an enormous ballon filled with helium

A much loved professor of mine once told me that almost everybody in his Tamil Brahmin family grew up to be a scientist and so he decided to be a social scientist, and when people asked what did he research within social science, he said "Scientists." He turned out to be a Science Studies scholar studying scientists. I want to hold on to this account and build an analogy with something that recently happened with a set of novels I bought. At a book sales here at Santa Barbara, I purchased four sci-fi novels - the list was almost a refresher course in sci-fi with Le Guin, Clarke, Banks and Bradbury paperbacks thrown in together with McEwan's novel Enduring Love.I started reading the first chapter of each of them. Here I was trying to re-read the science fiction canon and falling in love with McEwan's novel which actually is about a science fiction writer.

Enduring Love, among McEwan's novels, redoubtably has the most compelling opening and along with the openings in Raj Kamal Jha'sThe Blue Bedspread, Kiran Nagarkar's Sat Sakkam Trechalis, Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Rosalind Belben's Choosing Spectacles, has been one that has for those ten minutes spent reading, made me loose myself completely in the text. Each of the openings of the novels mentioned also do share a common trait which makes me a bit wary about my choice - they are (with the possible exception of Belben's sinuous prose) emphatically visual and endearingly cinematic. Not surprisngly therefore one often sees McEwan's novels being adapted for movies. The nagging question (often talked about), which is almost a conundrum is whether the all-pervasive cinema, screen and television presence around us, has fundamentally molded the way we read novels and ostensibly shaped the way novels are written today. If this question has bothered you, the only balm I could offer is reproducing a few lines from the quietest of stylist McEwan's prose --

"What we were running toward? I don't think any of us would ever know fully. But superficially the answer was a ballon. Not the nominal space that encloses a cartoon character's speech or thought, or, by analogy, the kind that's driven by mere hot air. It was an enormous ballon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and all our thoughts" (p.3)

Waiting

Conversations about Franz Kafka's The Trial often lead to discussions on the activity of Waiting. Often reading Kafka itself is like undergoing a waiting exercise for a 'probable' triumph of knowledge, only to realize it never was perhaps designed as such, and that there is knowledge in waiting itself. The 'waiting' theme/trick/idea, quite explicitly so, then can be seen in Beckett's work and also in Ha Jin's novel entitled "Waiting : A Novel" - reading them, it appears that waiting can become synonymous with almost leading life itself - the absurdity of mindless waiting becomes a joy - the reader's joy of reading it has to do with, at least to some extent, on the bet that perhaps the character/person doing the waiting enjoys him(her)self too.

There are others too - that charming writer of nothingness Javier Marías who through sleights and diversions arrests time, Milan Kundera who through his unbearably light novels meditates on where the pleasures of slowness have gone. And my two beloved philosophers - Paul Virilio who has dedicated his life to studying speed and Shiv Visvanathan who in some of his inimitable newspaper columns has asked us to re-feel "boredom".

S.K. caught me looking at this painting as I was circling through these thoughts and yet one can agree that waiting is not a joy always - the impatience of it as one sees in this painting. A tram or a train is yet to arrive, it has been hours in the line for bread, one cannot wait for a lover's next kiss, one cannot wait to see God...and yet we do like to wait sometimes, we do like to eat slowly sometimes if not drive slowly...we do like to get bored sometimes and not give in to switching on the T.V., we like to watch melodrama sometimes and not Action films.

You gave me a poem to write

You were going back

I would have to wait for the reason

You talked relentlessly about the weather

I noted that only old people talk about weather

You said you were old and you were re-starting your life at 27

I said I re-started when I was 24

You said 3 years is a crucial difference...

What really happened in a week?

I cannot possibly know

You were talking about the weather because you said to talk about anything else was painful

I could not guess what pain it was

You looked sad putting up a brave face

I was sad and did not know how I looked

Did you count the number of times we met?

I often term them as meets and not dates

Lately you often looked impatient in those meets

I was so glad to meet you that I deferred the Paul Austeresque investigations

You perhaps wanted me to enquire

I perhaps should have been less hesitant- more forceful in my inquiry

You guided our conversations to me, Tagore, Ray, Calvino, Madame Bovary ...

I never steered them away to you

You gave me a poem to write

I should have made you the poem of my life

To 'You' and Paul Auster

what kind of travel is that?

she wonders whether,

she ever will be able to write a poem

that is not about her

that has got nothing to do with her

it strikes her that

she has never written a poem

when she is sad...

she has written poems, also many sad poems

only when she is happy

happy with condescension

when she has heard girlfriends bitching about boyfriends on phone in public transport buses,

happy with tears in her eyes

when she has heard Mazzy Star, read Murakami, watched Ghatak

she writes poetry only because she has a blog -- her self-flagellating moment;

she writes poetry because she enters ennui and has a feel for the texture of metaphors -- more forgiving;

she writes poetry because she wants to be read by a boy in Romania under a mulberry tree -- day-dreams;

she writes poetry because she cannot travel, because she does not have a car -- pity;

'she' writes poetry because she wants to be 'he' for those two minutes -- what kind of travel is that?

For Müller and Flaubert