Once in a while I come across words, words that don't let my eyes go further keeping them transfixed for a quantum of time and in those moments I am lost in the addiction to the diction as if time itself has stopped. It is not just the lustre and the luminosity of those words that cast a spell, it is also the meaning and depth conveyed, some times with the truthfulness of a friend, some times with the mentorship of a teacher, and some times with the mysticism of a saint. I call them mesmerizing words, and I will be posting them in my blog whenever possible.
Here are three such mesmerizers:
I am leery of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is this that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities.
We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.
I love to learn. The writing process requires enormous learning. The more you learn, the more you do not know. If earlier I did not know 30 things, I feel today I do not know 130 things.
Acquiring knowledge is like a progressive discovery of one's ignorance.
Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, where homes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still range from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.
There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It's a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.
The Ganga is a river that flows backward in time.
Here are three such mesmerizers:
I am leery of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is this that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities.
We have room to act, to shape our stories, though as time goes on it is within narrower and narrower confines. A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives.
From "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End" by Atul Gawande --
.Excerpt published in Open magazine dated 20-Oct-2014
.Excerpt published in Open magazine dated 20-Oct-2014
I love to learn. The writing process requires enormous learning. The more you learn, the more you do not know. If earlier I did not know 30 things, I feel today I do not know 130 things.
Acquiring knowledge is like a progressive discovery of one's ignorance.
Dan Brown in The Dan Brown Code --
.Talk with Ziya Us Salam, The Hindu, 16-Nov-2014
.Talk with Ziya Us Salam, The Hindu, 16-Nov-2014
Varanasi looks like the scene of a plane crash in my sleep. Small fires are scattered about, seen from above, scattered on the banks where the debris still burns, where homes have been wiped out without warning, where bodies are strewn. Night falls in Varanasi and pockets of fire still range from the blackness, their flames reach up to diminish the stars, spewing sparks into deep space, souls orbiting the terror of this world.
There are lingams everywhere in the Varanasi of my dreams. On top of every step, at every ancient corner turned. It's a virile city, teetering on the brink. And on the other bank it is barren like the afterlife.
The Ganga is a river that flows backward in time.
.From the novel "A Bad Character" by Deepti Kapoor --
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