Apple and the Ebook conundrum, in dilli.

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APPLE: and the e book conundrum, In dilli,

Throughout my formative years, reading, leave alone being avid at it, was the last thing that came to my mind. What came was tomfoolery of the brightest and the best pedigree. Right from torturing kids in my school bus, to the art of splitting a mango kernel by its middle and tasting the really sour centre,from spitting  intrepid designs, to playing chupam chupai with a gratuitous twist, I was a master at them all. But reading !!, that was the stuff heavens were made of. Naah, and we were lesser mortals, and gladly so.

Even the Vedanta prescribes splitting down life into certain phases, and as I have presciently relegated myself to that of a lesser mortal, who was I to question. Phase II, was introspection, I’d say subliminal introspection. Not knowing that we were introspecting. Not knowing what introspection was , was phaseII. Chivalry, rivalry, camaraderie, coteries.  Whatever the bad stuff is made of. What some call graduation. What do we graduate from? What is the plinth that we can rest our standards on? Is it hormonal graduation, societal graduation, marital gradu..?  Maybe ?  Is it any good. Maybe not.

Only after your due bit of dirt do you land up with grit. And so it happened. It was an old pelican publication. I somehow like the smell of old books. I somehow find them mystically secretive and magical at the same time. How many hands must have held them before? And who? How many desks would they have decked? How many familial ceremonies would they have been party to,  domestic quarrels,passionate qualms, infant cries, they are such benevolent mute spectators.  And the pages which take a surrogate and intense yellow hue are testimony to the homes and the people they were with once. The yellow, an allegory of all what it had partaken of, a ball of fortune. If you look at them carefully, just stare at them into oblivion, you might just come lucky to hear a cry or two, the fleeting whisper of a passionate lover trying to sneak into surprise, or an old man’s content yawn, as he curls down to sleep.

Cut down  to the hustle of today, tonight in fact. International relations are giving me a hard time. One month for showdown, and I’m thinking of all the rhetoric and brouhaha that surrounds these 7 star-conferences. Arctic cap this, green emissions that, arms trade this, nuclear that. I need to focus. Yes it’s amonth to showdown. And I face a piquant thought, which refuses to wither down. Are eBooks really worth it? Should I be reading any more of them? What about those investments for posterity, which youcan show your friends grand children (you know). Read the man booker girl, Eleanor Catton,   and I fell succumbed as a human being. Christ she’s 28. Dexterity! I was caught by the apple bug sometime back.All the David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk rhetoric came crashing down as gracefully as the Dave Matthews number. Consumerism and I’m consumed. A slave of the corporate, made in china, designed in California diktat. I feel pathetic. Grotesque. And then this question.

The inky fool, what a master of a blog, the forsyth guy is scintillatingly intriguing. Scintillating,the word, I learnt,has a bit of a story. Add to it a bit of a brit humour and you get such an apocryphal anecdote.Started with the Latin, the word, I mean, ended up in Britain. They have a thing for it you see. Ill leave itto the brits now and their overtly lascivious politicians who are busy calling their women sluts and then justifying it o’er the OED

Posterity? Ill give that a miss. Let me live for tonight. I want to read the Indian clerk, by David Leavitt and I’ll do it now. The internet is killing me. Apple should reinvent its logo as the ‘loading flower’, here in dilli. Where are my yellows?