Mr. Bhagat, A Word Please

Since I have not really read the book, my only impression of it has been built by the bits and pieces the roommate indignantly read out loud to mark her displeasure. It is at her behest that I write this piece.

Mr. Bhagat, I am aware of the sheer esteem of the institutions you belong to, and the credit you bring upon them. The fact that I read 'five point someone' at what is best described as gunpoint and have not cared to read the rest might reflect a certain bias in my attitude towards your works, but personally, I have had nothing against you or your successes.

However, the latent economist in me can not but crib and cry afoul when she finds incorrect definitions and concepts lightly thrown about. My dear man, an L- shaped curve is not the marginal utility curve. Marginal implies differentiable and the L shaped curve has a kink. That is why it is L shaped in the first place. The L- shaped curve, sir, is in fact a special case of an indifference curve where two goods are supposed to be complements, which, since you have studied Microeconomics both in IIT and IIM, you must have memorized a thousand times.

Please do not insult economics or students of economics so, considering your own grounding of the basics does not seem to be the strongest.

Best wishes for your next work.

Regards
A very irked Economics student

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I have been tagged, and by tagged, I mean properly tagged and not a tag stolen from someone else's blog. Though originally tagged in Facebook, I prefer limiting tags to blogs, where no one really knows me and therefore, would not bring it up against me next time we meet. The tagger, Vanilla Sky, defines this tag as

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

1. If I stare at a person long enough, listen to their conversation and not say a word, the person eventually ends up betraying all their innermost secrets to me. I attribute this to an unwavering stare. Blackmail, therefore, is a very effective career option.
2. I adore shoes. I buy them in hordes. But the only shoe I ever wear is a very worn out pair of 'Ketoes'.
3. I get very excited at the sight of policemen, police jeeps, police stations or vans carrying criminals. I do not know why. My mum thinks that is the reason I happily lose my identity cards.
4. I am possibly the only person on earth who has sprained a foot while dancing to 'Safety Dance'.
5. My favourite sort of movies are musicals, specially the type where things are bound to end happily and the songs are popular ditties. Sweeney Todd does not fall under this category. Nor does High School Musical.
   
6. The only time I have had a crush on a real person (defined as people you actually know and who know you back and you have conversations and hang out in general) was when I lost a classmate's pen and he laughed when I tried to apologize for it. By the end of three years, I had begun to dislike him intently for trying to steal my thunder.
7. I have elaborate dream sequences, most of which would make very gripping thrillers. The last one was a murder of a newly wed man and Bobby Deol happened to be the detective in charge. He goes and asks the bride if she had had something silvery grasped in her palms at the time of death and whether the victim was humming to himself at that moment. The bride opens her palms to see a silver foil attached to it. It was clearly the defining moment. Then the alarm bell rang. I hate my alarm very, very much.
8. I am a terribly messy person. The sort of person who would not clean her bed and would rather sleep on the mess, and, if the mess happens to be uncomfortable, on the floor. But I am obsessed about clean sinks. I often spend my time in dinner parties cleaning the sink.
   
9. I never understand the business section of the paper. I blame it on the Economics degree. Everything works completely against all the laws proposed.
10. I have a maroon top. If I wear it and it rains, the umbrella turns inside out and I get soaked. It is uncanny.
11. The first actor I ever fell in love with was Rupert Grint. The fact that Ronald Weasley and I shared birthdays just proved the fact that we were soulmates.
12. My favourite word is 'preposterous'. As a nineteen year old, one of my deepest wishes was to become a princess, and say preposterous all the time while randomly ordering people to be beheaded, not unlike the Queen of Hearts.
13. I think Anne Hathaway has the most beautiful smile ever.
14. The Air India Maharajah scares me.
    
15. The more I see of Dustin Hoffman, the more I like him. I really wish to see him in Death of a Salesman, a very favourite play of mine.
16. The English Patient is the only book/movie combo I like, rather, admire and love, despite the fact they both are very different.
17. I wish to dress up as a witch someday, get dressed in floating, flowing, wispy clothes and cackle.
18. The only people I bond very well with are twelve year old girls. They immediately like me and say I am the nicest person they have ever known. Not many people say that. The world needs more twelve year old girls to be a happier place.
19. If I ever write a novel, I want it to be a tragedy. Everyone in it must die lonely, painful, lingering deaths. There will also be a family ghost, a woman with a haunted past and a retired acrobat. They will all die too. Except for the family ghost, since it is already dead.
    
