Travelling to Sri Lanka recently,
Junior and YT were counting blessings, that is spots to be visited- first and
foremost Tooth Relic Temple, at Kandy, which in fact was our real destination,
then some of the fantastic Lankan beaches, the Royal Botanical Garden, the Polonnaruwa
ruins, Colombo, Galle Fort, the Elephant Orphanage….and we did justice, not
wholly and in full measure, but substantially, ohhh….NOT again…. we mutter, as
we run a check on last blog entry on Bhairavi….how this bally line continues to
bedevil this blog I sayyy…..the blog seems to have developed a mind and an ishtyle of its own, and gathers its old
friend and relatives again and again…it’s beginning to seem that CVB and YT are
two different persons…-like Phaedrus and Robert Pirisig…ha, ha, ha…
‘Serendib’ was the name given to
Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in the wee hours of the Christian era by Arab
travellers, and in the 18th
century, Horace Walpole derived the term ‘serendipity’ from the Persian story
‘Three Princes of Serendib’, defining it as that peculiar knack for stumbling
upon ‘fortunate happenstances’ which formed the character or fitrat of the Princes, who in Walpole’s
words, were “always making
discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest
of”…whewww..
‘whewww’ because it turns out that the above 200 words are couched into exactly
2 sentences…bahh…! We always despised the Germanic style of lawwwnngg sentences
with lots and lots of subordinate clauses…now you get what we mean when we say
the blog has developed an ishtyle of
its own and is its own master, he, he, he…like Sir Arthur C Clarke’s machine HAL,
the protagonist of ‘Space Odyssey’ ...but wait…!... before judging on CVB: here
is a sentence from the stable of that master of English language H.W. Fowler,
which is lawwwnngg but not unwieldy, some neat penmanship, and in bonus, it also explains the long
and short of a sentence- the prerequisites …"Actual words given as such
should also be begun with a capital letter; and if they consist of a compound
sentence, or of several sentences, a comma will not suffice for their
introduction; a colon, a colon and dash, or a full stop, with quotation marks
always in the last case, and usually in the others, will be necessary- but
these are distinctions that need not be considered here in detail.” (for IK
follows these rules intuitively-editor)
Back to Serendib…
Could ‘serendipity’ have an antonym? Alas the answer is a tame Yes, delivered
in the manner of a sigh…it’s ‘the uncanny talent to overlook something supremely
important, and repent at leisure over it’. What we forgot was the remarkable fact,
that the great scientist Sir Arthur C.
Clarke made Sri Lanka his home settling at Unawatuna in 1956, and stayed there
till his demise in 2008. He did a Visvesvaraya, being knighted by the British
Empire, and then being decorated with the Sri Lankabhimanya, or the Lankan
‘Bharat Ratna’ in 2005. The grievous omission in the itinerary was discovered
by Missus when she espied the sign ‘Turn for Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur C
Clarke Highway’ when travelling to Bandaranaike Airport from Colombo on our way
back. Sir Clarke was enamoured of the Lankan
scuba-diving scene, the tranquility, the easy-going, kind, unrushed folks but Kya zamana hai…the reason for the holy
emotion towards Lanka cited by
Posterity-ki-bachhi is the sexual
preference of Sir Clarke…his closest friend Sri Leslie Ekanayake (not Sri
Lanka, ehh…) was supposedly his paramour, case of morbidly commercialising a nitant personal matter.., the most
hilarious input on the issue coming from none else than Sir Clarke. Replying to
a news correspondent’s query ‘are you gay Sir?’ all he said was “no, merely
mildly cheerful!”. Of course Sri Lanka fascinated him…the evidence is strewn
all over his writings…for instance in his series Rendezvous with Rama, there are so many endearing Lankan allusions…
In Sri Lanka, Colombo is the starting point of all major Highways, an
exception being the Arthur C Clarke Highway. In fact it connects
the Colombo-Matara and the Colombo-Katunayake Highways at the mid-points.
Likewise, Sir Clarke was never the starting point of this blog-entry. We deliberately
and with feigned conviction stated above that ‘Sir Clarke basically was a
scientist’ as a foil to the lines that here follow...Was he in general
parlance, a Scientist or a Scientific Speculator or Littérateur? Really he was
philosophical, he was a link between the two indisciplines …he, he, he…like the
eponymous Lankan highway…a link between the ‘Two Cultures’ of Sir CP Snow, if
one were allowed liberty to be a little vague…
The train of thought leading to the abovesaid incoherence was really
flagged off by the quotation "When
I hear about Schrodinger's cat, I reach for my gun", ascribed to Stephen
Hawking. It led to a round of philosophising between Senior and YT late into
one night- the question of how to conceive the real ‘real’ Universe with the
help of the crude sensory and mental apparatus provided to humans by the Supplier.
Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, C.P Snow and Robert Heinlein on the one hand,
and Newton, Einstein, Schrodinger, Hawking on the other, are characters engaged
in this common pursuit, to unearth the story behind the illusion called
‘reality’. What the first group imagines, the second tries to root into ‘reality’,
i.e. the accepted postulates of science. If we were to cook up a cinematic allegory
based on the movie on Mary Kom, if the scientist corresponds to the real-life Mary
Kom, litterateur would be Priyanka Chopra...
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| Three such satellites are required by a channel to cover the entire earth: observe white circle completing one revolution in 24 hours that earth rotates in |
From there, red-herringed by Sir Clark, the writer strays into Sri Lanka, and after succumbing to the temptation of quoting a favourite she-r, takes leave, even as he types furiously on the office computer, for it is late, and the security staff is dimming the lights...not forgetting calls from home…
Zara Si Baat Thi, Andaisha-e-Ajam Ne Isse
Barha Diya Hai Faqat Zaib-e-Dastan Ke Liye
It’s easy to understand…it’s not
by Salman Rushdie, but by his very antithesis…Allama Iqbal…what matters is how
you relate with your readers…and the jamaat
knows the asinine motive behind the writings of the former…people love to
possess a volume of Midnight’s Children, but no one finishes it he, he, he, the
Booker Jury must have said…Ama yaar, le
hi lo ab tum…
Back to Lumding from where the
train-of-thought started for Haflong, in the next instalment of the entry..
SRI LANKA ALBUM
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| WITH OUR LANKAN STAFF |
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| ROYAL BOTANICAL GARDENS |
JUNIOR SHOT A CATWALK BY THIS
AUDACIOUS MAGPIE ROBIN IN THE PARK
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| LAKE AND TEMPLE AT KANDY |
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| SUNSET AT NEGOMBO BEACH
SURFING NEGOMBO BEACH
|
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