TOC
What feeling drives you to read terms and conditions minutely?
.
.
.
I will beat the fuckers at their own game.
You’re talking. I’m getting pissed off.
I don’t like the pseudo-gruff, I’m-important, let’s-do-things-properly, now-we-are-talking-serious-business-here look. But then, I don’t like a million things. Like babytalk.
Another character from Lord Jim. Seaman + naturalist
"His wealth and his respectability were not exactly the reasons why I was anxious to seek his advice. I desired to confide my difficulty to him because he was one of the most trustworthy men I had ever known. The gentle light of a simple, unwearied, as it were, and intelligent good-nature illuminated his long hairless face. It had deep downward folds, and was pale as of a man who had always led a sedentary life – which was indeed very far from being the case. His hair was thin and brushed back from his massive and lofty forehead. One fancied that at twenty he must have looked very much like what he was now at threescore… He was tall and loose-jointed; his slight stoop, together with an innocent smile, made him appear benevolently ready to lend you his ear; his long arms with pale big hands had rare deliberate gestures of a pointing out, demonstrating kind. I speak of him at length because under this exterior, and in conjunction with an upright and indulgent nature, this man possessed an intrepidity of spirit and a physical courage that could have been called reckless had it not been like a natural function of the body – say good digestion, for instance – completely unconscious of itself."
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
“Then, as ill luck would have it, in my agent’s office I was fastened upon by a fresh fellow from
Doodh si safedi…
Where is that girl in the frock in the washing powder Nirma commercial now? Where is the kid that poses on Parle G biscuit packaging? Are they 40 years old, catching the bus to a sarkari office or living as immigrants in California? And have they framed these ads and put them up on the walls of their houses?
By the way, ever wondered who Seetharaman Narayanan is?
Rain after school
I really want to be out. Driving in the rain at night with city lights reflecting madly. And us, swerving past thunder, pulling our toes away from lightning that cuts like a knife. I want to mingle with the rainy cityyyyyyyyyy.
I remember a rainy evening in
No one I know
He lived in folds. And bent his knees together till he was caving in on himself. He had no chest. Just a pouchy tummy. Limp hair. Looked like a Mr Slytherin. Had thick lips. Put him in the Simpsons. He would sit on the roadside chai-wallah's with his legs crossed, hunched forwards and look at you with yellow glazed eyes, holding a conversation with all the semblance of sitting in a drawing room. A cigarette would hang loosely from his hands, but emanate no artsy razzmatazz. And he would stumble and stammer. He was so much his own echo, that more than himself, he was an echo, his echo. Tell him something cheerful; tell him an achievement and he would ask “So, should I salute you?” And in a while he would bite his lower lip and ask if he had spoken too much. He apologized. He apologized so much that he was less a man, more an apology. And he never knew all that. He lived in some other reality where his plans were just about to be realised.