Mundane Musings

Last week I got caught in the mother of all jams. In all my life of riding my bike I am yet to have come across one that physically sapped me like the one I endured that day, on my way to office. I can safely say that the speedometer refused to climb above 10km/hr for a stretch of 6 kms. As I sat on my bike, fuming and mentally cursing no body in particular, I thought about ways to keep myself occupied. If it was another lucky day I’d have had my mp3 plugged to my ears rendering soulful songs. But alas! When this super infuriating jam was to take place how in the world could fate have rewarded me with a comfortable portal that’d transport me to another blissful world? So I sat on my bike, studiously avoiding glances of curious fellow travelers who seem to think the best way to beat the jam is to look at what people were doing while waiting out the clearance of congestion. So I decided to watch the vehicles instead. Lo and behold I saw an impressive dark blue Nissan Xtrail parked next...

Oh boy, the joy of reading a good book! Felt that a couple of weeks back and still feel the glorious warmth filling me up like a good movie could or even good sex! The book in question is Khaled Hosseini’s – The Kite Runner. I don’t read tomes which are too serious or which ponder over the philosophy of life and such. And I stay away especially from books which proclaim self improvement tips or the how-to –types. My kind of reading veers alarmingly from pithy strong romance to some good serious fiction. I am quite partial to reviews written by my favorite critics, leaving the job of keeping abreast with the myriad books being published per month and deciding which ones are a good read, to them. So it was, that I sat down with the Kite Runner one lazy afternoon and was tugged and pulled to great heights like a kite, by the skilful writer. That it was his first book and that he could write it with such simplicity and understanding amazed me. The characters in the novel are so real that...