8th Sep, 2018 // 7:26 PM// FTII, Pune

" Never shall a young man

Thrown into despair 

By those great honey-coloured 

Ramparts at your ear

Love you for yourself alone 

And not your yellow hair."

- W.B.Yeats

 8th July, 2018 // 10ish AM // Deccan Gymkhana, Pune 

" I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary."

- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Fehr

4th June, 2018 // 5:24 PM // On the road to Bombay

" By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick."

- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Fehr


" You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget."

- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad Fehr

 

 2nd June, 2018 // 4:56 PM // FTII, Pune

"One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”

- Slouching towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion

 14th January, 2018 // 6:30 PM // NID, Ahmedabad

" How far are we free from feelings? Is love a prison? Or is it freedom? Is the cult of television a prison or is it freedom? Theoretically it's freedom because, if you've got a satellite, you can watch channels from all over the world. But in fact you immediately have to buy all sorts of gadgets to go with the television. And if it breaks down you have to take it to be repaired or get an engineer to come and do it for you. You get pissed off with what's being said or shown on television. In other words, while theoretically giving yourself the freedom of watching various things you're also falling into a trap with this gadget...

The same applies to emotions. To love is a beautiful emotion but in loving you immediately make yourself dependent on the person you love. You do what he likes, although you might not like it yourself, because you want to make him happy. So, while having these beautiful feelings of love and having a person you love, you start doing a lot of things which go against your own grain. That's how we've understood freedom in these three films. On the personal level."

-Krysztof Kieslowski

 9th October, 2017 // 11:00 AM // DIFF House, Dharamshala

" My recent reading has caused me for some reason to remember myself as I was when a young girl, reading high Romances and seeing myself simultaneously as the object of all knights’ devotion—an unspotted Guenevere—and as the author of the Tale. I wanted to be a Poet and a Poem, and now am neither, but the mistress of a very small household, consisting of an elderly poet (set in his ways, which are amiable and gentle and give no cause for anxiety), myself, and the servants who are not unmanageable. I see daily how Patience and Faith are both worn down and hagged with the daily care of their broods and yet shine with the ow of love and unstinted concern for their young. They are now grandmothers as well as mothers, doted on and doting. I myself have come to nd of late a kind of creeping insidious vigour come upon me (after the unspeakable years of migraine headache and nervous prostration). I wake feeling, indeed, rather spry, and look about for things to occupy myself with. I remember at sixty the lively ambitions of the young girl in the Deanery, who seems like someone else, as I watch her in my imagination dancing in her moony muslin, or having her hand kissed by a gentleman in a boat. I hit on something I believe when I wrote that I meant to be a Poet and a Poem. It may be that this is the desire of all reading women, as opposed to reading men, who wish to be poets and heroes, but might see the inditing of poetry in our peaceful age, as a suciently heroic act. No one wishes a man to be a Poem. That young girl in her muslin was a poem; cousin Ned wrote an execrable sonnet about the chaste sweetness of her face and the intuitive goodness shining in her walk. But I now think—it might have been better, might it not, to have held on to the desire to be a Poet? I could never write as well as Randolph, but then no one can or could, and so it was perhaps not worth considering as an objection to doing something. Perhaps if I had made his life more dicult, he would have written less, or less freely. I cannot claim to be the midwife to genius, but if I have not facilitated, I have at least not, as many women might have done, prevented. This is a very small virtue to claim, a very negative achievement to hang my whole life on. Randolph, if he were to read this, would laugh me out of such morbid questioning, would tell me it is never too late, would cram his huge imagination into the snail-shell space of my tiny new accession of energy and tell me what is to be done. But he shan’t see this, and I will nd a way—to be a very little more—there now I’m crying, as that girl might have cried. Enough. " 

-Pg. 122, Ellen Ash née Best, Possession, A.S. Byatt

20th September, 2017 // 12:12 p.m. // DIFF House, Dharamshala

"There is no completeness; nothing endures, nothing lives; there is only change, unreasoning, unreasonable; only birth and death repeating the same story each time, yet different; why?"

-Pg. 30, Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Vikram Chandra



"But when de Boigne, wiping his face and passing a hand over his eyes "

-A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson



"Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about one percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by the ancient remnants of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember you can always watch the birth of the universe.

- A Short History of Nearly Everything , Bill Bryson