20. I have an Oscar acceptance speech prepared.
21. I often wake up in the middle of the night due to sheer panic. Most of these are caused by the fact that I have forgotten whether Obama is republican or democrat, the meaning of allegory or whether I had cleaned the sink before sleeping. Whenever this happens, I end up sweeping.
22. I want a hat. A floppy, large brimmed hat with grapes on it. I will distribute grapes from it to people I meet.
    
23. I chew my hair when distressed. It is not very good for the hair.
    
24. I love it when I find some of my favourite songs in movie soundtracks. Like Saif singing Heartbreak Hotel in Parineeta. Or More Than a Feeling being played in Madagascar 2.
    
25. I believe the best entrance ever in a movie was made by Akshay Kumar in Tashan. Yes, I have watched Tashan. I watch everything. Except Ghajini.
    

I am still rather surprised by the fact that I have finished this. I tag everyone who has not done this but wants to.

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A Murderer Breathing Down My Neck

(It depresses me extremely to realize how pathetic I actually am regarding giving titles to post. If I ever write a book, I shall name it A, and then go along the English alphabet while naming any other books there might be. Then, of course, my publisher would expect me to write 26 books, and I shall disappoint him extremely by going until C and then suffering from a major writer's block, or acquiring a religion which prevents a person from leaving any tangible proof of the fact that they had once existed. If I do not, I will keep on worrying what I would name my book after the 26th is published and probably die due to a massive heart attack. Despite these misgivings, I quite fancy writing a book called A for Aardvark. It shall be, because I will be a sort of a rebel author, about aardvarks. The title shall not be a metaphor for the tragedy of the demise of seals. That story shall come under S for Seals. My autobiography shall be named P for Pestilential Parasite. Until then, I will put this post under the rather banal title of A Murderer Breathing Down My Neck).

In Agatha Christie's world, people fall in love for the most peculiar of reasons. Women fall in love with men because the men do not love them back, the men need to be protected, the men are pure evil, the men are faithful puppies, or perhaps because the men have a streak of untamed wildness. All the men fall in love with the women because they are curiously beautiful. Moreover, the women are usually around nineteen years of age, which is rather sad since, all my life, I have been vaguely hoping I would bloom into some sort of a beauty around the time I am thirty. In Agatha Christie's world, when you are thirty, you are a lady, but not so young. No one speaks of blooming beauties. Yet, Poirot assures us that there always is someone because "journeys end in lovers' meetings".

Yes, that is correct. I get advice for my love life from a fictional Belgian bachelor with a pronounced case of moustaches.

My favourite (and spookiest) teacher once asked me why I liked reading, nay re-reading, Agatha Christie so much. I, with the sense of a feeble minded 15 year old, ventured a guess that it was because her plots were, rather, you know, page turners. He raised an eyebrow, glinted thorough his spectacles, and asked me why, then, did I not feel the same way for Sherlock Holmes, or even, Father Brown. The power of most detective stories lie in their plots. How was Christie different?

By then, practically petrified by his glinting glasses, I brought forth an "er..." and relapsed into a painful silence. After glinting for a few moments more, he answered his own question. It is, he drawled, because of the humanity in her books. The various people, the various thoughts, the banters, the humour, the tragic touch, the inevitable romantic end. Hers is not a murder alone, hers is a whole by-play of human life.

Father Brown, however, still remains a favourite. Despite the rather Gothic atmosphere, the scholarly outlook of the author, and the incongruous mildness of the detective (for detectives, even Miss Marple, are usually very agitated by the evil in men. Father Brown, invariably, chooses Christian forgiveness). The spiritual approach, however, was never a fault. The underlying religiousness, the humility and the gentleness - was Chesterton, one wonders, symbolizing the supreme tolerance of his own faith?

Do books with religion as theme take on the characteristics of the religion? There is Buddha Da - charming, insightful, gentle, probing, introspective, in fact, donning the mantle of the very Buddhism it uses as plot tool. Despite the rather uncomfortable Scottish way of speech, the book never fails to touch a chord. It remains, above and beyond religion, a heart warming depiction of faith and acceptance.

