Category: Uncategorized
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Disparate thoughts on life
I remember watching an interview of Vashti Bunyan where the interviewer asks her if she ever felt the need to marry her partner of twenty years – they were separated by then, hence the question perhaps – and she said, so beautifully, so naturally that it was not nice to bind someone to you. Tarkovsky,…
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on professors
In my university, there was a particularly handsome and brilliant professor, in his late forties (we guessed : but he was probably older) – there was not a girl on campus who did not have a crush on him – and stories circulated about him : he was married to a renowned dancer for…
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Geeta Bali
In 1965, Geeta Bali contracted small pox while shooting for the film Ek Chadar Maili Si. It was being directed by Rajinder Singh Bedi, who had also written the novel the film was based on. When she died, Bedi put a copy of the novel on her burning pyre. She was only 35. It’s strange…
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The blue Danube
One evening in Calcutta, my father, somewhat drunk, called me and told me that I could come to him even if I murdered someone. I told him I really had no intention – it might seem otherwise sometimes – of doing anything like that but it was good to know that I could. He was…
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cherchez la femme
In the depths of the Thar, I sometimes look for God. I have never found Him. The ancient question comes to mind: क, who, what? Someone, in the middle of the auric fort of Jaisalmer, hands me a note: cherchez la femme.
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Nastagio degli Onesti
In a dream, Nastagio degli Onesti calls me by name and shows me a painting : a knight hunting a woman he once loved, ripping out the heart from her dead body. Beyond the frame, the knight weeps. The woman, restored, weeps too. After life, the cruel fate of people who reject love. The next…
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Bhangarh
In a ruined ancient village of Rajasthan exist all the erased stories of the world. There, sometimes, among the weeping peacocks, and dancing bulbuls, one can hear the forgotten dictum. I was alone when I heard it, and now I go mad. I would whisper it in your ears, but do you have the courage…
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Jaipur and Dostoevsky
Taraprakash Joshi, an old man from Jaipur, he’s probably more than 90 years old now – a friend of my parents’ – is a poet and playwright. He was also a magistrate. He once pardoned a man – I don’t know for which crime – by quoting from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He said he…
