Handbag wishlist

The one article almost all fashion magazines feature is on handbags and what to carry in them. '5 must-haves for your handbag' or 'Handbag police: What will we find in yours?' or 'Travel essentials: 7 items every girl needs on a holiday' and there's also the 'guide to a perfectly equipped handbag'. It seems as the handbag is the saviour of the world, the real superhero which will have the answer to everything.

Since I am obsessed with bags and do end up carrying a lot of stuff for those 'just in case' moments (which have never really happened in all these years), I made a wishlist of what I'd really like in my handbag...from all my favourite books. 

1. The Invisibility cloak: Both Harry Potter and Amar Ayyar (Tilsm-e-Hoshruba) have one and boy, does it come handy. Once someone asked me if given a choice between the power to fly and becoming invisible, what will I choose? It was a no-brainer really...invisible beats flying any day. Imagine the possibilities of having such a cloak in your handbag?! Endless! 

2. The Light of Eärendil: Galadriel's gift to Frodo, this small crystal bottle of liquid contained the light of Eärendil's star. A light to fight darkness will come very handy in Karachi when muggers try and stop you. Flash the bottle at them, the light will blind them momentarily going you enough time to make your escape. An extremely handy item for the handbag.

3. The little box Amar Ayyar carries with him which contains a special drug powder. One blow of it in the face of someone and it knocks them unconscious. Will probably come in very handy when noisy and ill-mannered children are screaming near your table at a restaurant. Or in a cinema. Or on an airplane.  Of course, how to go about it requires skill but when one is in a desperate situation, desperate measures need to be taken.

And speaking of Amar Ayyar I thought, why carry a handbag at all? If only I had his Zambeel, his magical bag of tricks in which anything of any size, animate or inanimate can be stored, I won't have to worry about handbags at all. Or muggers or weight limits while travelling! 

What item, from literature, will you like to carry in your handbag?

A postmortem of Beginnings

The most difficult part of writing a blog post is the beginning. Even now I'm thinking whether I should re-write the first sentence..is this how I wanted to start? Isn't it rather mundane? And mundane made me think of the word banal which took me down memory lane and once I start walking in this lane, one thought leads to another and I start thinking, now this is what I should blog about next. But I don't. 

Beginnings are generally difficult. Be it a new job, a new city, a new relationship, or a blank page, I always find beginnings daunting. What scares the living daylight out of me these days is the cursor blinking on a blank page, challenging me to write the first word. The first sentence. The first paragraph. To BEGIN the story (or the blog post).

Writing, like everything else in life, suffers if it's not genuine. My writing efforts, recently, are tainted by thoughts like, what will so and so think of this? Is this even good enough to share? Can't I come up with more meaningful stuff? Is this grammatically correct? Questions give birth to doubt and instead of fighting back I shut shop and curl up with a book. My great escape from life!

But escapes are never permanent and I've decided to follow my intention I made a bit earlier this year (read here in detail) of writing without remorse or shame. And to let go when it comes to writing also. Don't say later I didn't warn you. And whoever you are, thanks for reading!