Stranger to fiction n fact

Is she an Emma?
not in the least!
to mine eyes though a feast,
to have met her is my Karma!!

Could she be another Tess?
Sure she has beautiful black tresses,
A chatterville, but certainly,
she is no Durberville!

Well, a Scarlett O'Hara perhaps?
ever ready for a row,
at the mere mention of tomorrow,
this miss holds no promise

May be an Anne?
for a fairy, she doesn't give a damn!

How about Elizabeth Bennet?
but for her catchword_ forget,
she comes close to,
Austen's lady in wit and humour too,

Then who is she?
From North or South?

Neither! not just to fiction,
to fact too, she's a stranger!!

Vanka __By Anton Chekhov

NINE-YEAR-OLD Vanka Zhukov, who had been apprenticed three months ago to Alyakhin the shoemaker, did not go to bed on Christmas eve. He waited till his master and mistress and the senior apprentices had gone to church, and then took from the cupboard a bottle of ink and a pen with a rusty nib, spread out a crumpled sheet of paper, and was all ready to write. Before tracing the first letter he glanced several times anxiously at the door and window, peered at the dark icon, with shelves holding cobbler's lasts stretching on either side of it, and gave a quivering sigh. The paper lay on the bench, and Vanka knelt on the floor at the bench.
"Dear Grandad Konstantin Makarich," he wrote. "I am writing a letter to you. I send you Christmas greetings and hope God will send you his blessings. I have no Father and no Mummie and you are all I have left."
Vanka raised his eves to the dark window-pane, in which the reflection of the candle flickered, and in his imagination distinctly saw his grandfather, Konstantin Makarich, who was night watchman on the estate of some gentlefolk called Zhivarev. He was a small, lean old man about sixty-five. but remarkably lively and agile, with a smiling face and eves bleary with drink. In the daytime he either slept in the back kitchen, or sat joking with the cook and the kitchen-maids, and in the night, wrapped in a great sheepskin coat, he walked round and round the estate, sounding his rattle. After him, with drooping heads, went old Kashtanka and another dog, called Eel, on account of his black coat and long, weasel-like body. Eel was wonderfully respectful and insinuating, and turned the same appealing glance on friends and strangers alike, but he inspired confidence in no one. His deferential manner and docility were a cloak for the most Jesuitical spite and malice. He was an adept at stealing up, to snap at a foot, creeping into the ice-house, or snatching a peasant's chicken. His hind-legs had been slashed again and again, twice he had been strung up, he was beaten within an inch of his life every week, but he survived it all.
Grandad was probably standing at the gate at this moment, screwing up his eves to look at the bright red light coming from the church windows, or stumping about in his felt boots, fooling with the servants. His rattle would be fastened to his belt. He would be throwing out his arms and hugging himself against the cold, or, with his old man's titter, pinching a maid, or one of the cooks. "Have a nip," he would say, holding out his snuffbox to the women.
The women would take a pinch and sneeze. Grandfather would be overcome with delight, breaking out into jolly laughter, and shouting:
"Good for frozen noses!"
Even the dogs would be given snuff. Kashtanka would sneeze, shake her head and walk away, offended. But Eel, too polite to sneeze, would wag his tail. And the weather was glorious. The air still, transparent. fresh. It was a dark night, but the whole village with its white roofs, the smoke rising from the chimneys, the trees, silver with rime, the snow-drifts, could be seen distinctly. The sky was sprinkled with gaily twinkling stars, and the Milky Way stood out as clearly as if newly scrubbed for the holiday and polished with snow....
Vanka sighed, dipped his pen in the ink, and went on writing:
"And yesterday I had such a hiding. The master took me by the hair and dragged me out into the yard and beat me with the stirrup-strap because by mistake I went to sleep rocking their baby. And one day last week the mistress told me to gut a herring and I began from the tail and she picked up the herring and rubbed my face with the head. The other apprentices make fun of me, they send me to the tavern for vodka and make me steal the masters cucumbers and the master beats me with the first thing he finds. And there is nothing to eat. They give me bread in the morning and gruel for dinner and in the evening bread again but I never get tea or cabbage soup they gobble it all rip themselves. And they make me sleep in the passage and when their baby cries I dont get any sleep at all I have to rock it. Dear Grandad for the dear Lords sake take me away from here take me home to the village I cant bear it any longer. Oh Grandad I beg and implore you and I will always pray for you do take me away from here or I'll die. . . ."
