Time stops for Volga Resturant and Bar, Delhi

My dearest Connaught Place bar is no more. Steeped in another time, it welcomed the big and small and let us linger for hours with our Old Monks. On wintry Delhi nights, the light and dark of its great hall evoked the setting of a Cold War spy thriller - a hard-jawed man in a trenchcoat and top hat would walk in through its heavy oakwood door and get the table at the corner. He had the slippery eyes of a reptile and he hadn't taken off his trenchcoat even though it was warm inside ... RIP Volga Restaurant and Bar

Word Trips - Dogmas, Catechisms and a few Antics

Grasp the subject and the words will follow - Cato the Elder

Tripping on words again on an empty Wednesday morning. Lot's of blood in the news. About time the dailies started printing their front pages in red. Opened an escape hatch into the world of words and discovered a world of animals  -- animals, insects and lesser creatures. 

Wondering what is the role played by a dog in a doggerel and why does a cat have to bear the burden  of a catatonic state? Isn't it marvellous that industrious ants, great social-networkers these little guys, have been recruited to perform antics for the benefit of the language or look for opposites (er antonyms) when a Thesaurus is not at hand. You say I am driven by a dogma, no Sir I am not! Look around yourself, there are hundreds of such words in the English language. 

By the way, a word of warning. If your best friend is an etymologist ( guys who tear apart words to look into their past) keep her away form this. Unless you are calling for a catastrophe!

A tasting sample:

Ant-antler antonym antique

Dog: dogmatic doggone dogma

Cat: cathartic catatonic catapult catastrophe catechism cataclysm

Cow: coward cowslip cower 

Bat-batted batter batten bath battle bathroom

Share with us what more such words you can find. Throw them here, under the Comments section below. If there are examples from Indian languages, post them here. Happy hunting!

Copyright 2010, Rajat Chaudhuri and rajatchaudhuri.net

Published piece. All rights reserved. 
Original images used in this post have a Creative Commons CC0 designation and are available at this site. The images have been edited and text has been added to the original images.

Twitterature - Books according to Twitter

They have done it! The butchering of the classics of literature has been taken up with much fanfare and with a book to lead the battle! Twitterature, to be released by Penguin, USA is an anthology of great works of  literature reduced to about 20 tweets each. On the chopping-board are Kafka (Metamorphosis), Beckett (Waiting for Godot), Joyce (Ulysses), J D Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), Voltaire (Candide), Virgil (Aeneid), Dickens (Great Expectations) and many others. 

A sampling:

Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He's probably overtweeting." (Ulysses, James Joyce)

 

@bugged-out—I seem to have transformed into a large bug. Has this ever happened to any of you? No solution on Web MD.'' (Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka) 

 

Vladimir and Estragon stand next to tree and wait for Godot. Their status is not updated. (Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett)

 

Well, they are sexy tweets no doubt and clever.  I think I will read this book, but keeping somewhere in my mind the Wall Street Journal comment about Twitterature,  "Do you hear that sound? It's the sound of Shakespeare rolling over in his grave." The clever publisher, they are using this quote on the book cover!

Come to think of it doesn't `twittered' kind of rhyme with `butchered'?

Helping new writers get published

I had written an article for The Statesman recently about how some organisations, communities and individuals are helping new writers get their work published. This article was published in the print and web editions of the newspaper on 13th January. You can read the full article at the newspaper's website.

Your words will see the light

A new breed of editors and entrepreneurs are providing a bouquet of services for aspiring authors struggling to make it into print, writes RAJAT CHAUDHURI ... Read the full article

Night Sights - Calcutta

Park Street: Two nights to go before 2010 rolls in, with what in its store?

Clicked on my phonecam - Samsung Omnia B7320
Masthead photo shows an electronic goods mall on a July night in Calcutta.
(Please don't copy or reuse these images.Best friend's a copyright lawyer)