Raining Thoughts

  A year that began with a humbling and heart-warming outing with the elderly residents from Pune’s old age homes, as part of the CSR efforts at Citi India and ended with an exhilarating experience as a speaker at the UI/UX conference by Reflections Infosystems, sharing the magic of storytelling with an eager crowd… and of course, underlining it all with the mandatory year-end Goa trip! What a journey—both literally and figuratively. As ever, books were my solace this year too. My top 3 reads Big Magic (Elizabeth Gilbert), Gut (Giulia Enders), and As A Man Thinketh (James Allen) guiding me through creative blocks, health insights, philosophical musings and much more. Not to forget that Earth Sky , my first book, turned three! The second book lingers in the wings, waiting for its time. 2024 brought its share of health hurdles for loved ones, and one hat that I donned again and again this year was that of the caregiver. Grateful that life continued to progress despite the dif...

 A fond farewell to the old, as a bold 2022 unfolds. Power naps are super productive! It’s after one such snooze that I woke up to the impulsive, yet intense resolve to publish my first book. I don’t think I ever foresaw myself accomplishing the mission until that moment, when the thought almost exploded in my head like a supernova.  If 2020 was about surviving the colossal disorientation, 2021 was all about re-building the bridges & re-connecting with the self (that seemingly had been paused), as well as, with others. It was also about giving in to the now unpaused otherworldly biddings of the brain – in my case, resulting in Earth Sky – my first book of poems. The burning desire within, finally transformed into reality.  2021 made us work hard, & hope harder! The Cabin fever state-of-mind apprehensively gave way to a sneak peek of the mountains, the rivers and the back waters too - perks of working remote from God’s own country for a whole year! The post-pandemi...

  Guess life is never complete without rewriting a fairy tale. Scouring away cinders off the cold hearth at night, Ella wondered, ‘Will there ever be an end to this misery?’ As if negating her hopes, Ella heard her stepmother thunder from upstairs. "Ella, are you dreaming? If you have scrubbed the kitchen, come upstairs, make my bed and wash my feet." Ella lived with her stepmother and her two stepsisters who had always been mean to her. Days passed on in drudgery. Deep within, Ella knew she was meant for something better in life. “What is my true calling?”, Ella would ask her reflection in the water barrel, to the squeaking mice in the barn and to the scudding clouds in the sky. “What do I really really want?” One day, an envoy from the palace arrived with an invitation for the young ladies of the house. A royal ball at the palace! The crown prince was looking for a bride. Ella helped her sisters prepare for the ball. The ladies were particularly careful in keeping Ella ...

Happiness in a 'Chatti'! The Kerala (Kottayam) style kudampuli fish curry Intro '... Kudampuli ittu vecha nalla chemmeen curryundu ...' Ever listened to the lyrics from this evergreen Malayalam song of the 70's? The ultimate Malayali sea-food song! I am posting a ' Kudampuli ittu vecha nalla neymeen (not chemmeen) curry ' recipe today. After i posted the click of my latest Kerala style kudampuli fish curry on Insta and her kin this week, I received requests from quite a number of friends and my own kin to share this recipe - so dedicating this mouth-watering post to all of you. I've never posted a recipe in this space before. This is the first one & so it definitely had to be something really special. So, here's the recipe i follow to cook up 'happiness' in an earthern ' chatti', as I deem it. The hot 'n spicy Kerala fish curry. I must say that this one's a tad spicy and is definitely gonna strike a chord w...

Sorry, I was talking on mute! Yes, this monologue thrived on, until one fine day the mute button on my phone decided to take a vacation during an office call – opening the floodgates of cacophony emanating from my household to the other side of the cosmos. Microcosms, rather! Each family, a little universe now – with its own chaos and controls.  The new normal is creating novel ways of doing everything – from launching the next big technology that can transform lives, to chopping onions. The world stands transformed. The world is working from home - as the only ‘home' we’ve cohabited in this universe takes a breather. A COVID-19 medical leave, maybe! Pigeons crossing the street, peacocks patrolling the alleys, lions snoozing on the tarmac and roosters out for a walk in the park giggle teasingly at us from our digital screens, as we gaze on wordlessly, mute buttons still on, juggling the chaos of an overwhelming shift in our day-to-day lives, devising new ways to numb the ...

