Just a thought...

Yea....I have neglected blogging and my favorite crew of people here for quite some while now. It has been quite a quagmire ...you know the kind, when you turn back to "real" academics after a long break and you find a big hole between you and the last page you left at, and then you start picking up lose threads and start darning up the hole in your attempt to build the bridge and get some sort of foothold back into the field . A lot was written, a lot theorized and a lot researched after the liberal humanism at which I had left, and have since been picking up again ; rolling in 'structural' maze on to 'deconstructing' and stepping over 'interpellation' and 'hegemonic' 'discursive practices' I have started to 'culturally materialize' into the ever vast postmodern era , which itself is again a transgressive resistance to specialized categories.

So I am somewhere which is actually nowhere (technically speaking). Now I won't elaborate on that one guys; if you need an elaboration, please go and read Baudrillard and about the fight that ensued between Lyotard and Habermas !

We has a lecture in our department today, that threw us back somewhere in 1611, where the visiting professor ( Prof. Gordon) from England was elaborating on the beauty of the rhythms and the monosyllabic simplicity of the authorized version of King James Bible. He read quite a few passages stressing the intonations with an up and down wavy movement of his delicate hands commenting upon ( for eg.) Ruth's address to her  mother in law ( telling us how he had it read at his wedding ceremony at the church some 49 years ago) etcetra etcetra! He said that King James's set of translators had worked very hard to 'beautify' the text, so as to make it recite able " down to the ploughmen and even the women" [ ! ]  so as to be easily understood and liked by one and all.

As far as I know about translation and translating, there is a process which Lawrence Venuti described as "domesticating and foreignization" which involves plucking up a meta narrative from its own cultural context and making it fit into the cultural context of the foreign language in which it gets translated to. Secondly, If a translation is beautiful it can never be faithful and vice versa.

In lieu of the above statement; I wonder if the King James authorized version has been as 'beautifully' translated as Prof. Gordon made it sound, how faithful had been that translation...

Cousins

My son says that his stubble grows to this length within five hours after his last shave. His cousin ( sitting next to him) bears witness to it. Do I smell a colonial cousin conspiracy here???

:S

A long time really... and although there has been a whirlwind of half formed posts in the mind, nothing ever materialized as you can see here. The reason? (shrug) Confusion, lot of confusion and some loose end threads that get so much entangled as I try to pick them, that my 'thought- arms' have begun to ache.

I tell you, never try to go back and settle in a place that you left behind twenty years ago, its not just merely going back into time machine; its more like taking endless rounds in a nightmare machine. You come across faces which somehow seem to represent Time and its excruciating lapse a palpable experience. A surrealistic change materialized, more presentational than representational...

Every day, I come across faces, faces that I have seen and known in the past, faces that had seemingly disappeared from memory, but had actually gone to settle in some limbo of this devil mind ( yes folks, mind is a devil really, but I would have to deal with that subject in another post (psst...remind me later)) so that they could actually raise their head in the future in teasing disturbing fragmented figments.

Now, the problem is not the faces really, as is the struggle to recollect. When faces seem familiar, and you try hard to recognize and can't, you start feeling panicky, you feel that both your sight and memory have started failing . The very sense of familiarity without a name, or the partial recovery of the past ('concretized-as-faces') adds to the torment of nostalgia. Shades of skepticism about the self creep in and you start hoping that they do not become shadows...

Sometimes the failure to recollect threaten to extend so infinitely, that you feel that you have entered a ghost valley of eternal silence. They all pass in front of our eyes, so quickly, one after another, that before you can clearly 'visualize' one, the next has already replaced and stepped in. Its a sea of flow, not just a few.

People have really not moved out of this place it seems. " Kooein ke meindak"( frogs of a well) we would call such a motley crowd in my language ; the ones that have never been or have desire to be out there to see that there is another vast world beyond their ghetto.

Crap!

See where the frustration leads to!? You start blaming the people (read faces) for your own memory failure! What  does one do in such a situation, save seeking consolations like blaming the corporeal decay factor of the 'familiar - unfamiliar'?

Time Flies :)

Friday Flash 55ve Fiction ( Beast Fable # 7) Even Tigers don't kill when not hungry!

Fox and Lion enter a restaurant.

Fox: (Signaling to a waiter) I 'd like to have ten buffalo wings served on my plate.

Waiter: Ok. And what would your companion have sir?

Fox: O he is not hungry. If he were, do you think you would be here... or I would be here ordering for food?


(Inspired by Mark's   Scarring the Light Blue Sky

Friday Flash 55 : Misery of Miserly(Beast fable # 6)

Pig:(lamenting to Cow): How's it that people always praise you as gentle;when you only give them milk and cream? I give much more like bacon, ham, bristles and they pickle my feet.Yet I'm unpopular.They even use my name as an abuse.

Cow:(Musing) Hmmm...perhaps it's because I give while I'm still alive...

Rest in Peace Z

With utmost sorrow I mourn the loss of my sister Z two months ago, to cancer. I have been searching for words to express memories, but words fail me somehow yet still. I can only say Rest in Peace Z.