Mehmet Murat ildan…

I stumbled upon ildan quite by chance. He is a contemporary Turkish playwright, novelist, and thinker. I wanted to know a little more about him, so went on a search. I’d like to share some of his quotes:

When nobody is applauding you, applaud yourself! Your most precious support is the support you give yourself! 

All the fun is there, in the simple life! 

However strange your style may seem to others, never mind, because it is your style!

Profound thoughts…

I came across this line…

in a novel I was reading, and was struck by the truth in it…

‘There will always be trying times. During trying times it is essential that we live while we move through them.’

We are not to let trying times get the better of us. Rather, we need to do something uplifting, maybe sip a glass of wine and sit out the initial impulses of acting on it immediately….bring in a pause…

The best part is that when we pause with a glass of wine (or whatever kind of pause works for us), we would be allowing our minds to work out the solutions peacefully and steadily. This is LIVING. If we don’t pause, then in all likelihood we will be frantically rushing around trying to solve the issue, and making mistakes in the process. 

Ragpickers…

turn dress designers thanks to an NGO Tanuz Vocational Training Society. A group of women, who used to be ragpickers are designing and stitching clothes, and their children are modelling for them. 

Introducing Khudey: the little one.

These enterprising women believe that children of financially-deprived families do not need to be excluded from life. So while one group in Tangra does the embroidery and printing, another group in Barasaat does the stitching, and they are showing the world that all children are but children. 

Veere di Wedding…

Good to see we, as a people, are shedding our masks of hypocrisy and self-righteousness and bringing a whole lot of till-now-wrapped up topics out in the open. LGBTQs, single mothers, single fathers, surrogacy, sex, women as human beings, are issues being talked about and exposed in ways that can be understood by the zillion strata of our society without any kind of ill-feeling or discrimination. 

Veere di Wedding is a case in point, among others…

Fed-up mothers scream their heads off

https://www.telegraphindia.com/world/fed-up-mothers-scream-their-heads-off/cid/1849102

A must-read…

The Delight of Being Ordinary

 By Roland Merullo

This wonderful, absolutely must-read book is about a road trip that the Pope and the Dalai Lama take. There is a lot of wisdom hidden in the pages of this adventure story, besides being an unputdownable read.

The House In The Cerulean Sea

This is an unexpected story but it has been so beautifully crafted, that a few pages in, you are drawn into the unlikeliest of families… you soon feel part of them, and realize some basic truths of life. This special family is everyone’s family and one realizes that huge differences, happiness and unhappiness in equal measure, mistakes and errors of judgement, all go into making life richer and more beautiful. We don’t have to wish away the bad things that happen, or things that we cannot understand happening to us, we just have to accept and wait till they get assimilated into our lives making the whole experience of Life that much richer…

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse

 by Charlie Mackesy is MUST READ. 

This book came into existence over long conversations Mackesy had with his friend Bear Grylls. Of the book, Grylls says, ‘Love, friendship and kindness - this book speaks a universal language.’ 

……and it is much needed by each one of us….

Jon Kabat-Zinn

 Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness.

Toni Morrison

On language

The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.

Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.

Ursula K. Le Guin

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

Henry Beston

In Northern Farm

.....a small thing can touch the heart and the imagination, a fine phrase is as good as an epic, and a small brook in the quiet of a wood can have its say with a voice more profound than the thunder of any cataract. A gold and scarlet leaf floating solitary on the clear, black water of the morning rain barrel can catch the emotion of a whole season, and chimney smoke blowing across the winter moon can be a symbol of all that is mysterious in human life.

What imagery!!!!

An absolute must read

Fredrik Backman's My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologises

In fact also, read A Man Called Ove by the same author.

Backman's very distinct style is unbelievably charming and brings all the characters alive...

The English Spy

By Daniel Silva

I liked what this sentence conjured up in my mind:



.....had only limited accommodation with the modern world.

From Blossoms and Shadows

by Lian Hearn

Then everyone spoke of the dead man's qualities..........and the words, together with the sake we drank, and the flowers and incense, stitched death up so that it was no longer a terrifying rent in the fabric of our lives but something quite natural.

What a beautiful play of words

......small yet enormous moments in which destinies pivot

and another one, talking about the time when...

...the elaborate universe of priorities we’ve spent a lifetime constructing, combusts into stardust.

Powerful picture

 .......one of those mundane anchors of constancy by which we hang on to existence.

Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul.

Listen to Tchaikovsky after reading this and absorb the depth and beauty of his music...let it go deep into your soul.

Go Set A Watchman

Historical events lose their edges, and even their shapes, as they get recalled, pulled out of the depths of time.

Our emotions over events past get colored - they become brighter or darker, shaded or clear.

Our memories play hide-and-seek, remember some things, forget others...some memories seem very different maybe even alien.

The way we view people and events from past stages in life is naturally totally different from how we view them in the present.

.....simply because we have changed over the years.


Read Harper Lee's 'Go Set A Watchman' keeping these in mind. And along the way re-read and revise the recorded History of the times.

It's a fantastic book...

From 'An Unnecessary Woman' by Rabih Alameddine

Words, phrases and sentences to think about:


1. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. ....he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions. Novels tend to lose their flavor because we are 'always supposed to infer causality.'

2. 'None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.'

3. 'If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she's trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours.'

4. '...I do what makes me happy sometimes. I don't suffer from anhedonia after all.'

5. 'When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.'