Tales of Tales

Some memories are precious indeed ... and so many of mine are immersed in the pages of long beloved and much treasured books. It is well nigh impossible to pick only a few books from the many that I have fallen in love with. Yet, having decided to relive my first experiences with atleast a few books, here goes ...

A. A. Milne's 'Winnie-The-Pooh' was a childhood favourite. Of Pooh coming down the stairs upside-down with Christopher Robin every morning and wondering if there wasn't any other way down the stairs even while banging his head on each stair. By which time they would generally be downstairs already so it wouldn't matter any more and they would be ready to set off on a new adventure. Pooh's immense love for honey, Eeyore hunting for his lost tail, Piglet and Pooh's friendship and their fascination with Roo and Kanga, Owl's apparent wisdom, the entire Rabbit family and oooh, the Heffalump! Tra-la-la, tra la-la, Tra-la-la, tra la-la, Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum, Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle, Rum-tum-tum-tiddle-um. And best of all, aai telling me Winnie-the-Pooh stories over and over again when I was too young to read ... ensuring that I fell in love with the characters and imagined them in my own rich, fantasy-filled world every time I did read the stories myself.

Another book I remember being absolutely in love with was Gerald Durrell's 'Rosy is my Relative'. It was so engrossing that it became utterly impossible for me to keep the book down and I had to finish it in one go. It is mighty difficult to pick a favourite scene ... Adrain's surprise at being bequeathed a drink-loving, yet gentle-tempered elephant. The myriad characters he encounters on his journey to the sea-side to sell off Rosy. The ballroom escapade with Rosy pulling down the chandeliers and the pantomime disaster. The court room scenes with the lawyers and the jury and the judge all confused and yet plodding along...  Adrain's love for Samantha, Rosy's love for drink and everybody else's love for utter bedlam made for one of the best reads in my life ever!

Durrell's 'My Family and Other Animals' and 'Birds, Beasts and Relatives' were enjoyable too, not just because of his unintentionally hilarious family but because of his descriptive style of writing. Strawberry-pink villas, forests full of olive trees, loud Greeks and their love for life, food and wine ... Corfu came alive in Durrell's books and his friends, mother, brothers and sister made his animal adventures even more exciting and lively. I am sure the puns in his titles were absolutely intended. He introduced me to phrases like 'deliciously sick' and 'forests that chirped and came alive' and I have been a Durrell fan ever since.

Enid Blyton's books ... Malory Towers, St. Clares, Five Find-outers, Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, and umpteen other awesome books were the stuff that kept me sane during school holidays. A book a day was the norm and I am so thankful that there were good lending libraries in the area I grew up in ... and that my parents were ardent book lovers too, always believing that a book was of course the best gift ever! Blyton's stories have a charm, and though many have criticized her writings for their orthodox style and the implied anti-feminism or discrimination, I do not believe a child will ever be negatively affected by her stories unless an over-smart grown up tries to prejudice the young reader. Her tales are simple, imaginative and full of life. Harry Potter came along much later; magical stories for young adults have been around for far too long before J. K. Rowling wrote her books.

Classics such as Hitchhiker's Guide, Jane Eyre, Mill on the Floss, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and so many others have all been on my book shelf at some time or the other. Later I found John Grisham, Arthur Hailey, Jeffery Archer, Ayn Rand and its been an ongoing journey of discovery. Every visit to a book store brings the realization that there is so much I have never read! Over the years, I have forgotten the names of some of the people who introduced me to each new genre. But they enriched my life and made sure that as long as I can read books, I shall never be lonely here. Novels, short-stories, autobiographies, travelogues, diaries ... so many forms of writing. Sometimes I wish that life could be a long long summer vacation and I could just curl up in a comfy chair and read, with no regard for the passing of time and the oh-so-important work and life that constantly await us.

Yippee!!!

IISc Marathi Mandal rocks at the Ganeshotsav One-act play Competition organized by Maharashtra Mandal, Bangalore!
We had put up a play at the Competition this year (16th September 2010). It was the first time we participated at this event.
There were five of us on-stage and an incredibly awesome team back-stage and it was a seriously thrilling, exhilarating experience!
And like dark-chocolate-mouth-watering icing on a super-delicious cake, we won the top prizes in all categories except script-writing since that we had borrowed (though it was wholeheartedly modified a lot with creative inputs from Anirudha, Anup, Shantanu, Pramod and poetic contributions from Amrut). Three cheers for the original script writer though!

1. Best Drama (One-act play) - Artificial Intelligence
2. Best Director(s) - Anirudha and Anup
3. Best Actor (Male) - Anirudha
4. Best Actor Runner-up (Female) - Jahnavi
5. Best Supporting Actor (Male) - Anup
6. Best Sets/Background - Madhumita, Nivedita, Vishal, Siddharth, Atul, Bharat, Nagraj
7. Best Sound/Music arrangement - Abhijit, Shantanu, Amrut, Harshawardhan, Siddharth
8. Best Light arrangement - Ravi

This has been one of the "funnest" times ever! Hip Hip hooray!
आवाज कुणाचा? आय. आय. एस सी.चा!

The Stage

Dark spaces everywhere,

Muted whispers in the air.

Faceless entities floating around,

Anxious flutters all abound.

Bells ring, curtains are drawn.

Flood of light ... the play's on.

Charged spaces, myriad characters,

A story told, amid tears and laughter.

Captive audiences, 

Fleeting emotions.