Millions of years ago, inspired by the flames and sparks of nature, humans set forth to reinvent the idea of fire. The turning point came when he mastered the blaze, and controlled its use to redefine his own existence. What made all the difference was of course execution, and the continual process of its betterment, without which we would have faced extinction as a race, long before.   The noted American scholar Mark Van Doren once quoted, “Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.” Ideas are ubiquitous. Nonetheless, the worth of an original idea lies in how scalable and innovative it is. And the only way to bring out the true value of an idea, lies in its execution.   Not everyone can make an idea work. Take, for instance, the case of the rise and fall of the internet pioneer, Netscape. In spite of being the browser that introduced the world to the web, they were beaten in the long run, first by Microsoft with their strong ...

Pic Courtesy: Here Some things in life are as pointless as dogs peeing on random car tyres. It might not be as much of a necessity to the car owner, to have his car tyres peed on, as it is for the dog to demarcate its territory on a piece of asset that travels around a lot. The same thought applies to those uninvited geniuses who spend half their lives prying across the wall into the privacy of unwary people, unsuspectingly dazzling them with their hitherto unrevealed moral intelligence. However, what exactly they are trying to demarcate with their unsolicited wisdom still remains a mystery to that section of mankind stranded on the receiving end of their bounty. These morally super-intelligent beings are everywhere now. Breathing the air we breathe, viewing the very same sights we see, but perceiving a different and perhaps a more stimulating version of reality, which simply cannot be kept to the confines of their brilliant minds. They spew wisdom anywhere and ever...

‘Kattappaaa!’, I animatedly yell at no one in particular from time to time. My empty war cries travel across the length and breadth of our apartment, only to collide with quizzical stares and die inaudible deaths. I believe there’s a vocal magnetism attached to the very name ‘Kattappa’ that triggers its utterance at alternating intervals of time. I am one of those late subscribers to the Bahubali franchise, who watched the beginning and the conclusion all on the same day, to overcome the so-called ‘handicap’ of not having savoured Rajamouli’s magnum opus motion picture, that the nation was obsessing about, only to become obsessed with Kattappa, the slave warrior, an epic all by himself. The protector and the destroyer, troubled by his self-imposed inner turmoil. Perhaps, a veteran Hamlet who has outgrown procrastination. No one could have essayed this iconic role better than Sathyaraj. There is a strangely satisfying exclamatory feel to the sound of Kattappa. The plosive phonetics...

There is no movie which I can finitely claim as my best movie or a favourite. The finality of superlatives scares me. I have three movies in mind that I watched again this week, as I write. Three planets I re-visited. Each a planet with a pull of its own. Sudhir Mishra’s ‘Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi’ , (Hindi) set in the times of political turmoil of the 70s in India,  is not just the movie that gave me the ‘Shiny Ahuja problem’, as my husband has been jestingly calling it for nearly a decade now, or a tale of lament over unfulfilled dreams. It is an intense struggle of identities as the characters grapple with their individualities, beliefs, emotions, dreams and realities on a shifting landscape, drifting ahead to where life takes them inevitably, changing them forever. A gem of a movie that I can never stop loving. Some stories blur the fine line that divides fact from fantasy. Hariharan’s ‘Ennu Swantham Janakikutty’ (Malayalam) beautifully does that. Janakikutty’s char...

Afterlife options could hardly ever be considered a sane lunch-time topic. But it so happened one day that our office lunch group conversation rose up in spins & swirls of mystical musings that came to rest finally upon the turn-yourself-into-a-tree-after-you-die topic. Beautiful and degradable earthen urns that encased the seeds of trees where your ashes would go into, so that once it’s planted in the soil you eternally become a part of the tree as it sprouts and grows. The beauty of the idea struck my soul so hard that I could almost envision my tree-self, rooted beside a white thicket fence blooming fragrantly in green profusion, with perhaps a few cows mooing in the back drop to enhance the pastoral effect. And what did I visualise myself as? A little allspice tree… One of the first plants that I’d ever fallen in love with. I have fond memories of the allspice plant that stood sturdy and fragrant on the gravelly laterite on our front porch at home years ago....

