when ruins speak up

I always wonder how passionate people are, about visiting new places and spending time relaxing . Thou the concept of holidaying,and going to places has gained large attention in recent years,But people often wanted to change the monotony of life,hence at least planned some days out visiting relatives, which was more economical,ands sometimes to holy places as a pilgrimage  to pay our thanks to the GOD for the good that has happened and to wade away any evil,beyond  this visiting places was a dream,which has come true,due to the multiplicity of airlines, a product development in the tourism industry,compelled pestering by our kids and of course the social pressure to keep up that you too had planned a holiday.well i also had planned a visit to Andaman a few years back,beyond the natural beauty that the island had to unfurl, the most fascinating and memorable,thing was the visit to the Andaman jail and the sound and light show,well the narration about toiling of the inmates was made by the tree which was witness for all that happened, which still remains, while the characters are dead and the sufferings and.such incidences are stored as memories in the grains of sand of the lovely beaches which,receive millions of people.
two recent incidents have made me to recall what the ruins would hold and how memories are lost until saved in some ones heart

Incident1: a few decades back we shared the pleasure of staying with my brother who was given palatial govt quarters,a white building surrounded with huge trees,plants and a veiled compound, our presence there would make the whole area lively,our mornings would start with a few sitting out in the veranda,sipping,our morning tea,browsing the papers,while a few kids would be enjoying their tricycle or bicycle ride ,my mom busy plucking flowers for making them into a mala,the kitchen brimming with activities to ensure that every one supposed to leave are fed and taken care of, the maid a the backyard,assisting in cleaning or washing, and as time progresses,people will start leaving for,schools,colleges work and for other business,the liveliness that was amid used to draw the attention of people passing thro on the roads, time changed and we have moved out but i happened to cross this building on my way to work only to see that it was occupied by different people with their own preferences.but a few years back it was declared as abandoned and work started for its demolition.when ever portion of the building was transformed into rubbles my heart ached and memories flooded down regarding our stay there,today the building is gone,many of the trees too have gone and a new building is coming up, i guess the soil there would behold the lost memories of happiness that was once there andwould  keep haunting as dreams.

Incident 2

i was on my way back from work i saw a huge JCB put to work it was sincerely bringing down the once famous Dasaprakash hotel, the demolition work was in full spree,and advertisement board also claiming that a posh,unaffordable,luxury apartment is coming up was establishing that this name would get erased from the memory of chennalites.there will be no dasaprakash signal, no hotel,no functions and no land mark as dasaprakash, only to be replaced by some dwelling unit to be filled with new people,.well,i have been to dasaprakash, with my dad and mom and sister ,while we were waiting for a medical seat counselling, i have organised a few official functions there, attended a few marriages, so also many people would have had occasions to carry memories of their own about this building which is just a rubble now to be built in.

These a just few examples, but the list would go on like the well on which i would sit and spend endless time looking into its depth, the easy chair which i would sit and drowse with an open book, the trees,under which time was spent to rest. who knows might be the the trees around us the rusting air the birds and insects too keep conversing about such things only we don't hear them

THE GOOD FIGHT

The world we live in is made of so many rules we but  we simply follow in the name of disciple, many a times we are let to feel so small at the behest of authority, where suddenly you feel that what ever authority you have has been nullified and you are simply at the mercy on them.well this would also apply to the troubled, starved devotee who takes on a pilgrimage to    Tirupathi,with one vision that some how he should have a glimpse of their favourable god and during that brief moment THE LORD ALMIGHTY should have eye contact with him,alas what happens the nearer you move towards him the pressure exerted by your co devotees and more by the security who just shove you out, Deny's you even that short glimpse and out from that group the only question that each one asks each other is samiya,partiya?(did you see god) well such instances are many and the insults you undergo are very many.
yet another place where you get hurt, insulted and helpless is when you are in hospital,having admitted your dear ones that small reassurance that he/she is fine is the paramount need of the hour,so we start queueing at the entrance/icu,many times you do undergo this feel that a preferential treatment is given by the security man,He would be allowing every one in, suddenly becomes,conscious the moment he sees you try's to stop you saying you do not have a pass you are late by whisker and the visitor time is over,well these can only be lame excuses,when you try to question his arbitrariness he is annoyed and treats you just like dirt,some take this humiliation with remorse, some would like establish the malafide behaviour,but then often you are left to fight a lone battle, in fact you will not be surprised to see that the security man has more sympathisers than the one who needs consideration.For courage and virtue are bad words in the present days.
so goes the insult list, which can be added up with your own experiences, which many a times we shy away even to share it with our dear ones,thou we may justify the act as apart of their duty,the inner intuition tells us that such negations ARE purely for the pleasure of saying NO. And such ridiculous rules As OBSERVED BY  COELHO "sometimes THE WORLD ask us to fight for thing's we do not understand and whose significance we will never discover ".but the feeling that you had the courage to stand up the humiliation and fight for a cause which you believe is true, gives you immense satisfaction and strenght

