:)

There are those few moments when something from pop-culture, something from mass entertainment, something that by right, by virtue of you characterising yourself as better than everything else you ought not to enjoy – there are those few moments when something makes so much sense that you can’t help identifying with it, despite your own misgivings.

Without further ado, here is my ‘moment’ for the week:

let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments

[Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare]

There’s a certain sort of magic in those words, I’ve always thought – “the marriage of true minds”.

My mother gratified my vanity immensely last night when she suddenly remarked that she believes I will end up in relationship with an inappropriately older man, blessed with an immense intellect and professorial manner.

Unfortunately, such men seem to be terribly hard to come by. If you know where one can find them, do tell. I promise I won’t let too many people into the secret.

I was reading about Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, whose marriage was one of intellectual equality; they even lived in separate houses to maintain their independence. And that was in the 18th century.

I will be eternally jealous of Mary Shelley for having had not only great parents, but also a genius for a husband, besides being enviably intelligent and talented herself.

if there’s one thing that we know, it’s that we will not grow old

[from We Will Not Grow Old, by Lenka]

“There was also a strange Elf, clad in green and brown, Legolas, a messenger from his father Thranduil, the King of the Elves of Nothern Mirkwood” (Fellowship, Pg 234)

It started in a darkened movie theatre, nearly 6 and a half years ago, and while it has waxed and waned over time, I doubt it’ll ever completely go away. Once the sublime takes hold, you can’t shake it off. Though Burke might take issue with my applying his lofty aesthetic theories to an imagined world – then again, the similarities between Tolkien and Burke are astonishingly numerous.

[To anybody reading, be warned this is just the beginning. I'm working on Tolkien in a proper academic setting, and as soon as I have only him and Middle-Earth to think about all the time, legitimately, my blog will inevitably be inundated by similar gushing posts, or angry, confused ones about the unjust nature of the critical universe. You have been forewarned]

my gift is my song and this one’s for you

[Your Song - Elton John]

Another weekend gone, another week approaching. I’m ridiculously behind on my reading but ha, when one has lots of work to do, one must blog. It’s one of those rules for procrastination that I seem to live by.

I thought I’d have lots to say, but I don’t, unfortunately.

I’m momentarily happy. And that’s the best kind, isn’t it? :)

what’s a new word for petty?

My knowledge of Indian politics is sketchy at the most. Whenever an election is due, I get very excited and watch all the news channels prodigiously, attempting to glean as much information as I can. At other times, I avoid news channels like the plague because I simply don’t want to know how many more people died in terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir, or how the Taliban has been beating up young women in Pakistan. In a way, even natural disasters seem less horrendous than watching news stories that focus on how human beings feel impelled to treat their fellows with so much inhumanity.

I watched The Road last night. In a post-apocalyptic world, all the trappings of civilization disappeared, and humans hunted humans. While that bleak, horrific reality may be a comfortable distance away from the airconditioned multiplex, watching the news makes it seem more than likely that that is what we will become, that we will forget we were ever anything but animals, fighting to survive in any way we can. That it will become possible for us to hunt down, kill and consume our own, to see suffering without mercy but with triumph, to care for nothing at all but our own survival. And for what? A few more hours in a dark, dank, sunless lifeless world.

I’d like to make the members of the Shiv Sena or the Taliban watch The Road. I’d like to see what they think of that situation and I’d like to ask them how far they’d go to survive in a world where there is no religion, no state, no supposed higher purpose to be fighting for but just pure, naked, ugly self-preservation.

This pettiness that they engage in, petty battles over land and religion and ethnicity and gender – battles whose causes are unclear, whose only virtue lies in mobilising the mob, in spreading fear, terror and anarchy – seems to me the first step towards the terrible, soulless world of The Road.

And that, is why I choose not to watch the news, I bury myself in the past and I refuse to see what the world is. Because if I did, I would be afraid to live in it.