Rendezvous with Rashmin

First it was a 5 hour train journey from Baroda to Mumbai and then a 8 hour flight till Frankfurt and then a 8 hour halt in Frankfurt and then again a 2 hour flight to Oslo. I am a full time traveling teacher and such long journeys cannot be avoided. But now there is nothing to worry since I have found the greatest companion. MR P G WODEHOUSE.

"Aunts arent Gentlemen", 'Cocktail Party" and "Uncle Fred in Springtime". I have carried 3 P G wodehouses with me and now after this journey I have decided that in this lifetime I will never ever travel without him. For those of you who dont know P G Wodehouse, he is the best comic writer ever. He was also known as the greatest musician of the English Language. Apart from being the cleverest plotter and side-splittingly funny His characterization and description of every situation to its minutest detail just speaks volumes about an exceptional ability of observation of the human mind and behaviour he must have had.

The originality of his sense of Humour is what sets him apart in a class of his own. Whenever you are all alone but you have one of those books in your hand you are very close to happiness.

He has written more than 90 books. Each book can easily be read atleast thrice. So all my travel for this lifetime has been taken care of.

In one of his books Uncle fred with a catapult and a Brazil nut knocks off the hat of a barrister named Sir Raymond bastable, a very respectable but arrogant man. Here is a typical P G Wodehouse description of this character. The sentences are always long and a bit heavy but once you get used to it you can very easily get addicted to it.

" There may have been men in London who thought more highly of Sir Raymond bastable than did Sir Raymond bastable, but they would have been hard to find, and the sense of being someone set apart and superior to the rest of the world inevitably breeds arrogance. Sir Raymonds attitude towards his sister, phoebe, who kept house for him and was reduced by him to a blob of tearful jelly almost daily- was always that of an irritable tribal God who intends to stand no nonsense from his worshipers and is prepared, should the smoked offering fall short of the highest standard, to say it with Thunderbolts. To have his hat knocked off with a brazil nut would, in Uncle Freds opinion, make him a better, deeper, more lovable man."

For people who are not so used to reading, reading P G Wodehouse would be like listening to classical music. It takes time to discover a taste for it but once you start liking you cant live without it.

JGD
Rashmin