While we are on the topic of Scottish authors, Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith is supposed to be inaugurating the Kolkata Book Fair on the 27th of this month. People not unfortunate enough to be a part of Calcutta University might want to drop in there. Perhaps get me an autograph. Or read him the seven page speech I am going to write in his honour. Pretty please with a cherry on top?

I now forget what the title was supposed to be about. Why a murderer? Why the neck? Where did Scotland come in? Why can not I stick to a point? What are aardvarks?

Which probably means, why am I even posting this?

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A Second Quest

My memory is not one of my many strengths, as most friends would fervently agree. In fact, if I died and people were looking for a favourite one-liner of mine to engrave on my tombstone, they might as well engrave "I have forgotten" and go home with the satisfaction of a duty well done.

Why do I mention this?

For the past few days, a scene has been tormenting me. It is about a woman bursting balloons with cigarettes in the backseat of a car. She was accompanied by a male. The only other information I can provide is that it as not a movie. I am definite I was reading it. It could be in a blog, a novel, a play, a short story, a newspaper, even a cerealbox.

A little help?

Please and thank you.

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The love affair one is envious of.

(note: Wikipedia has it all wrong. Go read the book to know what it is all about.)

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Chronicles of Part-2 Exams: The Voyage of the Blog Reader

So I was blog hopping as usual because that is all I seem to be capable of nowadays, excepting, of course, watching all sorts of Govinda movies. So here is another tag I was fascinated by at aandthirtyeight's.
It has been described as "In one stone, two mangoes!" and I intend to keep it. Admirable description, methinks. Considering we have two wholly different tags.

First tag

Aim: To do something utterly meaningless to avoid getting back to the books.

Methodology:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.

Procedure:
Get lazy bum off comfortable seat to look for book.
Find all books have managed to evaporate inexplicably.
Wander off to room and find "The Secret of Cliff Castle"
Blush profusely and look for some more intellectual sounding book.
Decide to be honest to people who would not know any better anyway if you lied and choose Secret of Cliff Castle.

Results:
Hilary's eyes shone. She felt excited. She caught hold of Ben's arm and looked at his eagerly.

Conclusion:
If I had not known better, I could have sworn this came out of some Mills and Boons. Which goes on to show that in life, you never know any better.

Second Tag

The following is apparently a list of books, "most of them sitting unread in people's bookshelves to make them look smarter". The rules are: bold the ones that you have read, underline the ones you have read in school, italicize the ones you have started but didn't finish.

Which is precisely what I think I will do.

1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake
87. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

The only novels I did read in school were The Old Man and the Sea and The Tiger of Malgudi. I did not end up loving any of them.

I tag everyone. You are here, you are reading this sentence right now, you have the right to take up the tag . There, you have material for another post.

(p.s. I know Prince Caspian come first, but Voyage of the Dawn Treader arrived first because it was easy to mess up with the title. Prince Caspian is next. Promise.)

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A Quest

Once upon a time, when I was around fourteen and literally gobbled up stories about little girls who lived happily ever after, I came across one such book in the school library. It was about this ten year old city girl called Elizabeth who shifts to the country after the aunt who looked after her, gets a job someplace else. The book is mostly about how she deals with the country life. She lives there with her two aunts and uncles who insist on calling her Betty, and I also remember a scene where her uncle asks her to describe how roads are laid. Subplots include adventure in a fair with a little girl on her (Betty's) birthday, making butter, and incidents in school. At the end, of course, she decides to live in the country rather than move with her aunt to the big city.

What I am looking for is the book's name. As a 14 year old, I remember crying copious tears over it. Its purely meant for little girls who have nothing better to do than read stories about happily ever afters and ruin their concept of real life. But right now, that is exactly the sort of literature I need. Any help would be much appreciated.

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Rants, Birds, More Rants and Stuff

Once upon a time, I used to dabble with the idea of taking to crime. It was the same age during when any man over 21 was supposed be called an uncle (At 20, everyone under 30 is hot). The idea did not really last. Possibly it had to do something with my abject inability to shoot balloons. As a four year old, I would get agitated at my inevitable failure to pop even one of them and would have to be forcibly restrained from beating up all those balloons with the same rifle I was holding. 16 years later, I wish my father would be around to restrain me again.

I have never really known why my father would take me to shoot balloons at an young, impressionable age. It has been proven in time that he never harboured dreams of raising a sharpshooter as a daughter. Common sense tells me it was probably because he had no idea what to do with me when babysitting. Paranoia tells me it was the best way to quell any homicidal tendencies I might otherwise visit on delicate furniture. He is a smart man, my father.

