To another year

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself." 

~ Neil Gaiman

Wishing you and yours a wonderful 2014. 

May you find love and sunshine wherever you go. 

To newness

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s what part of it means to be alive. But inside our heads — at least that’s where I imagine it — there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let fresh air in, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.”

— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

And with that brave sentiment borrowed from Murakami's ethereal prose and this feisty cluster of palash (how very aptly named 'flame of the forest'), I wish you all a wonderful new year filled with much love, laughter, and sunshine. Stay blessed.

A new dawn

Dear friends,

As the stars of the old night trail away

and give way to another promising dawn...

I wish you all things happy and wonderful

in this new year.

Love,

me.

Remembering resolutions

"For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice."

~ T.S. Eliot

Just five more days rumbling away for the old, haggard year to end. This morning I felt that bothering impatience, the sudden sluggish pace of something that inches towards its completion. Like the traveler who travels resolutely for miles and days, but feels depleted of all zeal when just steps away from his destination. By November I could already feel this year was history, but now it seems as if the time has stood still. How awfully slow the minutes crawl and for what! Shouldn't a handful of days pass by in a wink? Strange are such philosophical transactions, often questioned but always unanswered.

The time has come to look back at the colourful mosaic of flashbacks that this year has been, at all the possible permutations and combinations of the laughs and the trials. Then there's the rampant rummaging for resolutions (I heart alliterations, by the way!). I, for the record, have never been faithful to one. If I was, by now I would have - completed a significant part of my research plans, lost oodles of weight, written something staggeringly brilliant, been in touch with my singing side, and even read the Bhagavad Gita! Instead I chose to remain mediocre and reign as the undisputed queen of procrastination forever. I am just not capable of something so spectacularly life-transforming and rule-governed, you see.

But come the new year and I do have plans to work on a list. And hopefully it won't be another of my usual Bridget Jones rigmarole. The mantras that I intend, and quite vehemently this time, to stand by are:

1. Must decide on a suitable author/area for my Ph.D by February

2. Give meaning and matter to a bunch of randomly scribbled pieces

3. Chalk out a proper timetable for the haphazard yoga mornings

4. Boost my fiber intake

5. Be less obsessive-compulsive

6. Curb the monstrous Virgo in me

7. Pick the roses and ignore the thorns

8. Read, read and read

9. Blog regularly

10. Stick to all of the above!

Season's greetings

A big fat toast to another year of new hopes, new joys and new beginnings.

A very Happy New Year to all. Stay happy, stay warm!