Long Paths & Short Cuts

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Spring is here. Advertized by Valentine's Day and Saraswati Puja and sparrows making love.

Talking of love, it is ultimately about proposals and disposals. 

Way back in the 1850s in Boston our Autocrat (OWH) had this quaint way of doing it to the schoolmistress in his boarding-house where he talked and talked for 300 pages and more.

It all started with an innocent enough walk:

---Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?---I said to the schoolmistress.

[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,---as I suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary she turned a little pale,---but smiled brightly and said,---Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards her school.---She went for her bonnet.---The old gentleman opposite followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow. Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet, and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

This is the shortest way,---she said, as we came to a corner.---Then we won't take it,---said I.---The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was ten minutes early, so she could go round...

...When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask roses (on her cheeks) I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to  take a stroll like this every morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again...

 

...It was on the Common we were walking. The mall, or boulevard of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the question,---Will you take the long path with me?---Certainly,---said the schoolmistress,---with much pleasure.---Think,---I said,---before you answer: if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!...The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,---the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree.---Pray, sit down,---I said.---No, no, she answered, softly,---I will walk the long path with you!  

---The old gentleman who sits opposite me saw us walking, arm in arm, about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,---"Good morning, my dears!"

Oh, come, how very romantic and how silly that was!

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And here is a proposal and its disposal in a delightful Subhani cartoon on DC of February 13, 2013:

This girl in the cartoon is sitting by her friend on a park bench and asking him to (apparently) marry her quickly.

The caption reads:

"Marriage? Wait one more day. The Sena activists will get us married free of cost!"

And here is the followup a day after the Valentine's Day in ToI front page:

Hyderabad: Right-wing groups Bajrang Dal and VHP activists who donned the garb of moral police and patrolled the city streets on the occasion of Valentine's Day on Thursday actually ended up playing match-makers to five couples who appeared to face opposition to their alliance back home...

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Who Killed Who Please?

DC Thursday 14 February 2013, OP-ED

...The "alienation" that is spoken of flows from the idea that "India" has battered Kashmir. From this public narrative is concealed the well-documented fact that extremist organisations and the foreign terrorists they have hosted have killed many times more local Muslims than the Indian security forces...

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