Vanka's lips twitched, he rubbed his eyes with a black fist and gave a sob.
"I will grind your snuff for you," he went on. "I will pray for you and you can flog me as hard as you like if I am naughty. And if you think there is nothing for me to do I will ask the steward to take pity on me and let me clean the boots or I will go as a shepherd-boy instead of Fedya. Dear Grandad I cant stand it it is killing me. I thought I would run away on foot to the village but I have no boots and I was afraid of the frost. And when I grow up to be a man I will look after you and I will not let anyone hurt you and when you die I will pray for your soul like I do for my Mummie.
"Moscow is such a big town there are so many gentlemens houses and such a lot of horses and no sheep and the dogs are not a bit fierce. The boys dont go about with the star at Christmas and they dont let you sing in church and once I saw them selling fish-hooks in the shop all together with the lines and for any fish you like very good ones and there was one would hold a sheat-fish weighing thirty pounds and I have seen shops where there are all sorts of guns just like the master has at home they must cost a hundred rubles each. And in the butchers shops there are grouse and wood-cock and hares but the people in the shop dont say where they were shot.
"Dear Grandad when they have a Christmas tree at the big house take a gilded nut for me and put it away in the green chest. Ask Miss Olga Ignatvevna tell her its for Vanka."
Vanka gave a sharp sigh and once more gazed at the windowpane. He remembered his grandfather going to get a Christmas tree for the gentry, and taking his grandson with him. Oh, what happy times those had been! Grandfather would give a chuckle, and the frost-bound wood chuckled, and Vanka, following their example, chuckled, too. Before chopping down the fir-tree, Grandfather would smoke a pipe, take a long pinch of snuff, and laugh at the shivering Vanka. . . . The young fir-trees, coated with frost, stood motionless, waiting to see which one of them was to die. And suddenly a hare would come leaping over a snow-drift, swift as an arrow.. .. Grandfather could never help shouting:
"Stop it, stop it . . . stop it! Oh, you stub-tailed devil!"
Grandfather would drag the tree to the big house, and they would start decorating it. . . . Miss Olga Ignatyevna, Vanka's favorite, was the busiest of all. While Pelageva, Vanka's mother, was alive and in service at the big house, Olga Ignatyevna used to give Vanka sweets, and amuse herself by teaching him to read, write and count to a hundred, and even to dance the quadrille. But when Pelageya died, the orphaned Vanka was sent down to the back kitchen to his grandfather, and from there to Moscow, to Alyakhin the shoemaker. . . .
"Come to me dear Grandad," continued Vanka. "I beg you for Christs sake take me away from here. Pity me unhappy orphan they beat me all the time and I am always hungry and I am so miserable here I cant tell you I cry all the time. And one day the master hit me over the head with a last and I fell down and thought I would never get rip again. I have such a miserable life worse than a dogs. And I send my love to Alyona one-eyed Yegor and the coachman and dont give my concertina to anyone. I remain your grandson Ivan Zhukov dear Grandad do come."
Vanka folded the sheet of paper in four and put it into an envelope which he had bought the day before for a kopek. ... Then he paused to think, dipped his pen into the ink-pot, wrote: "To Grandfather in the village," scratched his head, thought again, then added:
"TO KONSTANTIN MAKARICH"
Pleased that no one had prevented him from writing, he put on his cap and ran out into the sheet without putting his coat on over his shirt.
The men at the butcher's told him, when he asked them the day before, that letters are put into letter-boxes, and from these boxes sent all over the world on mail coaches with three horses and drunken drivers and jingling bells. Vanka ran as far as the nearest letter-box and dropped his precious letter into the slit. . .
An hour later, lulled by rosy hopes, he was fast asleep. . . . He dreamed of a stove. On the stove-ledge sat his grandfather, his bare feet dangling, reading the letter to the cooks. . . . Eel was walking backwards and forwards in front of the stove, wagging his tail. . .
-1886-

