First Morning in SF :
There is no greater happiness than meeting your bestest friend after 5 long years and eating your heart out of Bhel Puri and Sarvana Bhavan specialities.
And seeing the first snowfall ever of your life as soon as your plane arrives into the terminal.
And sleeping in after girlish laughs and a warm cigarette, knowing you did not have to get up early, but when you finally did manage to shake off the blankets and step out to see the sunlight that is getting colder and colder, you would be greeted with the Californian peaks around you.
San Francisco is being so nice!
Truth be told, I started this blog a couple of days ago and it read something like this -
'The light outside is tender and the library is dim and silent. My head though echoes with uncomfortable, tangled up threads.
It feels like I am lying on the shore and the storm has passed, yet the waves tease my feet and I cant still afford to get up and walk farther away. The sky seems overcast and I am warned of another impending storm, but all I do is lie still and make up sentences, trying hard to make sure that they are laden with meaning.'
'Drab drab drab! Why so sad??'
One of my friends asked me after reading. A couple of them asked the same thing, actually, with regard to some of the previous posts as well, but only those who were really close to my life too.
When I had other people read it, sadness was the last thing they saw.
Makes me wonder about the communicative power of language. I am finding it increasingly vague, formless; it cannot stand on its own feet without the support of the actual 'you' or the imagined 'you'.
It is the writer that gives it its (other) meaning.
A hat is definitely a hat always, but it is the writer that makes it sit either on someone's head strolling through tropical sunshine, or in a damp hanger in a cold room.
So you have the actual meaning, and the assumed meaning. (Not sure if 'assumed' is the right word here).
It is kind of like our lives - What it really is, what we assume it to be, and what we portray it to be.
(The air seems to be getting too complicated around here now!).
But when it comes to Art, how honest is too honest ?
My professor back in London had once asked me 'Can you afford not to be honest in art?'
What is it that draws the difference between an autobiography and a fiction, and what defines that which lies somewhere in between both? Is it ever possible for a writer, or any artist, to write or create beyond their experience?
How do they do it?
Because of late, every time I start reading a book, I immediately Google the author's background too. And almost always, (at least) the first book is startlingly similar to their deepest and most profound experiences and their immediate backgrounds.
But coming back to the communicative power of words - yes each has its own meaning and that can't be changed, but there is a vulnerable part in them that opens up and lets its blood flow in unknown veins as well. There is a part of them that is always attached to the writer, whether that connection is seen by everyone or not, and there is a part that is always attached to the reader.
It is more like the the readers are creating the story as they read it.
But there are some stories, which flow beyond time and space, and them we call the fairy tales.
I am more than ever in love with Abstraction! That sly thing, always peeking its head even in the most literal efforts, even in the seemingly most obvious answers.
Does feel like a happy aura to close the post with, but let me try and make it happier. And let me do it with visuals, rather than words.
A few pics from the wee bit I have seen of SF in the past few hours -
The tiny snowfall at Denver airport yesterday:
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