Crossword Companions

It has been exactly hundred and three days since my friend M and I started doing the Mini New York Times Crossword together. That is literally the first thing I do everyday after waking up. I go to the NYT app, open the mini puzzle, solve it and send my time to M. M lives in Amsterdam and wakes up a little while later and sends me his time back as soon as he can and that is how we greet each other Good Morning every day. Once we compare our timings, we discuss the words that we found most difficult and also the clues that were great. M even notes some special words and clues down in his diary which I think is really adorable.

M’s Notes

I decided to also look into the history of Crosswords and The Smithsonian Magazine has published an amazing piece where it talks about Arthur Wynne, who managed a puzzle supplement for New York World. He wanted to do something new and fun. Inspired by rudimentary word puzzle games he gave birth to the ‘Word-Cross’. An illustrator then accidentally changed ‘Word-Cross’ to ‘Crossword’ and the name stuck. Surprisingly enough, the NYT was one of the last metropolitan newspapers to offer the puzzle to readers and in an editorial piece they called it “a primitive sort of mental exercise”. And look at where they are now, with the NYT puzzle probably being the most popular crossword puzzle in the world.

The New Yorker also did a beautiful piece on ‘The Art and Politics of Crosswords’ where the author has beautifully described her addiction to the crossword puzzle and what she likes and dislikes about them:

In my ravenous puzzle consumption, I’ve inevitably developed tastes and preferences. I prefer vocabulary to trivia, I love visual jokes, and I live and die for twisty, punning clues that require their own decoding.

The video in the post above also talks about the term ‘Breakfast Puzzle’ which is essentially a sort of quality check for croosswords and in simple terms it means that a the crossword should not offend anyone solving it while eating breakfast. But the Crossword Constructor also mentions a valid point that as time passes, people have started becoming more comfortable with concepts and theories as compared to the time gone by, so what is good enough to think about during Breakfast also changes.

As an ending note, I decided to write this blogpost when today in the morning I saw a video on The New Yorker about Partner Crosswords, I realized that there might be many people who share this love of solving Crosswords together and I just wanted to thank M to initiate this tradition. It has truly been an amazing experience and I hope I have more wins on my hands than losses. Thank you for being my Crossword Companion. 🙂

Damien Rice

If I had to describe Damien Rice in just a few words I would say he is the one who can make you cry, make you fall in love, make you fall out of love and then teach you a thing or two about it. I cannot even recount the number of times I have just sat on my terrace listening to his songs, staring into nothingness. It is surreal. It really is. But of course that could just be my opinion, you will have to listen to him to believe me. 🙂

Here are some of his beauties which really stayed with me, the name of the song in bold followed by some of the lyrics:

I still haven’t found what I am looking for

I have kissed honey lips,
Felt the healing in her fingertips.
It burned like fire,
This burning desire.

Delicate

So why do you fill my sorrows,
With the words you’ve borrowed?
From the only place you’ve known.
And why do you sing Hallelujah?
If it means nothing to you,
Why do you sing with me at all?

I don’t want to change you

Wherever you are
Well, know that I adore you.
No matter how far
Well, I can go before you.
And if ever you need someone
Well, not that you need helping
But if ever you want someone
I know that I am willing.

Wherever you go
Well, I can always follow.
I can feed this real slow
If it’s a lot to swallow.
And if you just want to be alone
Well, I can wait without waiting
If you want me to let this go
Well, I am more than willing.

100 Follows

When I joined WordPress, it was just a way to express feelings, reflect, wonder and things like that. 😛
Now I am at a 100 followers, I know that’s not much but it is unexpected considering that very few of my friends follow me on WordPress. I really didn’t tell many people about it, just a select few. It’s good to know that 100 people might read something that you wrote.
I remember a friend used to bug me to death until I responded to something he wrote or drew or a song that he had told me to listen to. I was never that way. Not to that you extent, at least. I think that also borrows from how you were in your childhood. I was never the kind who would raise their hands if I knew the answer, who would jump up and show the teacher that they had finished the sum. I was the kind who would not turn submit the homework just because no one else in the class did. Enough digressing, this is for whoever is following this blog – which is more of an effort at self-reflection. Keep following and thanks for sticking by me. Suggestions are always welcome. 🙂

Making Meanings

It’s funny how a single word could possess so many meanings. Yesterday while watching Button Poetry (refer to previous post) I came across a poem “Phases”:

They (Kevin Kantor and Sienna Burnett) talk about the different ways in which this simple word is used.

“I’m just going through a phase.”

“The process of waxing an waning.”