A SMALL OBSERVATION

Life is always woven around with contradictions and due to our preoccupied mind we rarely observe people places and articles around ask and even at times fail to logically analyse certain things and just agree that it has to be like that, well even this thought came to me only after reading yet another book of Paulo coelho were in he himself had said that certain things have logic  behind them like having buttons on the shirt  in the front which is for convenience , but having a qwerty key board has no logic(any contestants).well with this spark now i have started questioning the logic behind many things even like kaka en kaka enu kathuthu?

well i was recently out to a place by flight,which is always a dreadful experience,between the take of and landing their exists a vacant space,you can see no moving trees or posts as in the trains,never hear the crippling of birds,listen to those noises of vendors nothing ,even passengers next to you resolve to remain silent either with eyes shut or open,and me also following the same but, i preferred to just observe whats happening around me

well the first attention was towards the cabin crew and their dress code, why were all girls dressed in short skirt with a zip at the back,which was inaccessible ,tight shirts, and a hair do with a puffed bun which had to be put in place with so many hair pins,high heeled shoes,and a thick paste of kajal for the eyes and not to forget that dark lipstick,who had defined this dress code for them, are these people not the first to respond in case of emergency, the skirt was so tight that their steps were measured, then how would they run and reach anyone if required,will they not trip and fall while running with a high heel in the flight,by and large all of them were pretty,there were not there for a Barthnathya performance than why so much of make over, who has defined this, and why none of them have pointed out the practical difficulties, well i guess they would have fallen trap to the belief that this has to be like this,where no logic or reasoning is required .

well my second attention was drawn towards two kids and their mothers  The kid were so restless, kept on screaming in high decibel shrills,many a time he/she was calling out for his father who was just occupying a few seats away,the father never uttered even a single word nor nod,in acknowledgement of child's tantrums.

The mother was just taking that strenuous effort of holding this child in the cramped seat,avoiding all those eyes which gave a look when the child's cried,she had no weapon of distracting the child beyond that feeding bottle what she had.Never did i hear the mother nurturing it with lovable words,trying to soothe it and put to rests with the magic touch what many mothers had or use the threat that boochikaran would come or rather wee willi winki(modern mom) if he doesn't keep quiet, well this just kept me wondering whether,mothers have lost the art of child rearing,well it was beyond my level of reasoning i could only see that as the height inability

well now it was landing time, and as the descend started visibility of a few lights twinkling in far vicinity and the gradual increase in numbers and that celestial beauty of a million lights of different colours opened up, that's when i realised how long it has been since i saw the open sky and the twinkling stars, i guess its been years that i have relished seeing stars.The rhyme twinkle,twinkle little star has to be reminded and we should all go out and show to our kids this is night sky ,those tiny shining lights in the distant end is the star,which is as big as the sun , if not  we may even forget what stars really look like, so lets take time to see things around us work and leave more on convenience,ra.ther than following others without reasoning or logic

childhood

Oh oh with this fast phase of life and the kind of pressure that we shoulder on .Many a time we do curse ourselves to have grown up into adults. We often wonder how nice it would be to be a child again. i guess every one of us would have seen the feeding bottles and that Dal rice which was offered to our siblings with some envy and desperation that ,we have been denied it because we have grown in size.So also the type of restriction that has been injected to us as we grow in the name of good manners,Don't shout,be gentle,don't be adamant,respect others give attention to what others say,don't interrupt when some one speaks,be regular to school,don't confront your teacher. well the list would be quite exhaustive and would never end.
Well while this factor has been on my mind, today i happened to see an incident which gave me a reassurance that we can  still have the fun and excitement of a child and much more, but the price and risk that we  have to take is too huge. Any guesses ?how this can happen ?well all that you have to do is become a politician   and get elected to the parliament, you will realise that you have been returned your childhood,well if you still have any doubts about this just watch any TV channel that gives you an coverage on what happens in the Parliament, its really good and enjoyable

