Darling... do you dare... this is India shining

As i walk into the busy exodus of people in Churchgate, the smell of "tea - chocolate" tempts me to stand at the stall and check out what is being sold there.. the board reads.. tea- 5 rs, coffee- 5 rs, hot chocolate- 10 rs.. vow.. that gives the answer to the enticing smell... both the beverages being my favourites..

After a theekha snack of bhelpuri, my mind settles on the third option.. hot chocolate... and i walk towards the stall, blissfully unaware of the queue lined up to take beverages. I was given the nastiest glance by the aunty in white and it was then i realised that.. " oops.. mumbaichi queue" - one would dare not break the queue..

I pulled out my mumbai mirror and chose to wait rather than scamper into the 7.04 pm local to Andheri ... (all this was happening to me at 7.00 pm).. that i noticed a small boy dressed in a rather large baniyan , begging a man who was gloriously sipping his tea : behold.. the child was not begging him for alms.. he was begging him to give him the last sip of tea remaining in his cup...

As i closely looked at the child, i noticed that he had a sweet face, beautiful almond shaped eyes and is covered with dirt all over, scratching his head and begging with his other free hand... the man shooed him away but persistent to the hilt is what kept that child there... On one hand, here i am standing in the queue waiting for my turn, and there i see a child begging for a sip of tea. When the child realised that he had failed, he turned to large bin next to the stall, assured that the bin would not shoo him away and started collecting all the cups which had some leftovers..

He was making his own cocktail of beverages.. my heart went out to the child..

Behind me i had two well dressed, well educated gentleman sneering at the child, and telling themselves where our country is headed to... i thought.. " truly where is our country headed to..?"

Is it the childs fault that he is forced to rummage the bin to have his sip of tea? Is it the childs fault that he was born in poverty ? Is the childs fault that he is forced to have intoxicants in one hand and beg with the other??? It is sad, but this is the shocking fact of today, the pillars of tomorrow are wasting away in the streets with fevicol and ganga laden pieces of cloth, sniffing them intermittently to get a high and kill their hunger...

Having all the mind to question the men and finally deciding not to talk to the largest variety of nincompoops, i walked upto the stall and purchased 2 cups of hot chocolate and gave one to the child and holding the other one in my hand, i walked upto the platform to take the 7.13 local to Andheri.

Though i was glad that i had purchased a cup of hot chocolate for the child, a rather disturbing thought crossed my mind.. did i just spoil the child by getting him hot chocolate?? Would he be tempted to steal money for a cuppa hot chocolate or would he try to work for it... i was sure that he would choose the first option...

With my mind racing with thoughts of what i should have done/ what ought to be done... i got into the ladies first class, just to enter into another world of expressions, thoughts and struggles. I found my seat and leaned against the window listening to my ipod ( my best pal these days) and dozed off.. still happy that i made the childs night.. even if it is just a night...

All that came to my mind is .. "Oh darling.. yeh hai India... Mera Bharat Mahan"

Till next time.. happy reading

Ladies- I CLASS...

Platform number paanch par aane wali gaadi, aath bajkar chaar minute ki churchgate jaane wali jalad……..” these announcements become part and parcel of evry commuters life while working in Mumbai. It is amazing to see the number of people exiting from the trains and running to their respective offices and viceversa. The peak times and the lull times are common in any station.

The ladies first class compartment is a sparce bogie on the local trains as well and the earlier luxurious compartment, now gets packed like mustard seeds in a bottle. Well.. almost so. Women from different streams of lifestyle.. different areas of work/ levels of stress/ pressure in their lives enter into the train.. What entails most often is a clash of thoughts if one crosses another ones path or tries to find way into safety within the compartment.

One could call it a kind of stress buster when you shout and argue with a complete stranger, because it does not matter who you have been rude to and it does not matter if that person has felt bad about it. All that matters is that you have removed your frustrations on a person and that makes you lighter.. .. what a weird world we live in these days!!!

Last evening, while traveling alone back home, blissfully unaware of who’s near me and who’s quarelling.. ( thanks to my ipod that gives me company) I suddenly spotted a lady sitting in the corner of the second half, looking out the window, hearing music and eyes moist.. my heart went out to her.. it is amazing how women can compress all the feelings inside oneself and feel like a pressure cooker ready to give out steam, but still smile and work and put up with all the shit.. that she takes. ( Pardon my slang .. but I guess that’s the word that strikes ones mind, when you see someone in distress) Well clad and petite, she was a beauty to the sore eye.. and it was not a nice feeling to see her suffer silently sitting by the window and having her troubles come out of her eyes… there was a feeling of helpness in me…

Is she going through what I felt a few days back.. it is so hard to detach oneself from emotions.. there are times when all of them just get back to you and the feeling is so overwhelming that it cannot be controlled…. As I glanced around to see who else shared the same space.. I found sweet little girl chatting away with her mom and my thoughts raced to Trisha… Trisha my life.. my doll… my love and everything.. and I prayed that she grows up fast and becomes my friend…

By now, the lady was recuperating from the sudden burst of emotions that she felt.. it is hard fact but it is true and every human needs to master the art of detachment. It is a conditioning of the mind that associates itself to the best or the worst happenings in ones life and all that surrounded the event at that time become the conditions to recreate the same situation… and when one faces them, it is like reliving the same day/ the same moment and successfully detaching oneself from these conditional items is a tough task… but not impossible….

