Esperanto lures

Simply said…


I love Esperanto. A language of regularity. Learn it in half an hour and connect to the vast world of Esperanto speakers. They are thick as thieves. And you will get a great all- -Esperanto lunch when your Korean co-Esperantist welcomes you home !

All nouns end in o;all infinitives end in ‘as’; change to ‘is’ for the past tense, to ‘os’ for the future tense. Add an ‘n’ to the noun to make it a direct object. Words can thus be put in any order in a sentence. Add the same set of prefixes to make different questions. Mal added to any adjective makes its opposite. And so on…

This in a nutshell is Esperanto; a nutshell of a language, a nutty one, nonetheless packed with all essentials for full flegedness in expression.

Esp would be any kid’s delight as second language in school- if not the medium itself. He/she could write the best essays with no red lines for spelling mistakes, no syntax spoofs. Zamenhof was a darling to have perfected the principle of affixes right to its logical conclusion.

If only everything in life were as threadbare as Esperanto! .like a just hatched pigeon chick . But he wastes no time remaining my role model. Within days it adds complications by way of featherhood and flies away to evolution. Fossils are more reliable that way.

‘Simplify simplify’ I hear a voice goad me..looking back, ‘simplify fractions’ were my delight in school. Fat numbers skimmed, slimmed.. wow! A plus + n here waiting to take on a –of its kind. Happily clumped together xs and ys turned me on. No wonder geometry was my bane with its unyielding spread outedness

The ‘simplify sums’ didn’t remain sums; they entered my kitchen; what can be eliminated should be; that little something which defined my mother’s masala got the axe. She was sure scandalized. This wasn’t that, no, she tried to tell me . Serendipity is my password and discovering shortcuts through mistakes my preferred pathway. Of course the garbage bin has been the shortest cut to salvation many a times, or the scrawny stray puppy. And the comforting thought that there is always a next time- and more starving stray puppies on the way. And I get right back, ready with a –n ingredient, wisdom and hope dictating the presence of a +n somewhere to take it on.

Simple interest, simple sentence, simple person as opposed to their compound, complex counterparts; isn’t there a certain something in them ? now mamma, what is a compound sentence and what a complex one…asked my daughter; I never could get her to understand because I was so stuck in my love for the simple one ..conjunctions need only be in the mind. Simple living, high thinking goes an adage. I would say simple thinking high living, or better still simple thinking, simple living to get a high in life. Minimalistic furniture is in; besides elegance, it brings more space to the home..or the illusion thereof.. A simpleton is then a spacious-minded person, a mind-in-space one, certainly less of an earthly burden than the Intellectual.


Call it the Lure of the Stark. Or a Sound Sense of Economy. Or Great Packaging.

Mother Nature leads me on. My favourite is her one-actor-many roles model. One organ-many functions. One colour-many illusions…a spare part neatly tucked in.. simple you-scratch-my-back-I –scratch-yours. Plants and insects, intestines and microbes…two sides, one coin. The same landscape in summer, in autumn, in winter. A time for breaking, a time for rebuilding. An atom freed of a proton, one gaining…all within seconds, all complicatedly orchestrated. A second versus infinity…a second becoming infinity.

Variety, is the spice of life. I believe Nature merely tricks us into believing that she is all for diversification. ..one only has to see the mere line that joins all these diversions- joins the dots in fact to get one whole simple picture of Life and Wisdom or life in Wisdom or Plain Wisdom.

It is simple, basic, fundamental, elementary really…

The newspaper says…the govt has simplified tax procedures. What goes up must come down…what goes complicated must return to simplicity-unless it wants to strangulate itself with itself.

So may my musings if I do not stop right here.