A Sunday Spent

I visited this nice restaurant usually called "Sue's Indian Kitchen". Sue used to be the handle for "Subhadra" who was the woman who painted all the paintings hung in the restuarant. I learnt she died recently and her brother took over who renamed the resutaurant "Godavari". Sad, this restuarant has been around in Mountain View for over 30 years and seems like a loss.

I strolled across Castro Street and found this beautiful place called "Book Buyers". Ordinarily book shops carry stuff that their suppliers want to shove down the throats of the buying public. Here's a pleasant change where both new and used books (you can sell your books to them) are kept in the same racks. The advantage of this approach is that most used books are ones bought by somebody and hence a greater chance you might be interested. (Remember Bayes theorem, where the probability you might like some thing in the same zipcode with same demographics as you have bought is far higher than the random splattering of new books marketed at the usual store)


A nice part of the character of this store was that there was this poem written by Jorge Luis Borges hung on the wall called "The Maker". (Originally called DreamTiger in South America)

We are the river you spoke of,Heraclitus
We are time.Its tangible course
Carries lions and mountains along
The tears of love, the ashes of pleasure
Insidious interminable hope,
Immense names of empires tirned to dust
Hexameters of the Greeks and Romans,
A gloomy ocean under the power of dawn
Sleep, that foretaste of death
Weapons and the warrior,monuments,
The two faces of Janus ignorant of each other,
The ivory labryinths woven
By chess pieces moving over the board,
The red hand of Macbeth which has the power,
To turn the seas to blood,the secret
Working of clocks in the shadows,
A boundless mirror which regards itseld
In another mirror and non one there to see them,
Steel engravings, Gothic lettering,
A bar of sulfur left in a cabinet,
The heavy tollings of insomnia,
Sunrises and sunsets and twilights,
Echoes,undertows,sand,lichen,dreams,
I am nothing but those images
Shuffled by chance and named by tedium,
From them, even though I am blind and broken,
I must craft the incorrputible lines
And (this is my duty) save myself

Nice na? Later I picked up Finding Neverland as a gift to my niece here and watched the whole movie with her and later dined. I was trying to convey her the message of Einstein "Imagination is important than Knowledge".