Seven

Being a lurker on various blogs, I got tagged to do this:

7 things I want to do in this lifetime:
1. Adopt a child, or two

2. Own a floor - to - ceiling library of 10,000 books, including a *complete* collection of Wodehouse (articles, lyrics and plays included)

3. Take Norman Murphy's Wodehouse Walk

4. Meet V.S.Naipaul (which I came so very close to doing once)

5. Skydive

6. Get through In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses and the Lord of the Rings trilogy

7. Take a long and leisurely vacation through southern Europe

7 things I can do:
1. Stay awake for 60 hours at a stretch

2. Reread and reread and reread every book I own

3. Speak four langugaes

4. Shower and dress in 7 minutes flat

5. Multitask with 22 windows open simultaenously

6. Obsess and lose sleep over trivial little nothings

7. Be a good listener

7 things I can not do:
1. Leave home without a book

2. Curb my addiction to mindless Hindi tele-serials each time I visit home

3. Drink milk

4. Kill roaches and/or clear away their carcasses afterwards

5. Make small-talk

6. Stop and smell the roses (or most other flowers, for fear of triggering raging allergies)

7. Use SMSese (think 'U R Gr8!')

7 things that attract me to another person:
1. Well-read without being pedantic

2. Dead-pan humour

3.Shell-framed glasses

4.Articulate

5. Curly hair

6. Fixation with grammatical correctness

7.Predilection for Polo mints

7 things I say most often:
1. ..don't you think?

2...you know?

3. That's ridiculous!

4. umm, uh, and other fillers

5. How's it going?

6. Absolutely

7. (And I cringe as I type in this final one) It's, like,...

7 people I'd love to do this:
1. InAustin and Blue dragon

2.Aru, who should start a blog

3.The lurkers who never leave comments

4.My non-blogging friends, Sonali and Shweeth and Anita and Raz and Rev and Bondhu

5. Priya, who regularly sends me this kind of forward on hotmail, even though I'm too lazy to respond

6. The WI crowd, most of whom can feature 'Quote large tracts of RH,J from memory' high up on their lists of 7 things they can do

7. (This is random, but...) Anthony Lane

Another Friday, Another 55, of a sort

Suspense

The clock ticks loudly, as seconds and minutes drag on.

Time seems to stand still. I wait, breathlessly, anxiously, endlessly. I rant, I plead, I cajole, I threaten. All in vain.

The suspense kills me slowly, as I try to check my email on a 7 kbps (7!) dial-up connection. All hail Zamnet, ISP extraordinaire.

Another Friday, Another 55 (give or take a few)

As it starts to drizzle, the brick pavement glistens and green streetlights are reflected off puddles. Across the street, two Chinese people stop and look admiringly at a flowery trashcan shaped whimsically like a teddy bear. An African American man walks past the window and then bends down to do his namaaz.

I look at the rosy-pink cover of ‘The Crazed’ that I have laid aside for a few minutes. At the next table, a young Indian man smiles briefly at me before turning back to his laptop. Tired and a little cold, I sit inside the warm yellow interior of the café, sipping a vanilla latte and savouring possibilities.

In defence of the extra 55 words here, I present the following:
"... brevity has the cardinal virtue of preserving time for advertising. I don’t see it as the concern of literature to perpetuate or enshrine this" - W. Paul Anderson