Sunday Posts

Dear M Do you believe in dragons?  I know many people who doesn't. Because they are grown-ups, and it is not fashionable for grown-ups to think about dragons. But I would like to believe that they are real. At least as real as the things we believe in. For that matter, we call investors dragons in some countries - in Britain, start-ups go to the Dragons' Den - while the other countries have Sharks (India) or Tigers (Bangladesh) for that. The investors changing the world for better as real a story as my having a dragon which can fly me from one country to another, coming to my rescue when bad guys really corner me. You would say that is literally not possible. I would say - cliché but true - that literal is a metaphor. Language creates the world we live in, in our minds: That indeed the only world which matters to us, the only one we can ever know. In reality, there could be other worlds - one where dragons fly around, for example - but we live in our own literal bubbles, where ...

Dear Me, I write because there is nothing else I can do. Someone said that before, but I am not quoting - I am speaking for myself. I write not because I have something special to say. But I feel that I am inside an endless stream of words and ideas, and I live to explore them. Through me, then, they find expression. Perhaps that is imprecise and I don't have the right language to say what really happens. What I want to say - the Word exists. With or without me, it exists. I write them not because I want to, but they find me to become. So, I see writing not as a craft. Rather, I surrender to writing. I realised this when I started writing poetry. I wrote it once, when I was young and in love. I don't remember how I wrote it then. But much later in life, when another moment came, I wrote not to impress anyone, but because I couldn't do anything else. It was not to tell anything to anyone, but just to surrender myself to the feelings which took hold of me.  Reading those poem...

It is almost over and it is starting.  I am finishing 2024 wiser. This has been one of those pivotal years of my life, comparable only to 1993 when I started working or 2004 when I migrated to the UK and started my life again. In the sense that those two years taught me a lot and made me a different person: 2024 did that too. I am also wiser because my optimism is tempered. I have finally gotten rid of my youthful assumption that it is possible to change people or systems (in other words, I have now, finally, become old). I am not cynical - at least not yet - but far more conservative than I was. I know things change only very slowly, and only organically, and forcing the change, however desireable, is beyond the powers of human beings. We seem to think that we are at the centre of the universe, and therefore the changes are really brought about human action. I can wake up one morning and command the Sun to rise, and when it rises, can claim my supernatural powers, but ...