theories of cake.

# 1: Choices.

How do you decide which kind of cake to pick? On what basis must your choice be made? Of course, there are the usual – flavour, texture, taste. But choosing what kind based on those parameters necessarily needs you to know which aspect of cake you like best and would want more of. Sometimes, confronted with a limited choice, you just take what you can get irrespective of what you might want; and of course, sometimes, with a wide variety of cake before you, your choices can get tangled up in more than just the factors mentioned above.

# 2: Categories of taste.

Of course, cake is never generic, but it can be categorised. There’s the basic good cake, and bad cake. And cake that might be good at first but can be bad for you in the long run. And cake that is an acquired taste. But at any given moment, confronted by the choice outlined above, how do you know which cake to choose? Momentary judgements are all well and good, but once you’re a regular at a particular bakery, how can you, with a clear conscience, switch to another on a whim? And anyway, making the choice takes some amount of determination and judgement, and when you simply don’t know what kind of cake you want, you can be indiscriminate and just take the first one you see – but then, you might go home and realise it was a bad choice and now you’re stuck with a huge cake you don’t really want but have to eat anyway.

# 3. Favourites.

Over time, you tend to grow into a particular flavour/category of cake. It’s comforting, it’s easy, and you know, ideally, that a triple layered Lindt chocolate cake with pretty swirls on top and chunks of chocolate is what you want. But, when you enter a bakery in the expectation that this is what you will find, all you see is an ordinary two layered cake with fresh cream chocolate frosting. It’s not bad, but it isn’t what you would have ideally wanted. And it grows stale far too quickly. On the other hand, it just might grow on you – while your decadent Lindt cake might have been too rich to consume on a regular basis anyway.

#4. Variety

So, you’ve found a cake you like. It’s good for you, isn’t too rich or too dry, and has been keeping well in the fridge so far. But then, you happen to pass the bakery and see a new cake sitting there, calling out to you. Do you cheat on the cake you have back home, sitting in the fridge, by sneaking in for a slice, or do you turn your head, ignore this new cake and go on?

A little bit of variety never hurt anybody, did it?

…so, what do you do?

How do you decide what cake you want?

Don’t ask me, I still haven’t figured that one out.

it’s not a slow dance, this modern romance

As usual, I’ve left my reading for class till the nth hour (literally), so I’m attempting to read very fast. But Derrida, whose reputation for incomprehensibility is notorious, does not lend himself to speed-reading. Contrary to expectation, I’ve found him remarkably exciting, thus far. Reading theory seems to me to be the intellectual’s fix: it’s a way to read about the mundane world in abstract, even astonishing terms. It makes everything new, it peels the layers off, one by one, in a tantalising strip-tease of ideas but what you find underneath is nothing like you expected.

I’ve decided to reform my decadent ways. I’ve been sleeping too many hours a day, watching too much House, spending too much time on Facebook talking to people I really don’t care about except as sounding-boards for my boredom and neglecting the pursuit of potentially intellectual things. And of course, eating way too much junk.

No more of this, I say! Nose to the grindstone, back to the wall, nose in a book, and all the other cliched metaphors you can think of for serious study in response to the peril of being proven second-rate shall be the order of the day.

In other news, Ireland tickets have been bought. Now we just need to find places to stay, things to do and of course, a damn visa that allows us to enter!

—

Ah, I could have spent words uselessly on questioning my actions, recent and imminent, but I’ll save it for another rainy day.

thanklessly

Finally finished The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, which I’ve been sitting on for the last week. And what do I get for ploughing through all of that intense characterization and careless wit? A haphazard, slightly unoriginal plot twist (almost an afterthought!) and, yes, that’s right, an OPEN ENDING.

I abhor open endings. Grr.

In the book’s defence – it’s a good example of the transitional period between Victorian and modernist ideas, values, language and style; Isabel Archer is a literary heroine I identified with quite strongly, and finally, it did manage to make me cry.

Think I’ll take a break from fiction for a while.

—

Sometimes, there are things, there are people, there are places that you feel like you understand better than anyone else. The entire world thinks you’re thoroughly stupid for even undertaking to care about any of the above, but you still continue to do so, because even though you’re doing a thankless thing – like defending a genre, tolerating a partial friend and going somewhere you’d rather not go – you just go on doing it. It doesn’t cost you much, but it doesn’t give you anything either. And yet, you continue doing it, smiling at the pointlessness of the act, but smiling all the same.

Maybe someday you’ll regret it.

But future regret is better than present discomfort, arguably.

you found me lying on the floor

Haha, I spent all of last night not studying and watching ‘The Other Boleyn Girl’ at long last. Limewire is a boon. Twilight now waits for me, when I’m back from rehearsal. Which probably means I’ll end up not studying for tomorrow’s paper.

Bah.

This is probably post-MSing time, which is why I’m blue. I wish this hollowness would go away. It’s not a very nice feeling, betrayal.

And unfortunately, the sting of it stays long after the edges of the event itself don’t seem as sharp as before.

[the things I said, the things I did - they haunt me, constantly. They're the only things my wall can't keep out, they're the only things that make the sickness even more acute. How could I? How could I let you?]

city of sleepless nights

It was a small room. A bookcase crammed to breaking point against one wall, a wooden cupboard, also stuffed till it could hold no more, occupying the second wall. Two years of sleeping on a sofa cum bed and a bathroom so small it could barely hold all the buckets of washing, let alone allow me to shove myself into it.

But best of all, a balcony. A view to die for: miles and miles of buildings, slums, huts, trees, people and beyond it all, the glorious, changeable sea. In the monsoons, you could see the approach of pregnant rain clouds, and, with the threat of rain imminent, we would run out and drag the clothes-stands in before newly washed clothes received a second dousing.

Two years of living out of a minuscule cupboard, a tiny bookcase and nooks and crannies: between pillows, behind the computer and under the dryer.  My  keepsakes jostling for space with wine and vodka  and whisky; papers being blown away over the Bombay skyline every time I neglected to shut the balcony door; waking up to cold, misty mornings and little children screaming bloody murder.

A thunderstorm and a small, scared, warm shape crawling into my bed. Mealtimes that turned into battlegrounds. Reading “Harold and the Purple Crayon” twelve times successively to my darling baby.  Gift-wrapping and gossip, for mammoth birthday parties, sneaking in TV after the kids were packed off to bed, trying to live my own life as much as I could in the middle of this madness. Shopping at Big Bazaar and Linking Road and Colaba Causeway; on the quest for the perfect dress and the perfect shoes.

So much advice, laughter, love and letting loose.

Diets, walking, enforced healthiness – resentment, anger, claustrophobia. But those phases never lasted long. Late night jaunts to Haji Ali Juice Centre or Barista or ice-cream at Worli with the babies. Playing in the garden, revisiting the Disney obsession, long MSN nights, midnight snacking on smoked cheese and crackers and whatnot. Half-adult, half-child – the boundaries were blurred and we rocked back and forth on unfamiliar, bumpy territory that we were all learning to negotiate.

I miss my life there.

I miss waking up to the puddle the rain made next to my bed. The surprises and the masala chai. The love and affection of people whom I can never hope to thank enough for having let me live with them.

I might not have communicated how utterly grateful I am. But suffice it to say, without those years, I would be nothing.