Lucky 14th, I hope!

Hmmmm...! So here I am! With my own blog! Always wondered what it would feel like to gab about my little life in cyberscape. Now, I'm actually doing it! It's funny that I should start blogging on a day on which I'm nursing an awful pharyngitis and have just taught a French play to Open University students for five hours and got paid less than a thou for my vocal-chord-breaking efforts and it happens to be the 13th. I have decided that I shan't publish this blog till the clock strikes twelve and it's fourteenth! Not that I'm very superstitious. I'm not. I'm extremely superstitious. So which play did I teach, as I'm sure you are dying to know (Not!)? It was Moliere's Le Misanthrope. I've been teaching the wretched thing for ages now and know it like the back of my main, but I still enjoy telling my students that the French playwright was walking a tightrope in this play. He had to amuse the ghastly aristos and also, discreetly criticise them! Slap and tickle, slap and tickle! Slap them hard, make them laugh and do it over and over again through the entire duration of the play!



This is what I'll do in this blog: I'll post here my readings of the stuff I teach at the university. The stuff that I can't talk about in my class, because it may be considered too radical, I'll talk about here. This blog will be mostly about literature through the four eyes of a 40-year-old University lecturer! But I'll try and stay true to my blog id. I promise lots of clutter because there is a lot of that in this brain of mine. Don't expect posts on cricket or the stock market. Expect everything else! Expect Diana, Princess of Wales, expect Diana Haddad, expect Diana Vreeland, expect Diana, Goddess of Hunting, expect Diana Dors, expect Christopher Isherwood, expect David Hockney, expect Durga Puja, expect Federico Mompou, expect Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, expect Rahul Gandhi, expect Kalighat paintings, expect Pedro Almodovar, expect Gael Garcia Bernal, expect Cavafy, expect Mark Doty, expect "Brothers and Sisters", expect "Desperate Housewives", expect Vanraj Bhatia, expect Talat Mahmood, expect Manna Dey, expect Vani Jairam, expect Madhubala, expect a desire to record all the fleeting beauty that life keeps surprising one with, expect a constant subtext of gratitude that I'm healthy, solvent and alive. Am I in love? At the moment, yes. With a person? Yes. But my desire to record life's joys, strictly joys, has always been there even during those dark days when my pillows used to soaked with my self-pity. I always found a reason to get excited and get happy. I guess, I now think that the time has come to communicate this to the world out there. It's almost midnight. I'll post this blog now! Welcome to my world! And visit often!