People come, make a mark in ones life/ people leave without a trace.. just like that and I sit wondering as to what did I do??? In the recent past I have been troubled by this question way too often.. trying to seek answers to why some people in my life just detached themselves in such a shoddy way that it becomes difficult to comprehend, assimilate and change accordingly.. because you don’t know “ WHAT THE HELL YOU HAVE DONE???”

The best out of it as I realized was to just shut oneself out of the complete thought.. may be shed a few tears and bury the person/ image forever and for mental satisfaction.. lay an epitaph calling all of those collective bunch of people/ circumstances as “IDIOCRACIES of the MIND” and flush them out of your system.. I guess I have partially achieved that.. ( Kudos to you Priya…!!) One needs to pat oneself on their backs for good job done.. and am sure that all of you who read this will agree to me

Life goes on.. circumstances/ events and people will come… it is like the first class that one chooses to live in.. but it is impossible to find luxury at every stage in life.. there will be times of distress/ pain and sheer happiness.. we need to maneuver our lives and take complete charge of it…

So this is the note to all my friends…

Life is the first class compartment
You wait for one….
You are cheated by one…
You finally get one…

Live on
Laugh on …..and life will be yours forever…

Till next time… happy traveling………………

Games of the Mind

Love, hate, cheat, trust, lies.. all are fragments of the small human mind. The phrase "small human mind" is an oxymoron as the human mind is not small, but can eventually end up thinking and acting so small that one starts wondering that the large mind is truly small.....

Relationships / feelings/ emotions are all part and parcel of the same mind matter that one tries to grab and never leave. In the midst of keeping and accumulating, we lose so many things that it is difficult to realise and the day the realisation dawns, it becomes difficult to accept and then the mode of depression sets in.

When any of us are in confused state of mind, we tend to try and find a soul mate, now how the soul mate wishes to respond is solely on that person, be it genuine or false/ but at that juncture one tends to totally trust that entity and a relationship is created. Some of these relations are very hard to explain, for these are relations whose foundation may be strong, but do not still know what direction the structure has to be built will always be in a state of flux.... The worry that will then always remain is that in the garb of building and maintaining, the relationship may just fall .... and this makes the human mind behave in an insecure way that is difficult to comprehend.

Have been writing on the human mind lately and this is the third part to the first two. Feelings/ emotions have been taking me on a roller coaster ride lately and in trying to untangle the knots and clarify my mind, the realisations that come are penned down in the blog. Am sure a lot of you will be able to synchronise and echo my thoughts..

In all this what we need to understand and tame is the mind, because once tamed, it is your slave otherwise it is a very dangerous proposition to be enslaved by the mind...

Think about it...

New lesson....

Trisha.. Trisha..... Trisha... my life is just Trisha and Trisha now.... today she did something really really splendid and i am amazed at the rate at which children learn and teach elders...

While watching TV, i generally hold Trisha towards me so that she does not get a chance to see the idiot box. However, i was watching the news and had my eyes glued to the TV. Our lady, was fiddling my T shirt, my earring, pulling my hair and scratching my ears too... I still managed to set my eyes on the TV.

The minute she realised that she is losing the game.... she does not shout or cry for attention, instead, she lifts herself up and tilts her head and looks straight into my eye, blocking the view of the TV... giving me that impish look that.... " do you realise that i am smarter" and then breaks into an amazingly beautiful smile...

She looked at me as if she realised what i was going through and as if she had taken it on herself to make me laugh.. and truly she managed it... When i tried to test her by looking otherways.. she followed me and kept looking straight into my eye and continued the impish smile....

Persistence pays... and i yielded....

Love you Trisha... you made my night...

The Duo

HAHAHAHAHAHA... laughter is the best medicine.... yes true, infact this has more meaning, if, in the course of life, one is able to laugh at oneself before anyone mocks at you. Thats when we have succeeded in living up to this saying..

I was trying to teach my daughter the same.. was trying stunts with the camera... and tried self clicking our snap together... and the result is--- the photo looks like an oil painting...

When i saw the snap again, all that came into my mind was that, this is a true fact of life as well... what ever we are, our lives are finally painted much in advance by a super power. Not that i want to give the super power a face or a structure.... but one thing is certain, if we try, we can help make a nice picture of the painting...

