Raining Thoughts

 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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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.

           Her curls were all so intact and beautiful yesterday. Today they look ruffled, in fact today they don’t look like curls at all. She looks tired too. Her eyes sans the usual twinkle look droopy & sleepy. Maybe she was up till late last night, logged into Facebook, chatting up the day’s travails with her childhood best friend, or maybe a raanjhanaa who kept her hopeful eyes awake till dawn whispering over the phone, sweet nothings and a hundred dreams contrary to reason, for sleep can always be postponed when in love… Or maybe an exam of the worst kind? Her face looks so pale, as if drained off all the energy. Yes, an exam it must be.           As I wait for my shuttle to get to office, I see her, as I do every day, waiting for her college bus. I see her and think of myself waiting for my bus years back at the same place. She reminds me a lot about myself years ago. Thin, spirited and bouncy most of the days...

There are times when I choose introversion over all the other ‘versions of me’.  Of late I have been fluctuating between all the possible versions that live inside me, so much so that I’m likely to give the Kerala State Electricity Board (the proprietors of power fluctuations), a run for their money. Juggling with words like ambiversion, hypo-extroversion, hyper-introversion etc. for a long time now… I realize that they no longer take me anywhere I’d like to go. Introversion + Extroversion = Ambiversion Hypo-extroversion + Introversion = Hyper-introversion Hypo-introversion + Extroversion = Hyper-extroversion Hypo-introversion + Hyper-extroversion + Introversion + Extroversion + Ambiversion + (!!!) + (???) + (……) + Talking to self + Talking to trees & cats + Wanting to be left alone sometimes + Dancing right in the middle of a dance floor, rare, but that happened too +Talking the crap out of people + Running away from people and conversations + A very...