Raining Thoughts

                             What's it with tea shops & me…? The connection is hard to explain as it closely borders on those realms of attraction based on ethereal abstractions.  The sight of a tea shop gives me goose bumps and lights up my life in ways manifold that cannot be penned down in words. I collect tea-shops & can smell a tea shop from miles away in fact. And once out of one, I'm infinitely haunted by those dusty corners, clinking of glass and the fleeting aromas.. for eternity.                    Speaking of tea shops I'm not hinting at the cozy-couched, coffee-machine powered, spic & span coffee-shop of a tea shop,  But the thatched, leaky roofed, wooden-bench lined, smoke-filled, glass-shelved, heavenly smelling tea shops where the smell of freshly brewed tea that is poured out and mixed from pot to pot in a rathe...

                   I've developed a most annoying habit of frequently missing buses. This often happens due to the various ad hoc  undertakings that I manage to get involved in, be it at home, in the office or anywhere for that matter. Most of these events manifest abruptly and at the eleventh hour…often leaving me to grapple between odd options.           Not long ago, one such last-minute feat left me with a Hobson’s choice between taking a dive into an already crammed bus and missing, what looked like, one of the last buses available during that hour of dusk, heading towards the part of the city where I lived. As it was getting late and dark, I didn’t want to wait any longer or waste time considering different 'imaginary' options.            Along with the tussling techies, certain North Indian building laborers were also trying their best to throw themselv...

               It’s awfully painful for me to part with any piece of material reality that has a memory attached to it. In my case the pain extends to my old archived mails, ancient greeting cards dating back to my primary school days, strangely shaped dried leaves collected during old walks, old note-books (especially the ones with graffitied back pages!), dried up ink bottles, pebbles collected from stream & river beds (from the Kallaar stream-bed to the Ganges river-basin, as well as a few odd ones from an old decommissioned aquarium of ours)… Oh... and I could go on and on with this list forever.                I've recently discovered that my hoarding skills can be paralleled only by my equally honed misplacing skills. I do not misplace important objects like my pebbles, my pet jars or my toy pandas, but only petty things like our house keys, car keys, medical prescriptions, marriage cer...

Even the noisiest marketplace fascinates me. The rich colors, the spicy aromas, the bustle, the abundance & the variety of the scene where life meets its needs, and the plethora of sights & sounds that surround it have always captivated my mind. Occasional doses of the noisy local Madiwala Market, the SG Palya Kerala Market or the Saturday Market of the Chandapura Circle in Bangalore with their share of cows chewing up leftover radish leaves, cats mewling & drooling at the torpedo sized tunas on display, mounds of coconuts, flowers, vegetables and fruits, had often proved to be miracle stress-busters for us every once in a while. A natural retail therapy that unwound us from the continued stress build-up that often arose out of spending a lion’s share of our lives caged in enclosed air-conditioned office spaces. In my family, a visit to Ooty was never considered complete without a trip to the famous Ooty vegetable market. The fresh veggies grown on the terraced fa...

'I don’t know how much of 'subtle' phallic symbolism can be impregnated into my words if I say; every popular world cup ever played on this globe had always been about men & balls... Well, women may have rocked a million cradles. She might have made fundamental contributions to arts, science, math or sports. Women might have made the world go round, and eyes go 'rounder' in this microcosm where she gets stared at hard, by a certain section of the society that suffers from a condition of the worst kind, a certain species of mortals who cannot help but stare on, indifferent to her age, appearance or emotions. And at the end of it all… no golden cup awaits her, no golden boot laces to tie...' I had switched off close to around 29.5% of my consciousness concerning my immediate surroundings as I sat immersed in such random rants at one of my most loved vantage points in the world, the bus window seat. It was not raining outside anymore & the fresh ...

My near-exhausted quest for clear bespectacled vision & the perfect scratch resistant spectacle lens has once again been rendered null & void as my eyes are laid to rest upon one of the most recent scratches on my supposedly 'scratch-proof' lens. It leaves a minute gash across my visible truths for a little while, until my vision becomes accustomed to the slightly distorted reality within a matter of hours, sometimes even minutes. And so is the very nature of life itself, which makes room for every blemish within & beyond, and flows unimpeded by the umpteen specks of dust, wounds, gashes, imperfections and upheavals, so effortlessly fluid & unfaltering in its course.  Scratch-proof lenses are as mythical as a life free of imperfections.

Well, years & years back I must say that there were days in my life when I was practically ready to give  donuts or even Zillion dollar lobster Frittatas to get Orkut up & running.  The concept of Orkut was so new & fresh then. We took to Orkut like fish to water. We took no time in adding    into our day to day lives;  scraps, communities, fans!, profile pictures, testimonials, our very first social, professional & personal profiles..., profile visitors and every teensy bit of thing that Orkut had to offer. Orkut was our primary school of social networking. With the passage of time the Alma Mater saw her wards move on...leaving behind countless scraps, pictures & migrating to upper-primary, high-school &  universities of networking. Somewhere along the way we forgot her, but now we've been rudely jolted back to her memory by her own creators who have now slated her decommissioning on Sept. 30 2014. "Like a patient etherize...