Urmilla Deshpande's Blog, page 9

Head~lights

Nearing the end of my five mile walk through the green humid woods of Tallahassee, I noticed something on my sunglasses slightly obscuring my vision. I took them off and wiped them on my sweat-soaked t-shirt. Joe and I kept walking, the gang of children including my son running ahead of us appeared and disappeared among the trees, like woodland creatures. I had swum an hour that morning with another friend, done a respectable amount of editing, had my four-month teeth cleaning, and couldn't...

Modesty Blaise

Modesty Blaise

If I was to be honest about who influenced my writing and my fantasies about life and love, I would have to say Modesty Blaise. It is ironic that she is a pulp fiction character created by a man, that she could be mistaken for a male fantasy. But she was far from that. And if she was, it was a man very secure in his maleness to unleash a woman like her on the world. Modesty is stronger than most men, more resourceful, more wily, more – just about anything. And she is everything ...

Erratic Engineering

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As I work on editing and think about the shape and layout and progression of the IIT Hostel4 book, I am amazed at the audaciousness of these boys' lives (they were all boys, H4 is a men's hostel, and I say 'boys' and not 'men' because they were between 16 and 22, and my experience with a 19 year old son tell me 'boys' is appropriate). Some of those boys are now men, and some of them tell stories wonderfully, and a lot of them have stories to tell. This is, to me, a kind of collection of...

Madhouse and marathon dreams

Two things happened to me in the last two months that changed the course of my life. (I had a birthday, but that didn't change the course of my life – we go relentlessly on, birthday after birthday until we run out of them, so birthdays don't count as life changers in that sense. Even a 47th.)

So: First, I was co-opted to edit a book of memoirs of a bunch of guys from Hostel4 in IIT Bombay. I don't really know if co-opted is the right word – this is something that happened so organically as...

Piece on love in Elle India, Feb 2010

Love by Any Other name

Pheromone overload in the presence of a member of the opposite sex (who may or may not be biologically opposite) – one of the most illogical, frequently occurring, meanest and most fleeting of emotions, institutionalized into marriage and made the very foundation of society – is that love?

Or that feeling of nurture and protection we feel for our own young and the young of other species – puppies and kittens – sometimes to the point of doing violence and risking bodily...

Truckin' ?

I heard a discussion on the radio about the unemployment rates in the country right before I started my walk, and I got to thinking, what sort of job would I get in Florida today, if I were to start looking for one? If I really needed one?

So here's the situation: I am forty six years old. As I've said before, I have no degree of any kind – I dropped out of school in the eleventh grade, and did a GED (high school equivalent) in 2000 in California, so even that is now ten years ago. I did not h...

Prolification…

My next book, Kashmir Blues (Westland/Tranqubar), will be published later this year. It made me acutely aware that I was finished with that book, but did not yet have another in the works. Life was taking too much time, all the daily eating and walking and children and cats…

I decided earlier last week to begin the process of completing my next book. I decided to write, or try to, 10,000 words a week. When I did the calculation, I realized that if I actually did write 10,000 words a week, I...

The Cholesterol again: Leaves and fishes…

My first cholesterol fright happened on Veteran's day last year – mid-November. The numbers were frightening, and I'm sure anyone who gets this bloody news at their doctor's office has experienced the same overwhelming sense of doom that I did that day. It made me run to the pharmacy and buy Lipitor.

The reason for this post is simple: to share with the people reading it that I did not take the Lipitor, or any other statin drug, or any drug at all, and, three months later, here I am, still...

rim shots

photo by Jon Hammond

Though my son is a jazz musician, I have no feel for it or knowledge of  it except the most basic. I'm working on a new book. A man I intended as a minor character is a jazz musician. I suddenly find him becoming very insistent.  This happens uncomfortably often – I remember my mother telling me that people in a book do what they want, and become who they want, and it is not always in the writer's control. I thought she was quite mad. But in Kashmir Blues...

Flight

The cathedral is thrust six hundred feet out of the ground as though in an instant by forces of the earth, but it was built painstakingly stone over stone, century after century. It seems as a young mountain peak, angry and defiant, piercing the sky darkly even on bright summer days though it is neither angry nor young, but insolent and anchored. The hawk was invisible on the brittle silhouette of a Northern spire. He looked down at the people floating in and out and around his home on a...