Of stolen glances, 

Actions and reactions.

Silences that speak aloud

Faces that talk to the crowd

Real and unreal converge,

And all my worlds seem to merge...

A matter of trust

Returning from an errand, I met a rickshaw-wallah the other day, who set me thinking. Upon being told my destination, he was full of questions. About my place of study, where I come from, whether the courses are difficult, the accommodation, the campus, the admission process, the composition of the student community and so on. I was a little reluctant to answer his questions and evaded them in what I thought was a skillful manner. You don't go around divulging personal details to absolute strangers, do you?
Having managed to try and give monosyllabic answers for most of his questions, I was almost patting myself on the back when he turned around and apologized for his inquisitiveness.
"Madam, my son an engineer. He study here, but now job in Pune. Good job. Very proud. Hard work, you know. I want him to study more. So asking you. Sorry, madam if you don't like it."

I was ready to dig a hole through the floor of his rickshaw and allow the earth to swallow me up, metaphorically speaking. What kind of person had I turned into if I had allowed my essential niceness to be swallowed up in the safety drill!?!

Why is it that we are taught to not trust strangers? We are born with the ability to look at the world like it is full of the most innocent and beautiful people. It is as we grow up that the prejudices set in, become ingrained in to our psyche and we turn into suspicious, small-minded adults! I hate the fact that the minute I see a stranger staring or a slightly different/weird looking individual walking by me in a slightly lonely locality, the thought immediately crosses my mind that this person might mean some harm and I should be ready to face anything. I should be careful, mindful of my own safety and so on.

And then the guilt crashes in. That such thoughts come visiting. Perhaps they are important in today's world. But that human beings have lost such faith in others of their own kind is disturbing. It is not fair to the other person or people. I would hate it if anybody thought such awful stuff about me for no particular reason. I would hate it even more if perfectly innocent people who just happened to be around, minding their own business, or perhaps even wondering if I am a safe person while passing me by, could look into my head and read my thoughts.

It is sometimes difficult to follow all the rules of this world. At least in the present day and age...
What are we always told about strangers right from the time we are kids? DON'T talk to strangers. Strangers can be bad, can be cruel, can mean trouble. Stay away from them. Very important life lesson indeed. Especially when one considers the statistics about crimes where children and women more especially, and even men in many cases, are the victims. Strangers can indeed be dangerous, at times.

But when is the "no strangers" rule supposed to be eased a little bit? At what age is one supposed to be grown up and able enough to judge people, especially strangers? Because every new person is a stranger and many might turn out to be people you could treasure, awesome people. And doubting them to begin with does not make for a happy time ahead, in fact, might mean driving away the very people who might be meant to travel the roads with you...

Somehow we need to strike the perfect balance between staying safe and away from harm even while being good human beings, who trust and judge correctly. That, I believe, is the essence of all that growing up, maturity and wisdom. Perhaps life and experience teaches you this, it is not something you can learn in a class or from a  book about morals and values. This might be why our parents and grandparents seem so much wiser. They have seen, lived and learnt, a process that takes patience and time. But having to live in a fast-forwarded world today, where we have so little time to invest in wisdom, we forget to learn. Perhaps every now and then, I ought to stop and think for myself if I am the kind of person I like. Then I might yet end up the kind of person I could like if I ever met myself as a stranger...

Constant Change

Change is supposed to make life more interesting. Change is necessary for life. Change is good. Change is the way of the world.

Seasons change and each one seems to enthrall me.

Winter with its bone chilling cold and the pleasures of snuggling under blankets or the stylish layering of colourful sweaters and scarves and hats. It brings along the Festival of Lights and heart-warming sweets and and the Christmas spirit and the New year.

And then, before you even know it, Spring has crept up upon you and the world is a riot of smells, flowers and colours and chirping birds and myriad shades of green everywhere you look! At times i wish i were a painter and could capture the feelings that arise within me and put them down on paper with just a brush-stroke!

Even while the birds are yet singing their songs and the flowers are still peeking out, Summer announces itself with its sweltering heat and constant sticky sweatiness and sweet, cold long drinks and ice-lollies and unending ice-creams and the squeaking of the fan spinning at full speed.

Summer showers remind me of the fact that there is yet an entire lovely season to look forward to. In India, we call it the Rainy season :) I simply rejoice in the rains. If i were a poet i could write something about the rains watering my soul and so on...
The dark grey clouds sweeping into the blue skies majestically, the expectant stillness of the air, the rolls of thunder and a stray flash of lightening and then the first sweet raindrops. How many of you have stood still and just spent a moment inhaling the scent of the first rains as they hit the dry parched earth? I am sure you will agree with me that it is perhaps one of the most enticing smells ever! And then the sheets of water cascade. The pitter-patter changes to relentless thundering and i wish that the seasons would never change...

I have often wished that i could willfully choose some changes and completely wish away others.

I love my life as it is right now, the predictability of certain things, the routine, the responses of the people in my life, the people themselves! We always take so many aspects of our lives for granted. The family we are born into, the places we have lived in, friends, home, the choices we made, the freedom to make those choices, our right to self-involvement, everything! But then i would never be able to experience the differences that the changes bring along, the new experiences. Twelve months of rain would perhaps bore me. It is the fact that winter and summer and spring and rain come and go that they seem so interesting. Like having something to look forward to. So here's to wishing for a lifetime of changes and the joy of looking forward to each as if it were a new adventure :)