Just this half day - Poem

K Siva Reddy's poem translated

Just this half day

Let this half day be over

Silently, neatly

Sans regrets, sans consecrations

Let this half day be over

Sans worry about morrow

Sans slipping and haste

Sans turmoil, unending sorrow

Just this half day

Washing each half day the same half day and drying

At least this half day without tears

Without famines and droughts

Poor courts, false prejudices

Galloping horse not dying suddenly

Just this half day

Yesterday is irrelevant

Tomorrow out of context

Just this half day I shall

Turn me into myself

Hide me under my own eyes

Into a healthy point

Opening doors

First step of journey

Next step, Last step

That all be one

After nights, after highways

Stop scampering

Just this half day

On my own

With my own guard – my paradise

Without any other shadows touching

Without any foot prints marking

Just this half day, all mine, all yours

For all of us shall we make it

Shall we get it released from jail!

The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

A Novel by Orhan Pamuk, Turkish (Ferit Orhan Pamuk (born 7 June 1952) is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Translated by Maureen Freely (Faber & Faber)

On a snowy night in Istanbul, the lawyer Galip climbs the minaret of the great Suleymaniye mosque. As he scans the city of domes and hovels below, gazing across its cracked and frayed expanses of “concrete, stone, tile, wood and Plexiglas”, he feels that “he was looking at the surface of a planet that had yet to find its final shape”. The Black Book maps that unfinished planet in a mood and style of visionary fervour. It contains a detective story crammed with mirrors and labyrinths, a study in memory and mourning, a rhapsodic scavenge through Turkish history and culture, and a tear-stained, ecstatic love letter to Orhan Pamuk’s home town. In a time of political strife and personal unease, not long before the Turkish military coup of 1980, Galip’s wife Rüya – a cousin from the squabbling clan who grew up together in their gossip-ridden warren of apartments – disappears. Has she fled the marital home with their kinsman Celâl? He is the legendary newspaper columnist who for decades has spellbound his readers with tales of the folklore, the myths, the byways and the occult secrets of Istanbul, convinced that only by telling stories could he “come to know the mystery of the city and the mystery of life itself”. Through chilly winter streets, haunted by his own and the city’s past, Galip turns “apprentice detective”. He navigates a “sea of clues” in search not only of the absconding pair but a key that may let him understand “the thick cloak of melancholy sitting over our people”.
Alternating with Galip’s distraught zig-zags from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, enigma to enigma, Pamuk invents Celâl’s own columns. Sumptuously woven out of Ottoman history, urban myth and shared nostalgia, they engage in an almost paranoid pursuit of a mysterious “other realm” hidden within the signs, the faces, the bric-à-brac of urban life. These pieces burrow deep into the collective malaise of an era of disguise and masquerade when “we all tried so hard to become someone else”. In the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire, in thrall to Western modes and models in fashion, books, ideas and politics, Celâl’s – and Pamuk’s – Turkey has lost itself in a maze of facsimiles and simulacra, as found in the eerie mannequin museum that Galip visits. The circuitous hunt for missing persons turns into a search, historical and metaphysical, for “life’s secret meaning” amid the fog of change. A contact who might hold the key to the couple’s fate tells Galip that “To live in an oppressed, defeated country is to be someone else”. Yet fables wrenched from the past, individual or national, can never return these vagabond souls to some pristine condition of authenticity. We may peer into “the garden of memories” but its gates stay stoutly shut. Turkey’s “Eastern” and Islamic heritage becomes as much of a consolatory illusion here as its “Western” and secular present.
Galip’s memory-guided investigations, and Celâl’s literary excursions, conjure an Istanbul of the mind. It feels both cinematically precise and poetically elusive. Page by page, Pamuk reanimates every grimy nook, down to the stairwells of backstreet apartment blocks “that stank of sleep, garlic, mildew, lime, coal and cooking-oil”. Yet these streets, squares, cafés, clubs and flats also become mystery-laden “extensions of a dream”. In this oneiric atmosphere, identities blur and shift. Galip starts to inhabit the life of his quarry. He camps out in Celâl’s hideaway in the old family block, and even files columns in the voice of the absent chronicler. His assumption of this other self embodies the novel’s suggestion that “What made the world mysterious was the second person that each of us hid inside ourselves, the twin with whom we shared our lives”. Beyond the public entanglement of East and West, tradition and modernity, the mystic signs that crowd the frozen streets hint at this universal doubleness. “The carpet store, the pastry shop… the sewing machines, the newspapers” – they all “shimmered with their second meanings” when observed by passers-by who all hid second selves.
In torrents of incident and anecdote, rumour and parable, Sufi mysticism and tabloid sensationalism, Pamuk draws on his “bottomless well of stories” to plumb “the mystery of defeat, misery and ruin”. But The Black Book, paradoxically, explodes with joyous life. Each episode of mourning, melancholy and nostalgia has such buoyancy and brio that the “muddy concrete forest” of the city becomes an icy, sooty fairyland. Among the list of tips for columnists Celâl gathers from his journalistic cronies, number fifty-nine runs: “Never forget that the secret is love. The key word is love.” Galip’s pursuit of Celâl and Rüya will end in sorrow, as we always suspect. But stories of love, that “antidote to solitude”, thread The Black Book together. They range from Galip’s reveries of remembrance, with young Rüya minutely recalled down to the “lone green sock” worn on a cycling trip, to Celâl’s enraptured excavations of the city’s eccentric past and people. Among them, we encounter the veteran journalist “so enamoured” of Proust (rather like Pamuk himself) that he endlessly re-reads In Search of Lost Time. Pamuk’s city of loss and mourning is also a metropolis of desire. It is a place that resounds to “the enchanting harmonies, the barely audible music, of longing itself”.

