2850 : Aandhi - tum aa gaye ho lyrics and translation)

Listening to Aandhi makes me nostalgia, great poetry is always a salve :-)

O din dooba nahi, raat doobi nahi
Jaane kaisa hai safar
Khwaabon ke diye aankhon mein liye
Wahin aa rahe the
Jahan se tumhari sada aa rahi thi

(The day has not set yet, the night has not set in yet,

I do wonder how the rest of the journey is going to shape up,

And yet, I have dreams and hope that light up my eyes,

I continue to move towards my dreams (you),

Homing in towards the location from where I think I hear you)

2849 : Reading list 2020: #11 Shapeless unease by Samantha Harvey

How to completely fall in love with an author, you need to learn from me :-).

Another 18 on 10 book by Samantha Harvey - "The Shapeless Unease".

I learned more about myself than through years of meditation.

This might the only second book after "The Sense of An Ending" by Julian Barnes that I might be tempted to read again (back to back).

I almost stalled reading this book.

Hands down, this book (or my copy) has more highlighted passage than any other book I have read in my life.

One for the keeps....and read every year.

At 192 pages brings my 2020 total to 3190 pages.

2848 : Twitter

I have started relying on Twitter for my everyday news. Its a visceral underbelly of the world around us, unforgiving, and undiluted....scathing.

But so much of the truth is making me very cynical and "glass half empty".

Worried at times.

2847 : Everywhere

If I had to choose one song, that I would love to hear in my last moments (just to make it dramatic for effect :-)), it would be a very tough choice, but I would be hard-pressed not to include "Everywhere" by Fleetwood Mac in the top 5 possible candidates.

Its such a happy song....and the chorus harmony is just plain genius on steroids.

I have heard this song for 25+ years and every single time I hear, it makes me roar with an internal smile.

2846 : Demons

Have been reading an author's trip down insomnia lane, and it reads almost like a memoir. It seems intensely personal, and the demons are all out in the open. She is allowing her demons to dance.

I have always maintained, that each of us - irrespective of our pungent privileges, is always carrying around a sack of demons. 

Usually we leash them, or sometimes, we just know that they like to play during the evening....so we remain under the table at that time. Hiding and cowering....though externally putting up the brave face of a soldier.

I have also said that the best way to love someone is through his/her demons and your own. A friendship that feeds the demons and takes them for mid-afternoon walks.....just cannot go wrong.

2845 : Khoj by When Chai Met Toast

Is such an interesting acoustic song. Great harmonies. Some unusual Tamil (or should I now say Tamizh :-)) lyrics interspersed.

Addictive on a loop.

Do listen. And the video is fab too.

2844 : Night birds

I was talking to my mom, and we both agreed, that working at night with music playing is the most serene thing - it's the time when the most difficult creative jobs get done.

Is it healthy? Maybe not.

But Prateek Kuhad and work. Sweet temptation.

2843 : Meaning in an atheistic world

If our life is nothing but a brief moment in the sun. Brief (to put in the context is 60/10bn years)...its about 10 raise to -8 in the order of things...

We are not even a blink and miss....we are in the territory that if you blink you miss the entire 200,000 years of human life.

So if that is how weird our life on this planet is. Think of each of us as free bosons or quarks, with life of nanoseconds.......

In this nanosecond, and in my atheistic (or no larger meaning than my present) world, does it matter if you are Putin, Modi, Trump, Elon Musk or me? 

No measurement device will detect a blip of difference between any of us. 

We are all quarks that come and go. The larger space is blissfully unaware of us.

My awareness is my own sense of ego and self-preservation. 

In this black eternal world.....what is "meaning"?

2842 : Reading List 2020: #10 The Four Horseman by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett

I am an atheist, and I still loved this book. It debunks the view, that sometimes atheism itself can become a belief. 

Its a great book - probably 9 on 10 - just for having 4 great intellectuals who are having a playful but intellectually stringent conversation.

You don't have to buy the book, we can watch it recorded at 

At 160 pages brings my 2020 total to 2998 pages.

A definite good and breezy read.

2841 : My brother

The very act of even looking at his brother was one of reconciliation between these two opposite views of love and frustration, love and anger, and most often love and incomprehension.

From Samantha Harvey's All is Song

2840 : Potato and Jam

The thing was, she’d have the potato cakes with jam, which he found somehow terrible – the clash of sweet and savoury. You wouldn’t have a baked potato with jam, you wouldn’t have mashed potato with jam; it was a type of madness. And so, he thought, I’m better off without her.

From Samantha Harvey's All is Song

2839 : Mental Chaos

She always prided herself on her grammar, but her punctuation displayed mental chaos. She misused and overused colons, and he suddenly thought less of her for that. Commas! Four commas per sentence sometimes, so that he tripped like a blindfolded child through her emotions. How had he ever stood a chance of understanding her?

From Samantha Harvey's All is Song

2838 : We are all peripheral

All that was there had been unused and forgotten for a year and was fairly peripheral to him, but as he folded up those old jumpers and sorted through the shaving foams and obsolete credit cards he felt protective towards himself – we are our peripheries, he thought, we are all these forgotten things. He was disappointed with himself over the sentimentality of the process.

From All is Song by Samantha Harvey

2837 : Starch

The two men had always slipped into these starched dialogues when the topic became personal. For all their closeness over the years they still didn’t know how to negotiate the extremes of one another, and as soon as the I think became I feel, they faltered, as if they were constrained by the awkward fact that they were human.

From All is Song by Samantha Harvey

2836 : Wild Child by Jeanne Willis

Came across this on twitter.

Haunting lines.

2835 : Reading list 2020 : #9 All is Song by Samantha Harvey

You read great books and then you read books which you will never fall out of love. All is Song is quite a stunner. 

A fascinating exploration of what it is to be "yourself" in this maddeningly fast world. Distinctly personal, and hugely disruptive. There will be so many times you will shut the book and think - hit by some thought which shakes your foundation.

The dialogues between characters in Samantha Harvey's book are almost ethereal. A skill which Ayn Rand had too. Its just that Miss Harvey is contemporary.

This book is 18 on a scale of 10. Its a book I shall read every year.

Absolutely go pick it, and if you are my friend, ping me - seriously!! and I shall send over the copy.

Brings my 2020 reading total (at 288 pages) to 2838 pages.

Totally smitten :-)

2834 : Indignation is always a surprise for me

As I read this in NYTimes, I was almost caught unawares by the strong note of indignation. 

I see the same extreme note of acidic anger in some of my RWA (apartment complex) members. If I am downstairs alone walking with my puppy, someone screams that my mask does not cover my nose.

And at all of these times - I sit and wonder, is this is really what we have become in terms of our understanding of science? Are we so weak that we shall blame the next "cause" without looking inwards. 

These very people who are struggling - or aghast are probably ordering food online - or takeaways - blissfully unaware that they run a 100x risk on that versus my mask missing my nose.

We live in an age and time of ignorance. We also live in an age and time of ribald righteousness. 

My approach to this. Just fly under the radar always :-)