Another gem I came across on a friend's post:

Not nothing (by Erich Fried)

without you
but not the same

Not nothing
without you
but perhaps less

Not nothing
but less
and less

Perhaps not nothing
without you
but not much more

Weekends are the time for coupling and warm embrace, and emotional disconnect from the rest of the world.

Sometimes I need to get used to my own insignificance.
"... At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.
Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.
Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.
I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A (wo) man-god, a god-(wo) man
Whose days are numbered.”

Love After Love: Derek Walcott

Just saw this poem on a friend's page on Facebook and connected with it instantly. How often do we forget to value ourselves, swayed over by our love for others.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

I now have a mellower view of people who have stayed exactly where they started. It's not that they didn't want to leave. It's just that nobody was willing to have them.

I am counting hours, waiting for Friday evening. I look forward to spending the weekend doing nothing. Maybe just curling up with the as-yet-unopened Puja Barshikis that Maa and Baba brought with them from Cal. And maybe, just maybe, brushing up on my French lessons. And what about having some biriyani? And to top of it off with ice-cream with brownies? Ahhh..what bliss!

Frankfurt on the last day was kinda cool. Though I was obsessing over the fact that I had mis-planned my whole trip and that I should have stayed one more day in Berlin so that I could pay a visit to Sachsenhausen, which has a Concentration Camp Memorial, the last day turned out pretty ok. One of the great big advantages of traveling alone is that you are forced to make new friends, and so that is how I contacted AK, who's a friend of a friend of mine I went to college with. AK, a PhD degree holder in Physics from Oxford now lives and works in Frankfurt. The advantages of going sight-seeing with a local guy is that he'll know about obscure details like which shop stocks the cheapest German chocolates, the kind I want to know when I am travelling to Europe. So AK picked me up from my hostel and we roamed around the city for quite a while, went on a cruise on Main river which has some awesome views of the city riverfront, and finally had some German dinner: a highpoint certainly, thinking that it was my first turkey dish!
What I loved about Frankfurt (and this is true in general about European cities) is how they have maintained their heritage with the lovely old buildings that were rebuilt after the war in exactly the same style, the cobbled roads which have not been concretised, the squeaky-clean statues which are free from bird-shit, colorful trams that made me feel sad for the rickety ones back in Calcutta, lots of museums and open-spaces that had a happy feel about that, not the feeling of neglected, dark buildings which nobody bothered to visit in India. Oh and the river. Very tough anti-pollution laws in place that nobody dares to break by bribing the authorities. A clean river that brings much beauty to the city, lined with tree-shaded roads where I could see people jogging, cycling or walking even in that cold weather. A scene that onec again brough back unhappy memories of the Yamuna in Delhi and the Ganga in Cal, rivers nearly choking in its own filth, slowly dying, unloved and uncared for.