Light of the Lamp

Hi everybody,                           As the year 2014 downs the curtains, everybody gets ready to welcome yet another year. Another year? Yes, every year seems to arrive and disappear so soon before we realize. What each year means to us depends on our personal achievements, happenings or failures. Those of us who are hale and hearty should thank the almighty that we are alive to see the next year. Here, I may sound a bit preachy or philosophical, but each passing year will make us more philosophical.                          Every year turns to be a mixture of sadness, happiness, hope, despair, frustration mostly because of various acts of humanity. We, as humans, are united only during the acts of God which are cyclones, floods, earthquakes. Acts of terrorism, killings, rapes numbs our minds for sometime. Deaths of famous personalities or our relatives make us realize the fact that life is too short to live with hatred, sadness, regrets. What are the incidents that touched you

Hi friends,                  Wish you all a happy holiday season ahead filled with fun and frolic. December is the month of the year when the regular and hectic schedule comes to a pause almost automatically , if not for all, to enjoy rest of the days with our friends and family in a place we choose to have. Like everybody else, I also yearn to travel and explore different places, be it in our own country or abroad. We choose a place and book rooms in advance so that we would go there during the third week of December. It has been my long cherished dream to visit Hampi in Hoskote which has magnificent structures of the erstwhile Vijayanagara empire. Hampi seemed to beckon me for a long time, but Thailand or rather Bangkok called me in a louder voice. Yep, it was a place that I had visited once before, but she called me again and there I went!                                          We stayed for 3 days during our first visit and it was a stopover while coming back from San Fransisc

Friends,                          I hope all of you had nice Dussera vacation this year before heading back to work. This Gandhi Jayanthi was celebrated with a fervor of different kind. Our honourable Prime Minister announced on this day with a mission to clean up India - Swacch Bharat Abhiyan. October 2nd is also observed as the birth anniversary of another great human being and former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who is more remembered for the slogan 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan'.But his birthday is always overshadowed by the same of the father of our nation.                                   On October 2nd this year, along with Gandhiji, another celebrity who made into news was our veteran singer K J Yesudas. He was invited by a voluntary organization to deliver a speech for Gandhi Jayanthi celebrations. Had he made a general speech about Gandhiji and services that voluntary organizations deliver, the news item might or might not have appeared in the local page. We would n

          Repeating the line from Elton John's 'Candle in the wind'- It seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind. Hi friends,                  For more than a month this space has been remaining idle and I keep searching for topics to write. It can be 'writer's block' or simply some other excuse. But now I am back again and not with happiness that I have found something to write, but with a heavy heart. September 19, 2014 will remain a sad day for me and other music lovers due to the sudden and untimely death of U Srinivas who was more recognized as Mandolin Srinivas. If chess is to Vishwanathan Anand, saxophone to Kadri Gopalnath, so was the western instrument Mandolin very unique to U Srinivas. It takes so much courage, commitment and will power to bring in something new and make it widely popular especially in the ocean of Carnatic music. Like guitar and violin (or fiddle), mandolin is a predominantly a western instrument belonging to th

Hello,                  What is aimlessness? It is when you do not have any specific purpose in your life. Does all of us go through a phase when we feel what the purpose of our life is? I believe everyone of us do have that feeling when we think where our life is heading and how should we take it forward. Some of us will term it as 'midlife crisis'. Save for the poorest strata of the society who struggle to live each day, rest of us do go through this phase. The landmarks-when during our childhood we make lasting friendships during our school days, score high marks in the exams, win prizes in the competitions, get into professional courses, finish our college and land into dream jobs and get the taste of our 1st pay cheque, and ' if lucky', marry a person of our dreams, become a parent, and then see the same cycle repeated with our children. Majority of us do fall into this category, and if not, try extra hard so that we can 'fit in' the stereotyped society t

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority. Bjarke Ingels Hello friends,                             Yes, this time I want to write about the travails that a pedestrian faces when he chooses to walk on Indian roads. When is the last time that you walked to a nearby kirana shop and and purchased some miscellaneous items and walked back? Did you walk to school or college which is nearby to your house on a footpath or a pavement? Sounds old fashioned and impossible right? Am I talking about something that is a generation old? Walk and go to a shop or school? Who does that these days? Who goes to that shop walking these days? We go to a supermarket and buy groceries in a bulk or place the orders online to be delivered at our doorstep. Children either go by school bus or are chauffeured in a car or bike by th

Hi friends,                  This time I do not have a particular topic in my mind to write. But I still feel like penning a few lines. It is said that writing acts as a catharsis to a troubled and a lonely mind.   My mind is troubled at times for multitude of reasons that may seem trivial to others. I am not a fan of the thing called loneliness, but it has been my 'companion' throughout my life.  I do not want to be a lonely animal but at times, this 'companion' helps me to introspect who I am, what I want to be, whether I would have been a more efficient person if I had not been limited by circumstances around me.  It is not that I grew up in pathetic surroundings struggling to live each day for the want of food or clothes. I have been well off since my childhood thanks to my dad's profession as an engineer. I did my schooling in a prestigious convent and later on in 'All Women's' Colleges.       But did those alma maters help me finding my own ide

Hi pals,                I promised in my last article 'My inner reflections', that I will be back soon!! And of course, I wanted to be back sooner than now, but  when there are no deadlines set, anybody including myself will take one's own sweet time. I should have written this post  a little bit earlier, but there I go about this now.                                   May was the month of sweeping change in our political arena, the change that everybody was waiting to see and it favored Narendra Modi heavily in the form of anti-incumbency factor. NDA alliance (or BJP??) swept the congress-led UPA so heavily that they could not grab enough seats to form the opposition party. Even Rahul Gandhi won against Smrithi Irani in Amethi constituency by hair's breadth. The swearing-in ceremony was most watched as it was made more special with the attendance of leaders from SAARC countries and also with various film personals, industrialists. The expectations and positive vibes

Hello,          We are in the middle of summer season and in lot of places the heat is felt. Even in Bangalore, the summer is getting hotter with each passing year. Talking about summer, this time is always synonymous with vacations, especially from schools before going to the next grade.                                  Alright,  I am not going to write about summer vacations, but about our visit to Mahabalipuram (near Chennai) during last month. We were in Chennai for a wedding recently and it has been my longstanding wish to go to Mahabalipuram. And of course, I did not want to miss that chance. This place is only 45 kms from Besant Nagar (Chennai) and can be easily finished as  a day trip. One thing you have to take into account is the scorching heat of summer. So take enough liquids with you.                                                 The day had finally come and after having breakfast, we drove with our relatives who gave us company. On the way to Mahabalipuram, our rela