The only thing worse than having a conversation with a self deprecatory man, is talking to a Seinfeld quoting man. It is so Bleh. It is such a 90s thing anyway. And not to mention, entirely too unimaginative.
I must really shut my mouth at my work-place. I don’t get these people, and the feeling seems mutual. As the youngest person in the team, they tend to be mostly indulgent cum dismissive about my opinions anyway. I am tempted to dole out one of those clichés - age is just a number. Bleh. Anyway who cares?
Yet, they choose to pay attention to things that are not terribly important, like it happened at the lunch-time conversation yesterday. A colleague of mine had recommended Amitav Ghosh’s “The Shadow Lines”. Since, the colleague boy seemed to be sensible and dishy (heh), I gave the book a reading. Besides, I had enjoyed the documentary style of - In an antique Land anyway. I thought that this book was a disappointing read. This was a quasi-exotic oh-so-quaint-calcutta-lanes kind of book, steeped with longing and immigrant angst! *yeah AGAIN*! Dishy Boy seemed offended. And before I knew it, the discussion went into the whole area of how Bengali writers were the most superior Indian English writers. And I was like, WOAH! Also, as a South Indian, I was supposed to feel ashamed that we don’t have great writers in English.
I am not even going to bother to ascertain the validity of that claim. I don’t think it is a personal triumph if someone who shares my gene pool is successful. Why must everyone take every insult and triumph as a personal one? Are there own lives incredibly hollow?
Most boring.
And quite frankly, for a large part of my childhood and teenager years, the only author who I thought actually wrote books in English was - RK Narayan.Heh!
