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 ...

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...

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 ...

          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,...

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… ...

                        Perhaps I should have titled this post just ‘Dreams’. I’d not only have done Freud a favor, but also to myself in uncomplicating matters, simply because the truth about dreams, I feel,  is that they can never be interpreted fully. They are these indecipherable bits of moondust that seep into your brain in the dead of night, to trick you into believing that your cat is not dead, your apartment watchman is an FBI agent, your car is really a Ferrari in Maruti disguise, your swimming pool has an underground connection that drains into the Pacific ocean, your kitchen water purifier has started running wine, your maid is an alien from Andromeda and best of all, those un-called for siesta dreams that graciously grant you entire evenings free of cost, when you’ve just dreamt that a day has passed you by.                       The latest d...

The Chitharal Hill Temple The day had dawned with a forewarning that Sunday. Various meteorological sources across the nation & the world, had issued warnings that the ominous Hudhud was expected to hit the northern Indian ocean & its coastline during the early hours of the day. Having lain to rest our much-awaited Kanyakumari beach plans at the ominous newscast of the storm, we continued to watch the news channels race to make hay out of the disarray. Kanyakumari might have been well out of the path of Hudhud’s destructive agenda, but one never knows... Nature has always been a mystery woman with strange whims and fancies … What followed soon after was nothing, but a perceivable void in space & time, as there was practically nothing to do that morning. All possible routines and chores had been completed well in advance in view of the trip that was planned for the next day. However the vacuum didn't exist for long as Sir. FB chose to ride in, clad in shin...

                             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...

               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...

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...

... The magic of a hundred brilliant specks of light darting through the darkness, the Christmas night of so many years past when as a little girl I watched along with my cousins the countless fireflies released from a jar into our room  by one of our naughtier elder brothers ... ................................ ... The lonesome walk to nowhere on one of those indescribably beautiful overcast afternoons, lost in the crowd ,lost from the crowd, with the rain-promising wind on my face, thinking of absolutely nothing, lost in the ebb and flow of unpredictable nature ... ................................... .... The experience of taking in the aroma and swirls of steam arising out of my red mug enjoying the absurd romance of tea at the safe haven of my writing table and wondering why has not anyone thought of the concept of a tea mug to be as romantic as that of the stereotypical coffee mug ... ...................................... .... The tw...