Being part of any kind of sisterhood requires sacrifices. You are bound by some social law thingy to be there especially at time when others would rather not be there. From time to time your commitment is tested to the core. During a four hour sojourn at clifton photostat waiting for kAy's mini-thesis to get printed, to pass the time and effectively prevent myself from going insane, I wandered down to the stationery shop on the lower level to browse. (P.S: I love stationery shops especially ones stocked with a variety of pens) Anyhow, after spending a few minutes rummaging through pens and paper and examining a stapler or two, I chanced upon a 6 colour set of clay (plasticine in my childhood). Much to the amusement of the shop assistant, my much tired sister and my somewhat new husband, I kept myself constrcutively busy and them successfully enteratined with my rendition of "cute things to do with clay", encouraging audience participation by modelling the creations.
escape
Today was fabulous day in the library.I sat therereading, oblivious to the heat and bijli-goings, utterly lost in the wonder of words. Marvellously simple thoughts and ideas put into beautifully clear words with such depth that they just blew me away. So this excerpt I must share with the world."Why one writes is a question I can easily answer, having so often asked it myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me-the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own like a climate, a country, an atmosphere where I could breathe, reign and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That I believe is reason of every work of art. We also write to heighten our awareness of life. We write to lure, enchant, and to console others. We write to serenade. We write to taste life twice, once in the moment and once in retrospection. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak to others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled or restricted or lonely. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."- Anais Nin, from an essay titled "A New Woman"
build up.
The Karachi Carnage.
The birthday thoughts.
The random mish mash of life.
Piling work.
My design ideas.
Reading.
Plans.
Changes.
Holiday.
Clothes.
Home stuff.
I can't believe April is on its latter leg.
Didn't this year *just* start?
It seems to me that once life sets moving in a particular momentum, to try to slow it down can only result in trouble. In effect, things keep getting piled ontop of one another. Things you want to do. Things you want to do something ABOUT. Things you want to think. And before you know it the lower layers start gathering dust and the upper layers start becoming lower layers as more stuff comes up.
Conclusion: we will always be working on a backlog.
meeting names.
someone I know once asked me why bloggers have other names.
Why do we use words other than our names to depict who we are?
Rather harsh in his judgement, he asked what we all are trying to pretend to be and why we have to divulge personal thoughts and details of our lives under pseudonyms and nicknames to the whole world. I tried explaining that more often than not, it has nothing to do with blurry anonymity because we mostly know who each one is and we write for various reasons but his decided lack of comprehension explained something that i knew all along- you can't explain the blog world to someone who is not open to the idea.
So despite the evil forces of the universe not understanding this new way of shrinking our planet and encouraging some semblance of creative thought, this saturday at espresso, the blog world of nicknames came out alive as names got faces and faces got personalities in a meetup I cannot really do justice by writing about it- suffice to say, you just had to be there.
View from Across
Yesterday we took out an indian visitor to dinner at Nawab, after having been tipped off by a Hindu friend that they serve the best tawa vegetables there. After an excellent meal, we drove him to saddar for some kulfi. The entire evening was peppered with India-Pakistan comments and subtle comparisons from his recent visit to Lahore and my own visit to Mumbai last year.
I told him how much I liked the idea of developing small industries like they had and he loved the way junaid jamshed clothes have sequins within the work; he commented on how different the colour palette at Khaddi was from the FabIndia woven clothes while I talked about how good the double decker buses ads worked there. He marvelled the idea of a place like One potato, Two Potato and fell in love with the masala mayo fries. He wanted Ahmed ka achar to take back home and a cookbook on Pakistani dishes. I distinctly remember thinking that no one can cook vegetables like the Indians can. His shopping list included Hashmi Surma (of which he bought a whole sheaf for his wife)and I thought back to how we had gone all over the place looking for bindis and kurtis. As we drove across Saddar, he casually mentioned how impressed he was with how clean Karachi was and I almost laughed out loud, after recalling how we had gone on and on about how advanced the civic sense of Mumbai was.
All it takes is someone from across the border to love what you have on your side :)
Being part of any kind of sisterhood requires sacrifices. You are bound by some social law thingy to be there especially at time when others would rather not be there. From time to time your commitment is tested to the core. During a four hour sojourn at clifton photostat waiting for kAy's mini-thesis to get printed, to pass the time and effectively prevent myself from going insane, I wandered down to the stationery shop on the lower level to browse. (P.S: I love stationery shops especially ones stocked with a variety of pens) Anyhow, after spending a few minutes rummaging through pens and paper and examining a stapler or two, I chanced upon a 6 colour set of clay (plasticine in my childhood). Much to the amusement of the shop assistant, my much tired sister and my somewhat new husband, I kept myself constrcutively busy and them successfully enteratined with my rendition of "cute things to do with clay", encouraging audience participation by modelling the creations.
