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Showing posts from November 5, 2006

Joy of Soccer

Just finished a wonderful game of Soccer. May be it had to do something with the fact that we won :-) But maybe it does not. Because Soccer is not a zero-sum game. I have always been an underdog in sports. And like all underdogs, I always hated loosing. I remember a childhood incident. I was playing cards with my Mami (aunt). It was the simple game of Bhikar-Savkaar. (each player takes turns playing the card on top of his stacks, and if your card has same type as the card below, you win) and I lost... and then I burst up in a fit of rage, tore the cards and shut myself in the room :-) I was angry with this game, with the winner for having won, and mostly with myself for having lost it. So then on, I have tried to avoid games I loose, and found perfect ally in this quote from "Catcher in the rye", as a balm over all past lost games. Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it's a game, all right - I'll admit that. But if you get

Grand man of Grand canyon

I am reading a book, Grand Canyon: Early Impressions . These are writings of intrepid explorers who saw Grand Canyon, the mile deep furrow in Arizona, carved out by Colorado, literally, the 'red river'. Col. John Wesley Powell made the first river run of Grand Canyon in 1869. Without the buffers of dams, Colorado ran way too fast & turbid than it does now, making its river run almost impossible task. But Powell & his ragtag friends ventured into this great unknown river, and penned his travelogue. The funny thing about this piece is that, it has all the seeds of great novel; heroism, drama, nail biting tension & anticipation, conflicts of egos, judgment as well as trust & steadfast fraternity. But the very fact that it was a nonfiction, and written not as an afterthought but as a daily journal, makes it a dry, barebones, matter of fact document sans verbal embellishments :-) This makes each word & sentence carry its weight in gold, sinking down the mind wi