Last time, first time...

When was the last time I did something for the first time? Day before yesterday. Shed a long stream of tears (a really long stream that I had to remove my glasses) watching a movie. Shadowlands. After all, am 90% Lewis and 10% Gresham. No wonder 90% cries for the missing 10%.

C.S.Lewis. Richard Attenborough. Anthony Hopkins.

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My eyes only...

Looking at the stats, am doubly sure that my blog is for my eyes only!

If not anything, this, my blog is just what it is called. Reflections. Me reflecting on my thoughts. Recording the reflections, for reflecting upon later. Things I want to remember but might forget.

 Last post - August 2011. And this is end of November 2011. No posts in between. Once in at least two days, something or other captures my attention and I'd want to write about it. All those reflections remain converged in a highly sophisticated cloud-computing platform. My mental blog (or should I call it - block, huh?)

So, this post is to remember that I am consistently inconsistent. For my eyes only, absolutely.

Break the monotony...

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For thy acceptance...

Sometimes, I search for the verses of a vaguely-remembered poetry to go with one of the pictures I shot. And sometimes, its the other way round. Today, as I recalled some verses while gazing at the morning sky, I searched for a picture in my archives and found this eagle I shot, about a year ago, while driving to Rameswaram.

Here's the inspiration:
My desires are many and my cry is pitiful, but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals; and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked---this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind---saving me from perils of overmuch desire.

There are times when I languidly linger and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal; but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.

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From the Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore

Who is D.N.Yadav...

To keep the prankster in me entertained, I needed a good laugh as in R-O-T-F-L and of course, I desperately needed to conjure it myself. If 'what is your name' is the most frequently asked question to any kid, 'when are you getting married' or 'kab khilaogi' or various other versions of this same question can easily be the most frequent one posed to me, in the recent past. Having hit upon a topic which can never fail to evoke curiosity, I couldnt be more pleased when April 1st presented itself as a good opportunity to ROTFL. I sent an email to a select list of people; a mix of whose reactions I could predict and whose reactions I could not.

Here's the content of the mail..

Subject: Wedding Invitation

Hi...

I am sure this comes a pleasantly-shocking surprise to you; am surprised too. :)

I am getting married tomorrow evening, to Yadav D.N. I have known him all my life and fell irrevocably in love with him during our recent trip to Gujarat in September 2010. They say everything happens for a reason. So, I am just hoping that we will find out the reasons for this, in due course.

My father has taken all my friends' phone numbers; he will be inviting you over phone, as we dont have enough time to personally invite everybody. A formal invite mentioning the venue & timing, is attached.

I hope you will take a few hours off from watching the World Cup and grace the occasion of my wedding, to which only a very few close friends are invited.

Regards,
Subah G.

I had zipped the attachment to add an ounce of confusion, and named it 'DN_weds_SG' to make it look authentic. Here's the invite I sent:




Here are some of the reactions...

"Disappointed. I knew it from the subject line itself. Unga kittenrundhu innum konjam adhigamaa ethir paakkaren"

"aiyo aiyo, i guessed it
ha ha ha"

"Erumai maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadu...
do u know how excited and happy i was !!!!! Idiot !! sathiyama kolai dhaan unnai adutha tadavai pakkum podhu.. "
[This dear friend of mine, is in a far-off place and so he got really wild. I added some dialogues to my original invitation mail, saying "wish you were here" :D]

"Hearty congrats... i could view only one page of your zip mail.. when you get free mail me the wedding photos. (photography by another person?!!!)"
[This one bowled me over; double ROTFL]

"I know you are april fooling me! Asku busku! "

There are some more (sure-shot) promises of killing me the next time I'm sighted.:D

Here's the prelude to the prank...
I would have believed what my friends hinted at, to be true: I've transformed into a dunce from being brilliant once upon a time, into a dullard from being exuberant in the recent past. The hints sounded louder after I failed to make a decent score in some dumb games and refused to play some not-so-dumb games. I might have even agreed with them explicitly, if only they had stopped at that. After all, change is the only constant and transformation is mercilessly qualitative. But when they said I had severely damaged my humour-bone, succumbed to reticence and killed the prankster in me along the way, just because I needed a few extra seconds to digest their silly jokes and mutual leg-pulling, I saved me from condemning myself to moronity. Though I do not talk and laugh incessantly anymore, it does not necessarily mean I have totally lost my ability to laugh, joke or talk; alternatively, it could mean that I have better things to do or doing things in a better way.

And....who is D.N.Yadav? None other than Him, DwarkaNath Yadav!

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Yet another 365...

Starting a fresh set of days
After gains which are much
And losses having left their touch.

Mulling over places visited
Projects confabulated
And results uncontrived.

Lessons willed and learnt
Travails drowned unwilled
And together they keep me grounded.

Age is just a number
But let 16 make me humbler
And anything but a grumbler.

Will I get better or worse
Performing my chores
And in performing my chores???

Last time, first time...

Media or Medi(ocr)a...?

Spelling mistakes are granted absolution, by default. Ambiguity in reporting is tolerable, though wih a pinch of salt. Both these follies can be disguised as opportunities, to learn the correct spellings for sure and not to forget them ever, and in the second case, to derive our own opinion of the news being reported, instead of being fed in by the inevitable bias of current-day media. But the levels of mediocrity which have surpassed spelling errors and typos, want us to take a serious decision: either to cry or laugh, over the time and money spent on newspapers these days.

