Welcome Aboard! You are embarking on a journey back to a magical time, an idyllic childhood, an ideal education, an idyllic town, in one of this earth’s paradoxically most ancient and simultaneously most modern of places...
Complexities throw up surprises. Contradictions result from complexities. What is life without a bit of all of these?! What is Idyllore without all of these?!
“Idyll-ore”? Or is it “Idyll-lore”? “Idy-llore” perhaps? Let us see, shall we? ‘Lore’ means knowledge, especially something that is taught -- so say Merriam Webster and a zillion other dictionaries. How appropriate for the theme of this book! On the other hand, you and your every acquaintance must have heard of Bangalore, haven’t you? Guess what the “-ore” at the end of Bangalore stands for -- “town” is the answer, my friend. An aglicised version of the real local word “ooru”. The British had difficulty rolling their tongues. So there are Bangal-ore, Cudd-al-ore, Tanj-ore, Chitt-oor, Mys-ore, and a myriad other “-ores” -- towns and cities in southern India. How ideal that we now have an “Idyll-ore”!! Speaking of which, an “Idyll”, according to the ir-referensible Wikipedia, “is a short poem, descriptive of rustic life”. Well, this book is no poem, but rustic life, yes, it does describe! On goes Wikipedia: “[Theocritus]’s idylls are limited to a small intimate world, and describe scenes from everyday life”. Ah! Hear! Hear! for a description of this book! “Later imitators include”, Wikipedia adds, “the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King).” Indeed high praise, for idylls! The icing on the cake: ”Goethe called his poem Hermann and Dorothea - which Schiller considered the very climax in Goethe's production - an idyll.” But, the icing for this book’s title is this: the best ice-cream in Idyll-ore is Ideal Ice Cream, a real brand!!! Thus -- when the Universe conspires -- thus does it conspire universally...!
Thusly, dear time traveller, if you want some fun, and some surprise, and some excitement, and a bit of bewilderment, we humbly suggest that in life you should look for complexities and contradictions, perspectives and kaleidoscopes... and, THAT is what you will be treated to in these vignettes!
So, sit back, relax, start reading, and enjoy...