Britannica Online

Just now stumbled upon an excellent site. If you are interested in gaining a bird's eye view of western philosophy, this article might just be it.

Wartime Courage by Gordon Brown

The Telegraph has been publishing extracts from Wartime Courage by UK PM Gordon Brown. I must say, I do have a certain bias towards war stories, but still, this is one of the excellent pieces that I have read of late. Bridge, the bomb disposal expert, is one I like most in these extracts. Please do check it when you have the time. But why has Brown chosen to come up with this now at a time when his popularity is plummeting by the day? At a time when Britain is slowly pulling back its troops from Iraq? Whatever the intention behind the timing, this book is a must read even if a bit too lengthy__at least the extracts are. Of late, I have been a bit flippant. The last straw was my conversation with my cousin. I cannot resist taking a jab. a little penance is what I think is needed for my sake and others too. I am employing my time profitably in reading these extracts and keeping away from chats.

To the artful dodger

I am no prophet,
but lest u forget,
I say this,
to u miss

on the deal u did sign,
seal and deliver,
the benevolent angels,
did confer and proffer,
on that fateful day,
their approval,
in colours gay.

and so, we shall meet,
in days, weeks, months or years hence,
for good or ill,
with or without ur will

For that is divine will!!

A touch of love

The complete review's Review:
A Touch of Love is an unpredictable and interesting little book. Centered around long-time graduate student Robin Grant who can't seem to get his thesis done, Coe circles obliquely around his subject. The artful construction of the novel -- intricate without being irritatingly complex -- is one of the pleasures of the novel, Coe's writing another. There are four parts to the novel (and a postscript), covering a time frame from April to December of 1986. Each part includes a story written by Robin, short fictions read by the other characters in the hope or illusion of the stories shedding some light on Robin. The stories themselves are fine as well, not nearly as artificial as such an authorial trick usually winds up being. Both in them and in the rest of the narrative Coe's own authorial command is always convincing, only rarely slipping to where it might seem contrived. Robin seems to be have become more depressed as the novel opens, and an old classmate from university -- Ted, who married Katharine, the woman Robin believes he might have been meant for -- drops by for a visit. They used to be friends but now lead very different lives, and Coe adeptly shows how they have grown apart. Even their memories of the past differ. In this, the longest section of the book, Coe carefully builds up the background for the rest. Robin does not appear in the second section, a few months later, but we find out that he has been accused of an improper act. His lawyer reads one of his stories, and she -- herself another lost soul, in a marriage that is falling apart -- is ultimately convinced that Robin should change his plea from not guilty to one of guilty. It is as much a legal decision (as a first offender Robin will not be treated harshly if he pleads guilty) as anything, but the ramifications of her decision, which Robin will take as a sign that she has lost faith in him, are far greater than expected. The third section reverts to Robin again, and elaborates on his relationship with the foreign student Aparna, a friend with whom he has never quite become intimate. Displaced Aparna enjoyed brief popularity years earlier as an exotic appearance at the university, but she too wants a different role -- and she too is unable to finish her thesis, unable to meet those expectations her advisor has. (Aparna as stereotype is the book's greatest failing -- Coe does not entirely convince with this exotic/foreign mumbo-jumbo: it seems far too dated or provincial an outlook to be believable in 1980's England.) Robin again only figures peripherally in the last section as his friends and his lawyer try to make sense of how he finally chose to deal with his situation. There is another story of his, and again it yields some clues. The book is filled with lonely and lost people. It is about a search for love and a search for meaning, and many of the characters -- Robin, Aparna, his lawyer, most of his friends -- are too tentative and unwilling to grasp at the opportunities they have. Aparna writes the postscript, having fled from the university and her thesis, wondering whether she and Robin could have had a different sort of relationship. Coe offers no easy answers, and he evokes the fleeting and delicate fabric of love and its possibility extremely well. It is not your usual university tale of lost souls. Poignant, yes, but almost none of the characters are boringly self-pitying (as is the norm in such tales). We can understand most of Robin's frustration, and it touches us. It is a small and varied book, Coe showing off what he can do and building up a very satisfactory structure. A thoughtful novel, we recommend it quite highly.