Sure that we make a great duo.. Trisha and myself.. there is a whole life ahead of us and we shall be best of friends.. that is one thing i am sure of... while taking this snap, i tried my best to urge Trisha to smile.. but she was way too perplexed with my endeavour, that she just chose to observe....Some day in the years to come, Trisha will also be able to laugh these days off.. when both of us looked like jokers to each other and helped each other bring a smile to our faces....

Life is a hope today, a hope for a better and peaceful tomorrow... a tomorrow where we will be able to sit along with each other and talk things over... laugh issues off and see the brighter side of what life has given us.....

In my last post, i had mentioned the human mind, this can be a corollary to the same as how one wishes to see life is nothing but a matter of mind and the clearer we are able to be, the better we will be able to project ourself and the faster we will be able to say HAHAHAHAHA and get on with life...

Truly... Cheeni Kum

Remember the movie that we went to rekindle and ignite the passion.... yeah.. right... cheeni kum... i was glad and happy that somewhere the right start is being made again.... now it is truly " cheeni kum" - a realisation that had been in my sub conscious mind that life is devoid of respect, dedication and value from the quarters one needs them the most.... the only difference being that today someone has stood up to it..

The feeling of referring to oneself as a third person is really interesting as you actually take yourself out of that person and see oneself.... Do all of us live lives or rather.. do all of us know what we want in life??? We tend to attribute everything to the human mind.. which is so abstract... have we understood the meaning of the so often used term??

This is the question that i ask myself today??? Is it a fragment of my thought and expression and a need to rekindle which made has made me feel the way i am feeling today?? .........." Thats a human mind" ... what does one mean by it... ???

Do the people who say it understand what a human mind is, or is a mere phrase which is used by the knowlegdeable and the nincompoops alike?? Not something that one would want to accept soon.. unless someone dwells and ponders on it. In all this there is truth in the fact that in any closely knit relation, if one heart bleeds, many others will bleed with it.. then does the human mind know how to react?? (Oopss... too heavy)

Let me answer that one... the phase of life that is on... feels like i am boiling on a hot pan.... know for certain that all close to me are also feeling the same way.. so how does the mind react, rather what is the role of the so common human mind?? The tempers run high....trying to establish peace... one just ends up in a lot of volcanic eruptions in the bargain....the fact remains- is it all really worth it

Not that my mode has changed to that of a cowardice.. "if one may call it so", but it is swinging between the modes of triumph and failure- it is okay if we feel only failure or only triumph but.... one of the worst emotions to face is "Knowing that you are victorious, triumph is at your door, but is veiled in failure..."

This blog.. inlaws and outlaws started when the human mind of certain in and out laws did not know how to behave and today .... we still dont know.... how this mind will react??

Unfortunately- all of us still want to believe that we know the human mind.. when in reality.. nobody does... we only want to know our emotions.....So where are we heading to as a human race????

A valid question to ponder on.. as far as the mind is concerned...

Shall definitely continue.. this... till then.. think!!!!

WOH DIN LAUTA DO....

The pitter patter rain on my balcony and the wet feeling under my feet took me back 20 years into one of the summer vacations that we had spent in Trivandrum. Trivandrum, now known as Thiruvananthapuram was our home town and every summer vacation we used to be there. Rains, no rains, the feeling of walking bare foot on the wet mud in the garden; the splendid endeavours of trying to be the mini hero amongst my friends and above all the hot maladus and boli that grandmom and mom used to prepare.

Seeing the water logging in front of our building, i could see the tiny priya run back into the house to fetch some newspaper... my sister used to then make boats out of them and we used to sail the boats in the water... WHAT FUN... PLAIN, SIMPLE Fun.. no strings attached. I long to get back to that life...

I could distinctly hear my granddad call out to me.. " Anga pogathey" , meaning, "dont go there" for fear that i might fall ill after getting wet in the rain. The only way i could appease grand dad was to say a yes, immediately back out, earn a good name and then ask him to buy a special plant for us.. it is called "Chodaku". Not many of us know that now. This plant has the flowers that fall out of the stem like small pitchers. One has to blow air into these pitchers and hold the tip of the flower tight and break the air in your palm or any other surface. The sound that it emanated was "SHHODAAKK" and hence the name...

Those days.. those days... "woh din kya the". The past comes back, especially when one knows that we cannot live those carefree lives again. Is this a fact that we yearn for things that we can never get??? Hope not. Because living in a dream is fatal especially if the dream falls flat on ones face...

When i sit back, relax over my hot cuppa tea, i sometimes feel like singing this to life:
" Kya se kya ho gaya ....bewafa .. " and here the one that is ditching us is life.. that we most lovingly hold on to...

Still.. i would end this post mentioning that.. Life is like MUSIC... We have to play on and am sure we will succeed at the end, even if there are pauses and slow numbers in the opera.