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I also encountered a terrific writer called Judith Thurman, who introduced me to 39 forms of desire in a brilliant collection of her New York Times articles called 'Cleopatra's Nose'. And a slim volume called 'Learning to Drive', by Kathy Pollitt.
Humour gets to me any day. But really, Jorge Borges is wonderful in his non-fiction. I had to reprogram my brain which had only the name of Umberto Eco as the Intellectual It! It really sounds so cool and superior, Ghostie mine, to spout those famous names.

By the way, I did read a novel by Paul Auster - the first of his New York Trilogy. I grabbed it because his photograph was as handsome as that of the young Arthur Miller. Haunting, it certainly is - the face and the novel. But not for me the Code of Babel and abuse of innocence - even in the name of intellectual sublimation. However, I enjoyed Paulo Coelho's Zahir. For lilting poetry in prose, try him any day. Now, apart from Little Lulu and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which my elder daughter sometimes allows me to share, I don't much remember anything else.

My Ghost looks disapprovingly at me. Arre bhai, I am not old Scrooge by the way. I need not pack a whole life time into one year, need I? Films, murmurs the apparition. Psheeew, man Ghostie, you got me this time. So after madeleines, domesticity and essays, comes films. Lord, what burns in Sidney Poitiers' eyes? Any person who loves the magic of films should watch "In the Heat of the Night" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". If screen presence can be equated to a single actor, Hallelujah! And when one gets time, it is worthwhile to watch Gregory Peck enact Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mocking Bird".

Ghostie is doing his calculations. That leaves an unaccounted 362 days, he coughs. Very boring existence, you seem to lead, my dear. Oh, but one lives intensely only on some days, I counter. And what we remember of those good times will help us plod on the rest of the year. Take it or leave it, Friend Casper.

Didn't a philosopher once define happiness as the feeling of being comfortable wherever you are, doing whatever you are doing, at the moment? I wish that feeling to all of you this new year. May all things bright and beautiful come your way, I pray. May our ordinary lives be blessed with the extraordinary gifts that are scattered abundantly around us. May we have the eyes to see and ears to listen to the whisperings of the soul. They came to me in soap suds, essays, Poitier films and madeleines the past year. And I am as thankful as can be.

Be blessed, the new year.

Concluded.

Ministhy Dileep is PG (PM&IR) from XLRI-Jamshedpur, and currently, an IAS officer working in the UP cadre. She has written three books - 'Unequal Equations', 'Learning with Tippy Tortoise: Tales for Kids', and 'Happy Birthday: Poems for Kids', and hopes to publish her first novel in the year 2008.