Translation by Maureen Freely (2006) crafts an utterly persuasive English voice for Pamuk: thrilling, intimate, tender, mysterious – and comic.The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

Bride - A Short Story

Yes, if it is...
Notice the first paragraph.
What is unique?

THE BRIDE by Gary Lutz...

If this is to be a story instead of what it was initially intended to be—an answer to the question of how you go about finding an outlet for what you are not sure is in there to begin with—then there might as well be two women instead of just one and, for a change, just the one man, who is no longer the one I threw my body away on but just somebody where I work, somebody with little say over what it is I do, which, I gather, is to look lonely from afar.
Which leaves how many more for me to pretend not to see? Because I have actually had people—persons—call me up and plead with me not to think about them. Persons who actually called me up and said: “Promise me.”
I am leaving out my brother because of what he said—or what was reported to me that he had said—when there was every chance that I would not be coming to his wedding, which was to be held many hundreds of miles from where I was going to try to be asleep. What he is said to have said was: “If he don’t come to mine, I don’t go to his.” It was probably that alone—the veiled compliment in it—that got me on the bus.
I did not kiss this bride on the church steps. This bride called me “catty” to my face not long afterward, but now that there are children, she tells me her troubles every chance she gets.
Mine—my trouble—is that if you got a good look at my wrists—if they were all you had to see of the world—you would swear you were looking at a twenty-year-old girl and not at a man pushing past forty.
So I understandably keep my sleeves rolled up and try to downplay the rest of me and keep it farther from the masses.
I am waiting to be addressed as Miss? Miss?
It is this alone they must mean when they keep pleading there is no such thing as a stupid question.

The colour above is intentional

The first sentence is just one sentence!!!

R K Laxman for You

Do I have to say something?

A Joke to make you think !!!

A Poem in Telugu

ఆలోచన

ఇక నోరెత్తకు

నా గురించీ నీ గురించీ, గతం గురించీ రానున్నకాలం గురించీ

నేల గురించీ, నింగి గురించీ

అవతలి ఖాళీ గురించీ

ఉందనుకున్న దీవి గురించీ

లేదనుకున్న దారి గురించీ

అంతా ఉత్తిదే

అంతరిక్షంలో అంతా ఎదురు చూస్తున్నారంటారు

అక్కడ మనకు బాగా గడుస్తుందంటారు

అంతా అబద్ధం

సూర్యుళ్లు, ప్రపంచాలు, మనుషులు, మృగాలు, పంటలూ, పువ్వులూ

ఇప్పటివి కానే కావు

వచ్చినప్పుడవి ఇట్లా లేనేలేవు

రేపు ఉండవు

ఎంతెంత గందరగోళం జరగిందో ఎవరూ ఎరుగరు

ఎప్పుడేది మాయమవుతుందో ఎవరికీ తెలియదు

ఉన్నంతకాలమే మన రాజ్యం

ఈ ప్రపంచం మనకు ఇట్లాగే దొరికిందా

వీళ్లు చెప్పేదంతా ఊహాగానాలు,

కంటున్న కలలు

ఇదంతా ఆలోచనలో పుట్టింది, అందులోనే పోతుంది

మెదడు దాని ఊయల, అదే వల్లకాడు కూడా

గతం, వర్తమానం రేపటి నీడలు

అప్పటి వరకు ఏమయినా రాసుకో, ఎంతయినా చెప్పుకో

రెక్కలు కట్టుకుని విశ్వమంతా తిరిగి రా

ఎక్కడా ఏమీ లేదు, ఉన్నా అందదు

అందినా అర్థం కాదు

వంగిందంటారు

వస్తుందంటారు

ఉట్టిదేనేమో

కనుకనే ఇక నోరెత్తకు

వింటూ ఉండు

ఏదయినా జరిగినప్పుడు చూద్దాం.....

