October 2010

  • Plato, Nabokov

    To be honest I had a mixed reaction to Republic. On one hand, I was quite taken aback by the strict rules of censorship, weeding out of weaklings etc. etc. On the other I found myself nodding vehemently in agreement whenever Plato or Plato in the guise of Socrates, chastised moral corruption. Which I think,… Continue reading

  • Yellow Rose

    There are I believe two very disturbing kind of ‘mistakes’ to make in fiction:– to put in your characters’ mouth your words, thoughts and emotions– to put in your characters’ mouth your readers’ words, thoughts and emotionsHow difficult it is to conceive of characters that are truly alive, that are neither shaped by some beliefs,… Continue reading

  • From Tagore

    More quotes… ~ If you want me to take to butchering human beings, you must break up that wholeness of my humanity through some discipline which makes my will dead, my thoughts numb, my movements automatic and then from the dissolution of the complex personal man will come out that abstraction, that destructive force, which… Continue reading

  • From Tagore

    I started reading essays on Nationalism by Tagore yesterday. In the first reading it might just read like any polemic against the western civilization. However, when we rewind ourselves back to his time, a time which was still not completely mechanized, when the pace of life was different, and sources of information relatively scarce, his… Continue reading

  • on childhood..

    I sit on the roof overlooking a vast stretch of land underneath. Rows of streets with moving red yellow lights, dots entering exiting little grey brown matchboxes, yellow-green lawns speckled here and there like pattern of clouds in the sky, at some places dense at others almost fading to pale green and white, tapering at… Continue reading

About Me

Nehaan in Persian means ‘secret’ or ‘hidden.’ In Japanese, the same word means ‘nirvana.’ In these pages, I will make an attempt to explore, and if possible, partly or fully reveal what lies hidden from our view in our day-to-day lives. The path will be characterised by a certain lack of method which I think is characteristic of human intuition. I write and shall continue to write only when inspired to do so. This also means I might occasionally make forays into varied fields such as science, music, philosophy, language, linguistics and poetry, to name a few. I hope this would not put off new readers and tire the old ones! But who am I to complain–even the lovers of fine wine feel repulsed by the first drop and still, quite strangely, dizzy by the last.