The mind is restless, O Krishna!

"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Mrs Frost probably agreed, as she gave poor Robert the business end of her umbrella for getting them infernally lost.

Turns out poor Robert actually led a generally fucked up life, with a dad who left the family $8 when he died, him, his mother and his wife suffering from depression, a daughter he had to commit to an asylum, and all but two of his children dying before him. Ouch.

In other news, it has now been 16 days since my laptop died, and the days of hand wringing, verbal diarrhoea and crying myself to sleep are finally behind me, and I have successfully negotiated the five stages of the Kübler-Ross model. (Yes, I get the callousness of grieving over a lost laptop, while poor Robert wrote abominable poems after the loss of his children.) On the bright side, I've taken recourse in books, finally getting around to reading 'Mother' by Maxim Gorky.

One book that I recently reread is Upamanyu Chatterjee's 'English, August' (This would be the time to get scandalised, Mom). A brilliant book and one of my perennial favourites, it struck a peculiar chord this time, with its theme of dislocation and culture shock. Once you get past the brilliant satire and often adolescent humour, you get a profoundly sad story of a permanent outsider as he struggles to define his ambitions. I know it's terribly bourgeois, but there's been many a night when the question has given me sleepless nights. As for the culture shock, I am going to spend the next two months getting hazaar fucked in Korba, Chhattisgarh. Oh, and the characters of Prashant, the ample-bosomed childhood friend and Sathe the cartoonist are just plain creepy.

P.S. Meta-fiction is fun at first, but trust me, a hundred pages of it makes you want to do horribly unspeakable things with a certain Signor Calvino.