Rice in India

Indian Influence

Rice may have been domesticated independently in Afghanistan and northern India at least 5,000 years ago. It spread west to the Indus Valley and south into peninsular India. Rice cultivation began near the Ganges around 2500 BCE. Semi-nomadic hunters and fishermen moved regularly to avoid Mongol invaders from Central Asia, and to find arable land. Around 2000 BCE, these Indo-Aryans moved into the Caucasus, Persia and the Hindu Kush Mountains, settling in Punjab, Delhi and Afghanistan. The five rivers of the Punjab irrigate much of the rice grown in India, even though rice consumption in southern India is greater than in the north. From the Moghal influence comes pilaus with cream, fruit and nuts in meat and rice preparation. Idlis and dosas – both fermented products (souring and fermentation lowered bacterial contamination risk and extended ‘shelf life’) – and rice and dal (lentils) are more common as you head south. For Kashmiris, pilaf is seasoned with cumin, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom. For Bengalis, the ‘holy trinity’ flavour profile includes fish, rice and mustard seed oil, just as celery, green onions and green peppers are the ‘holy trinity’ of Cajun cookery, and mirepoix (carrots, celery and onions) for French cookery. For Keralans, curry leaves and coconut perfume rice. Mutton curry with rice showcases the Muslim influence.

                                                                         From Rice A Global History.

I find some facts in this book related to asia not exactly acceptable. Researchers depend on what comes their way.This book says the words paddy and batty came from a sanskrit word Bhakta. They say it means cooked. Unfortunately that is not right. Cooked is pakwa in sanskrit. It also means ripe.

Do I know him?

By Umberto Eco

A few months ago, as I was strolling in New York, I saw, at a distance, a man I knew very well heading in my direction. The trouble was that I couldn't remember his name or where I had met him. This is one of those sensations you encounter especially when, in a foreign city, you run into someone you met back home, or vice versa. A face out of context creates confusion. Still, that face was so familiar that, I felt, I should certainly stop, greet him, converse; perhaps he would immediately respond, "My dear Umberto, how are you?" or even "Were you able to do that thing you were telling me about?" And I would be at a total loss. It was too late to flee. He was still looking at the opposite side of the street, but now he was beginning to turn his eyes towards me. I might as well make the first move; I would wave and then, from his voice, his first remarks, I would try to guess his identity.
We were now only a few feet from each other, I was just about to break into a broad, radiant smile, when suddenly I recognized him. It was Anthony Quinn. Naturally, I had never met him in my life, nor he me. In a thousandth of a second I was able to check myself, and I walked past him, my eyes staring into space.

Similar thing happened to em in Hotel Banajra long back. I even smiled at teh person. Then I realised that he was Jitendra, Hindi film actor!

He - A Real Short Story from China

By Guo Moruo

Lately the short story has become quite in vogue among artists in the West. The shortest has no more than a dozen lines. Would the piece I’ve come up with below be worthy of the name at all?
It was getting late. So he went downtown to purchase firewood.
On his way home, he looked up and saw the crescent Moon in the sky. Wrapped in a pure, flimsy robe, as if having just stepped out of a fragrant bath, she flashed him a smile. Around her were many bright-eyed fairies, all smiling at him. He gazed up at them silently, in awe: Oh, Light! Love! How should I live my life to earn your favor? How lucky are those who have earned your favor!
Hello, Mr. K! Where’re you going?
It was Mr. N, one of his former classmates. K pulled his mantle to reveal a piece of firewood and said,
“Hey, you always run into me purchasing firewood.”
N smiled. He smiled, too. Then he asked N,
“Where are you going?”
“Visiting Mr. Y. Why don’t you come and join us for fun?”
“No. Visiting with firewood in my arms?”
“Don’t want to come and have fun?”
“No, I’ve got to go home.”
They went separate ways at H Shrine. He went on home murmuring his own poems.

Can you belive this story was written in 1920?
I loved it and thought a few of my friends may like to read it too.....