You get the gist.

The word I thought I would make meaning of was: SPACE.

With time it has come to mean so many things to me. Earlier when I was at school, all it meant was a physical tangible space.

Then there was the phase when I realised what sadness was and started spacing out. I don’t know how it was for you but I distinctly remember this phase in my life when I started getting sad and depressed and this depression lasted for hours. Maybe it was during puberty maybe later but there was this point when it all changed! That was also when I started ‘Daydreaming’. There are so many instances where I just space/phase out and lose track of what is happening. Daydreaming is just an old hobby of mine. I guess when you have to reach out to a world happier than your present one, there is no other option.

In my relationships with people, we talked about “our space”, the times when we needed space which we would not have to share. Needing space essentially means getting away and taking a break. This particular space also talks about a mental space. What you want is to have that person out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes the other person needed more space, sometimes I did. This was a hard one because someone always suffered.

Then when I came to college, space became this huge thing to be researched about. It is one of those elements of life which you don’t credit as much as it deserves. There was talk of “safe space” – a space where feminists like me could talk about our ideologies.

Safe space also reminds me of the need for a world where I could live the way I want to, without any restrictions and inhibitions. Space becomes such an important factor in your life when you really think about it.

Home. One of the most important spaces of your life. The place where you grow up, learn and then finally leave only to go to another space to make it your home, or a place which looks familiar to it.

And lastly, what I could think of, the space that this blog is, a space on the web, intangible. It’s not physical, not mental but a combination of the two and that makes it so so special.

That’s all that I could come up with, what is your meaning of space? 🙂

The Leaf(?) Book

Inspired from Ai Weiwei’s Black cover book, our visual design teacher told us to make a book of our own. Something that would provoke thought, something that you can’t express to the world otherwise. Call it shortage of time or whatever, but I decided to use poetry/writing from my blog to make the book, also considering the fact that this blog is a pretty private affair, not many people whom I am close with know about it. So just the poetry wasn’t enough. I decided to couple it with art, i.e. paper cuts that I could manage. Here is the first page, also why I call it the Leaf Book.

Cover page

I found this leaf outside college and safely placed it between the pages of a book. It was really beautiful how each and every vein of it was visible, I wonder how that happens.

Page 1 and 2: Rain and Winter/ Water and Air

So I decided to write about the four elements and four seasons because I find them really inspiring. I wrote the passage while I was sitting at Marine Drive alone one night, the passage on Height, I wrote while I was sitting on the water tank on my terrace and listening to music, again on another night.

Page 3 and 4: Sun and Moon/ Day and Night

This passage was also written on a night while contemplating love and hate…

Page 5 and 6: Fire and Earth/ Summer and Spring

The passage on the left page was written after a fight with a loved one, and the one on the right was written in considerably opposite circumstances.

So that’s the explanation for MY LEAF BOOK! The papercutting took a lot of time, especially the spring page. You can clearly see what each season and element means to me. Nature has always been a strong inspiration in my life. Ever after I started travelling by myself, the mountains have held some kind of magic for me that compels me to write, and also the serenity and silence of nature. These are just some of the products of that inspiration. ❤

The Burning House

If your house suddenly caught on fire, what would you grab as you fled out the door?

Visit this link to know more about “The Burning House”.

In the meanwhile, here is what I would take from my present house i.e. my hostel room.

HP T-shirt, Scrapbook and Journal, Wallet and Postcards. Couldn’t put in the crocs because they are dirty, jeans is in the laundry, too lazy to empty the sling bag and the camera was obviously being used to click the photo.

Name: Shreya Sachan

Age: 22

Location: Hostel Room, Mumbai, India

Occupation: Student

List:

My journal and all the letters, photographs, postcards and dried rose petals that it has between its pages.

Scrapbook that a friend gave as a farewell gift.

Camera because its my most expensive possession.

Laptop because it has all the photographs that I have clicked in the last 8 years.

Copy of On the Road and Secrets of the Heart.

Harry Potter themed T-Shirt and a pair of Jeans and my crocs.

My sling bag.

Wallet that I bought in McLeodganj.

Bucket List Part 2

Living in the Mountains.

My love for mountains is just never ending. There is nothing in the world I would love more than living my life there. This is perhaps on the topmost preferences on my bucket list.

I wish I could just leave behind this crazy world and live there amidst nature at its best. I wonder how, just how did all these places came into existence? Why do they inspire us? Why are all of them so different? Beaches and mountains and plains. (P.S. my instagram bio reads “Mountains Beaches and Everything in between) I think why a particular person likes a particular kind of place depends a lot on their personality. For instance, I think I am more intrigued by places which are silent, calm and slow. The weather also makes a lot of difference to me. I’d rather have an everlasting winter than an everlasting summer. The mountains are thus perfect for me.

