Raining Thoughts

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,...