"Nambinaar keduvathillai"

when the going is tough and life looks tattered it is always good to be silent, withdrawn and calm.but putting our inner self to such silences is very difficult .as I had said once I  am an admirer of PAULO
COELHO's writings and hence thought i would revisit his books for some reassurance and strength.I
happened to see to story of a pencil WRITTEN BY COELHO  and i thought i would reproduce it for the benefit of everyone  A pencil has five qualities and IF  we manage to hang on to them, we would always be at peace
First quality    :you are capable of great things,but you must  never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps.We call that hand GOD,and He always guides us accordingly to His will.
 Second:   now and than we use a sharpener, that makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards,its much sharper. so  WE  too must learn to bear pain and sorrow because they will make us  a better person.
third: the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out mistakes. this means that correcting something is not necessarily a bad thing as it helps to keep us on the road to justice.
fourth: what really MATTERS in a pencil is not its wooden exterior but the graphite inside. so always pay attention to what is happening inside you
fifth:     A pencil leaves a mark. in just the same way, you should  know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in action.

cemetery looters

Are we not too shy to express our self either orally or in written and is this not one of the major predicament that defines the sucess of man. Right from our young days as toddlers we start acquiring words  syllabi's etc and admiration runs in for people who have  a good vocabulary,more so if it is in a foreign language.Many a times we fumble with words and go blank  at times just for the simple reason that we are unable to recollect the right word/do not know the usage of words used/and also fear making some mistakes in pronouncing them
I learn noah webster is the first dictionary to come out in 1828 with about 70,000 word and on date it has around 475000 words which is again debatable,but i am really surprised with the introduction of new words in our daily life some pure English,some a mix of Tamil and English,some just substituting the local language its only with this back ground and a recent article in the Newspaper which has made such wanderings.
CEMETERY LOOTERS well on seeing this i was just shocked, .thinking that looters have now shifted their venues to cemetery instead of bungalows/homes/and houses,But thanks to the publishers that this was accompanied with a coloured photograph, where a woman made up as kali was danging glee fully with neem leaves in hand some organ of goat might be liver or lungs clenched in her teeth. well this made me to recollect what cemetery looters meant(i did give a momentary smile to myself for that knowledge enhancement).
WELL this is a ritual(festival)that follows Maha sivarathri and popularly known in Tamil as Mayana kolai,and colloquially termed as masana kolai,thats how we used to call it,well the writer wanted to give an account on this and not knowing how to get it on paper has translated each word mayana-cemetery and kokai-looter. so is that so simple to write. Had we known this life would have been soooo.easy for us not to remember words memorise spellings etc.

Coming back about reminisces of mayana kolai,(masana kolai, in our words) this was a dreadful day which we used to enjoy with,terror,we are scared  of horror movies, but still we would like to undergo that thrill, so was the case here too.

As school students, our school had a very big cementry in its neighbour hood, there would be a huge crowd,relatives of dead souls ,having a grave,would have assembled there, decorated the cemetery, and would have come with a spread of eateries,delicacies what they presume was liked by their  dear ones when they were alive.this crowd used to wait for the arrival of a convoy of  people dressed as deities mostly incarnations of kali with deadly colors and some raw meat clenched in hand or mouth.this scene and crowd was enough reasons for us to assemble their as spectators since the event was always around 4 oclock, the end of our school. how ever there were very scary description that     people dressed as kateri(as being named) would come and attack  people if found with any accessories in black.so we used to remove our black shoes dump it in our bags,cover our head and hair with what ever little cloth we have and prefer to take the gaps behind people so that we can have some glimpses but should never be the front liners of any attack, if at all it happens by the kateri, the long wait would end with people(dressed ones) just visiting the burial ground and occasionally they used to lift some eateries from the spread and eat, and people who ever have displayed it get a consoling factor that their dead ones have consumed the same.well this article was not about mayana kollai, but just in appreciation of the editor, who did not shy away from writing about this,many people would have had an iota of doubt how to give a caption and here we had one with out any inhibition wrote CEMETERY LOOTERS, YET ANOTHER ADDITION IN THE LIST OF VOCABULARY ON WEBSTER,well at this instant i am also reminded about a person
who walked up to the board and wrote VENGAYAM well this is response as a students to the challenge posted to a class who can spell (vengayam) in english correctly the expected reply being ONION ,well if we have confidence looks speaking and writing english  is a coool job

