Book Recommendations (2011)

Fashion

1. Tim Gunn & Kate Moloney, A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style

Feminism

1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Nonfiction

1. Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math

Novel and Novella

1. Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
2. Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing…
3. Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince
4. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
5. Lauren Weisberger, Chasing Harry Winston

Photography

1. Andy Warhol, America

Physics, Mathematics & Related Academic Pursuits

1. Mary L. Boas, Mathematical Methods in the  Physical Sciences
2. Kenneth Hoffman & Ray Kunze, Linear Algebra
3. L. D. Landau & E. M. Lifshitz, Course of Theoretical Physics, Volume I: Mechanics
4. Michael Nielsen & Isaac Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
5. Ramamurti Shankar, Principles of Quantum Mechanics

Poetry

1. Agha Shahid Ali, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems
2. E. E. Cummings, Selected Poems 1923-1958
3. Eunice de Souza, A Necklace of Skulls: Collected Poems
4. Ted Hughes, Poems Selected by Simon Armitage

Psychology

1. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Roman à Clef

1. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
2. Lauren Weisberger, The Devil Wears Prada

Short Story

1. Raymond Carver, Collected Stories
2. Ismat Chughtai, The Quilt: Stories
3. Anais Nin, Delta of Venus

Self-centeredness

Meet me in a bookstore. Spend twenty minutes gushing about your favorite writer. Make me feel ecstatic about adding another name, another experience to my list of interesting encounters. That’s right, sugar. I collect memories.

Bump into me on the metro. Act like we’re still close friends. Tell me I’ve grown prettier. Talk about your dead mother and your boring job. Tell me your story: I’ll sympathize. Give me your number. We will never call each other. I will delete it in a week. You will probably do the same. Give me a big hug before leaving. Tell me you miss hanging out with me. Leave me feeling important and kind.

Die. I will be the protagonist of this story, of course. I will push daisies: ping ping PING. What, doesn’t that work here? Such a shame. I will write letters to you then, questioning everything. I will figure things out, probably become wiser.

Tell me you love me. Look at me and say my name. I will push you away. You will fade until you only exist in a story on my computer. I will get something out of it.

Change. I will start needing a filter in my head to speak to you.

Hesitate. I will gush.

Give me a name. I will tell you all my secrets. The burden will be yours; try not to flinch.

Don’t let me in. I will become an extreme version of you. I will become an unperson, undetectable.

Show me what it feels like to be you. Give me your eyes. And your ears, nose, tongue, skin. I will carry you around: everywhere I go, always. Your world will exist right inside mine, secure and magical. Always magical.

Cling to me. I will cling to you. We will become good friends. And then I will get bored.

.

When I was six, I believed I was the only real person on the planet. I was wrong: you are real too. I thought it was all about me, the whole drama.

Well, isn’t it?

Goodbye, Class Clown.

You sweet, funny, goofy, crazy thing, you’re dead. So people can die at 21. You just did.

The worst part? I remember all your jokes but I’m scared I will forget what it felt like to laugh at them. Once I do — once we all do — you will be…gone.

We will miss you. But that doesn’t matter to you: you don’t exist anymore. Shit, dude.

Change #5

1. Get up at 5 am everyday.
2. Go for a walk. Listen to music. Hum, skip, and look at the sky.
3. Sing in the shower.
4. Make my own breakfast. Eat slowly.
5. Read before leaving for college.

This and that.

Earlier this month I made this blog private (again), promising myself to maintain a diary/notebook. That didn’t work out. I must write for you. I need to write for you. Don’t tell me your name, don’t contact me. Don’t ever contact me. I have best friends who know me inside out — they have the front seat tickets to my show — but even they don’t know the things you do. You and I, we’re a special part of each other’s lives: we’ve talked about life and love, about our quirks, and about the particular affliction of being the people we are; you once translated one of my favorite sentences in all the 11 languages you speak; I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life with you; because of you I love looking into mirrors; you told me about books I would never have heard of otherwise, and introduced me to some of my favorite writers. I will write a diary — I will write it for you. Because most things don’t feel real unless I tell you about them.

I’m back.

.

I’m 21.86. I feel old. I’m more attractive than I was at, say, seventeen — but I’m too old. I’ve never chewed ice cubes in December, I’ve never had lemonade in a sunflower field, and I’ve never traveled for music. I wonder if I’ll ever feel young and free and alive enough to do these things.

.

Sometimes I just want to run away and flip burgers somewhere and save a bit of money to buy an ordinary book and feel happy as hell after buying it because it would count as a luxury. Flipkart stops being fun after a while.

.

I was bored out of my head this morning and I kept thinking: damn, I think I need a bad haircut.