Clicked at Triund Trek, McLeodganj/Dharamshala.

Thoughts on Kahlil Gibran

Let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.

Such profound lines. Kahlil Gibran is one of those writers who leaves you dumbfounded for words. I have read a few of his works – ‘The Prophet’ and ‘The Secrets of the Heart’. Needless to say, he expresses the beauty of the world in just a few words.

Here are some more of his lines that will make you fall in love with his writing:

• A true hermit goes to the wilderness to find -not to lose himself.
• I often picture myself living on a mountain top, in the most stormy country in the world. Is there such a place? If there is I shall go to it someday and turn my heart into pictures and poems.
• What is poetry? An extension of vision – and music is an extension of hearing.
• Knowledge is life with wings.
• You listen so much more than I can say. You hear consciousness. You go with me where the words I say can’t carry you.

It is amazing how much I can relate to him even now in this age even when he wrote all this long ago. My love for travelling and trekking comes out through the first line. It was then when I found myself, found love and so many other things.

It has always been a dream to settle down in the mountains, sometime in my life, disconnected from the rest of the world. Just me, my books and my writing. The second line says all that for me.

The next line brings out my love for poetry and music. Even though I am not a poet in the true sense of the word, I like to express myself through as little as can be said, and that is what poetry is for me, who decides the exact definition of it anyway. Music takes me to another world all together. Our five sense are forever in action, only at rest when we sleep. But still there are moments of high when a particular kind of sound, sight, smell, touch and taste transport you to another world altogether.

The fourth line is extremely inspiring, owing to my never ending curiosity for knowledge, to know more and to learn more. Everything I am today, I owe to my education. The simple fact that I am writing this blog right now is also because of knowledge. Knowledge of a writer who I came across and learnt to love.

The last line is perhaps my favourite. Its about how that one person knows your being and soul and mind so well that they are always aware of what your consciousness is thinking or saying. A relation like that is difficult to achieve and lucky are those who reach that level. The last line leaves me confused. It has several meanings I could think of. I will leave it to you to decipher it your own way. 🙂

~Shreya

10 things that happen to me while reading a book

1. Where the hell is my bookmark, again.
2. Must highlight this, so beautiful.
3. Oh my god, this book is the best book I have ever read.
4. Why God why? Why does this always happen to people I love.
5. I can’t believe I loved them. This other character is so much better.
6. I wondered what they were thinking when they designed this cover.
7. I wish someone would dedicate a book to me someday,
8. Writing must be a tough job. I make 15 errors in a single page!
9. Done with another book, what a crazy ride.
10. Time to rate and review on Goodreads. 😀
    

    Book Shopping Sprees. Such a stress buster. Favourite-est thing ever. ❤

Children and Art

I will tell you frankly, I don’t like children. I was an ‘angelic child’, if I may say so, and that is why when I see naughty children, I lose my temper. So today was a funny day, we are working on an article for a web magazine that revolves around children who live on the street and their dreams of a home. So we went out to record a video as a part of which we gave children blank sheets on which they could draw their “dream-homes”.

Some really interesting things that I noticed was that each one of them was using a scale and a pencil. I on the other hand would have gone straight into drawing the thing. It all depends on how you were taught to do a particular thing. In school you were always taught to colour in between the lines, but sometimes I think it is okay if you go beyond the lines. Anyway, so they began drawing and there were some beautiful drawings that they came up with (which I will be uploading later). One of them drew a haunted house. Well, there is always that one person who wants to go on a path far removed from the normal. Then there was just one who drew his house in the mountains in the midst of nature. It was disheartening to see that. But I guess there is no one to blame, in a concrete jungle like Mumbai it is hardly possible for children like them to imagine themselves surrounded by nature. There was a girl who drew a castle for herself. Her grandmother couldn’t stop gushing over her artistic capabilities and forced her granddaughters to draw something and to show it to the camera even when they were reluctant.

Then there were the children who were very young and couldn’t draw and just could not stay away from the camera and the tripod no matter how much you tried. It was so hard to shoot the children who were drawing because the ten other around them created such a ruckus. We somehow got done with it. When the rain started and we had to run away to save the camera, it was then that the parents stopped bringing their children to us. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant experience and I even made a friend by putting in almost all the rings in one of those handheld water-ring-toss games. 😛