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Sighing in Winter

Discussion in 'Snippets of Life (Non-Fiction)' started by ojaantrik, Feb 14, 2016.

  1. ojaantrik

    ojaantrik IL Hall of Fame

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    Dear kaniths,

    I don't know how old great grandfathers normally are. I am running 73. But why do you sigh? I would love to be your great grandfather. As far as Aparna went, she was probably 4-5 years my junior. That explains why I suspect she is a grandmother now. And I am not even a grandfather alas!! :hide:

    oj
     
  2. kaniths

    kaniths IL Hall of Fame

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    OJ seemed like a cool nick, of someone from this generation... I imagined you 2b much younger... So... Sighed....! But glad to have you as my grand father, I can hear more stories of your life! My pleasure! :)
     
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  3. ojaantrik

    ojaantrik IL Hall of Fame

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    :wowWhat with the galaxies colliding to produce gravitational waves, science fiction specialists are already speculating the arrival of the Time Machine for real. If it does, I may take a trip backwards in time. Whether that will change my age though, I am not sure. As for oj, this was Cheeniya's invention. I write under the pseudonym of ojaantrik. Cheeniya chopped off the unnecessary parts.
     
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  4. jayasala42

    jayasala42 IL Hall of Fame

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    A master piece,couched in simple elegant style,capturing the exact location and environment just like a live telecast.Those sweet memories are ever green in our mind.
    Jayasala 42
     
  5. Mindian

    Mindian IL Hall of Fame

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    Dear Oj da
    What a delight to read you. As always, your narration is captivating. With Aparna being only five years younger to you I am surprised that this was no love story. ( Hahaha I couldn’t resist this dig at you. )
    I totally enjoyed visualizing the rest of it …the room, the characters and the magic skull :) Just beautiful!
    Keep writing .
     
  6. iyerviji

    iyerviji Finest Post Winner

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    Welcome back OJ da , glad to see you here with an awesome post and congrats for being nominated by your friend Kamal bro. Aparna must be telling her children and grandchildren if she has become a grandmother that whatever she is teaching was taught by a superb teacher. I am saying this because though I was not a perfect teacher like you I used to give tuition to my friend's nephew and nieces . After many years when I had gone for her son's marriage one nephew of hers introduced me to her son and said what ever I am teaching you now was taught by this aunty. I felt so happy that time
     
  7. ojaantrik

    ojaantrik IL Hall of Fame

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    Jayasala 42,

    The live telecast thing was a wonderful thing to know. I will share a secret with you on this. Satyajit Ray once delivered a public lecture where he made a point about making films out of novels or short stories. He complained sort of that some of the most well-known pieces of writing were hard to make a film out of because they did not tell you much about where the event was taking place, or, sometimes, how some of the characters looked. The movie director had a good deal of freedom as well as a sense of insecurity. Whatever he was making into a film might or might not have anything to do at all with what the author had seen. And a film is a visual medium. This has stayed stuck in my mind. I don't think of films of course. But I think I should take my reader to the the scene I have in my mind. A story should not simply be a sequence of dialogues. It is much more. Since you say you were watching it happen, I feel happy as I said. That's one of the things I attempt deliberately, with varied degrees of success of course. In the present story for example, I haven't described Aprna at all. She was pretty, that's all. Not good enough. I am leaving too much to your imagination. I remember that I used to face a similar problem during my b/w photography days. What my eyes saw were not b/w. But I might be trying to capture an afternoon sunshine. I used to spend a great deal of time in the darkroom trying to capture the colour of nature in b/w. Don't know if I was particularly successful. But writing is different.

    oj
     
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  8. ojaantrik

    ojaantrik IL Hall of Fame

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    Ah Mindian! You visualised too. If my writing was any help in the process, I feel more than satisfied. That's the whole point I think.

    Not falling in love! Yes, that was surprising, wasn't it? But I didn't. Really. I wonder why. I suppose I scolded her so much for not studying properly that I had no opportunity left for falling in love.

    oj-da
     
  9. ojaantrik

    ojaantrik IL Hall of Fame

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    How wonderful Pashenka. But why do you welcome me back? I was never gone. Good to know how your student remembers you. I have no idea if Aparna has memories left of those days. But I have my bagful of stories nonetheless. That's all that matters in a writer's life.

    oj-da
     
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  10. Elphaba

    Elphaba New IL'ite

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    Dear ojaantrik ,

    When someone writes a fermented snippet in pickled thought and softened eloquence, it's not peremptory but pride to write a comment. When I started reading your snippet, something jutted in second para, trumped in third para and wreathed by fourth para.


    Like OJ, his metaphors are also versatile! You have sensually consigned 'moonshine' to represent a girl, a job, an era, ambience, an event. I've never seen anyone do that in IL in such an adorable fashion. There are blogs that you read and remember. There are blogs that you read and quote. But there are also few blogs that you wish to read and scramble every word and punctuation and toss in air to be tickled by those flakes when they flop on your senses. Your blogs undoubtedly fall in that third category whereupon your writing as riveting , feelings as palpable, description as vivid cannot undercut the wordplay as glorious as that gibbous crescent which steal the show.

    Privy to your compulsive revision, I was initially puzzled with your unabated affliction. Later I reasoned it may have something to do with your conviction of not settling for anything but the best. How wrong I was and how deviant! The more I familiarized with your exquisite posts, the less perplexed I was when it struck me that the structure, form and fluidity in your posts sprouts from a fertile mind ricocheting with so many ideas, constructs and vocables that it takes certain discipline to honor the spatial and temporal constraints to manifest as a blog which you find stifling. The dilemma is not how to enrich but what to prune. I'm sure your crude and unabridged drafts are equally tasteful as your final copies. Vladimir Nabokov once said, "My pencils outlast their erasers." Don't we all agree it's worthy sanction to savour his rich style, and that we never run out of rubber.
     
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