Priya > Recent Status Updates

"Salim, who was travelling to Lahore with his father, would be particularly enchanted with the city and would live there many years when he became Padshah. His wife, Noor Jahan, is believed to have said; ‘We have purchased Lahore with our soul; we have given our life and bought another Paradise.’"

Finished the first story, which is Khekda itself. I remember my grandmother having read this story to me when I was quite small, which I now realise was super inappropriate, but I'm so glad she did. My love for horror started with this man, my grandmother's narration and their deliciously imaginative stories.

Like running, swimming has a basic, elemental feel. Your chief adversary is the clock, and in this case, the water that you've got to work with to beat it.

Jay began to think hard about the way swimming stripped people down to their bare elements. "You lose even more of your normal identity than if you got dressed for tennis, for example. You're just skin, cap, goggles," he says. "The outfits for swimming are at the bare minimum - their other identities aren't visible. With two military people, you can't tell who's the officer and who's the enlisted man."

What I remember most is the profound feeling that ocean water had weight. In the years since, I have come to appreciate open water - an ocean, a lake big enough to generate its own waves - as its own animal. I see swimming as a way to get to know a place with an intimacy that I otherwise wouldn't have.

Back in Kajimura's office, we marvel at the idea of swimming in a pool cut into the Siberian ice. "I guess whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger," Kajimura says thoughtfully, "I used to think it was all philosophical, but it might be true from a clinical standpoint."

They know that people need witches; they need the unofficial people who understand the difference between right and wrong, and when right is wrong and when wrong is right. The world needs the people who work around the edges. It needs the people who can deal with the little bumps and inconveniences.

I am currently reading a lot of books, but that's precisely my goal for September - so I'm quite happy about it.

I think of Charles Tomlinson's poem "Swimming Chennago Lake," which captures this state of being. He describes swimming as the act of moving in the embrace of water, but mindfully. To do so is to realize what it means to be, as Tomlinson writes, "between grasp and grasping, free."

If the complement to human biology is culture, then our strength is our ability to identify a problem and invent a solution.

Three hundred and four years after a shy sixteen-year-old boy had reluctantly accepted the throne at the plea of the Russian nation, his descendant, also named Michael, had given it back. The Romanov dynasty was swept away.

The Tauride Palace possessed two large wings; one was the chamber of the Duma, the other, formerly the budget committee room of the Duma, was given to the Soviet. Thereafter, wrote Kerensky, “two different Russias settled side by side: the Russia of the ruling classes who had lost (though they did not realize it yet) … and the Russia of Labor, marching towards power, without suspecting it.”