Hello son, one moment please? Life ought to be a string of shining moments laid out on the dark velvet of necessary actions and less frequently, unnecessary ones. Your kindness in hearing me out would suggest your agreement. I am humbled by it. I hope this fortuitous crossing of paths serves to heighten the sparkle of the rest of your life. I am a traveler on an accursed road that tracks every rainbow with a pot of gold at its end. I can only move in one direction. But that’s just a rule of this game. The curse has to do with beginnings and endings.

When I first set foot on the road, I started at a canter. I knew that I would travel faster and smarter than those before me. My thoughts raced ahead of me, colored my dreams and consoled me when I woke up. The gold lay heavy, solid and pregnant with possibilities in front, ever in front of me.

Then one day I woke up and there it was in my thoughts, a monstrous Idea, fully formed and confounding in its simplicity. On which end of the rainbow lies the gold? I had been running helter-skelter since I began my travels. What if it lay closer to the beginning than the end? The Idea fed off my doubts and loss of faith. What does faith have to do with it you ask? Everything! What is a traveler without a faith in his eventual destination? The Idea was now a succubus that weighed me down. If you admit the possibility that the pot of gold could be at either end, then what is to stop it from appearing in the middle or to not exist at all. At first, I raced off the road and began looking in my immediate vicinity. Then I started traveling in sinusoidal wave (ha! ha!) about the axis of the road. And my mood followed my footsteps. One moment I would despair of ever finding the goal and the other I would be racing ahead in desperation, hoping that a focus to my physical exertions would allow me to rediscover my first conviction. I traveled a lot and now I am at a standstill. Here I stand, hoping for inspiration, from a fellow traveler like yourself or a voice of thunder emanating from a burning bush.

Millions upon millions walk this road; some moving with such purpose that millions move in their wake; some walk without any notion of destination, the faithless travelers the worse of the lot; some, like me remain still, embracing their succubus which is now a familiar, halting passers-by and hoping to unload some of their doubts in the forlorn hope that their own will be lighter for it; others remain still in the belief that all movement is an illusion and it’s the road that moves beneath us; some will wander off the road before their journey is at an end convinced that the only illusion is the pot of gold; a very few will strain every sinew and nerve in the belief that that which makes them faster and stronger is a reward in it’s own right and pots of gold be damned. What are your thoughts on this son? Do you have an insight that can help me? Son?

A friend put me onto a good thing the other day. She's been reading a manga series called "Lone Wolf and Cub" and recommended it to me. I was hesitant because I have never been impressed by manga art. But I am glad that I picked up the first few books of the series.

LWaC is the creation of Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima and runs to around 8700 pages. Created in 1970, it chronicles the saga of a Ronin (Samurai without a master) called Ogami Itto and his son Daigoro who he wheels about in a cart. Ogami Itto is an assassin with an unknown mission that is revealed over 28 volumes.

I personally think that the Sandman series is the most amazing piece of creative work that I have ever seen. Though I have read but the first two volume of LWaC, it seems to be comparable. The premises are different and comparisons cannot and should not be made, but the cinematic artwork of Kojima San and the multi-layered storytelling of Koike San makes this one of the most compelling pieces of visual art I have ever seen.

The storyline is set in the Edo Shogunate period (14th-16th century) Japan. Each volume contains 3-4 short stories that move the saga along. Thus far, each story has had a different structure to its telling. It is remarkable to me that they were experimenting this boldly with visual narrative back in 1970. Small wonder that it is a winner of the Eisner award.

In summary, to those looking for something different, something that will be hailed as one of the masterpieces of the 20th Century in a few hundred years, I cannot recommend this one enough.

List of items purchased yesterday at the Forum -

[1] Kingdom Come - by Mark Waid and art by Alex Ross
[2] 100 Bullets: The counterfifth detective
[3] 100 Bullets: Six feet under the gun
[4] Serendipities - Umberto Eco
[5] Adam, one afternoon - Italo Calvino
[6] Napoleon of Notting Hill - G K Chesterton
[7] VCD : X-Men - The Last Stand
[8] VCD : Baba Ramdev's Pranayama

Any biblio-profilers out there? I hope it's nothing serious.