The Most Dangerous of All Lies

I've been re-reading my copy of The Satanic Verses; not because of the whole hullabaloo that's erupted in India conveniently before the state elections. I'm a slow reader, I've spent over a month poring through these pages, well before Rushdie announced his intent to visit Jaipur. That being said, I don't want to write a discourse about censorship vs free speech. 

The strange thing about this book is that it has a fantastic sense of imagery. Whatever you hear about the Satanic Verses in the public domain is always about the controversial chapters. The ones where he blasphemes like crazy. But there is so much more to this book. The first time I read it, I used to get these dreams with weird figures dancing all over. I remember I sat up in the middle of the night a couple of times , unable to understand what I just dreamed. This time has been relatively mellow. Amongst the parts that usually get left out of a public discourse, are these little gems I found as I started on Page 305 a few minutes ago-

"...her father Otto Cone, the art historian and biographer of Picabia, had spoken to her in her fourteenth and his final year of 'the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives', which was, in his opinion, the idea of continuum. 'Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straitjacket tailor'..."

"...Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can't ask for a wilder place..."

A book worth picking up, where legal; not just for the blasphemous parts.

The Sun is the same in a relative way...

...but you're older.

Fare thee well, 2011. Like most other things last year, my regular New Year's Eve post didn't make it on time. The reason I pick those lines up from one of my favourite Pink Floyd songs is the fact that that song was central to my life last year, especially towards the end. In the beginning there was plenty of it, somewhere down the middle I was wasting a lot of it, and towards the end, I was scrambling to save as much of it as possible, just so I could spend those precious few minutes with the people I love. All said and done, it treated me well in 2011. It showed me sights, it made me hear voices and granted me a fair degree of professional success. The beauty about the passage of time, is that it never lets you stay satisfied with what it has brought you. It continues to flow, and you submit yourself to wanting more and more out of life. But without that, I guess there'd be no joy to watching time fly right by. There would be no challenge, and I wouldn't like a life without a challenge to keep it going. So I begin 2012 with a new set of challenges to face, a new list to scratch stuff out of, and quite surprisingly, no Kappal Antry quips (I was tempted to call them jokes).

I read this PhD Comic recently, according to which I'd be classified as a weirdo (by a long shot) for wishing my readers (the very few of them that might glance this way) a happy new year three weeks into it. But I'm well beyond the point of being classified that way, let alone by a webcomic. So, happy new year folks! Hope it's great for you and for me!

The story continues in 2012...