Even though I had long-ago made the decision to not spend time on newspapers, I do browse through them now and then. Having recently read a book on the sainthood process in Christianity, this news item (TOI dated 02/05/2011) attracted my attention, only to confirm my belief that I should not spend time on reading newspapers.

I wonder what the editor was thinking of when this piece of news went into print; either of these?
1) Nobody's going to read the article, or the whole of it; so anything can be printed.
2) The tiny bit of sleaze should be printed twice to get noticed.

If this size of an article requires TOI to print the same sentences twice at different places, what is the status of those half-paged and full-paged articles? And with this kind of mediocrity present in the basic function of disseminating news, what is the degree of sincerity and seriousness in the much-hyped "social initiatives" of the media...

Half of what I say...

The flight lands ahead of its schedule, only to be leaving in less than six hours. So be it. Though am late to reach the airport, I am just as gleeful as a child because it's me picking you up and not some of your uniforms.

There is the cheerful welcome, with my mind already sensing the farewell which lingers so closer by in time. And then there are the white lies about how we look just the same having not changed a bit since we saw each other. I cannot find another person with whom I would exchange such lies and be so happy and unguilty about it.

Neither is there a person to whom I can say "No, I dont like the tee you are wearing". Then, strange as it may sound, we talk about all the tshirts & kurtas each other wore whenever we met, during the past. The closet sentimentalists we both are, it is no surprise that we remember the details. The surprise lies in realising that I miss you more than I knew. Suddenly, the few thousand miles between us seem longer than they usually are.

We take a ride home, the route rickety and still unfamiliar to me. I miss a turn or two, but I really dont mind - I just get to ride a little longer with you. I'm sure my bike would not complain, you being the only person who remembers to ask about it every now and then.

The visit is unplanned and so I have no time to prepare for cooking lunch at home. Am upset about being not able to stuff you with home-food, but at the same time, unabashedly glad that just the two of us can have an elaborate lunch elsewhere. I am mighty pleased that you like the restaurant I chose.

We eat and eat, updating each other about life, all its nitty-gritties, and about our worries. Laughing over so many things even as we brood over the times we had missed to spend together. Ah... those movies I wanted to watch with you but never got to; I still hope that we will catch them on DVD someday.

There are moments I fall silent thinking of numerous tiny things we've shared and enjoyed, all those shayaris over the innumerable cups of tea and all the times I was teased about my dryfruit diet and my being a sleepyhead. Too bad that we never get to exchange a shayari today. I think of all the moments when I had to send you off at many airports and many railway stations. My mind is clouded with thoughts of Kashmir, of rains, of long conversations, of babies, of Psalms, of summers, of sonnets, of swims, of prayers, of flamingoes. But when you ask, I answer vaguely, that am out of my mind.

Three hours pass off, across the table for two, and its time for getting back to the airport, but not before we drown ourselves in black coffee. I get to laugh out loud about this and that, all through the ride to the airport, at the parking lot and at the cloak room and upto the departure terminal.

Then you disappear quickly after the briefest of goodbye-hugs, leaving me to start waiting again, not knowing when I would meet you again. I start waiting again, just as I waited for you to board the train, years ago, even before we had met.

Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you...

Nothing funny about Sonnet 44...

Funny is how the human brain works, if that is what I have inside my head. My brain cannot remember what I ate this morning and it cannot recall when I changed my bike's oil-filter. No, it cannot even blurt my sister's mobile number. And when I have to make a total of 3 different two-digit numbers, my brain forces me to click Start->Run and type "calc" for the simple reason that it cannot add more than two numbers. But, how does it untiringly manage to relate daily life and day-to-day activities to a Tagore's poem or to a complicated philosophical expression from Gibran or to a Shakespeare's sonnet....read, enjoyed and believed to be forgotten, long time ago??

Was winnowing few storable shots from thousands, so that I could create some precious space in my overloaded hard-disk. This is probably the best-framed, out of 15 odd photographs of take-offs shot by me & Sankar, near St Thomas Mount, on a rainy day in August 2010.



For me, airplanes never mean speed, but always, denote the long distances, the excruciating pain of separation...and my brain relates this picture to these verses picked out from its mossy folds...

If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way.
For then, despite of space, I would be brought
From limits far remote where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee.
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me, that I am not thought,
To leap large length of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend times leisure with my moan,
Receiving naught by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either's woe.

[Sonnet 44 of William Shakespeare.]

Feeding my Ego...

Found a bug in Google. Someone please verify...

Google Image Search for 'mylapore mrts' returns about 1600 results, the top of which is a shot from my photostream... This is NOT the bug...okay? This is actually the most perfect part of the search algorithm which happens to return my shot.

Here's the bug: on clicking the result the adjacent picture in my stream is shown instead of the picture shown on the Image Search result....by coincidence the other also happens to be a shot of MRTS train...

The second top result is from Sudhamshu's stream and am seeing the Auroville Globe in his stream, on clicking Sudhamshu's MRTS pic.

Thats one good post-lunch browsing exercise, which also fed some fodder to my ego. And an excellent example I can remember to use when somebody points out a silly bug, albeit a rare occurrence, in one of my own software apps!!