#1 Two Smoothies, Please!
a blend to savour and remember.
Hello from our corner of shade away from the heat of the hustle. Made of all the things we love, of comforting solace we found and keep finding in places both real and imaginary. It’s often an incomprehensible blend of flavours, but there’s always one for every mood or time: a poem, a book, a cafe, a play, a movie, an essay, a song, a person, an experience, a memory, inventive pick-up lines, snippets from short stories. Just as in life, you can’t predict what’s coming next, and neither can we!
Answer To a Child’s Question
Sometimes a poem is more than words, it is the feeling of finding an illustrated book of poems and nature in the children’s section of a library you grew out of too soon.
Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet and Thrush say, "I love and I love!"
In the winter they're silent—the wind is so strong;
What it says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving—all come back together.
But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he—
"I love my Love, and my Love loves me!"
– Samuel Taylor ColeridgePicking Books In A Book Store or a Library
I was in 11th grade when I dismissed Elif Shafak‘s Forty Rules of Love—sitting on a bookshelf glaring at me—as I thought ‘What a trite, hacky listicle title!’ and moved on to popular science section carrying my gloating bias. 13 years later, on my birthday last year, I spent 4 hours in Blossoms Book House, Church Street, Bengaluru, browsing books, reading pages of some of them—the starting of some, the middle of some—all over genres. I followed Stephen King’s advice in his book On Writing –
Open the book in the middle and look at any two pages. Observe the pattern—the lines of type, the margins, and most particularly the blocks of white space where paragraphs begin or leave off.
Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.
and obsessed over how paragraphs looked in the books that I picked.
There is just something about picking books from bookstores and libraries that gives an unparalleled experience, starkly different from following a book suggestion from a friend, newspaper and magazine book reviews, browsing books on Goodreads, without reading ratings and reviews of a particular book.
For me it’s the thrill of picking mediocre or bad books as much as good ones – the ability to form my own opinion, beyond the escalated moral order of critiques and reviews. Neil Gaiman said about letting children pick and choose what they want to read instead of gate keeping books and comics, in The Reading Agency Lecture, 2013 –
A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn’t hackneyed and worn out to someone encountering it for the first time.
I love the people I share the aisles with. Sharing moments of having read a common book. A possible student from Christ University, exclaimed to her friends, ‘This book [Secret History by Donna Tartt] is something else.’ I turned to her and blurted, fanboying, ‘Isn’t it?!’ Stumbling upon books, in second hand book stores, feeling excited foraging the year of publishing and counting back – 30 years, 50 years, 90 years! And once in a while, gems like these are excavated –
Picking a book in a bookstore or library has this relief — of options, browsing and time, of feeling texture and colour and smelling differently aged and type of paper.
Go to your nearest library or book store and get lost for a while, browse, flip, accidentally throw book stacks by the unintentional nudge of your elbow or leg and feel sheepish and embarrassed. Feel bright at seeing the books you’ve read when you find them, and be on a curious quest to find the ones you haven’t, keep your eyes wide, live the pain in the neck that has made home there, as you tilt your neck to read titles of the books, massage it, move it, and pick the next book to test drive it, with the slide of your fingers on top of it, from the book shelf onto your hands.
The Invisible Life Of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab
What do you want to be remembered for? People often ask/get asked this question as they make their life decisions. So how does a woman who knows she won’t be remembered make decisions?
Imagine a girl who lives forever but no one remembers her. Big moments in history, monuments, music and art, she experiences it all but no one experiences her, gets to know her or remembers her when they turn away. The most beautiful part about this book was the details, the sharp poignant details about how she manages to create a memorable life despite not being remembered. It is harder than you think.
The book raises, rather drags back to the spotlight, the relationship between ideas and memories, the thin line between the two and the combination of the two that shapes life and the one who lives it. This is a story of a remarkable unforgettable woman who is only seen through her ideas and determination.
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else's hearth.
