Lets dream !

As I sat next to my dad in one of those open air movies watching “The Exorcist”, I was scared to my wits. The head of the young heroine turned 360 degrees; the candle in her room burnt blue and there were a lot of flies that hissed around the blue flame!! I pulled my chair closer to him just to check if he too was terrified about what he saw. Well he seemed to have sensed my chair being drawn closer and he just smiled(more a smirk!) to himself that did get me embarrassed as he would quote this episode in one of our arguments.  I didn’t care! This was terrifying for the moment!

That night I recall having a dream (my dreams are very realistic?) that would have possibly had a lady(I am quite unsure why its always a lady!!:(   in white behind the mango tree at home. She normally had sound accompanying her walk! Now for the added part …the lamp she carried in her hand burned blue. There you go! Realistic to believe she stood there. After all,  the unicorns that exists only in the imagination are still products of real things- i.e.,. horns and horses. The human mind is funny! But fifteen years later I saw the movie all alone at night and I watched it with a different eye.  Many parts are humor pieces! The human mind is indeed queer. It remembers all the details of what once took our mind off …may be the tone and the mood of it is different. After all old is gold!

On the same note, recently a very good, well meaning friend sent us a forward that had allof us at home recall memories of childhood. This picture says a lot.

With the World Cup around the corner there has been too much of cricket talk at home (cricket matches are life changing events at homeJ). The happy grin on the batsman’s face resembles the happy grins at home when Sachin makes his centuries. Never mind the wicket keeper…too many jokes on Kamran Akmaal already. To me the drift is more than cricket…its also the giant pencils standing as stumps. These pencils used to be in boxes kept out off our reach in our school days. My bro once bought a 1000 of these for my daughter and when I asked  …he just confessed that he had this dream of a Nataraj pencil house(like Hansel and Gretel’s biscuit houseJ) . Today my daughter needs pencils with cartoons sticking behind or a fancy rubber at the end or she just needs those graphite nib sophisticated variety (most irritating discovery in my opinion as when u write on paper with a slight press, it will break and you need to reload the graphite sticks with as much precision as you will a needle and thread!! By then you have probably forgotten what to writeL

Another picture in her attachment was this phone.

Well, it was an event of the day when the phone rang with a volume slightly lower than the church bell. Loud as it was, the entire household would call out,”I will get it!”. Of course we could pick it up only if parents weren’t around. It had a cloth neatly spread on it and was placed in a special projection from the wall. Whoever was talking had the whole household drop the work they did and crowd around the speaker(I told you it was the event of the week also sometimes!).  Wow what a joy it brought …even if the call or the caller had no remote connection to us! A happiness for no apparent reason. Must admit that this whole rarity of the event brought with it a neat sense of discipline that can only be dreamt for our kids!

This picture took my attention for a  variety of reasons.

                                                   I am a Complan boy ! I am a Complan girl!
                                     

 First of all, not once in 11 years has my daughter held her Complan mug with that broad smile! That too with so many flavors she gets in the market to choose from. Secondly, the gender discrimination that this advertisement brought seemed quite uncalled for as though there wasn’t enough otherwise. Thirdly, the plastic cup they hold were a compliment with the Complan and we drank from it. Period! Today Science has proven that these plastic cups are a root cause for Cancer. Times have changed. Remember!  Wasn’t ignorance seriously bliss!!

Ah the white shoes with green soles.

                                                  The green sole sport shoe!

It had to be washed and polished with the wet polish and left to dry.  If you forgot to do it, simple just run white chalk on it  before the PE period. You are pretty much out of danger after the initial inspection of the shoes. Oh!What I loved the most was the smell of these shoes when they were brand new. The joy of releasing them from the Bata boxes and wearing them on the first day! Unbeatable!

Well, times have truly changed people. There are shoes and pencils bought with monthly grocery and handphones that blink every few minutes to give you status updates of social networks. With it has changed our understanding of the world and yes, we have learned to tweek our concept of happiness  too. Living and changing with the times is the key to happy living else you would be left behind(say all 'Change' programmes)!!  Having said that, how many of you can actually open a Vcard that is sent to you on your phone from a friend’s number? An old friend ..pretty much from my generation wrote me a message that read, “Please message me her number. PLEASE don’t send it by V card. Type it for me. I don’t know to open it!”. I obliged completely.

You know why!!!

Into her world....all over again!

The strong aroma of the filter coffee and the sound of water flowing from the garden hose pipe tells us that she is up for the day. She will loudly greet the milkman and wish him a good day though she doesn’t buy his milk. For the next 2 hours the house is reverberating with all the devotional songs(all of us know them by heart by the sheer power of sound!). Born into a Palakkad Iyer family,my mother complemented my dad in every way. She is impulsive, can multitask amazingly, talk her way with the veggie vendors, intuitive, spirited, very original, absolutely artistic, reads all the tamil magazines(Mangayar Malar ranks on top!), cooks the best meal I have had so far and the surprise is she loves outdoor sport-plays badminton very well for her age. She is a bag of unpredictables and yet so predictable in so many other ways!



