Friday 10 July 2009

Hiya there...

AWOL again! Really, I feared that my blog site might well have been disabled. This is what comes of not having your own computer + Internet connection at home...and my beloved CP [Compaq Presario, for the uninitiated] languishes in Kolkata...sigh :-(
Lots of things happening in my life, in which nothing is happening at all. Confused? Don't be. What I mean is: there are lots of things happening in & around my life that I could well do without, whereas things that I'd love to happen to me are just nowhere on the horizon. What, however, keeps me going is the thought that I'm not in a position to stop [I was about to provide here a rather lengthy example involving sharks & Mumbaikars, but then deleted it], coupled with the maxim that "the only sure thing about luck is that it will change" – which is the tagline of the forthcoming Hindi film Luck.
The last couple of months were exciting, to say the least. First came in the beginning of May my week-long trip to home in Kolkata. Planning another visit in September [that reminds me...I've yet to get my leave application approved]. Then at the end of the month, my Dad & my sis came to my Mumbai home for a day en route to Pune. Visited Pune after 22 months & stayed with...who else, Rahil :-) Not much has changed, very little, in fact.
Then in June, a fire broke out in our new apartment, my wife went down with malaria for the 2nd time in 11 months & went to her aunt's place for a week to recuperate, after spending 3 days in the hospital. Then came what is potentially the biggest media event of 2009 – The Death Of MICHAEL JACKSON!!! Yes, the King of Pop, who later morphed into Wacko Jacko, is no more. In the history of Pop/Rock-N-Roll music, this event can be rivalled by only one other event – the demise of the King of Rock-N-Roll Elvis 'The King' Presley 32 years ago.
While Jackson, who died of a cardiac arrest brought on by a drug overdose [so what's new?], was 2 months shy of completing 51 at the time of his death, his father-in-law Elvis [yes, Jackson's 1st wife Lisa-Marie Presley was Elvis's daughter] was barely 42 when he died of – hold on – drug overdose!
Among all the media attention that MJ's death was subjected to, one thing that no one seemed to notice, but which I kept thinking of, was—what was Lisa-Marie thinking? Her father & her husband were undoubtedly the two biggest figures in the history of Pop & Rock-N-Roll, both were unbelievably talented, both [esp. Elvis] suffered from not doing full justice to their talents, and both died of drug overdose—while Elvis was found dead lying in his own vomit, MJ died with nothing but half-digested pills in his stomach, a bald, emaciated, barely-51-kilos shadow of his twinkle-toed public self, a tortured soul haunted by the childhood abuses heaped on him by a brutish father and the taunting, all-pervasive glare of the unforgiving, twin-headed monster that the media & the public parented. What was it to be positioned between two supremely talented men who both died rather ignominious deaths?
Meanwhile, finished some more Dean Koontzs...slowly turning my focus [tho' not fully] towards some good pieces of Indian fiction in English...have more or less got my hands full till mid-Sept. Hopefully my next posting won't be that long in coming :-)
Until then, ciao :-)

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