The Babu’s feeling distinctly Eeyorish today. First Blogger offers gorgeous new templates shortly after I switched Kitabkhana over to a basic placeholder version, so I’m going to have to shift style again pretty soon. Then I went off to do the good citizen bit and cast my vote in the elections only to discover that I’d been disenfranchised. (This is an improvement over a previous election, when I discovered that my father’s parents, both long since deceased, had apparently cast their votes from beyond the grave.) Then I got back to find that while we have long since spayed and neutered all the neighbourhood cats , they have now introduced a friend to us. She’s young, has no morals whatsoever, and arrived pregnant. Kittens are on the horizon.

It’s good to know that other people have their problems too. Amit Chaudhuri writes of a writer’s burden and the impossible distance between places in the same neighbourhood in this column for The Calcutta Telegraph: “Ordinary people give me their manuscripts — their novels or stories — and want me to tell them how to write better, or that they write well, or in what way they might get published and become famous, or at least read by others. But some — relatives, strangers — might ask me to fictionalize their life-stories, or someone else’s. They seem to sense, rightly, that the burden, and the material, of the writer is anonymity; not only his own, but others’.”