Playing with words...

Of late, I have taken to extensive or excessive, I should say, crosswords and jumbles..
The mind which is losing its acumen because of the mundane things which it is subjected to gets a new life when it comes across such challenging and fun stuff! It has almost become a part of my daily routine, I shoud say...Attend morning's class and then head straight to the library, for the Deccan herald and Hindu, for the day's crossword! Never knew that the college library had a dictionary and a thesaures, until the day when I decided to resume my crossword solving, went and asked the librarian - "Do we have a dictionary in the library? " After getting a reply in the affirmative from the librarian, I was wondering as to how I never came across them in my one year stay at IIITB!
The best thing is to start with the day's jumble! most of them are sitters which will boost your confidence which would have reached its acme by the time it is done, except a few rare ones where you try out all possible strange combinations of the letters in various positions, and grin sheepishly to yourself as to how one can even come up with such words! But you may never know! Sometimes it even happens this way that you guess the final phrase right and then backtrack to find out what the words are.. thats also fun in a way! And if the final phrase is not done, then rest assured that the mood for the entire day is spoilt, cursing yourself as to why it couldnt be solved...
The Deccan Herald crossword is pretty easy compared to the 'Hindu' one which is basically cryptic, and if manage to get around 7 to 8 in the latter, you can find me on top of the world!! But my friend who is adept at solving hindu crosswords say that, Hindu crosswords have a particular pattern and there si a particular knack for solving it.. and that will be realized after months and years of continuous solving. Hope that day is not that far away.. Man! its too good..
The whole process filling the grids in the crossword is fun.. more or less like chess, though a strange comparison, where you think you have cracked one particular clue, but you are not so sure and hence try solving all the other across' and downs which are adjacent to it so that you can be sure that the intital word is right...And believe me there are quite a few situations where you think that you arrive at a solution to one particular clue , which is the most perfect fit (not referring to the number of letters but to the context and quality of the word!) but you are highly disappointed that it is not so friendly with the other words around! ;) Then you pity the crossword guy for lack of creativity and quality and carry on with the next clue, occasionally peeping into the same clue and thinking- "Huh... it SHUD have been the one I thought of !! "
And its all the more fun when you have another person for company. With different ways of thinking for the same clue, ridiculing each other by saying that, the probability of what was guessed was wrong, could be really high !! Best of all, a good thinking exercise and neat improvement for the vocabulary...
But just that, if I get a little late to the library, the CW and J are already attempted and quite a few of them solved.. :( .
Anyways, nice to see that there there are quite a few who are as or more enthusiastic than me, in playing with words......