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Showing posts from January, 2011

Re-discovering Lin Yutang

It was a perfectly useless afternoon – like the one that Lin Yutang urges you to spend in a ‘perfectly useless’ manner. The chilly winter breeze of Northern India and its accomplice the dense soupy fog had made commutation redundant and I was confined to stay at home. It was then that I turned to my old bookshelf, rummaged some of the lesser accessed shelves and blew away dust from atop some of the volumes and made a nice pile on the center table. I had read some of these works partly earlier a long time ago, and the others I had kept for leisure reading. It was like meeting a handful of school friends once again after years – not at the planned alumni meeting, but while you are out shopping your week’s supplies – by sheer chance. I pulled out a mid-sized volume with a yellow cover that shows a man playing flute by the river and a few others listening to him, leisurely resting on the nearby rocks and trees. It was ‘The Importance of Living’ by Lin Yutang – a work I had discovered i