Her sense of aesthetics!

It is her conversations with people outside that is most hilarious. Now if you haven’t seen my bro and me you are likely to think we were both prodigies in the making;)! I thank my stars for all the confidence that she managed to instill into us by just being immensely proud about us (even for the way we argue with her!). Every single medal or certificate will find the centre place in the showcase at home as she has to brag about it to her visitors who are normally family friends but it also includes people who briefly visit our homes-this is the most embarassing part though(now these include the occasional visit by the man who climbed the coconut trees, jasmine vendor, newspaper man and alike!). All these people still think we are probably assuming the position of the President of the countries we live in as they for the last 3 decades have looked at us in total awe for no apparent reason!! Btw by now you know that bragging about children is a family trait;)


Her world revolves around us and then of course the rest of them in the family! She was smart enough to make us believe that our secrets were safe with her and will never reach appa. She was a superb actress at that! We believed her completely until recently she let the cat off the bag! Our deepest secrets were like an evening joke for them!!So apparently without reading any blog column on parenting she succeeded in getting us to speak our day at school/college. She had a knack of reading our faces to know if it had been a bad day! So as she strings the flowers or kneads the dough, she will throw her questions to get her answers effortlessly! The next day will see her preaching a few lines to help us defend the difficult world we will go back to.. and that will be done so subtly that you cannot turn around and ask her why she said it!! Motherhood came very intuitively and naturally to her! Its becoming a mother myself that has grown to respect her ways immensely.

She has a passion for the Kolam/Rangoli(I have learned all mine from her!), making adapradhaman, singing, writing diary,play swing with her grand daughter, wearing chungudi sarees, buying mud pots with different roses from the nursery, lately the dough nuts have found a place too(not to forget her taste for coke and 7Up!..this is amusing for us though!) -what more… a passion for traveling too! Her grand daughters take her full mind these days. Now this is true and I now know it happens in many homes- they can do all that we were not allowed to do!!! They can sleep into the day, break cutlery at home that is 25 years old while we would have been asked to do thopi karanam even today(thats a exaggeration...just to convey some intensity :)), go out for shopping with her at 9 at night, can watch tv as long as they wanted, ask for pakodas at 12 midnight, play badi with neighbours without seeking permission,can over indulge in ice creams and can choose not to study!! How things change and after many arguments with her she once blurted out that, “ I never had the time with you’ll when you grew up and was always strict but now I feel I can make up for it! Don’t scold her..let her enjoy life!” Well? Well! I think I do get it in some parts! People, the rules of motherhood and grand motherhood are very different!

She taught me love, fun, care and dependency . My motherhood has taught me more of her and I have now grown to see all those little things she did to make me strong, spirited and vulnerable all at the same time! There is one thing that I certainly love and will always thank god for…the fact that my daughter has her most special relationship with her beloved grandmom and to me that is priceless as it brings back and preserves the sentiments completely all over again!!

The sunrise in my mind!

Note: This was written by Rachana in her class when the teacher asked the class to write for the local paper. 

There are many good memories I have had but the trip to the Grand Canyon is simply unforgettable and very close to my heart. At about 5.08 am that morning, as the sun rose from beneath the majestic mountains, I could see the whole Canyon painted in deep orange. It was a treat to my eyes!The sun's rays looked like a loud yawn!! :)  It looked like the most beautiful place in the whole world. I could hear the sound of the Colorado River that was hitting the rocks. This whole Canyon was sculptured by the wind that blew hard and by the noisy river. It was great –the way I felt when I stood staring.

 I remembered my mother telling me before that many years ago the Red Indians had inhabited this whole Canyon. While I was watching this amazing sight, I saw a glider rising above the Canyons. In my thoughts I rose to the height of the glider and saw that the canyon was alive with many creatures big and small. It looked like it was tossed by a gush of wind that threw it up in the air. The Canyon was deep and looked eerie. So many people stood staring at this magnificent sight. People whispered their happiness to one another. My uncle cuddled me as it was very cold and took pictures with me. I never took my eyes off that beautiful sight. But when I stood there, there was a deafening silence that made me think that the mountains stood alone. It looked like the supreme king who conquered that territory!

                                                              The first rays of the sun.....

 When I was thinking of all this and watching, the sun had now risen completely and lit the whole Canyon yellowish orange. I loved all the colours which it brought. My parents, my aunt and uncle were clicking so many pictures and it seemed as though we wanted to take with us the whole Grand Canyon back home by doing that! J I thought to myself if there were so many shades in the orange family of colours. I remembered that I always painted the sun with just the same shade of orange during my art lessons!

Today, when we sit down and see those pictures , we know that the pictures don’t  show its true beauty of what we saw .Every time, I think of those good moments and the spectacular sunrise, with my eyes closed, I know that it is a perfect picture only in my mind!!