amazing grace

i remember singing this with jaya in her house one night

Amazing grace; How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The world shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun refuse to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Shall be forever mine.

When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.

i <3...

in 2009, i visited many cities...

ahmedabad, where i became a movie star


igatpuri, where i thought and thought but then forgot

(photo by scratchpost)

kolad, where i wasn't afraid of water


atlanta, where my favorite socks tore


cincinnati, where i was quite quiet


new jersey, where i wasn't


new york, which i really, truly do heart


delhi, where i ate six cuisines in two days


ambala, which went by in a blur


amritser, where i'm convinced my mom willed me to go.


chandigarh, where i was too sleepy and hungry to take pictures.

mandi, where i lived someone else's life for a night


manali, like goa but with mountains

(photo by scratchpost)

jispa, which was cold cold cold awesome cold


leh, o leh.


bhopal, where Y got hitched at last!


some of these cities became my friends (wazzzaaaa manali), some remained a distant acquaintance (ciao amritser). some were simply like coming home (here's looking at you new york). but of all these, it was only in leh, up in the mountains, the farthest, highest i’ve ever been, where i slept a deep, sound, calm sleep. and i think how well i sleep in a place is always an accurate measure of its love for me. so thank you leh for the love, for keeping me warm and putting me to sleep with the flowers at your window and the mountains at your doorstep.

before the year is over, though, i am returning to visit an old friend i haven't seen in too long.

goa


i think i ran all around the world just so i could come back to you at the end of the year. it’s just you and me again, goa, and i have a feeling my sleep is going to be just fine.

wearing a conversation

i am in deep love with the feeling of wearing skirts
the long voluminous kind that go down to your shins, swirl around
and announce your arrival with soft swishy sounds
like shy church bells or old trees
and when you have to sit, you are involved in this sitting
and it is a grand sitting
with lengths of fabric to arrange, display
just so.
then they busy themselves, my skirts
chatting with the small bones in my ankles
dancing around my tattoos
playing with my silver anklets
these skirts of mine that are always Up To Something
sometimes get so chatty and bold
brushing up against strangers' legs when all
i am trying to do is walk away quietly.
but sometimes they fall into strange, limp silences
folds immersed one in another
many random wrinkles
going darker, falling into themselves
turning into the mere weight
of cloth
yes i do love that wearing my skirts
is like wearing a conversation
that begins, "dear world,
this is how you made me feel today..."

o i know how hard you try

on the bus, i met a boy who tries so very hard. things get tough but he wears jeans with determined creases and a black shirt. when he sat down next to me, i said almost out loud, i understand. i know how hard things get, and i know how hard you try. but his phone rang just then and the moment belonged to he who had selected it first. his mother, i explained. she calls every two hours and he patiently tells her exactly where he is.

i adjusted the AC duct. he opened and closed a book. we were two people traveling into the city together and i held his hand. he didn't turn. he held my hand back. warm, small. behind us, cable TV wires and crows rolled past like many pictures.

his stop came a few minutes before mine. i didn't know his voice but i knew his hand. and when he turned around, my face was a silhouette framed in the sky.


(experiments with flash fiction)

pune

i've been accepted to attend the open space writing masterclass next month in pune.
looking for a cheap place to stay/couchsurf there for a few days every week for 3 weeks.
also looking for nice places to sit, eat, people watch, write!
any info, let me know!

Ps, i love you

diti's teaching me photoshop!
my first assignment was to take this picture she shot and do "something" with it.
i used all my available skills to do this :) (you need to click for bigger version to read)
not entirely happy with it, but hopefully i'm getting there!

how to turn a human into a personal plaything

my zorro is a weird wonderful little doggie-boy
who spends pretty much his entire day either sleeping
eating
or trying to con people into letting him come up to my room
when someone does bring him up here
all he does is sit in a corner by the door as if he's been punished
and makes us feel all guilty
then we rush to open the door and he goes charging back downstairs
and repeats the whole exercise a few minutes later
i'm not sure what it all means
maybe he has goldfish memory
or maybe it's his way of keeping us on our toes
by keeping us in a constant state of self doubt
he's either completely brainless or an evil genius
three years and i haven't figured it out
o he's evil genius alright...


