One quiet salon, ain’t this? It’s been a month since the last post—the longest silence in this blog’s career so far, I think; but I could rest assured that anyone who were to stumble into here would be greeted by the fine piece that the previous post is—my fave of Fobbin’s poems.

It may be that the most apt advice to any habitual blogger would be: Get a life! Happily, I got myself one. Thus the month-long silence. ‘So, what happened?’ you may ask. ‘Discovered amour? Found peace in the benign smile of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar? Joined kick-boxing classes?’ Let me reign in your adventurous imagination and inform you that the bland fact is that I spent most of the time sifting through piles of paper to the soundtrack of the BBC World Service. Being the sole occupant of what is termed a ‘2BHK’ apartment, I have now managed to fill one bedroom with crumpled sheets of paper waiting for the garbage man, and another with neatly sorted out piles of paper in various categories. The exercise was also a Proustian journey through the labyrinths of my memory. Coming across a cryptic note on a yellowing fragile sheet of papyrus that I have preserved for years for reasons I have forgotten can produce unexpected existential dilemmas. This cleaning up of cobwebs of my mind had been intended for a long time. For some reason the last few weeks have seen in me the kind of confidence I have lacked for this endeavour for years even.

William James, the hero of Pragmatic philosophy, has said somewhere that wisdom lies in knowing what to ignore. Pragmatic. (How easily a word can carry the weight of a whole philosophy!)