Laut Ke Buddhu...

I had forgotten how brutal an assault visiting Kolkata after a long break can be, compounded by the fact that's it's the peak of summer here. The mismanagement and chaos is nightmarish. The campus feels like paradise in comparison, though one with a lot more humidity than I would prefer. Coming back to my engineering college campus was never as looked-forward to an experience as this one was.

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I am absolutely in love with David Mitchell's writing right now. After Nabokov and Rushdie, Mitchell is one author whose writing I like simply because the way he plays with words. It's very stylish, fairly original (at least according to my very limited knowledge of literature) and deceptively clever. This is part of a paragraph I found towards the end of Number 9 Dream, which, though not the best specimen, is definitely a decent example. If you don't find anything special here, don't waste your time reading his books:

Rented-by-the-square-meter Tokyo has turned into zones of rice fields, houses, industrial units. The landscape itself looks like its map. "On a fine day," says Ogre, "you can see Mount Fuji over there, you can." Rain stars go nova on the glass, and Ogre speeds up the wipers. They squelch. The radio burbles away. Tires hiss on the wet Tomei Expressway. A minibus of kids from a school for the disabled passes on the inside. A pair in the back row wave. Ogre flashes his headlights and the whole bus goes wild. I wave too. I still cannot say why I feel so at peace with the world. I am suspicious of this feeling - when it leaves you feel hollower than before. Ogre is chuckling. "Who knows what makes kids tick? Not me. Alien species, kids are nowadays, if you ask me." Row upon row of polyethylene hothouses troop past. I feel I should stoke the conversation to pay for my fare, but when I begin a sentence a yawn splits my face in two. So I ask Ogre if he has any kids himself.

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I saw a hoarding with an ad for Tween Times while coming to the campus in the morning. I don't know if this supplement by TOI is limited to Kolkata or available in other cities as well. It is definitely refreshing to see someone identify this huge untapped market, something that I had written about once at my previous blog. I sincerely believe that there is scope for something like Target to do well in India even now, despite what most people might think of the short attention span of young individuals and their greater affinity for films and fashion compared to reading.

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I have realised that I am compulsively non-committal. If I tell a friend that I am going to keep writing to him regularly, even if I actually intended to do that earlier, because I let him know, I start getting this urge to not write to him ever again, or at least for a long time. There are several other instances, many of them in the recent past, which have convinced me. I hate letting any one else be able to predict what I am going to do. That's a good enough excuse to avoid marriage, right?