WORDS

Have you ever been jealous of WORDS?

"The unit of language" is what the Oxford English Dictionary defines 'word' as. Have you ever felt that the word sometimes is more than the unit of language. They say that the meaning of a sentence is more than the sum of meanings of its words, but is the value of a word as good as its sentence?. I like to think otherwise, because words are just that WORDS. You cannot define a word, but yes, you can feel it, express using it and also play with it, but you can never quite define a word. This is where i tend to get very frustrated with these words. I can understand the sentence they are used in , I can understand why they used there, I can even understand what the word is supposed to mean, But i can never quite get across to knowing the meaning of the word.
I am quite sure you must have heard of 'CATCH 22' or 'MIDNIGHT's CHILDREN'. These books are literary legends and are already part of folklore. I took to reading these books recently and i have to say i was quite amazed at the usage of words in this book. The words themselves were not profound but the way they were used was mind-boggling. While heller uses his words in such a twisted sense that you feel a sense of sarcasm at every word you come acrosss, rushdie is more straight forward, but nevertheless, the thread of words he uses to describe situations and emotions is amazing. I take the instance of these books because they show you that the a sentence can only be connected by a thread and also give you a profoundness about its meaning [and also because these are the only 2 books i have read in the jouner].
Now coming to the jealousy part, i was mended and sometimes laughing at the sentences that i found in these books, But i never could get around the fact that they somehow made so much sense on the whole that all i could do was admire them, even though i couldn't understand them. This is what frustrated me to the hilt, these books had sentences so profound and yet the emotions came across so clearly that i was left confused. and it was all due to those 'UNITS', those nagging little things hanging around sentences when you read them. What did i do? Well i went back to my staple of fictious fiction.

Smells like Home

Many a times I wonder when people say that they don’t have a city they call home. Too much time away from home makes home itself a foreign place they say. I got an opportunity to experience this feeling (kind off) when I returned back to Bangalore after a while away.

I was really surprised at how things had changed around my house. The new buildings and shops that had come up, many of the old hangouts that had been remodeled. The more I strayed out of my house, the more I started to see how different things had become. I was beginning to wonder if the city had actually become so different in such a short time or was it just me.

That’s when i decided to take a bike ride across the city on a election Saturday afternoon. I started to observe the new buildings that had come up, the increase in traffic, the increase in temperature etc… But as I rode along, I started to encounter so many familiar things from my past expeditions along these roads. The faces of traffic cops were still recognizable, many of them were still at the same junctions. The condition of the roads had become better or worse but the curves of the roads were still the same, I still knew when to overtake where and how fast to take a turn.

Nothing can beat the green road drives in Bangalore. I could still go onto the Asoka pillar road and feel the same breeze blowing in my face. I could still ride through the roads of JP Nagar recognizing the smell of the stalls on the roadside. The roadside stalls hasn't changed, the galli ka dosa camp hasn’t changed. Even the traffic signal remained true and loyal. I still could time myself to go through J.C.Road through town hall without catching a Red.

I was feeling a little good after my drive around when I stopped at a stall to buy some stuff back home, and I talked to the guy in mixed Hindi and English. I had never spoken to a stall guy in English, leave alone Hindi, before when I was in Bangalore. Maybe it was not the city, maybe i had changed in all this time. But it felt really good to finally be back in a place which you could feel like HOME.