Billy Collins, How I love thee...

I'm taking a poetry class this semester, and it's officially the best thing I did since the last poetry class I took. It's about contemporary poetry, so all the poets we study aren't, how do I say this delicately, dead. I used to think of Vikram Seth as my favorite contemporary poet, but here's a poem from Billy Collins' Ballistics that has dethroned Seth. I give you, January in Paris:

JANUARY IN PARIS

‘A poem is never finished,

 only abandoned’ 

Paul Valery

That winter I had nothing to do

but tend the kettle in my shuttered room

on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,

but I would sometimes descend the stairs,

unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets

often turning from a wide boulevard

down a narrow side street

bearing the name of an obscure patriot.

I followed a few private rules,

never crossing a bridge without stopping

mid-point to lean my bike on the railing.

and observe the flow of the river

as I tried to better understand the French.

In my pale coat and my Basque cap

I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie

or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,

and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.

I would see beggars and street cleaners

in their bright uniforms, and sometimes

I would see the poems of Valery,

the ones he never finished but abandoned,

wandering the streets of the city half clothed.

Most of them needed only a final line

or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,

but whenever I approached,

they would retreat from their makeshift fires

into the shadows- thin specters of incompletion,

forsaken for so many long decades

how could they ever trust another man with a pen?

I came across the one I wanted to tell you about

sitting with a glass of rose’ at a cafe’ table-

beautiful, emaciated, unfinished,

cruelly abandoned with a flick of panache

by Monsieur Paul Valery himself,

big fish in the school of Symbolism

and for a time, president of the Committee of Arts and Letters

of the League of Nations if you please.

Never mind how I got her out of the cafe’,

past the concierge and up the flight of stairs-

remember that Paris is the capital of public kissing.

And never mind the holding and the pressing.

It is enough to know that I moved my pen

in such a way as to bring her to completion,

a simple, final stanza, which ended,

as this poem will, with the image

of a gorgeous orphan lying on a rumpled bed,

her large eyes closed,

a painting of cows in a valley over her head,

and off to the side, me in a window seat

blowing smoke from a cigarette at dawn.

Oscar Noms and Slumdogs

Lazy lazy Saturdays. The official end of the second week of classes is here, and I am knee deep in homework. (Did I say something about Saturdays being lazy?)

Big things happened this week. Obama officially became president (flubbed oath or not). Kate Winslet *finally* won a Golden Globe, and made the millions who hate public speaking feel better about themselves. Slumdog got itself 10 oscar nominations, and I have nothing to say about that. I haven't seen Slumdog yet, and I will when(if) it comes to bloomington. I am expecting way too much from this movie, and as a rule, I get annoyed at movies that portray India as a dirt-poor country filled with noisy raggy people where civilization does not exist. I don't think Slumdog does this, but I heard one of the film's crew talking about the "harsh realities" of shooting in mumbai, and she made liking India sound like a case of the stockholm syndrome. 

India really needs to understand that its image is not built by movies like Slumdog Millionaire, and it should not stake claim to such movies. Am I proud of Slumdog? Yes. But I am proud as a lover of the triumph of an underdog, a small budget movie making it big. I'm not proud because of it being shot in India, because of it having an indian cast, or because of it being "somewhat indian". 

I'm over analyzing. 

A really good oscar nom? Taraji P Henson. She REALLY deserves it, and it's good to see a non-usual (yeah, another word I just made up: not unusual, non-usual. The difference is in the subtleties) name in the award circles. Besides, who didn't LOVE her in Boston Legal?

Anyways, it's high time I stop blogging, and go back to doing assignments. Ah, lazy lazy Saturdays.  

Google is taking over the world, and ruining my life.

As someone who has grown up in the world's largest democracy, I have always been wary of giant conglomerates. The fact that I am the world's biggest cynic doesn't help either. Don't get me wrong, in a recession, sometimes the best place you can be is in a diversified global body that is too big and too deep into things to fail (or be allowed to fail).

Let me start by making a few things clear. I intended to write a post about Obama's inauguration, the significance of yesterday being MLK Jr. day, and how the new president won over most of the IU students. Then something happened that made me completely switch gears, and take the 10 minutes I have between class and work to rant about google. 

Blogger.com is a google owned website. So is Youtube, Orkut and about a million other websites. All of this was fine till Gmail, in its alter ego as Umail,  became the email service provider of choice for IU. I have long had a dual presence in the web world - one email for the university stuff, and one for personal use(only). This is not required, so it IS just me. But one thing that almost all of us do is multitask. I don't have time to check my university mail, my regular mail, Orkut (which is a less glamorous cousin of Facebook and MySpace), and all the other websites I frequent individually. And because of Gmail being my email service, and my unversity email, EVERYTIME I leave one website and go to another, I have to sign out and sign in again. Otherwise it asks me to create a new account(multiple accounts IS the problem, dude). 

So as a consumer who doesn't want to a)remember multiple passwords, b)have to keep signing in and out and c) have to let go of the separation of personal and university email divisions, I have one plea to make to google : Stop taking every successful website over! I would like some diversification in my choice of websites, and who they get their marching orders from!

I'll have the Obama post up soon. I missed the inauguration since I was in class, where the prof reminded us there was bound to be clips of the speech on youtube(google, sigh). 

On a happier note, I found a great way to get indie music from fresh artists for free :iTunes indie sampler. It's free for download, 20 songs (I like about 12 of them, the others are ok, not great). Join their Facebook group (before google takes that over too) and get the code!  

Hi! I have never blogged before, except for occasional blurbs on facebook, so this should be fun! 

Let me start by introducing myself: I'm Sri, I'm a Junior Marketing and Finance major this year. I am originally from India(Delhi, born and bred), but I lived in Muscat for about 5 years before coming to school at Bloomington. Apart from going to school full time, I also work at the Campus Writing Program as an English Tutor. 

I don't really know what I'm going to be putting on here, probably just random thoughts about my day. I have a HEAVY course-load this semester (Finance and Marketing are two majors which have nothing in common, which essentially means classes galore!), so expect some rants from the overworked. But mostly, this is going to be a place to chronicalize(yeah, I made up a word) my thoughts about life and Kelley, and about living in Bloomington. 

Are you excited? I am!