The Start of a New Decade

To begin with, yes, I am aware that the new decade has technically not yet started, seeing as decades run from the year 1 to the year 10. However, given the fact that, for example, we very seldom think about the 1960s as excluding the year 1960 and including the year 1970, I believe I am justified in welcoming the new decade now.

Geopolitically speaking, perhaps, there is not much to welcome. Over six decades have passed since the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh and they have seen us become no wiser or any less belligerent. In the meantime, an entire continent is battling unprecedented fires and evacuating hundreds of thousands of people, all amidst assurances that none of this is out of the ordinary. This decade has not started well.

In my personal life, however, the start of a new year has brought with it a reinvigorating effect. I started sending out emails I had been planning to write for ages, and it seems I have finally crossed the finish line with at least one very modest piece of writing, a poem translation I submitted to the Yiddish Book Center. If everything goes well, the piece should be out next month, marking the first time I will officially be turning a profit on any sort of writing. I am holding my breath on a few other projects, whose publication is only a hazy possibility, though I do not yet despair. We Czechs are a superstitious people, and I take it as an extraordinary sign (and hopefully good one too) that on the 1st of January, both a blue jay and woodpecker visited our house.    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Southern Delhi and Other Bits and Pieces

Image
On my last day in Delhi, I managed to cross off the last few items on my sightseeing list. I began by packing my luggage, all the while congratulating myself on having remembered to ask the hotel to do my laundry in advance. That finished, I ordered an Uber to Akshardham, a massive Hindu temple east of the Yamuna River. The opening hours of the temple are not well advertised, and when I arrived by the front gate, I learned it was still closed. For a few minutes, I took pictures of the temple from afar, when suddenly an autorickshaw driver approached me. He reasoned with me that since the temple would not open until ten, I had better come with him and see other sights. I had to admit the soundness of his reasoning and gave him my next address.
Read more

India: Day 9 – Independence Day

Image
Tuesday the 15 th was Independence Day. I woke up in the morning to find a scorpion in the bathroom, whom I clobbered to death with a flip-flop. I figured that leaving it alone to go seek help might give it a chance to hide somewhere and threaten us later. I paid off my karmic debt in a few minutes by letting a trapped cicada out of the house. Having lodged itself between a shoe and the door, the insect zoomed off into the garden when I threw open the door and pushed the shoe out.
Read more

India: Days 5-8 – On a tea estate in Darjeeling

Image
I woke up a few minutes after four this morning as Sparsh began to rouse the house for our journey to the train station. Frantically but methodically, we washed ourselves and packed the last of our belongings before loading them into three cars and piling the fourteen-headed group inside them. The ride was smooth. Although I had been woken up a few times that night by the loudest thunder I had ever heard, the roads did not seem dangerously wet, and indeed, it was early enough in the morning that the lack of traffic added considerably to my feelings of safety.
Read more