The above paragraphs has nothing to do with the theme of this post. In fact, this post does not have a theme. I have absolutely no idea what I am even typing right now. Its early morning, the birds are chirping away, welcoming the world in a trilling, mad, joyful, soulful song and giving me a headache, and I have to leave for my morning walk in half an hour. It will probably be another furiously hot day and I will melt away, sweat droplet by sweat droplet. In fact, if you have not guessed it yet, right now, I am not a very happy blogger.

I spent all my money in buying the Gameworld trilogy and finished them in under a week. This has had very strange developments. Like a spate of re-attendance to college, where I spend hours gazing happily at the seats and wondering if Samit Basu's posterior ever adorned them. (He is an alumni from the same department as me. If you think that motivates me in any manner, think again). There has also been cases of tattooing the name Kirin on my arms during Maths classes and later explaining to questioning parental figures that its just a misspelling of an old Enid Blytonian term.Parents, but obviously, refuse to believe such tripe. But are reassured by the fact that the elder daughter is not the closet lesbian they were fearing her to be. Today, a fictional hero, tomorrow, a living breathing man is the motto they are trying to live by. I am still wording the speech which should be informing them about the celibacy vow.

There was a week spent in un-idleness in Delhi. College packed three of us pseudo-economists off under the hope of keeping the beacon of Presidency Economics high. Siblings sent us off with joyful good byes in the hope of the splendour of gifts brought back. We went there in the hope of meeting some proper guys for a change (Dear Kolkata guys, please do not get offended, we love you all. You are intelligent, stalwart men who will always remain the people our parents hope we will end up getting married to. This is just the rebellious phase every just-left-teenage girl goes through. But we always come back to you. Maybe we leave you again later. But we will discuss that in some other post).

We did meet them. It was a wonderful eight days which we spent falling in love over and over again with every man in sight, not even excluding wonderful looking professors from Pakistan (Pakistan has everything, good looking professors, good looking men, even, for crying out aloud, good looking women, and an actual interest in Economics. Wish to reword those Partition clauses again). We also realized Kolkata is not an undisputed World number one in aantlamo. Very, very curiously, Delhi comes close. Frighteningly close.

However, the trip's main impact laid elsewhere. Not being one to keep people with their breaths held in taut suspense, I will be quick to come to the point. It was the washing of clothes (Cue, quick drawing of breath). It was while we washed clothes, past midnight, with the aid of shampoos the hotel beatifically provided, we realized that we had actually transcended to adulthood. That we were women in the real sense of the word. Also that we would make terrible washerwomen and that washing clothes would also have to be struck off from the list of alternate careers. There were also instances of impromptu dances which involved jumping on a rather bouncy bed and which ended with loadshedding and meeting cute looking guys in the lobby to discuss the electricity problems in Delhi and why that meant the Stock exchange was about to crash(The mating calls of economists are not very attractive. We are reduced to either discussing the Stock Exchange or questions on how to become millionaires while trying to get Ph.D. degrees. The first ends in fistfights, the second in MBAs).

I realize I must have mystified my readers (Gasp, I have readers, it feels good to say that while planning crazy attack on chirping birds). The college sent us off to Delhi to attend a seminar on (held breaths again) Economics (gasps) with a few other South Asian countries. Scores of undergraduate economics students were bunched of in a scenario reminiscent of Goopy Bagha Phire Elo where Bikrams are caught and imprisoned (this is for my non Bengali readers. Bengali readers, skip this section before getting an aneurysm or something by the mind boggling description) by a mad yogi of a sort, whose death had been predicted by a boy named Bikram. The imprisoned Bikrams in the story become his housemaids and washerwomen. We, instead, presented papers and listened to endless babbling by famous people on how to achieve the Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani/Nepali/Sri Lankan Dream. Since none of us were even particularly clear about which dreams they were focusing on, we would utilize the time to run away to Connaught Place and visit Nirula's. Or some other equally wonderful, ambrosial joint (Cue: Wipe away nostalgic tears).

Delhi stories might keep on appearing by bits and spurts. So might murderous attempts on birds. The balloon story, however, appears only here. I have no idea how to conclude this piece. So I will inform everyone that I am going to have chocolates for breakfast. Also that I have begun to resemble a blob. A nice, shapeless, green and brown blob. Which still does not sound like a conclusion. So I will try again.

