"Alone"

Edgar Allan Poe has always been one of my favourite author-poets. He appeals to me even more when I'm in a blue or sombre mood. Not being a Literature student I'm not sure if the adjective Gothic could be applied to his oeuvre but it's certainly dark and, often, macabre. He may not be everyone's cup of tea, especially in this 'fast-food' era where reflection and contemplation are often sneered at as outdated and a waste of time. Yet I, perhaps out of step with the modern world, remain defiantly attached to such writing. I reproduce below a poem of his which is one of my personal favourites : Alone.


From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.


As an aside, the last line was used by Ruth Rendell as the title of one of her best known murder mysteries, 'A Demon In My View'for which she won the Crime Writer's Association Gold Dagger award in 1976.

'Hu's ' Arunachal is it anyway?

Just a few days before the Chinese President is due to arrive in India, the Chinese ambassador declares to a news channel that Arunachal Pradesh is a part of China. Typical of the Indian government, there is no strong condemnation of the statement, just a milksop statement that this is just a re-iteration of the known Chinese position. True, but the Chinese never shoot from the hip in diplomacy.This statement to the press at this juncture is a part of carefully thought-out strategy to raise the ante ahead of any negotiations that Hu Jintao may have with Manmohan Singh.We, on the other hand continue to stick to our time-honoured tradition of ad hocism and of dealing with issues only when they explode in our faces.

Pranab Mukherjee, the new Foreign Minister tried to put on a brave face in front of the cameras and said that the whole of Arunachal is a part of India and that there could be no exchange of populated areas. But the damage has already been done. The Chinese have succeeded in setting a cat among the pigeons. There has been no response from Manmohan or from the super-PM, Madame Italiano. The Indian Commies are scrambling for cover & wondering how they are going to justify this Chinese salvo. Till their Chinese masters dropped this bomb, these self-same Commies were pressurising the Indian government to allow Hu to address a joint session of the Indian Parliament, a privilege we hadn't extended even to George Bush! Karat, Yechury & company were also raising Cain because Chinese companies were not allowed to bid for projects in Indian ports or to invest in sectors like telecommunications, etc. for security reasons. Next, they'll want us to allow the Chinese and Pakistanis to design software for our armed forces and our intelligence agencies. After all, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Blog hacking - my new toy

I've spent the last few days tinkering with my blog templates leaving me with no time to actually write anything. I've found the whole process absolutely fascinating and my better half assures me that I now resemble nothing so much as a child with a new toy.

I know nothing of HTML, CSS, style sheets and all the rest of the nuts and bolts of blog hacking. Fortunately there are some kind and talented people on the web who've created web-sites and blogs to help the rest of us tech-challenged bloggers. For fellow-ignorant but interested bloggers who wish to set their blogs firmly apart from the ho-hum standard Blogger templates , let me give a few links. Visit them and start beautifying your blogs. And ,hey, you can have fun doing it. Put those toy trains away for a while and start playing in your very own e-sand pit. Now where did I put that dratted trowel?

BlogU
Hackosphere
Beautiful Beta
Hoctro's Place
Mandarin Design