Pradeep E > Recent Status Updates

Tamil writer Ambai sets a series of short stories in the world of women, Carnatic music and journeys. Other than a couple of stories, it did not mostly appeal to me. Maybe I was expecting a closure in every story and none was forthcoming.

"Happiness does not consist in being right at the top. Happiness is in recognising how much pressure you can take. Happiness means freeing yourself from the people who revere you for something you aren't. Not trying to please those people. Not constantly being preoccupied with making it all look effortless."

"Most depressives who attempt suicide don't want to die, they just want the darkness that defines their thoughts to disappear once and for all. Robert was almost certainly no different. "If you could have my head for half an hour, you'd know why I go mad," he once told Teresa.

"You feel you are creeping up over the edge of a precipice amd that this cliff beckons you; worse, that you have a secret desire to fall over its edge into oblivion and that there is no way to stop that fall because you are the precipice."

That sinking feeling...

"Tagore seemed to be carried inside all Bengalis, regardless of class or social background, like some inheritable disease,silent,unknown, until it manifested itself at the unlikeliest of times. How irredeemably middle-class all this was: The Little Red Book and On Practice on one hand; on the other hand, the poetry of Jibananda Das in his cloth sidebag and a coy, cloying Tagore song almost involuntarily on his lips."

"Vodka was one of the three things the Soviet Union made that were suitable for export, not counting political exiles; the other two were weapons and novels."

"Under Asian communism, everything but sex is free, since the sexual revolution has not yet happened in the East. The reasoning is that if one has enough sex to produce six or eight or a dozen offspring, one hardly needs a revolution for more sex."

Hehe..

"..queuing was unnatural for our countrymen. Our proper mode in situations where demand was high and supply low was to elbow, jostle, crowd, and hustle, and, if all, that failed, to bribe, flatter, exaggerate, and lie. I was uncertain whether these traits were genetic, deeply cultural, or simply a rapid evolutionary development."

Sounds familiar.

"Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless pre-occupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen."

"The worst thing about being a divorcee isn't that all men think they're obliged to proposition you. Rather, it's the fact that because you are a divorcee they think there's no need to be romantic. They don't flirt with you, they don't whisper sweet nothings in your ear. They just come straight out with what it is they want from you, right off the bat, in the most vulgar way imaginable."

"Believe what you need to believe in order to find comfort and peace with the inevitable fate that is common to every living thing on this planet. Death awaits us all; one can choose to run in fear from it or one can face it head-on with thoughtfulness, and from that thoughtfulness peace and serenity."

"It took me two solid years of living with metastatic cancer to realize an important truth: barring some physical pain or other impediment brought on by cancer or its treatment, it isn't cancer that denies me my dreams. Rather, it is a paralysed mind succumbing to the fear and unpredictability of cancer that would deny me my dreams."

"Somehow, we grow up thinking that there should be fairness, that people should be treated fairly, that there should be equality of treatment as well as opportunity. That expectation must be derived from growing up in a rich country where the rule of law is so firmly entrenched."

"It had been a lot easier to be a loser back in the days before social media, when the world wasn't quite so adept at rubbing it in your face, showing you all the fun you were missing out on in real time."