There's a reason why I started writing this blog at 4am in the morning. I was woken up by the deep philosophies Vijay sometimes mumbles in his sleep. And then I made the mistake of picking up my phone and checking email. I had submitted the following Haiku for critique on one of the forums: dying embers... the kohl beneath his eyes unsmudged The poem elicited starkly contrasting opinions. While some were offended that I chose to use "unsmudged", instead of "not smudged", other objections were far more existential. I will get to those objections in a second, but let me dwell on "unsmudged" for a minute. According to many traditional dictionaries, "unsmudged" is not a word at all, and even as I am writing this post, blogger is diligently putting red squiggly lines underneath "unsmudged". Blogger too is trying to bring this poem in line with traditional language, so why should biased, opinionated human beings be any different? But ...
Vibha Malhotra's Blog