Aziza

One funny thing the Russian genitive does to masculine nouns is it makes them outwardly appear like feminine nouns. The grammatical implication of the state of possession in the phrase “Adrian’s house” would turn the whole sentence into “Dom Adriana”. I mean what gives?

Nouns are fascinating. They can often reveal the truth about themselves in fascinating ways. They have aspirations. They react to their environment. They yearn to be what they’re not.

The entirety of the human condition can be observed in these tiny blocks of meaning that we throw around on a daily basis, in pretty much every sentence. (But not all of them)

It’s 2:13 AM in Mumbai  and the sticky air isn’t doing much for me. Nor is the flat coke I’m sipping. I’ve taken the week off. Medical reasons and all that jazz. I don’t have an assignment due or anything but I find myself working on this small project of my own, sitting and poring over these PDFs I’ve torrented. A random set of pieced together sources for this project with no purpose or audience. I’m not even sure why I bother.

Maybe it’s because the only alternative is sleeping. And I’ve been sleeping during the day, every day, these past few days. And no, it’s no, it’s not to recuperate, no siree. No scenes with red lanterns and green wine here.  Such is life in this massive metropolis whose scale the mind refuses to acknowledge.

I absentmindedly type out random sentences and delete them seconds later. I’m noting down Russian various word roots and the fruits of their union with auxiliary bases. Not terribly scientific of me but hey, that’s why I’m a broke student, and not gallivanting off in Rotterdam or Helsinki with my genteel European peers.

There’s a certain irony to examining a language, knowing fully well that you barely speak it. I mean who are you even kidding? An actual speaker of a language just is – They don’t psychoanalyze the significance and semantics of each syllable, or trawl through dictionaries while imagining the icy expanses of far off Siberia or arid Central Asia where these words originated as they look up the entries. House is just ghar in a bunch of Indian languages, and Indians are content with knowing that. The fact that it shares its ancient root from millennia ago with the word yard is of no significance to them.

But, no, I choose to think, and not to be. I’d rather know than do. I wonder what that says about my value system.

 I think it’s a manifestation of overthinking things – Wait, there I go again.

Well, there are various ways of coping. We all cope with things. Coping with loss, whether personal or in the form of failed love