After seeing companions buy Dracula, Prince by Nicholai Machiavelli & Narnia, it's a depressed soldier walking out. Just enough time to check one more book stall - the Colombo University book shop. I find Volume 2 of the print that i want; no volume 1. The lights flicker. I'm urged to move along. We're moving out of the main door, the point of no return, when i spy Volume 1, 2003, pearson, stuck in the last row of the last shelf of CG associates! I rush to the counter! They refuse to take credit cards! I have next to no cash! I send sagey scooting off to find cash. I ask the stall-dude, if he can reserve it if i don't find cash. He mumbles something, which i take to be a yes. I ask the price. Rs. 770.00. I look in my wallet out of desperation more than anything else; 500...200...20.20.20......10!!!! I have exactly 770! Oh, happy day!, night! Whatever! Volume 1 is mine!!!! mauhahhahahahahhaha!!! <sob>
Later on, when i narrate this amazing tale of chance to Bunyan, he says rather lazily "So you were meant to get the book, eh? What a fuss for just a simple book." That statement is all i will remember of the Volume-1-affair. It's what i do with that there book that matters, ofcourse. And until i do take it apart, it'll always be a reminder of what a text should be; a model text.
.....
I like to think that i live by simple rules. And one of those simple rules is that I don't lie to the significant other. Yeah, I speak untruths like a mad thing to anyone else. So it's quite a shocker when someone casually points out that you've broken this rule. On the one hand you have axiom A - no lies. And then, on the other, individuals who have absolutely no interest in lying insist that you broke axiom A. It's like trying to change the value of a final variable. And in the end the paradox, like all paradoxes, can be put down to missing information.
the scene:book fair small hall
me:(on the phone with sig-ot who is at home) I'm setting off soon
me:yeah, already in the car
s&n:(chuckling wildly) hmpphhh! Men! Blatant liars! Demon spawn! (and that kind of thing...)
now filling in what s&n didn't know!
me:(on the phone with sig-ot who is at home) I'm setting off soon
sig-ot: Did you remember to get a C book for me?
me:yeah, already in the car
I should ask for damages! Mental anguish, defamation, loss of reputation... There's no justice, I tell ya.
The two narratives are not one-hundred-percent accurate. Corners have been cut so that readers will not hoit themselves.
P.S: The point of that there last event was not anything do do with moral uprightness and wot not, but rather some obscure thing about paradoxes that I just can't seem to remember.... Or was it the other way around?
urped by gumz @ 7:58 PM
