Why this blog is called "Gallimaufry".
gal-uh-MAW-free\, noun.
Originally meaning "a hash of various kinds of meats," "gallimaufry" comes from French galimafrée; in Old French, from the word galer, "to rejoice, to make merry"; in old English: gala + mafrer: "to eat much," and from Medieval Dutch maffelen: "to open one's mouth wide."
It's also a dish made by hashing up odds and ends of food; a heterogeneous mixture; a hodge-podge; a ragout; a confused jumble; a ridiculous medley; a promiscuous (!) assemblage of persons.
Those of you who know me, will, I’m sure, understand how well some of these phrases (barring the "promiscuous" bit!) fit me.
More importantly, this blog is an ode to my love for Shimla. I hope to show you this little town through my eyes. If you don't see too many people in it, forgive me, because I'm a little chary of turning this into a human zoo.
Stop by for a spell, look at my pictures, ask me questions about Shimla, if you wish. I shall try and answer them as best as I can. Let's be friends for a while....
15 February 2011
Give me one lonely hour to hymn the setting day.
14 February 2011
I love you for a hundred thousand reasons But most of all I love you ‘cause you’re you
Thank you, God, for giving me Shimla.
13 February 2011
Ik suKhan aur ki phir rang-e-takallum tera... Harf-e-saadaa ko inaayat kare ejaaz ka rang
Though our journey's end eludes sight, let the quest be;
Though union defies attainment, let the longing be.
The body lacks blood, the eyes lack tears;
Yet the prayer of desire is obligatory, without purity though it be.
Let the gathering come alive somehow, O those of the tavern;
If not goblets of wine, let light-heartedness and laughter be.
If the wait is unbearable, then in the meantime, O heart;
On someone's promise of tomorrow, let conversation be.
In this land of strangers, if there be no confidante,
then Faiz! Let the invocation of homeland with yourself be.
11 February 2011
A feeling of sadness and longing That is not akin to pain, And resembles sorrow only As the mist resembles the rain...
9 February 2011
Poetry - the higher algebra of metaphors.
in the world between the covers of books,
such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,
such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
such and so many blinding bright lights,
splashing all over the pages
in a million bits and pieces
all of which were words, words, words,
and each of which were alive forever
in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
~ Billy Collins ~
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf
under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that
feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and
school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall
we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.