--> Travel Literature " In Patagonia " Re-visited I am a lay reader and my writing is just as lay. To top it, I am an uncomfortable traveller. And this is my lay review of an unusual travel book by an unusual author. Whenever I read classic travel books I am humbled by the profound detachment these authors seem to have had, travelling alone to places remote and uninviting. I am humbled by the fact that I am not made of that supreme stuff to attempt such feats. One book that completely disorients me is "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin. It was published in 1977 and it was instantly raved as a minor classic. It seems Bruce Chatwin left a message, "Gone to Patagonia", and abruptly left his job at the London Museum . He took off on a ridiculous journey of quest and came back with a minor classic as his debut into the literary world. "In Patagonia " defies any kind of genre classification. It could be called travel...
My MADurai- Temples, Vadais' and blaring speakers !!! “enna ooruda ithu ! che!” A typical Madurai morning morns to blaring speakers..for some godly festival or to an inauguration of some tea-kadai!!! Nothing new, this happens almost everyday. -Something is celebrated everyday, and everyday the speakers blare somewhere in the neighbourhood. That’s the only way this city knows to celebrate. Sound. Noise. “enna ooruda ithu ! che!” Correction - Madurai is no city, just a bursting, bumbling, over populated village. And this place has got temples in every direction you see, and in all sizes. This place is not just ‘a Temple city’ as it is traditionally known, but truly a city of Temples. And the Gods revel in blaring speakers. Today it is goddess Saraswathy, tomorrow it may be the street-corner Mari-amman, and the day after that it might be one ‘muni-samy’. I think that all the Gods that might have been conceived in the entire universe in its entire history...
In a dark moonless midnight, two exhausted men, harnessed to each other, grappled below an icy peak, with just an ice axe holding them from a fall to death in an icy abyss below. Their mind dazed and hallucinating due to lack of oxygen and the air freezing their tongue when they opened their mouth to gasp for breath. Boulders of ice broke off above and hurtled past them as they shuffled and dodged weakly. They knew it was a matter of time before a ice boulder would knock them down. They had given up hope long back. They prayed silently with bowed heads to the mountain goddess. She answered soon. An ice boulder or rock knocked on the head of the lower man and batted him off the snow. The weight of his body on the harness peeled the man above from the slope. Both men hurtled down towards the black darkness of the icy abyss below. They wondered on what they had done to get the mountain goddess so angry. They wondered on how they could have got themselves into this...
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