All things pure and joyful

Several things have happened to me in the recent past that have made me take a walk outside myself and enjoy the simplest joys of life, and touch that imperceptible membrane between nature and man's struggle to become part of it. Everytime such an incident has taken place that has given me reason to smile, i have felt surprisingly refreshed mentally and reassured emotionally that there is a lot of things around us that can change the way we look at life. So a few quick excerpts!! This will be a series of blog articles i reckon so the TBC at the end is left unstated.

- GT 1. I am making my way through the streets of Baroda in a chauffered car, from the airport to my guest house and we make remarkably slow progress not because of badly maintained roads or anything but because of the hordes of cows that seem to have invaded Baroda! And these are not your normal cows, these are your super-cool-check-me-out-dont-mess-with-me kinda bovine mastadons! They stand ever so happy bang in the middle of the road, lolling their long rubbery feisty tongue out unmindful of the fact that there is an Innovo right behind them filled with people with better things to do than ogle at their tongue. In a city known for its growing industrial economy and commerce, these cows decide who gets to work and when! They reminded me of the junkies i saw in goa, completely doped out and at peace with the world!

- GT 2. I am taking a flight out of Baroda to Mumbai and I need to board the plane. Waiting for the connecting bus to take me (there is a slight drizzle and the air is chill) when a very well-meaning airline official told me that i was free to walk across the tarmac with my trolley and board the plane. So far so good. But when i looked at the sprawling "tarmac", all that my eyes could take in was a magnificent puddle of water stretching from just after the step i was standing on all the way to the aircraft. And i smiled once again.

-GT 3. This one involves a chuppy, a pink dolphin and a photo-shoot which i shall elaborate on in my sequel to this post. But for the first time in as long as i can remember, my eyes welled up with tears of joy, overwhelmed by the purity that nature manifests itself in in every walk of life and then how we (mankind) systematically proceed to wreck all the good work done.

A ball of a time

Yesterday, from work i went straight to my recreational paradise, read as Fun square (bowling company) in Lokhanwalla, Andheri. I have been a bowling buff for sometime now and do spend a lot of time knocking pins down. And it was yesterday that i had one of my watershed days in this brutal activity of decimating pins as strike after strike dissolved the vulnerable targets in a blinding flash of white!

My score sheet read (after 4 games) 167,222,161 and 225, the last one being a clean game! So that made for a stupendous average of 193 for 4 games. That officially is now my new record for the highest average for 4 games or more. Awesome it has been! Awesome it will be!

When i was in chennai last week, i did some serious shopping for books with my sister who took me to a really nifty bookstore that had the most obscure books at really ground-level prices. I bought 14 books (8 of them being bestsellers) for Rs 750 or US$18. Nothing can beat that. Have already finished Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, Omerta by Mario Puzo and am currently devouring Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Recommend all the above for the discerning bibliophile.

More in my next.

Its been a while

After May 21st, which was when i posted my last blog article, i had let myself get immersed in a world of frantic activity and bohemian enjoyment and hence never got close to my blogging life. Mumbai has been reeling from the train blasts and the stories have been everywhere.

Some people are saying that Mumbaikars are resilient and always ensure that normalcy returns to as soon as possible after such deadly attacks. And there is counter school of thought whose followers believe that Mumbaikars are too self-centred and egotistic who do not care about what happens in the world around them as long as they are ok and doing well and that explains the quick return to normalcy. Whatever be the attitude, its been heartening to see that people always dont need a strong personally motivating reason to help their brethren as was exemplified by the thousands who came out on the streets to help the wounded and the dying.

Someday, these lunacies will stop. Someday, the lunatics will reform. And I am not too sure that all of them are on the other side of the calamity. There shall be light!