Foreword & Aftword

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Yes, it's official! There is a booklet in print of about 62 pages titled: "Woolgathering". It is a compilation of about 30 blog pieces written over the past 3 years.

Aniket wrote a Foreword and I wrote the reason behind this crazy thing. 'Thing' is a nice buzz-word (lazy man's first refuge).

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Foreword


When I laid my hands on ‘A Writer's Nightmare’ by R K Narayan, I was so enthralled by the personal essay I became utterly incapable of producing a single line of serious prose. It took a bout of tonsillitis to get me really down in the dumps, so down, so low, I ended up reading Kafka's ‘The Castle’ weeks before joining IIT Kharagpur, where my entire experience of having to meet elusive professors for any purpose seemed nightmarish.


When, nearly three years later, I first summoned the courage to enter GPS' office to debate a physics paper, the localization of interference fringes was foremost on my mind, yet thirteen years on it seems to me that physics was only an excuse for my running into him. For in all these years our discussions have quickly digressed at first to the story behind the Poisson spot and subsequently to cabbages and kings of various descriptions.


To quote one of his favorite authors, James Thurber, “Everyone should once in a while ask himself where he came from, what he is running away from, and whereto”.


And when I put this question to myself, I realize that for an inveterate escape artist like me the list is rather long. Fortunately or otherwise, I am not alone. There have been others, from Kalidasa's yaksha to Thurber's Mitty, from Maugham's Lotus Eater to Narayan's Swamy. One could be forgiven for imagining that such people were only the stuff of fiction, but to deny the dormant woolgatherer within us his or her due is probably unforgivable.


So, welcome to the world of daydreams pleasant that only makes the harsher detention camp of life a little more bearable, at the very least.



Aniket Basu

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A Curious Proposal


A business portal coaching students online for GRE, CAT, GMAT desperately wanted new ‘passages’ suitable for Reading Comprehension. They asked me if I could write some ‘original’ passages of ‘high quality’ (for money). I replied that they could use about a couple of dozen prose pieces that I had already posted on my blogspot. A week later, the Boss reverted to me saying that they found my pieces meeting their high standards of originality and quality, but there is a catch: “They are easy to read”. He wanted me to write new passages with abstract ideas, tough vocabulary and hidden depths of meaning. I said sorry, it is like asking Ravi Varma to paint in the Cubism style of Picasso. Mine is Calendar Art. When I paint a picture, a child of 3 should be able to look at it and exclaim: “Elephant!”, and not wonder if the cloud mass hides a camel, weasel or even a whale (like Hamlet and Polonius). He then requested me to permit his team of editors to rework my blog pieces into passages suitable for them. I told him to go ahead and feel free; but I would be curious to read his team’s end-products. I am sure I won’t hear from my Boss again.


These pieces were written to give an agreeable job to my Devil’s Workshop; and also to ‘forget’ (till I forget what it was I wanted to ‘forget’ in the first place). From IIT KGP freshers to knowledgeable IAS Officers quite a few found them diverting. But for one or two, none of these pieces have any ‘sentiment’. They are all heartless. I thought I better compile them before they are lost, just for the fun of it.


I thank Aniket for his telling Foreword; and my son Shreenath and daughter-in-law Sailaja for gifting me a blogspot and a keyboard to play with, and a printer too!


Who knows? A Shakespeare Sonnet may emerge if I live a million years!


G P Sastry

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