What are words worth?

--> It’s not supposed to be this way. But then, one way to look at it is--the way it is, is the way it’s supposed to be. Barbara Kingsolver, in what is one of my favourite books of all time, Poisonwood Bible , says (paraphrasing here) that if there is one thing that all cultures, everywhere wish, it is that the young should outlive the old. But we all know only too well that this is only a hope, and there is never any certainty about who departs first. This part week brought this home rudely, with two young people I knew passing away much, much before their time (and I wonder even as I write this, what is that hubris that suggests we know or understand what ‘their time’ might be?). One of the great joys and promises of working in a university is interacting with young minds that are full of ideas, plans and promise. While most of this engagement is transient, there are occasions where one forms connections that are more enduring, offering intellectual s

It’s hard to point to the exact moment when a place loses its strangeness and becomes home, when you can walk into the doorway of a previously unfamiliar room or apartment and feel like you know it: all the switches and plug points and creaky windows, the sound of concealed water pipes and the idiosyncracies of appliances, the smell of the upholstery and the texture of the walls. Or take the streets, where you go from being someone who pauses uncertainly at the pedestrian signal and watch what the others do, to confidently tapping the contraption on the pole like you’d done it since kindergarten. Or the café at the corner where you need to ask, in slow and halting foreign-speak, for the simplest beverage and a pastry whose ingredients are written into its name, but come to putting a couple of coins on the counter and picking up your café crema and walnut br ötchen. ... It’s a beautiful winter morning, crisp and blue, the kind that invigorates and makes me feel like it’s a

Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons --> This has been a depressing and confusing week, with the news having been mostly bad. The fact that I am far from the action and the hub of sentiment, makes it worse. Having to limit my discussions to the fickle forum that is social media leaves thoughts in a tangle, the anxieties stoked by those within my ideological circle and misgivings heightened by the few on my news feeds who express a contrary view and justify the actions that are causing distress. Like many of my friends, I retreat into a closed nest of words, written by those I believe have thought long and hard about such issues and seem to have the sort of wisdom that provides clarity, if not relief. One of the podcasts I was pointed to a while ago but that I got around to catching up only in the past two days is BBC’s Reith Lectures—often unfairly compared to their more glitzy younger cousin, the TED Talks. Named for the first Director General of the BBC, the lec