ENNA SUNDAY DA SAMY........!!!! @#@

WE often come across  usage of words such as, catastrophe/chaos pichikichu well here’s  just an insight about what they mean .

It was a Sunday morning, a long awaited day of rest, as you only break it from your routine of getting up in a hurry shouting at your kids seeing the clock every ten minutes to ensure whether you are in time to that 30 min of late with  which you can always enter your office head down avoiding those eyes  of a row of visitors with  with a minimal guilt, so the real rest what the word means is subjective..

I had made up my mind that the next day I don’t have to go thru this above mentioned routine and went to bed, the previous night presuming that I am going to have a relaxed stress free day. Well the clock had hardly crossed 10  past 7 , there was a gentle shrug  but a firm one from my maid, with the first announcement, water is not flowing in the taps, to make it still worse, she said she has operated the sump motor and still water doesn’t come, to give more clarity to her version, she narrated with action(u see she is partially dumb and deaf)that the motor does not make noise when switched on .

Well I think this much of alarm was sufficient to make me to jump out from bed to start  my relaxed day. Still that residual laziness to act made me to transform the same action to my daughter  shaking her up from her sleep  with a shout saying Check up whether the motor works this dame claims there’s no water. Well she went down returned and said yes the motor doesn’t work only difference being that she spoke these words out. Now I had to give the next command, check whether all three phases of EB is working after a delay of a few minutes she returned back saying yes. Now my temperament was changing, I said to my daughter do I have to give instructions one by one will you not run through  all the possibilities of reasoning to check why a device doesn’t work? Any way we can all guess why our people fair so badly in maths and problem solving, they get struck and always wait for the next statement for execution.

Well coming back to my water woe , I called up an electrician, with out showing up his displeasure to work on a Sunday he agreed to  turned up(bait being that he has been requesting for a job for his ward)and now a new dimension is added up there is no water in the s ump this response comes from my daughter, who has now gone for the next command    of execution. Oh now it is time for me to get started to switch from delegation to do it mode I walk down to the sump/motor for a first hand  status for the entire episode, well the inlet pipe of the sump is closed I open it so water starts filling up in the sump, the electrician turns up fixes up a wire that’s given up and the motor starts lifting up water, putting up a relief on my face but also triggering up with such a good start for my so called relaxed sun day…

This led me to wander my thoughts  on some of the happenings around

The recent pathetic earthquake of Japan, the tsunami and the after effects

The political war going on for clenching power, the exposures and aftermaths of various issues creeping in

Was the scene not the same even with epics such as Ramanayam, Ramas throning as king and his exile , ABDUCTION OF SITA AND THE STORY GOES ON..........

Well I can go about listing out happenings which substantiates that trouble small or big never come as a single episode but as a  culmination turning down into a catastrophe  but I think in the end every problems end with a solution and learning.

As alchemist quotes IF WE ARE DESTINED TO GET SOMETHING THE WHOLE WORLD CONSPIRES TO AID US ACHIEVE IT, AND I WOULD LIKE TO ADD THAT THIS IS BOTH FOR GOOD AND BAD,

AND JUST TO END WITH A KNOWN PUNCH SINGAM SINGALA VARUM…. PANNI KUTAMA THAN VARUM, I GUESS HAPPINESS COMES ONLY IN MEASURED QUANTITIES WHEREAS WORRIES AND TROUBLE COMES IN COUPLES AND COUPLETS.