Ha!

Realisation is an oddly humiliating, gently liberating thing.
I have just realised that when a good friend gets hooked up/engaged/married most friends leave the newly-attached alone not because she or he wants the new couple to have together time but because somewhere, she or he thinks her/his place/importance in the friend's life is slightly diminished. So we leave Them alone. And wait - unknowingly even to ourselves - rather pathetically, for the newly-attached friend to call, sms, need us.

*****

Haneef's back home. And, frankly, (my dear, I don't give a damn. Sorry...as tempted as I am to say that, I digress) it's coming out of my ears. A usually bright colleague said she thought the Saga (as we are calling it at our paper) would end after he got here. Strange. Because the circus will actually begin only when the lions get right in the middle of the ring, no? {Just for the record, I don't support circuses (circii?)with animals.}
It's odd how his personality has seen such a huge shift. At least, that's the way it looks to me. In Australia, he looked scared and pathetic (especially in that still of him in the isolation cell) but now that he's here, he's all fire and brimstone. And it's more emphatic because he isn't ranting or screaming himself hoarse. He's polite and soft spoken. And making one hell of a point. I wonder who wrote his press-conference speech for him.

*****

I've debated and debated and debated over whether I should write a review about the Deathly Hallows. Two things have stopped me - does a review matter? And should I join the multitudes that have talked about their perspective on the whole thing? I still haven't decided but I have something to say and it'll maim me if I don't say it. After all, a reader can always skip something if it doesn't interest her, no? :)

So Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Some thoughts.

I think Rowling wrote an ending that satisfied everyone. She played to the gallery and I wish she hadn't. I am glad she didn't kill Harry but the way she went on about many important characters dying in the last book, I would have expected one of the two sidekicks - Ron or Hermione - to go. Really, that would have been a little more twistedly satisfying than killing off Lupin and Tonks and whoever else.

And I really think Harry should have done better in Divinition. Because Rowling has made him out to be this kid who can conjure truth from mid air. What he can't figure out for ages, she has him figure out in seconds when he's keeping watch or sleeping or something.

She's like Agatha Christie that way - whacking the reader with something right in the end, a little detail of which there is no clue anywhere else in the story. A little unfair, don't you think? Another similarity that I find between the two remarkable women is that both Christie and Rowling are fantastic story tellers and have a knack for humour - albeit different from each other's. They also have terrific mastery over their language and can twist it wonderfully. But the most important thing in my book is that both of them have plots with a whole lot of holes, and many inexplicable things. Perhaps, that's the reason reading their work can be satisfying.

And, lastly, after all that jazz about blocking Voldemort out, giving Harry complete access to everything the Dark Lord was doing is such a braid-dead stroke. Tch.

Good News: About time too.