Raining Thoughts

               My three year old is currently drifting through the imaginary-buddy phase. And from time to time I find myself being dragged off from where I sit, to underneath some table or beneath the stairs or right to the middle of the room or to under some tree, where she expects me to have ‘a few words’ with the invisible ‘Suzy’ for not having food or for not sleeping or for not eating her medicines on time or for not sharing the color crayons and so on and so forth. Incidentally she also happens to have a Suzy in real-life, her best buddy at play school. But if asked whether both were the same, she indignantly shakes her head and tells me that this is a 'different Suzy'. The other day she totally spooked me out when she asked me to turn around and give some water to Suzy, who it seems, was standing right behind my chair with an empty glass! Heights of heaven! I'd now seriousl...

          Randomly thinking about the fleeting events and encounters that transpire in our day to day lives, I couldn't help but spend more than just a few minutes introspecting and weighing the evolutionary changes that have occurred to the concept of a word that held a world of meaning until a decade and a half ago…‘Friend’.           The term appears to have evolved through the times. With the arrival of the social networking wagon with its online and offline compartments, stopping at every station of our tangled existences we have been witnessing a global phenomenon which could be branded as ‘the friendship explosion’. The ever-increasing number of ‘friends’ who populate the ever-expanding ‘friend-lists’ of the young and the old alike in the various social networking websites and smartphone messaging apps that we see all around us, as well as within us, bears testimony to this fact.

 Green is the colour! No other colour can soothe my frayed nerves as much as Green is capable of. Even while having a busy day at office, just walking to the pantry balcony and having a cup of tea, watching the greenery outside helps in ironing out the creases of tiredness from my weary mind. And thankfully the campus in which my office sits is quite a verdant one. There is no dearth of trees, big or small; in-between the many buildings that occupy the vast business space, and short walks from one building to the other is never a dry or tiresome affair. Tall old fashioned silver & glass lamp-posts add charm to  the avenues and the vintage-looking park benches that line both sides of the walk-ways, makes the scene prettier. They call them the 'Think Points'. The thought of sitting on one of those curvy wooden benches relishing the luxuriant green spreading shade of a tree…watching the clouds change shape… waiting for absolutely nothing…. is so tempting. The only ...

              It was one of those slapstick moments of life when my husband’s aunt pulled out the chair on which I was about to park myself, from right underneath my bottom. Swish! Plop! A crash landing right on the floor.We both were lost in our respective conversations to different people, when I thought to sit and chat comfortably and simultaneously our aunt felt that it would be better to grab a chair to get a better look at all of us ‘seated’ around the table. My gleeful husband lent me a hand & at the same time congratulated me heartily on this achievement. On taking a 180 o  sweep of the surroundings I could see that our cousins were also trying hard to suppress their bubbling laughter. I rose up from the other end of the table, with my picture-perfect 32-teeth grin and a crushed bum, with a highly apologetic aunt hovering over me, apologizing profusely and trying to pull me up even after I was ba...

                                                        The year was ending with a twist. And the twist came in the form of rain. Trivandrum rains have always been a beautiful sight to behold, especially to the tired after-office eye. Most evenings were blessed amply with a fair amount of rain or at least a slight drizzle, which made my short walks from the bus stop to my home through the lane a pleasurable or a deplorable experience, depending on factors like the centimeters of rain received, wind speeds (to fly or not to fly with a flipped umbrella) as well as my ability to dodge the mud-splashes contributed by passing motorists.                               One evening it so happened that I was ...

       Boiling down our thoughts to condense upon a choice of location for our would-be home was one of the toughest brain exercises that we underwent in the previous couple of months.  The effervescent boiling of matters ultimately resulted in the concept of a would-be home condensing into the concept of a would-be apartment. After all home is where the heart is! And we decided to put our hearts into one of the not-so-bad newly constructed apartments in the city suburbs, not-so-far from our work location. Pic Courtesy :  http://www.coloribus.com/      The factor that elated us partly, as well as, weighed us down in parts, was that it was a peaceful residential suburb dotted with a few buildings here & there, say a college, a few essential shops, a petrol station, a couple of  ATM s , some apparel manufacturing units, a bangle store (to my daughter’s delight), plenty of houses, lamp-posts, lemongra...

                Just thinking of those days in Bangalore makes me crack into chuckles, and at times, the very same thoughts send my mind sinking into silent reveries as well. ‘ Those days ’ happened quite recently though, hardly a couple of months back, when my better half decided that eight years was a long time to have stayed away from the loving embrace of our historical hometown of Trivandrum. Excitedly accepting a worthy & in all ways, timely offer, he took the first step towards home-coming, which meant that preferably I was to follow suit ‘as soon as’ the company I worked with would relieve me off my duties. Hypothetically perfect PG room (in your dreams..)                   And… ‘ as-soon-as ’, we soon learned, amounted to nearly a hundred days, which I was to spend in a PG in Bangalore all by myself, away from my better half and my little one. Everyone in whose ears this piece o...