Saar Post!

I was playing with my daughter the other day with a set of cards called "People and Professions" . There was the usual doctor, carpenter, pilot... and suddenly flashed a card of a "Postman". Remember, the diligent human who used to deliver blue color inland letters, brown cards to our doorsteps. I am from the "eternal summer" land of Chennai and every postman would always ask for "thanni". My granny very meticulously would fill water from the tap and not from the vessel which contained the boiled water..:)

I do not see many postmen now. I see courier boys flipping karts or delivering the innumerable airtel bills. But no classic postman. Why? Because nobody is writing letters anymore and hence the absence of post boxes as well. My daughter associated the post box to the small box that is outside all houses either to collect milk packets or pizza hut fliers or worse "No parking" boards.

I really miss those days of postmen, circular dial telephones, 'boom-boom maatukaaran', night time kulfi man, vaerkadalai kaaran (thankfully this is still there, "kadalai" never stops ;) ) For all the non-tamil readers these were a bunch of people of the nineties who added color to my life.

Please do not condemn this post saying that "Our economy grew, we progressed and all that..". I completely understand. Its just that I miss them like we miss our grandparents who passed on....

lol, :), rofl, hru and so on.....

Look around you. There are mobile phones everywhere. People talk, message, play, while they eat , walk and run. You name an action and that can be done in parallel while on a mobile. Whatever happened to people talking to people? Or enjoying food without the need to hear a voice on the other end? Or walking without thinking about anything, just plain walking looking around at trees and birds (well, not many to look at nowadays - thanks to the million intersecting waves). People have lost the sense of a real society. You send a message to your colleague in the different room, you tweet, fb message your friend on the same floor. I am not an exception except that I used to do the same for official reasons. But I question why?

When a person types in :) or ‘lol’ or ‘rofl’, does that mean he/she is smiling? NO. Most of the time, it is a habit, courtesy. You are online; you see your friend ping you but choose to ignore it. Your best friend.  Why? Because you can. Emotions have been replaced by emoticons and each of us has lost the identity. Nobody is plain vanilla anymore and most of the time; we do not even know that. We all have a cyber personality. And we get confused between the real and the unreal. I can hear people yelling -'You cynic..' :)

People have changed, the world has changed, for the better or worse, I do not know. There used to be times when our ancestors were contented to be who they were. Few of them lived only to survive, while the other fortunate ones lived for art and music, science, and most of all passion of some kind. Few notes of music, a concert, some books, some equations, a scripture, would be enough to make them happy. Now, we need a CTC, benefits, reimbursements and what not. We are moving with the tide, and thus are not able to sense the pace at which we are moving. Life has become unhandleable. There is an invisible hand that is controlling us all. Well, it used to be God, now it is something else - ambition, money, power, fame, competition and most of all , sense “non-contentment” - if there is word.

I am certainly not an exception – just encouraging people to indulge more in the little joys that make life more meaningful. This is not a very structured ‘scribble’, just random thoughts.. and I know many will disagree! But, after all, it is a free world!

The art of doing nothing

Remember the times when we used to gaze at the stars, at the trees, at the passing by cars and just be. We did not need diversion as kids - looking at the clouds and the shapes they form, drawing figures on water split from a bottle and imagining stories, looking at the clothes on the clothes line and assigning names to the shirts and dresses, counting the similar patterns on the mosaic, playing chess on the square kitchen tiles, making weird things from dried leaves and twigs.. oh  how I miss those days. If we did these things during our generation, imagine what our mothers and grandmothers would have done..


There was no need for our parents to inculcate those things into us because there was no diversion, a single channel on tv - playing either crop harvests or monotonous news channels, parents very busy earning money or taking care of the household, but showering love and affection from every possible direction, the world used to begin 3 houses on this side and end 3 houses on the other. 
Agreed - we were not worldly, we knew about the world from books or from stories narrated by our grandmother. These stories and their world were not set in the scenic Europe or the antique Africa but in even more beautiful places in Mythology where heaven and earth could meet.


Will it ever be possible for the little ones now to do that? On their own, NO. 
We need to bring it to them. Create a world where there is some percentage of that world we loved. Reduce their TV time, introduce computer games at a really late stage, introduce books on mythology, and give them some idle time. Let them stay away from all that material for a while. Let them not know what ricj is or poor is, let them not judge people like we do. Let them not categorize people.. let them just love.  Let them get bored. The kid's mind is so imaginative that the idle mind is not a devil's workshop yet.... It is a magical land.

Revolution 2020

Chetan Bhagat's new novel - Revolution 2020 promises a lot but fails to deliver.
Three friends, love, ambition, envy.... It harps on the now cliched - corruption and ambition. It does get exciting and interesting in the middle but loses direction and the protagonist seems to be totally confused in the end.  


Varanasi has been brought to life and the setting is quite beautiful. But apart from that, there is nothing to write home about.


Five point someone had a heart, and two states was a laugh riot. Is this a fitting next to two states? Not really. Would have loved more soul in the story. Seemed too cinematic in the end. Probably Chetan has started writing books as scripts for movies :)