I have the fevered sniffles.......again....twice in a month this season.
Why is it more awful than usual?
Well when you have just moved out on your own and your mother thinks you are starving to death or eating very wrong things......its not good.
Not good at all. You find yourself, Rudolph nose, defending your full pantry (a full half shelf of it) and try to prove the existance of the 'essesntials-according-to all-mothers', i.e. milk, egg, juice, veggies etc in your fridge -all vainly coz your mother hasn't heard anything anyway and has gone off in tangents with her 'advice'...finally ending with "I knew this would happen when you moved out!".

Sigh.
She is so wrong.....I have juice in my fridge and a Swiss Chalet at the hospital :D





I have only of late finished 'Animal Farm' and '1984' by George Orwell. The ending of both I found strangely sad with Orwell's not-so-subtle-hint that the 'masses' will continue on in their struggles no matter who is in power and never 'rise up'. Nonetheless, I'm pleased with finally understanding the popular reference to 'war is peace', as well as scared shitless with Orwell's creepy predictions for the future, a lot of which has come true. And all this time I thought Tolkien and Pratchett were the only inventive geniuses in creating a believable world out of mist!

Reversed Benglish: I am wondering these days about my delayed admittance to the Western(English) literature and if there are going to be repercussions.
Along the years, when my contemporaries were reading Enid Blyton, I was reading Satyajit Ray's 'Feluda'.
They were immersed in 'Nancy Drew' series and I was gobbling up on 'Teen Goenda' series.
But unlike 'Nancy Drew', I never caught up with Blyton and now her books are out of print.
Though we probably read all the fairy tales (Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty etc) and classics (Frankenstein, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Odyssey, David Copperfield etc) at roughly the same time, I had only read them translated in Bengali and to this day haven't read them in English (except Copperfield).
And when girls at 13 were crying their eyes out with 'Love Story', I was still sitting with my own box of tissues and a thicker 'Pother Pachali'. I drenched the pages of 'Love Story' about a decade later than I should have.
Even my introduction to Jane Austen (my all time favourite author) was shamefully late...in my late teens.
We only matched our timings with Sidney Sheldon and he is just not as good as before.
Alternatively had I live in Bangladesh longer than I had or continued in a Bengali-medium school, I would have probably finished all of the novels by Sunil/Shirshendu/Bonkim eons ago instead of trudging through some of them in my undergrad years in Canada, sitting at various corners of the Robarts Library.
The dichotomy is pressing on me.
Translations of one into another (Bengali to English, vice versa) would just not cut it. I want to experience the best of both worlds in their original form, feel the words on my tongue, juggles the phrases in my brain.... But I wonder of I'll have enough time to catch up/finish them all before my eyes completely give up and wander off to be squelched underfoot by Beatrix (gawd what a horrible image, consequently the only image I caught of the 'Kill Bill' movies)!

And I haven't got hold of Huxley's 'Brave New World' yet!
('A Suitable boy' is coming along nicely though...only 700 more pages to go. Seth is quite the master.)

Update: excellent book- 'A Suitable Boy'....reminded me of Sunil's pseudopolitical novels. I'm not sure if I would have made the same choices as Lata, but its quite understanble why she made them. She is not the only one either- predictibilty and security is probably top of the list of requirement for many girls. More on that later.






Is it strange that I'm drowning myself and everyone around me in Christmas spirit this year?
I want a tree to decorate in my apartment,
String multicolor lights, bounts of holly all around,
Surround myself with Chocolate boxes ..
and individually wrapped Toblerone pieces too,
Singing 'Jingle bell rocks'.

It IS peculiar.....because I'm such a Scrooge most of the time. I scoff at the December'Cristmas Carol' cartoons, Ba-Humbug my way through all the gaudy christmas mall decorations and Santa's annoying little 'helpers'.
Maybe its being on my own in a city with beautifully lighted trees.....or maybe I can feel myself slipping into SAD soon and trying to cheer myself up.
Anyhow I got a tiny decorated plastic counter top tree for the apartment.
I can't have lights up or even holly- darn cat, or chocolates at home otherwise I'll never fit through the door. So I filled up the plastic skull at work with Hershey's kisses for everyone and am humming 'Jingle Bell rocks'.
The weather is just purrfect too ...from the inside atleast.

PS: just to top it off....I'm totally addicted to Shortbread cookies! All-Butter ones too! hmp...maybe I should have started my diet plans after the holidays.