The pleasure is all mine

I see u yet I see u not,
talk to u yet talk to u not,

for fear, my love
may come to naught

my aching heart doesn’t understand

ur coquettish art,

it throbs to ur tune,

waiting for ur boon.

stars no longer shine above me,

dark clouds hover above me,

but whatever u r,

in this rain, though am in pain,

the pleasure is all mine.

A pleasant encounter

I stood under a tree
watching a bee
that danced with glee
at a flower that offered
her honey for free

A rustling sound distracted me
I turned to see, it was She
our eyes met, my heart leapt
her smile let my mind drift

her entrancing touch, an ecstatic kiss,
caused in me ripples of bliss,
wish we were frozen in time,
intoxicating it is more than a bottle of wine

Ouch! an envious ant
on a jaunt, ruined a reverie
worth an eternity
all in a flash to face my wrath

I looked up to find her gone,
an inexplicable ache tugged at my heart,

but the busy bee still danced with glee
at the flower that offered her honey for free

A star from afar

Beneath the rippling waves of every kind,
I had a glimpse in my mind
of a woman so lovely,
she's almost holy.
May be I am too lonely,
a mere reflection
of my longing self,
thought I with a sigh.
But there she was
a star from afar
growing bright
by every night
within me and without,
to love and to be lost
in herself within myself
to time and to the world.

