"Where To?"

"Where to next, Maashe?" asked Madhavan Nair (draining off his glass).

"WHERE TO?! That's precisely the question I too have been pondering, all these years!" Ravi replied.

----------

Recently, I was at home in Kerala. My Old Man asked me to fish out 'Legends of Khasak' from our chaotic library. "I think I should read it." he says: "Tried so many times but somehow never progressed much. Once more!".

Finding the severely worn book took a while. I opened it 'generally' and saw the above lines. "Spot on!" I said to myself(*)

--------

A scholar-critic asked me the other day: "What would you say is the unifying theme of your blog?"

My answer went thus: "Each post begins with something and goes on to some other things and so on. Indeed, not only does each post digress a lot; each post, in itself, is a digression - but I dunno from what main theme. Like ... there is this big banyan tree in the Shalimar Botanical Garden. You see only branches and their branches and so on spreading all over the place, but there is no main body - it probably withered away long ago..."

----------

Over last weekend I watched nearly half a dozen Ray movies (won't even name them). With each movie, I felt a progressively more intense urge to smoke. And late yesterday night, the craving got so overpowering I stole to a colleague's desk and flicked a fag. Lighting the damn thing entailed further adventures which I won't relate.

Thus, I stole my first cigarette - not in teenage from Pop's pocket as chaps of my generation normally did but in middle age from someone half a generation younger. My Readers, this confession is likely to stay a secret between you and me. I doubt if the affected party will ever know. He is very unlikely to read this post - and I won't tell him!

And thus, the journey continues. "Change is the only constant" does not quite apply to mine. For example, after all these years, I still like my drink - shaken or stirred (although I don't quite go as far as one of our truly eminent scientists who declared on his homepage: "I drink only once a day, and I always enjoy it!").

----------
(*) Keralites sometimes employ a home-spun divination technique: open some holy text at random and read the first line (or from the seventh letter on the seventh line) on that page; for a generation and a half of Mallus, Khasak has not been any less holy than any other text.