What are words worth?

Share-a-Poem Postbox on Elm Street, Somerville In the most fundamental of ways, stories sustain us. They are instruments of being and becoming, and hold within their words and narrative threads the politics of the private, the social, the cultural, the communal, the public and all states in-between-and-not any of those. Michael Jackson (the anthropologist and international studies scholar, not the Moonwalker) notes : "In every human society, the range of experiences that are socially acknowledged and named is always much narrower than the range of experiences that people actually have." "Tell me a story" is an invitation to imagine and bring into discourse not only worlds outside ourselves but also those most intimate to us, the things that have burrowed deep inside our psyche and are given life in expression. "Tell me your story" is an invitation to make sense of the disparate threads of our existence, to give it coherence and weight...and yes, mea...

The only image not my own: Courtesy Kendall Square Biking Guide Walking out of Kendall Square Station, MIT seems pretty much like any other urban campus, tall-ish brick buildings and wide-ish streets where traffic privileges randomly crossing pedestrians rushing to a class or a meeting or just generally rushing. Like any other campus, that is, if you can rid yourself of the sense that you are in the heart of the military-industrial complex, where the power of Big Science and its relationship to Big Industry seems so pervasive. And then you see this jolly tumble of big orange letters that in a surreal way spell out the name of this square that is not really a square but something of a stepped-back intersection. If you get out at the other end of the T station, where Microsoft makes its presence undeniably felt, you're reminded of the centrality of where you are, Silicon Valley notwithstanding, to all things digital. Of course, unmindful of the structured symbolism around th...

My favorite image of the struggling artist in the proverbial garret is of the young Christian (played by Ewan McGregor) of Moulin Rouge , with that dramatic, sweeping view of Paris from his tiny room in which he wrote feverishly and scripted the grand tragedy of his life. The garret of my imagination draws from a small litho-print in my Hyderabad University office, a stylized view from (what must be) a writer's window, where books turn into buildings and line the roads with their hardbound spines. It reminds me of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala rendering of A Room with a View , some mythical space in Rome, or maybe southern France, where one had no responsibility other than to be creative (whatever that means). And now here I am, in my own garret--not  quite so impoverished, not quite so struggling (well, writers and academics always struggle), and--need I say it--not quite so lost in love! But it certainly fits the definition of garret, the top floor or attic space of a house (w...

Okay, so I'm still a tourist here in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not UK). Or maybe we all are, or should be, at some level. If this means walking about with a sense of wonder, with a willingness to risk direct experience rather than busily building bubbles around ourselves, then it's a good way to be. It means never allowing the familiar to become boring; it means seeing things from new angles each time, allowing different shafts of light to illuminate a well-known object so that new angles, new curves, new hollows and depths, are revealed. The objects in my current environment are far from having acquired the familiarity of home. And I suspect I will leave at that point when they begin to settle into lines that are strange no longer. Practically every day, I run into things that delight, intrigue, and make me stop--sometimes to look more closely, or to ask questions about, or to simply watch and take it all in. The lunch hour on the margins of Harvard Yard on Shabbat eve ...

The Tech Centre at the Boston Public Library The entry hall in Harvard's Widener Library I'm carded! A sampling of riches One of my favourite childhood memories of summer in Secunderabad was being able to go to the City Central Library branch near Clock Tower and borrow books, week after week. The selection of children's books must have been minuscule compared to the wide range available today, and Young Adult was a category yet to be invented, but even so, I was happy enough with the rows of mystery books and school stories and the odd Ruskin Bond, all covered in an indestructible green rexine. And the library was a reasonably friendly space--at least that's how I remember it. Apart from this, if we wanted books, and if our parents could afford it, you went to Kadambi Bookstores or the small but busy Sri Rama Book Depot and picked up the latest Enid Blyton for Rs 2.50 or a Children's Book Trust publication for a couple of rupees. And there were ...