Cut the universe, cross the worlds

This 'Young Adult' novel, the first volume in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, is on its own a work of transcendent brilliance.
Northern Lights (published in America as The Golden Compass) has all the ingredients of a children's fantasy - a child protagonist, a naïve freshness of perception, a sense that the world grownups have created is unnecessarily twisted and cruel, all of these united in a harrowing educative quest tale - but Pullman manages also to make his story a surprising and very mature exploration of the nature of power politics, cultural differences, bureaucratic ideology, and, most importantly, the nature of the Soul. When one considers that this book is probably the most exhilaratingly inventive Fantasy novel since Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Pullman's importance for the genre begins to become clear.
The subsequent installments of His Dark Materials - The Subtle Knife (1997) and The Amber Spyglass (1999) - take the story of the sequence's protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, into a succession of universes other than her own; Northern Lights restricts itself to her native version of the Earth, which is intriguing enough as a beginning. Here, what is presumably the late Twentieth Century is menacingly archaic. Europe is still dominated by the Church; but, in a deft variation on the well-established alternate history scenario of the Catholic Church suppressing Protestantism and perpetuating its Torquemadian rule (used by Keith Roberts, Kingsley Amis, John Whitbourn, and sundry others), it is the Calvinists who have infiltrated and subverted Roman Catholicism. A puritanical Magisterium controls Christendom from Geneva; its agencies are in competition and conflict, allowing the Church's ultimate rulers to maintain the general balance (and field-test all of their options). To the East, Tartars still threaten the civilized European kingdoms; technology is out of the steampunk cornucopia: 'anbaric' power sources, 'photometry', steam-driven vessels, air travel by zeppelin. England is in many ways a police state, a realm of tradition and hierarchy, the 'King's party' a great political force. All of this is a lightly sketched but sinisterly appropriate backdrop to a superb adventure story.
Another of Pullman's very effective conceits is his shamanistic one of 'daemons': every human being in Lyra's world possesses an animal familiar that is in essence an externalized soul, an inseparable part of the self, which assumes a definitive shape only after adolescence. Disturbed by the theological implications of the interaction between this phenomenon and enigmatic elementary particles known as 'Dust', a quasi-scientific Church agency known as the General Oblation Board begins to kidnap children and conduct secret experiments upon them. The head of this organization, Mrs Coulter, is Lyra's mother; in Pullman's symbolic scheme, drawn overtly from Milton's Paradise Lost, she represents the often cruel and inflexible authority of God. Her former lover, her charismatic and amorally ambitious Satanic opposite, is Lyra's father, Lord Asriel, who has a dark project of his own. Partaking of both of their natures but implicitly transcending them as well, Lyra becomes incipiently and dangerously involved in the great feud between them, and this drives the headlong narrative of Northern Lights.
Consigned to the care of the Fellows and Scholars of a Gothically conceived Oxford College, Lyra, a wild, vivid, resourceful, mendacious, and captivating heroine, is drawn first into her father's academic intrigues and then into the GOB's conspiracy of kidnapping. She flees her mother's clutches, lives among gypsies of the rivers and fens, participates in a reckless rescue mission to Lapland, befriends an exiled warrior from the kingdom of the polar bears on Spitzbergen, experiences an Auschwitzian medical establishment from the inside, and designs and participates in an ingenious palace coup. This relentlessly paced progress to the northern edge of the world is also a cascade of wonders: a compass that measures Truth; a Romany state within the English state; the aforementioned polar bears, expert metallurgists and armourers; bizarre mergers of scientific theory with theology; witches who act as flying archers in battle; a city visible in the Aurora, the Northern Lights of the book's title. Pullman's inventive storytelling genius, which is expressed in rich, erudite, finely cadenced language, is enough to make this novel extraordinary; but its metaphysics carries it still further.
For an adult reader, a text like this has disagreeable features, notably obvious didacticism, which at times takes the form of homilies: Now listen, children, for the moral... But while he knows he must cater to that audience, Pullman does so on the whole unpatronisingly, indeed challengingly; he is fully capable of deeper intellectual implication. He is playing with John Milton's dark materials, with all their grounding in Biblical and Calvinist ontology and moral philosophy. And so dogmatic conceptions of God are interrogated, as is the magnetism of Satanic evil, so alluring to the end; models of political organization, hegemonic and pluralistic, mingle with the theology of free will and predestination; and accompanying, indeed springing from, this mixture is a very elegant discussion of the theoretical mechanics of alternate worlds. These meditations can only deepen as the sequels take Lyra into other Earths, including our own.
Northern Lights is an immediate, certain classic, head and shoulders above virtually any competitor. It demands, and more than repays, serious (and mature) attention.

__review culled from the net

Anne spelt with an e!

It was an ordinary evening. Having nothing better to do and time heavily hanging upon my hands, I prodded on through the rush hour traffic to the British Library. The fully stacked shelves with a whole host of unfamiliar titles was not exactly the kind of entertainment I was looking for. I turned my attention to the DVDs, most of which are similarly unfamiliar. The cases all proclaim the same: Horror of the Century, A Timeless Classic,--never before never again, yes I have seen them all. Hang on. My mocking eyes rested on a green case with an appealing pair of eyes, peering through the rack. Anne of Green Gables, emmy award winner. Yup. this might be it. I looked at the running time. 4 hrs. that's more in my line. I borrowed it and went home in anticipation of a pleasant evening. It turned out to be a delightful evening. The innocent Anne, played to perfection by Megan Follows, has since become one of my all time favourites and I have the eight-set pack of anne series. It is the story of an orphan girl and her adventures as she grows up under the care of the aged Marilla and Mathew Cuthbert. The landscapes of Prince Edward Island and Anne's dreamy romanticism blend well. Such a world doesn't exist outside. It can exist within and anyone shut out from such a beautiful realm is poorer any day.