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Becoming a Master Perfumer’s Apprentice
I will teach you the meaning of perfume, he said. You have to start with a name. Name is everything. Will you smell this, he gave me a smallbrown bottle to tell him whats inside? Yes you are right, it isCocoa , now will you try this second one. Something in me was telling me that I know this smell, it was pleasing to senses and homy, but I was not able to name it. It took me more than a little while to finally recall it was the smell of coffee (and for some reason it reminded me of my last morning coffee…
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Guatemala Diaries Part- II
The climb to Mount Pacaya was steep and I was sweating like hell, though this time it was not out of working my way up but because of the hot land of this volcanic mountain. The trek was hell black with volcanic rocks, where few months back the eruption destroyed seven hundred houses nearby. It was just 20minutes on the trek and one can already feel the heat around.This was my second visit to Guatemala after two years. Nothing was changed. For some reason I was remembering my dialogues with her two years back. Your theory of natural abundance and connectivity makes sense, i said, but what if people donot…
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Hammam… Human dirt, Wars
It was a hundred year old Hammam building, in the middle of a nowhere town in eastern turkey. Dirty, rusted, tiled up with old bricks, and like all Hammams had that distinguished smell of decades of dirt coming out of thousands of souls, scrubbed, massaged and cleaned to purity every day. As per the owner of the hammam, business used to be good in old days but now people seldom come. But today was Baiyram Night (Muslim Eid festival) and alot of people , mostly living in big cities were here to re-cherish their roots and identity. The town itself is called ‘Kangal’ and as the name suggests have nothing…
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Konya Flashbacks….
“But is it really possible to find beauty in the most imperfect of things” asked the novice Sufi to his Sufi Master. The Master smiled. In that smile, were images of years and years of memories, of joyful and sad experiences, of lost and re-found love, of hopeful desires and fearful reasons. The Master remembered his own time years back when he was young and asked the grandmaster a similar question on how to find true happiness when all things are so imperfect. He remembered his own disillusions and then the moments of epiphany where he finally realized, it’s not about finding happiness in life but creating it and often with…
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Women… Fiction… stockholm… More coffee..
” You know, a gentleman always allows a lady to maintain her own fiction” she said It was an unusually pleasant sunny day in Sweden and we were drinking coffee in one of the street cafés when we saw a woman passing by with tears for obvious and only reasons and Ertyass commented on her, in her usual unique style. “Come on! Give me a break” I said, “are you suggesting women live their lives artificially, knowing that they are living in fiction?” I asked. “Well it’s a matter of perspective; fiction can be as real as reality depending on how much feeling or tangibility you can give to it.…