ladies and gentlemen, the face of evil...

collab

i've always been fascinated by collaborative projects of any kind. fascinated and trepidated, to use a big word incorrectly. they always get me happyexcited, but i must admit on some days and with certain kinds of tasks i'm not too good at working in teams. maybe that's the side of me that emerges when i edit. i kind of like the loneliness of the work. i like being able to sit in a corner and bury myself in something for days. and then i like being able to emerge from it, as if breaking water, dying to talk, share, meet people. and then go back into it when my batteries run out. that's probably also the introvert in me talking. (reminds me of this piece i found via rands on twitter. mostly true but for the "exuding calm" part. if anything introverts exude awkward restlessness, i feel).

so i felt a bit understandably shaken when i came across bite-size edits (all hyphenated and all!), a collaborative editing project. well, proofreading is the better word. but that's meant to be a solitary job, i damn near wailed when i saw this. and in the next instant thought, but that's how people used to think about writing once upon a time too. right? and about a whole lot of things that are being done in a collaborative way today.

i know this discussion is very old school web, circa 2005, but having been in such situations before, i can't help thinking editing is something best done by a single person, or at least a select group of people carefully coordinating with each other. and proofreading even more so. should the compound adjectives be hyphenated? is it british or american grammar? is there an oxford comma? these are the kind of answers style guides offer, the kinds of decisions arrived at after some amount of discussion. and some might argue readers don't care about this stuff being inconsistent, only editors do, but truth is a reader will notice inconsistent punctuation and poor formatting. no not consciously. very few will say, "o this semicolon is incorrect and look no indent before this one paragraph!" but these inconsistencies make an overall impression on the reader's mind that he can't quite specify but simply feels.

reminds me of when i first started working in digital and would often find myself saying things to designers like, "i'm not sure, there's something about this page, it just doesn't work," and only later learned to say, "well the form fields are all different sizes and the text isn't aligned and the footer's position changes from page to page by a few pixels." i couldn't quantify it, but i knew something wasn't quite right.

so my worry with collaborative projects is with these not-quite-rights.

but there are two things here. one, the collaborative model lends itself to to some projects very well. crowd sourcing is sufficient proof of this and i don't need to editorialize. and two, no collaboration is 100% collaborative. the line's usually always drawn somewhere. there is often clarity between the input of different participants. and someone usually cracks the whip. and that's all i'm asking.

rant complete.

mnml

i've become addicted to these three new tools literally within minutes of discovering them. loving the new minimalistic wave of software and tools appearing everywhere (all slightly apple-y in nature, and that is in no way a complaint). they're usable, pretty, and also free, which always helps. sorry, i'm poor.

the first is a software i've been aggressively selling on twitter for a few weeks now. ommwriter is currently a mac-only (but soon coming to pc) writing software. i know, such an abused term that is. but this seriously works. you don't even have to use it to know it works, just watch this video. so simple and pretty i almost cried.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

favorite feature: ambient key clicks that give all the pleasure of a typewriter with all the beauty of a mac. i love number 5 the most.

next is a browser-based app (yay for cloud) with a very clever name. teuxdeux is everything i was looking for. everything in the to-do tool category that is. again, just watching the demo is enough to know i'm right. i'm right.

TeuxDeux Demo from TeuxDeux on Vimeo.

favorite feature: the "someday" bucket :)

lastest (and i'm afraid to say leastest but definitely worth a mention) is scribbles. i heard of this through sam brown, mister exploding dog, who apparently uses it to make some of those scaryamazing characters. this one has fewer features than ms paint, but the ones it has are the ones it needs.

psst. teuxdeux was designed by swissmiss who's threatening to turn it paid soon. at which point i'll go back to covering my desk in post its.

and when ommwriter becomes unaffordable i think i'll just have to switch careers.

broke my phone :(

but look how pretty it looks!