It is impossible to go back to the same old places. Places change. Transform. So do people. They change, transform, grow out of their old selves and populate newer and stranger inner dimensions which might not have been known even to themselves before. Everything flows. It’s normal to long for the lost places of a bygone time. It’s human to pine and crave sometimes, for a return to those dreamscapes of the past. Irrational, though it may seem at times. You can go back to a house in the hope of rediscovering your home. But it’s foolish to hope to rediscover that very home where once stood a table laden with all your favourite books and your cat stretched wide on top of your open world history text book, pawing at your pencil, as you tried to make sense of the Cuban Missile crisis or the Code of Hammurabi. It’s foolish to hope to return to that very sunny evening on the beach when you had allowed the unruly waves to demolish that sand castle you had built for the sheer joy of build...

From in-between the clank clank of vessels in the kitchen, I could make out heavily accented telemarketing commercial voices emanating from the main hall where the TV had previously been spewing out Doraemonish Chotta Bheemish voices. Sensing that it was time for my kiddo to hit bed, I called out to her, “Bedtime…now go brush your teeth like a good girl..”  After continuing with my kitchen scouring for a few more minutes I  realized  that the telemarketing show was still on with the mock American accented Hindi speaking female voice continuing to wax eloquent on the 199 benefits of some bogus gym contraption that guaranteed all the right things in all the right places. What my brat was doing there listening to it puzzled me. ‘She might have slept off on the divan', I thought. Even if that was not the case, Silence had never been a healthy sign when it came to my baby angel. I moved to the hall to see what was happening. A mind-boggling sight greeted my eyes.. ...

As the title suggests, yes, I went to see The Martian too. I was very very impressed seeing Matt Damon harvest his successful crop of shit-laced Martian potatoes, eat a few and then make it successfully back to Earth in one piece. But I couldn’t help wondering why Matt Damon ever wanted to come back to such an obnoxious planet that is infested with the most poisonous of living organisms, supposedly considered to be the highest form of life on the planet. Man. A species so carnally deteriorated that the fully matured ones have deviated towards feeding on the infants of the species to appease their ghastly lust for flesh. The Martian was a fantastic experience. However, the best of our experiences are often marred by what precedes it and what ensues right after. And, this is exactly what marred The Martian for me, and it had nothing to do with the way the movie was or the actors were. So, off to what happened before…. I have always loved those specially made national Anthem vi...

Sharing a not-so-very-old uncut version of an item I had drafted as part of contributing to an old (again, not-so-very-old) internal employee newsletter at work...  There was an era when I used to remain AFAP from slang words and SMH vehemently every time I came F2F with informal slangs, even in text messages sent across by friends; until one fine day the information superhighway YOLO’d me and I started taking note of ‘slangs’ AAMOI! I am no more a hater of this relaxed hypermodern lingo when it comes to casual contexts like replying to a friend’s comment on SM, impishly irritating my perfectionist father or responding to personal emails from familiar contacts. Corporate jargons and slangs are not uncommon at our workplaces too. We often speak about ‘crunching the numbers’ or ‘testing the waters’. However the scene becomes inapt when text shorthand and chat acronyms make their way into business communications lending an unprofessional or even an offensive tone to the ...

A highly ornate BMW diesel auto-rickshaw that was stuck in the slow moving traffic in front of the non-branded rickshaw I was travelling in triggered off the amusement button in my head today. Amusing though it might have been for me at that instant, it sure would not have been so for the car owner who would have suffered the loss of his precious car emblem. I could almost picture him somewhere  in a posh Pune suburban villa, wringing his artificially re-grown crown of pitch black hair in angst, possibly at an emblem’s distance away from sanity altogether... Car logo thieves are frenziedly spreading brand equality all across the country nowadays. A slice of ‘have-ism’ gouged out and blatantly plastered across the foreheads of the have-nots. To anybody who asks ‘What’s in a logo?’ the answer would be ‘a whole lot!’ because that’s apparently what the ubiquitous mafia-like body that is involved in this ignoble art across the length and breadth of this nation suggests. One cann...

