A little kid wearing a sleeveless with an american university's logo on it in the middle of nowhere in a hamlet in kumbakonam. His face lights up when a plastic top unwinds and hits the dusty earth and spins perfectly, and finally topples to its inevitable fall. He picks up the top and tries to weave the cord around it and keeps trying again until he sees the top spin. satisfaction. happiness.

I am not sure if he would have noticed had the world stopped around him as he was wrapping the cord around. The only thing he knows is the top, and that when the top spins, he smiles.

He spots my friend's camera, comes up to him and asks him to take a picture. My friend obliges. The boy looks at his face on the slr's display, and runs back happily.

I don't see how life can get any simpler.

A bus, a mini bus, squeezes in as so many people, that all you are when you get out of it is your own pulp. The ever persistent honking is just another habit, a lifestyle statement.

A million little thaeneer viduthis and cool bars line the road at the end of the lower anaicut towards jeyamkondan and gangai konda cholapuram, with the occasional sight of the tender coconuts.

A dilapidated bus stand guards the fortress like structure of the temple. Adjoining the walls of the temple are walls of huts, thankfully not destroyed citing the words 'heritage', 'splendor', or 'glory'. Thankfully, sensibility and the interests of the people have survived. Also, a beautiful little puddle of sewer right behind the temple walls, and leaking into the temple itself, provides a disturbing vision of something poetic tarnished by reality.