines - this is my favourite track.
The last twenty minutes in the film were an absolute drag. They might as well have chopped off those minutes. I don’t think anybody would have noticed. Thing is, I am very fussy about the kind of fight sequences that I like. And while the film attempts to drool with style on every other aspect, the fights were very limp and so predictably flame-gunshot-rip limb apart-flame-repeat.
The thing is, you can mock and flatter at the same time. But that takes way too much talent. Oh, and I bloody wish Anil Kapoor was in more films. (But not that awful Black & White variety…)
I’ve never really had anything knitted for me. My mother was coerced by me to try and knit something for me. In the winters, all my classmates wore at least one item that had been lovingly knitted by some woman in their family. It probably has something to do with growing up in the South, but my mother never really understood the point behind knitting. Why would anyone sit down with yards of yarn and needles and do something that required such great levels of concentration? She never had seen any knitting been done in her family. And these are customs of habit. And familiarity.
She took up knitting one winter. My memory may fail me slightly but the yarn was thick and bright orange. I don’t know if she bought that yarn or if it was gifted to her. But there was enough of it to make two sweaters. She embarked on the project. She gave up in the middle I think. Perhaps a friend of hers finished the job. But what was to be a bright orange full sleeve sweater turned out to be a sleeveless and slightly tight. I also discovered then that I had a strange reaction to certain kinds of wool. It left my face red and puffy, and I constantly wanted to scratch the insides of my throat. She loves me to death.. my mother. But she can’t knit. Actually, being a supermom, she probably CAN knit, but she doesn’t like to.
I associated knitting with a certain kind of afternoon activity. In Delhi, you can see lots of people on extended lunch breaks in the winters. The men sit with their cups of tea and the women drink tea too. But they also knit. A furious vision of flying yarn on needles, automagically becoming something, someone might want to wear. I never really thought much about knitting before I met rr. She knits, and oh! so beautifully!
Thus it was that rr embarked on the Hat For Neha Project (HFNP). I found the colour I liked and she began knitting furiously. In fact, today I saw her live in action knitting a sock. Perhaps it was the sheer range of colours on the yarn, or maybe it was that complicated process that took four needles. But it was beautiful to just watch her knit away as we were getting back to Central London on a train. She’s changed the way I look at knitting. I am seriously considering learning the art.
And the hat that she knit me? It’s warm, comfortable and I have it on good authority (rr’s) that it makes me look rather nice. I didn’t want to take it off, even when the sun was out.
