Flo R > Recent Status Updates

Civilization advanced and still didn't stop calling it 'chai tea'?!

"I sometimes wonder, to this day, if courage is just another word for desparation." - Nadia Comaneci

A dream-starved brain cannot accurately decode facial expressions. You begin to mistake friends for foes.

The scientists had turned the MRI machine into a very expensive version of the beautiful handmade dream-catchers that some Native American cultures will hang above their beds in the hopes of ensnaring the dream---and they succeeded.

"I found that simply changing my location sometimes changed my perspective, allowed the anchor that was holding me in place to shift a bit, to lose some of its paralyzing weight. Changing my pattern was the beginning of real change. Gradually my soul started to feel less heavy."

"That night I slept clutching my new crown. It was pretty, it was shiny, and it was mine."

"This is ginger, Gabrielle, like what is used in Asian cooking." 😂😂😂 [That line is so much funnier when you're part of the Asian fanclub]

In India, individual shame did not exist. Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family, even to distant cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. The rumormongers made sure of that.

"I knew their children's personalities, the tics that even a professional matchmaker wouldn't catch. But these were flaws for a husband to discover, not for me to reveal."

Let boys be a mystery for another day; there was the mystery of her book in front of her.

Scientific evidence linking sleep disruption and cancer is now so damning that the World Health Organisation has officially classified nighttime shift work as a "probable carcinogen."

"Never seek a wish from a djinn. They're much better at negotiating than we are and things almost always go badly."

As if I had walked into a pot on the boil, all around me bubbled excited voices.

Cooking doesn't just nurture the recipient; it nurtures the chef.

All those hopes and dreams and talks of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

It is quite impossible to find this novel boring when sentences such as the following exist:

'...Amy felt deeply the want of a Grecian nose, and drew whole sheets of handsome ones to console herself.'

Most people believe that gods exist. Many do not; this does not trouble the gods, who know that if gods, in turn, were to not believe that people exist, people would actually cease to exist.

Setting the mood like... ↓

‘Outside, the afternoon cast drowsy spells over empty paddy fields, and cows stared longingly at each other and chewed cud in a melancholy, passionate sort of way.’

In her time - the 21st century - all these people were long dead, their backgrounds, childhoods, challenges, loves and hates, all gone. It was as if they had never existed.

It was a small, quaint shop that seemed to lean a bit to the right, as if it were tired and just wanted to take a long nap.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe - and He's evil. (Lol wot?!)

If you want to keep any human group isolated, the best way to do it is convince everyone that these people are a source of pollution.

Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

"I complimented him on the potty and said it looked very comfortable. But what really took my fancy was the bathroom window. I could see myself sitting for hours on that potty, enraptured, enchanted, having the valley and the mountains all to myself."

Can honestly say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the simplicity of all the varied descriptions scattered throughout this book.

'A policeman sitting on a stool outside a tiny police outpost yawned, stretched, stood up, looked up and down the street in anticipation of crimes to come, scratched himself in the anal region and sank back upon his stool.'

They considered indiscriminate murder a tactical mistake, undermining the Communist regime. There was nothing wrong with a bloody purge, but murder had to be smart and for the benefit of the Party, rather than to satisfy a personal grievance.

In his idle hours he read about the culture and history of this land and discovered that the only thing to rival the power of opium as a form of escape was academic study.

'The wallpaper was bubbled like adolescent skin, lined with some kind of grease, sticky to touch.'

'Everyone from the lowliest clerk to the highest-ranking officer understood that if you genuinely wanted to dispose of something you sneaked it out, discreetly getting rid of it on the way home.'

"The New Oberoi lobby's sunken coffee area in Mumbai operated as my office for many years. The Taj Mumbai hotel management, on the contrary, was quite nasty and always shooed me away."

A good number of Bombay's IHM grads can probably relate to this post their internship experiences.