This is the conclusion.

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The last ode to teenage-ism

Warning : Girlie post

Fellow blogger Doubletake, Doublethink has had a girlhood akin to all girlhoods, mostly spent in waiting for the dream man from the pages of a book (ranging from Danielle Steele to Gone with the wind) to materialize in flesh and of course, fall in love with us. This being the most significant experience for girls all over, one realizes the importance of preserving the essence of our first loves. Thus, while she rots with other more trivial pursuits (like Boards for instance), she, for us to remember her by, has started a meme, as she names it. In her own words,

"I'm starting a meme (muahahhaha). Anyone who has ever fallen in love with her version of the GHM, I tag you. Write a post, it doesn't have to be very big, about that person – literary character, comic book hero, some guy in a movie, a random person you'll never meet – we’ll start a list that will probably never end."

GHM would be the Georgette Heyer Man, a one of a kind lover an impressionable girl can easily be obsessed with. Doubletake has a more detailed description of him in her post.

And so, my GHM....

He arrived in my life at the very naive age of 14. He returned when I was 18. And, of course, till now, he displays no willingness to leave and someone real arrive. Harry Rayburn, or John Eardsley is a cross between Othello and Tarzan. He is rich but has given up all his wealth to seek vengeance for the death and defamation of his friend. He resides alone in an island in Africa and does more or less nothing but brood. Of course, he goes and seeks revenge, is often an impostor in the strangest of ships, is mind numbingly hot and threatens to beat up his love interest black and blue if she even looks at another guy.
A self confessed wife beater, an Etonian who has given up all his wealth for an African island near a waterfall, where he saves drowning damsels and then marries them (if he does marry them, hard to find a registrar in African jungles, I would have guessed). Paleolithic in his passions and general behaviour with the rest of humanity, rude, insolent and a woman hater, he is probably not every woman's dream, or even nightmare, but since the age of 14, Harry Rayburn has been the man I have woefully given my heart too. Of course, the fact that he catches diamond smugglers and can easily murder someone in the heat of anger just adds to his gentlemanly charms.

He is the chief protagonist of Agatha Christie's Man in the Brown Suit, and despite the impression I seem to have given, is wonderfully monogamistic. If it reflects sadly on my literary tastes, yes, I have fallen more in love with Christie characters than any other, except Feluda. And Lord Emsworth. And of course, Psmith. There was also these brief affairs with Rhett Butler, Buntschli, and Flambeau, but the Man in the Brown Suit stands tall and unchallenged.

I request all girls to take this tag up. Even guys if they have had their own female version of the GHM.
So, visitor, you are tagged.

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Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones - Another Rambling Non-Review

I usually do not attempt reviews, mainly because I get hold of the wrong end of the discourse or because I am afraid it may actually lead up to an argument I would pitifully crumble against. But sometimes, one comes across a book one feels very strongly about. Thus, a blog post is born, just to ask people to get acquainted with the book once, not because one wants discussions, but because good books deserve to be read.

All avid Dickensians would immediately recognize the eponymous character, the main protagonist of the " greatest novel by the greatest writer of the nineteenth century", Great Expectations. This book reveres Dickens as a rock against the insane ravages of a modern civil war. Set in remote South Pacific island, it deals with cultural imperialism, uprisings, generation gap, inter racial marriages and religion all against the backdrop of Dickens. An island where the only sign of civilization is the faith in Bibles.

Yet, the book is essentially a simple one. And, thus, equally devastating in its simplicity.

Seen through the eyes of a 14 year old black girl, it begins with an achingly familiar topic of reverence to a teacher who changed lives. But the narration keeps taking sharp diversions, but with smooth accelerations. The teacher, the last remaining white in the island, Mr. Watts, takes to the reading of the book in his classes periodically. And soon, the students start finding parallels with the problems of a white orphan, residing five thousand miles away from their little, forgotten island. Pip becomes more than a character. He becomes a friend, a person they wake up to, whose life they mull over before going to sleep.

Resentment thus takes birth among the parents. What it boils down to is that a white atheist brings hope to black children, who have lost faith in religion, with a person who is fictional, yet closer to them than their ancestors. A man who challenges the existence of the Devil by saying he is a make believe character and yet believes whole heartedly in the trial and tribulations of a boy. But soon, fiction and reality start merging with devastating results.

