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 rather distinctive stretchy frothy style transports the drinker to magical worlds.  Though I've tried re-creating this '

                   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 themselves into the bus. They were pushing and spading out a way for themselves among the crowd with thei

               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 certificate and the like. Recently, during an ongoing battle of survival betwe