          The outpouring of vehicles from the cyber park gate reaches an overwhelming crescendo at 6 pm. As I wait for the right moment to cross the road that would take me to the peaceful sidewalk where I could join the trickling pedestrians, I feel something soft and furry brush against my free hand. It is Mr. Dog; or rather, his tail. I say Mr. Dog because, I’ve been noticing Mr. Dog from Day-1, the veritable handsome fellow that he is. His coat of fur, oat-bread beige and his eyes a soft honey-brown; he would always be trotting in and around the park gate nibbling up titbits dropped by the fleeting crowd, nibbling dusty wayside flowers and sometimes nibbling at nothingness with perked up ears and a happy grin. A free spirit….          As I get on to the sidewalk, Mr.Dog does the same and trots ahead. ‘That’s a cute stray over there’, I hear one of the walkers ahead of me say. I feel an ounce of resentment well up within me,...

A picture that so reminds me of Leander (a.k.a The Poocha), or rather his condescending attitude towards humans, the alpha cat that he was...either dangerously growling or purring like an engine or texting his messages of fury across my arms; my personal tattoo artist of yore, designer of those fine signature scars upon my wrist, some of them still visible under a bright sun. I loved him for everything that he was. A cat that could oscillate between antagonism and apology, all in the same minute. He loved his sardines. But he loved his liberty most, the silent prerogative that he administered upon us one fine day and vanished without a trace. I am glad for the mystery he left behind…a whiff of immortality in his wake… In spite of this disappearing act of his being years & years ago, he still comes in my best dreams sometimes, menacingly waving his tail...his feline grey-green eyes gleaming, to scratch me awake from his memories. Pic courtesy : Google Images

Gazillion thoughts about our cosmos keep circling within the undercurrents of my subconscious. All questions regarding the sky and beyond strewn unanswered across my mindscape. Being  a mathematically and ‘equationally’ challenged human being from birth, I could never dream of furthering my knowledge on this topic by understanding the complex equations or scientific models of physical cosmology that would definitely provide a world of insight into the mysteries of the particle realm to anybody but me, a veritable mathematical handicap, a likely female Aadu Thoma . ‘Bah-bah-bah-bah’, an old Chacko maash would have said in disdain. The end of the millennium witnessed the theories of the Universe being challenged by theories of a possible Multiverse… Metaverse and what not. Exhilarating… But more chaos! The movies did a fine job, I must say. But is that it? For now… this mystifying world is wondrous enough as it is… and I will just keep spinning in circles… ...

Watching posts and discussion threads from others scroll up the facebook wall is rather like overhearing conversations in real life. However the guilt is comparatively less or nil, as most of these exchanges find their way into the shared cosmos post authorization from their owners to run amok and roll out the joy among mankind. A conversation thread I happened to recently over hear  glimpse was one between my school-going nephew and a couple of his friends; a conversation that revolved around 'F.R.I.E.N.D.S'. It is surprising to see the circle grow and overlap generations of friends all around, or is it? After all humor has no death, and F.R.I.E.N.D.S is proof. My relationship with F.R.I.E.N.D.S was rather complicated and strained until a few years back. I had never been a fan of the series in my younger days, unlike my sister, who used to hold the series responsible for not letting her smirk for an hour everyday, and like my husband, who till date strongly believes i...

Maggi’s brand building endeavors or magic masala flavors have never managed to woo my taste-buds as a much as a bowl of fish-curry rice or a platter of tapioca with ground onion & green chilli paste from my mother’s kitchen, but then.. that’s not what the whole concept of Maggi had been about.. to a huge population of the Maggi-loving, Maggi-trusting Indians over the past quarter of a century.  Maggi was India’s first instant noodle brand, easy to cook and light on the pocket & became as instantly the preferred choice of a quick bite, and sometimes even a major meal of the day for millions of children and adults alike who took to Maggi like ants to cubes of sugar; the widely preferred choice of a safe and healthy snack; be it right at home or miles away from home. I have memories of my mother, my aunts and my grandmother all tossing up that steamy bowl of Maggi with veggies & scrambled eggs, a loving welcome home meal after school or a game. This was and still ...