Frances Ha by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach
Frances Ha is a life sized story of friendships and platonic love, of Frances, who’s an apprentice dancer trying to make it full time, depicted with Frances having a blithe bounce despite the despair she feels and finds herself in. Friends moving apart and coming back, fitting differently but lovingly still, half-moments of almost hitting off, emoting out loud. Frances says, ‘I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet’, when she takes Lev, her flatmate, out for dinner, when she gets a tax rebate, but her card is declined. Story of struggling at adulting, comical and amusing lamenting about money – ‘Movies [watching out] are so expensive now’. A movie showing an artist's survival ego – Frances doesn’t take a desk job, nor the offer to live in her best friend Sophie’s apartment, when she and her boyfriend go to live in Japan, amidst battling with self doubt, friendlessness. Frances also battles quietly, in solitude with what people say in the passing – about her looking older than she is, about not being smart to go on a impulsive weekend trip to Paris on credit card. Undertone of a chipper misery out of inaction runs across the movie and gives way to show how hilarious Frances is, but doesn’t think people think so. At the start of the movie, she pulls down her pants and pees into the tracks, holding onto the pillar to suspend her bare bottom out over the track. A movie about misplaced faith, and giving into the bourgeois life to find a different calling than a dancer. Watch this beautiful movie to find out what. Frances, unemployed and houseless, goes to a dinner party with a dance company acquaintance, says this (after putting much thought to it, something that Frances does) to one of the dinner people:
Nadia, I want this one moment...it’s what I want in a relationship, which might explain why I’m single now ha ha. It’s kind of hard to...it’s that thing when you love someone and they know it, and they love you and you know it but it’s a party and you’re both talking to other people and you’re laughing and shining and you look across the room and catch each other’s eyes but not because you are possessive or that it’s precisely sexual but because that is your person in this life. And it’s funny and sad, but only because this life will end, and it’s this secret world that exists right there in public unnoticed that no one else knows about - it’s sort of like how they say that other dimensions exist all around us but we don’t have the ability to perceive them. That’s...that’s what I want out of a relationship. Or just life, I guess. Love. Blah, I sound stoned. I’m not stoned.
(suddenly)
Thanks for dinner. Bye!
Musings, Ideas and Coffee?
3 Beautiful Places in Bengaluru where you can sit and day dream
Kaara By The Lake ( Ulsoor Lake ): A peaceful cafe with best Strawberry Kiwi Smoothie in Bengaluru. Top it up with a walk by the lake.
HumbleBean ( Indiranagar ): A scenic view of a hidden park. Enjoy a cup of strong coffee. Not so surprisingly a great combination ☕️.
Paper and Pie ( Whitefield ): An aesthetic, spacious cafe with free wifi and ample plug points. Enjoy the hibiscus tea, variegated food options and a wonderful breeze touched promenade outside to walk.
When was the last time you went for a picnic?
Growing up, our parents were fond of traveling. So it would often be that we’d find ourselves on or around green grasses, rivers or gorges gushing around, unpacking gravy potatoes, puri and dry cooked black chickpeas, or sandwiches, and eating with relish with Sun meherbān ( kind ) to us. Maybe that’s why now both of us head out most weekends to find a new adventure, to sit under the sun and relive a childlike freedom, running around marvelling at new trees.
With the wonderful Tabibuea Rosea flower like suggestion, we found a place called The Lilac Farm for us to go have a picnic among other things.
An hour from Bengaluru, as we sat to have lunch when we reached. Anitha and Christina—the daughter-mother duo which runs this rescue farm—sat with us as we introduced ourselves and chit-chatted. They told us about how it was a dairy farm first but when they turned vegan, so did the farm, and their journey for building this organic, sustainable during pandemic.
With our picnic basket of delicious healthy snacks and some hibiscus juice we made our way to this beautiful spot in the middle of nowhere near the farm. It was serene and quiet in a magical sort of way, you could almost touch the clouds above you and hear the trees crackle. We sat here with some music and our book, reading together.
From crowded noisy picnics in public places to this one in a magical spot away from everything, there is something delightful about putting down your sheet and claiming a square piece of land as yours for the duration of that picnic. A space for you in a world so much bigger than you. It is always amusing to me how this very public small sheet starts feeling like a homely private space as you sit down with your books and food and music to enjoy a picnic!
Head out for a picnic, even if it is just to your garden outside. Do it now.
And finally, some wholesome homemade humour
Keep growing. See you next time with a fresh smoothie.