After quite a sabbatical from reading, I finished a couple of books in two days. Dreams in Prussian Blue and No God in Sight. Though I am no fan of fiction, I was drawn to reading Dreams... when a friend told me the story, seamlessly and in one flow. These two are page turners. Have 'Bombay' as the backdrop. 

And for me, they are slightly gloomy. but I loved reading them nonetheless. Loved the narrative. 

Nothing can be truer than the fact that books open up vistas you never knew existed or sometimes just become peep holes. Peepholes that could lead you to opening the door or just say OKThxBai, I'd rather not cross the threshold into whatever lies beyond that door. The mystery or maybe fear of not knowing what is beyond. And the fear that we could actually get lost in the nothingness of it all and horror of horrors, even like it, finally. 

Looking out of the window into a rain-washed city now that is trying to find some warmth and those who go on the roads wish, that the sun that peeps through the clouds would miraculously vacuum out the slush and murky brown and grey waters on the road and that their clothes could be saved the assault. We go here and there, rush about with this and that, lead the lives we lead, believing and kidding ourselves that it all has a purpose, when there is actually none, perhaps. All this, for what? The questions that has loomed heavily and largely over our heads, over our beings. And then we try and erase it frantically like a kid that wipes out mathematics theorems from the blackboard, wishing that it can be blotted out until the next fateful hour the next day. 

And we derive happiness and sadness, confusing purpose or the lack of it from all this transitoriness. Contemplate unsettlingly about all this, but go back to the familiar, and comfortable familiarity of that which has been done for aeons. Because it is easy to lapse into familiar drudgery than explore the scary beyond that we know nothing about. What if we actually see nothing, hear nothing and know nothing? Would we be happy that we started out in the first place?

Its easy being who we are. Doing the things we do. Singing the next song, humming the next tune, doing our next degree, working up the next rung in the cliched corporate ladder, lah-di-dah. 

And while I thought about all this, the phone rings for me to give a sound-byte to a radio station.