Several roads, several paths. In our lives. Also, when I took that wrong left and went into the narrowest lane in a town which had the a collective civility of india's recent test score. Practically every nook looks like a turn when it turned out to be someone's cowshed. Or worse, a tea stall. The really challenging bits in life come real fast at us, yes, but they also go away real fast. So.
In the year that has gives us many twists and turns, we need to find solace in the strangest places-for me, it is going to places that are frozen in time. A picture from a century back, to think how they lived. The epiphany is funny and too ordinary-we do the same thing too.
The ones that get the batsmen are the wide off the wicket probing delivery, so delicious in appeal, yet lethal. It is exactly like that layer of ghee that we know is fattening, on top of ven Pongal, sitting so innocently along with chutney that is glimmering white like the nanda devi peaks and a gothsu that will remain immortalized in human history.
Gently, very gently, the old woman picks up the plantain leaf, with rejections from the gluttonous wasting world -a layer of orange and red sambar soiling the soggy rice like the monsoon clouds running fast to catch the reddish sky. Gently, the gods watch this spectacle, as she creates a small mound of life's wretchedness in her hand, shakes her head and swallows it with so much grace, she might be Lord shiva with his thiruvodu, unmindful of the madness around.
December is the season for you know what-sleeping! Now, in a place where 10 months of a year is a oxy acetylene torch magnified by a parabolic reflector and that concentrated beam is placed up our, well everywhere, this month is a power cut for the torch. And somehow, this is the month, my brain for shorts the sleep circuits making me wake up at 3 am in the morning, asking the gods when the next cosmic deluge is coming,because I want to dress up nicely for it.
Nothing more viscerally satisfying than seeing kids take on bullies and win. On their own. And win decent and fair.
Be like the tea dust, I tell myself. Be the flavor in someone else's life/lives, learn to be used and thrown out, and even as manure, make things better. (OK even I can't stand this nonsense)
That big orange ball of a reflection in that glowing green water pond trying to pour out of those gray stairs made of gray stones, tired of waiting all time, nowhere to go, no one to listen, like old people, frail and waiting for the end, irritated by this stupid concept called time-but look, the gates open, a human walks in with a pot, the big pot takes a dip, the pot and the water travel to a musty room-
Lord rama and his consort and the brother are waiting for the pot. And the water. They are impatient! They know the pond's pain. The water washes away their impatience as they silently thank the pond. For putting up with the veil of this maddening world.
Mediocrity is alacrity if it has the temerity of humility and felicity of utility. Always wanted to do a proper tr based attagasam.
If you look very very very closely at the picture of the narasimha swamy and hanuman doing penance you can almost see them smile gently at you, coaxing you to live. Or that was just a smirk, I don't know.
