writings, musings, ramblings, snapshots

Welcome

Welcome to my digital archive

This site is mainly a collection of my writings over the past 33 years. (I've been writing for longer than that, but this record of my digital life began at Princeton in 1986).

The easiest way to find something here is to use the search box. Type in a subject and chances are I've written about that at some point.

I appreciate feedback. Feel free to message me on twitter or email kanthan dot pillay at gmail dot com. If you find anything here to be useful, feel free to share it.

What I wrote on this day years ago...

When expediency leaves a shadow

25 May 2011

Not so long ago, in a great land, there was a leader who did much good. And he had a wife who came from a noble family. But the leader took it upon himself to lay down with his maidservant, and begat a child, and in so doing split the family apart.

If you have been following the news over the past few weeks, you might well assume that I am talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this story goes back further than that to around 1992. (And I mean BC and not AD.)

Cut-price cuisine

25 May 1996

So the rand has tumbled but you still want to keep entertaining with style? Read on...

WILLIE MEYER, he of the Jaundiced Eye, prepares these rather extravagant fry ups® which use eggs, boerewors, vegetable sausages, sliced baked potato, and cheese.

The result tastes quite good, and goes down very well with the sea air on the South Coast, but is an unrecognisable mess which would probably raise eyebrows in more genteel surroundings.

My favourite writings...

Angels in desolation

6 August 1999

'In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty,' Phil Ochs once said ...

DAWN was breaking over the magnificent desolation of the Karoo landscape as cats eyes flung themselves towards me along the road pointing toward an infinite horizon.

The butterfly that stamped

24 September 1999

This is the 9th month of the year 1999. There are 99 days to go to the last year of this century. Do you feel a sense of destiny?

A BUTTERFLY flapped his wings in East Timor, setting up gentle spirals of air currents that grew as they intersected harmoniously with others nearby. He lived gloriously for a few short hours, mated, and died. Night fell and the remnants of his wings tossed and turned, no longer with life of their own, in the now strong breeze.

The stars looked down silently upon the scene. They had seen it before.