thaumaturgist

Hey everyone, this is definitely one of those dear diary moments. It is my first blog post from the Blogger application on my mobile, so three cheers to that. Well, the reason for my doing so is because I am on a 'Sex and the City' marathon on my laptop and did not want to open a different window to type this one out and multitasking is the modern equivalent of efficient, right? I have always claimed to be a city girl, as you all know, I have flourishingly managed to stay afloat 5 glorious years of my adulthood in the Indian Capital and I do hail from the former Indian capital but since my move to Dresden I have, slowly and unknowingly, got detached from big cities. Don't get me wrong, half a million inhabitants is not small by any means (in Europe) but when your public transport is rarely 5 mins late, it loses its big city status. Unless you are sweating with worry, looking at your watch every 2 seconds, running across streets in a frenzy to reach your appointment in tim...

It is 11 a.m. on a dark, rainy, cold 'autumn' morning in October. The husband is well on his way to yet another office trip and I have managed to a steal a day from my German-ridden week. Not that it is a first but today feels slightly ceremonious. My breakfast sits on the bedside table- a soft mauve yoghurt bursting with flavour, lightly specked with crushed blueberries, and on the bed I have the latest acquisition of a book that actually is signed by the author herself, a very dear friend. I feel rather guilty for beginning to read it so 'late in the day', but to be honest it is this book that has made me break my spell of inactivity on the blogosphere. It has nothing to do with the book per se although it is the use of adjectives and the detailed descriptions in the book that made me want to describe something as well, something I have been feeling so strongly about the last couple of weeks. Today I am writing about one of the simple joys of life that for some turn ...

Once again I found myself walking the wondrous streets of Paris. As if in a haze, I walked by the grandeur of the buildings and their gorgeous french windows. It seemed to me as though they were longing to be opened by someone coming to smoke the last cigarette in his pack while watching the world go by beneath the wrought iron railings or perhaps yearning to have new lovers murmuring sweet nothings, sharing a coquettish grin with martinis in hand. The french, the say, are arrogant sons of bitches, rude and ridiculously proud and I say why not? They can, after all, put together clothes that look fresh out of the latest Spring collection. They have what it takes to look cool and detached in suits worn in that summer haze while using public transport. They do own the word grandiose and all that the word describes. Unlike my last time , there were no festivities in the air, people were going about doing their usual business. As opposed to the chilling cold of the last time, this time it f...

Intelligent Conversation- Something that is very close to my heart; something if you are only able to have once in the entire year you can consider yourself lucky, very lucky; something that is as rare as hen's teeth. You know why? Because the art of conversation is lost, because we don't converse anymore- we are too bloody busy to have a chat. But, if I were to have an intelligent conversation, I would have all the ingredients ready at hand only to realize that I don't have the oven. Okay agreed, very bad metaphor-- but I mean the 'conversationalist', your partner in crime, your adversary, your best friend and your worst enemy all at once. These days I only dare to bask in conversational glory through books that use the literary means of irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, jocularity and double entendre. It is best achieved with the intelligent reactions of the listener. It is fun, invigorating and discursive. It is what keeps human beings alive, it is...

It is just another day of the week. It's 9:20 in the morning and I am cozily perched on my bed, a hot cup of coffee is resting on my bedside table the grey steam of which is filling my room with aromas that awake the senses. Morning is the best time to quietly sit and open oneself to the possibilities of the approaching day. But the beginning of the day is normally so rushed that one hardly has the time to to be philosophical about it. My mornings aren't rushed but even I can't be bothered to extrospect on a daily basis. The last few months have been busy with regular classes leaving me only the weekends to sloth about. We did manage to go on our vacation during the Christmas and New Years despite flight disruptions and it was a vacation in the true sense of the word. We relaxed and breathed fresh air by the caldera. The tranquility and solitude of Santorini was rejuvenating. I also managed to complete an 800 page book that filled me up with a great sense of achievement! A...

With daily German classes for the last one month my frequency of blogging has gone down drastically. Everyday I must forget the magic of one language to learn the tricks of another. Yes, it is very difficult to stop myself from thinking in English which in turn is limiting my imagination. My German class is like a giant experiment with Mundane Realism, the goal of course is to figure out how much we end up learning. I actually have the perfect analogy of the process of learning a language. It's like losing weight. When you start you lose some weight drastically and then you reach the plateau where you have to go a long way if you want to progress further, you need patience and perseverance, you will get frustrated but you have to keep at it. Learning a language is very similar, initially you learn a bunch of words and grammar that you fling around every now and then in markets and coffee shops then you reach that same plateau when you realise you have stopped learning anything mean...

People have different things they find cool, live-in relationships, computer hackers, fight club, catch 22, Playstation 3--- to me the very definition of cool is New York city I have spent exactly 3 days of my 25 years in New York city. Once when I was 15 and once when I was 24. I remember one of our Value Education classes in 10th std. where our teacher told us to talk about our five dream destinations. I remember jotting down NYC as one of the places. I don't remember what had me started in the first place, I only remember my writing it down on a piece of paper completely oblivious of the fact that my dream was about to be realized in a few months. Sometimes good things come of bad deeds-- My mom and I were flown to my uncle's after the final exams. He took us on a trip from Niagara to DC to Orlando. On the way we stopped at my mom's close friend's house in Princeton, NJ. I was feeling awful for being so close to New york and yet not having the chance to see it. My un...