This book, frankly, taunts the readers. Every pre-conceived notions, every partisan favouritism is challenged before you reach the end, forcing the reader to go back and review every character and find out the subtly hidden flaws and virtues not noticed the first time around. By the end, you even start having second thoughts about Dickens, the foundation of the book.

But what stays back after the shock subsides are the fleeting thoughts and ideas spread innocently around the disarmingly innocuous looking book. Be it the amusing discourse on broken dreams ( apparently, fishes are the best example of broken dreams. The surprised look on their faces when caught best explains it. They can not believe they will never see the sea again), the breathtaking idea of forming a whole world in your mind with the power of your own unique voice, or the shockingly matter-of-fact descriptions of barbarous murders, haunting images and ideas stay behind, long after the memory of the book is dimmed.

Its a tale of survival despite all odds, where people gain strengths from the power of storytelling. An unusual attempt to retell the old adage that "a book can change your life forever". For it can.

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The Railway Children - A Very Personal Reflection

At 19, when one is supposed to be reading Dostoevsky and ruminating on Kafka's works (I attempted to do both with very minor success), I still remain in denial that, at this age, The First Term at Malory Towers does not really make an appropriate reading material. Maybe I just chanced to retain the child in me or, more plausibly, the child in me has kidnapped the part of my brain which should feed me information about my mental and spiritual growth and is doing cannibalistic ritual dances on it. However, the moot point is, one of my best beloved books happens to be a children's classic and I type this reflection proudly, sheltering under a hope that my readers, a population of possibly five people at most, will agree with me.

For people unfamiliar with the book, Edith Nesbit's The Railway Children is about a family of three children and almost perfect parents whose life is transformed after their father mysteriously disappears. They face the fear of poverty, change homes, and, the most wonderful bit of all, get acquainted with the railway running near their new cottage. How their lives are intertwined with the railway and the friends they make there, their adventures and misadventures, and how it all becomes a process of growing up is what the book is about.

This is not a review. I cannot be presumptuous enough to review a book I loved as a kid, still love when I am pretending to be a kid, and hope some day my kids love it too. Though if my kids are anything like me, they would certainly prefer The Criminal's Manual to Lock Picking. This is just a very unsuccessful attempt to share the sheer magic of innocence and charm of a lost tribe of childhood. This is about a time when kids actually went and explored places when they had nothing to do-an Enid Bytonian era of childhood. A phase unknown to most people. Though what attracts you most is that there is no heavy morality, no adventures with smugglers who are apparently found at every nook if you are a band of at least four kids and a dog with ESP. At least that is the impression Enid Blyton gave me. For heaven's sake, 21 adventures!! All they did was make a plan to have a picnic, and whoa, suddenly there is a bunch of thugs looking for hidden treasures or Uranium five paces from there picnic spots.

Mind it, I love the Famous Five. Its just that I am mildly jealous of their luck.

What they do is what mostly every kid dreams of doing. The kind of dreams the BFG blows in the twilight hour. Stopping a train from accident, saving babies from burning buildings. Yet, more than bravery, what touches me is the other emotions explained here. The terrifying doubt of failure, the embarrassment at being felicitated, yet, an anticipation for it, the self recrimination, the childish attempts to make good, an undying belief in the goodness of others and the ability to love selflessly.

The Author's favourite character Bobbie wins my heart very time I read it. The unselfish love for her mother, the maturity of the young mind, the generous and impetuous actions and a brave little heart creates a little girl, not nauseatingly perfect, but lovingly real and beloved.

The story itself holds no mystery. There is no thrill of a suspense, no part where you grip the book in chilled anticipation. The charm of the book lies in the hearts of the children, who live in a world of their own, where their is imagination, adventures and friendship which blends easily with their trials in real lives-the boredom of lessons, the lack of playmates, the strain of work and, of course, the absence of their Father. Thus a book is made, where children are children, not young moral heroes, where they make mistakes and learn from them, where they have accidents, where the mother is a wonderful figure of motherhood, morally upright but with a sense of humour, where she is both understanding and generously loving, where, after all said and done, she is a beloved mother, like mothers everywhere.

Why do I suggest the book to a world of adults out there? I don't. Its a part of my childhood and hope it was a part of yours.

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