Why is it so hard to let go?

Years of gradual accumulation of things makes it so hard to let go; they range from small to large, toys and games that are long worn-out or discoloured, old books, papers and electronics junk, boxes and bags, clothes and furniture. Making it miserable is the fact that memories cling on to a few of them.

Learning it the hard, difficult way, as we are in the middle of a home shift. A filtering of what we feel are not really useful further and needs to be dumped, is in progress. Makes me realize painfully (it is not sorrow, however), how things are squirreled away slowly, unbeknownst of the fact they need to be discarded one day as they are past utilizability.

Just letting the unrest pass before it settles down to an equilibrium of acceptance ... :-)

Point, set and game

Read an article, a week or so back, in the Times of India on Martina Navratilova's breast cancer and Leander Paes' 9 PM call (Copy of the TOI article on http://citizensbi.blogspot.com/2010/04/im-martinas-9-pm-call.html) and its Tamizh translation that was posted on IdlyVadai (a popular satirical blogger). She was one of my favourites when I used to watch tennis on good old Doordarshan. I just liked her for no rhyme or reason.

Here is an one liner each about some of the tennis greats on what I recollect on them. You may not have heard a lot of these names or even be born during the era when these folks were at their peak. :) Ramesh Krishnan and Vijay Amritraj are there here as they were India's warriors in the Davis Cup matches time and again. I am not including the recent crop of players into the list.

Andre Agassi - Colorful shirts and knee length shorts, the tonsured head and cool game
Arantxa Sánchez Vicario - The girlish wide smile, duels with Steffi
Björn Borg - The bandana, Wimbledon games with John McEnroe
Boris Becker - Cat on a court, stalking corners in a flash, his hair
Chris Evert - All I recollect is that she kept losing to Martina
Gabriela Sabatini - Double fisted backhands, pretty face
Hana Mandlikova - The head-band, graceful backhands
Ivan Lendl - Tall, lanky, the never ending French Open rallies
Jennifer Capriati - She came young, she won a few and slowly disappeared
Jim Courier - His cap, wizard in clay and hard courts, persistence
Jimmy Connors - Southpaw whose nemesis was John McEnroe before retirement
John McEnroe - The scowling southpaw, his serve and volleys, the tantrums
Martina Navratilova - The southpaw, her glasses, calm confidence
Mats Wilander - Epic, epic clay court battles, curly red hair
Michael Chang - Another sly cat on the court, boyish charm
Monica Seles - The grunts, the powerful hits
Pat Cash - Bandana, Australia, his Wimbledon win over Ivan Lendl
Pete Sampras - Never say die attitude, and his loser posture when the going went really tough
Petr Korda - Hairs standing on end as if he kept his hand on a van de Graff generator
Ramesh Krishnan - Davis Cup, He played as if the ball could get hurt and his deft placements
Richard Krajicek - Probably the fastest serves and aces I have ever seen
Stefan Edberg - Grace, grace and nothing but grace personified gentleman
Steffi Graf - Serves, energy and the awesome forehand
Vijay Amritraj - Davis Cup, Could leverage a partisan crowd to cheer him to victory

There are a few whom I may have left out, but that is okay. This is a random recollection.

And yours???

The Class

First, wishing all a good Ugadi, that is passing by today.

This post is not a recap of the novel of the same name as the title from Erich Segal (which incidentally I liked), but just a remniscence triggered from a mini reunion of six of us from our class last weekend (from a class of 40) over lunch. Two of my colleagues came in from Canada to Chennai, and took time to come down to Bengaluru, meet the motley crowd here (six of us are here, out of which four made it to the meet). I had written sometime back when I started to blog, on the topic of  "The home that wasn't" on my observances on college hostel life.

I saw 4 of them again only now after leaving college an eon back (நாமளும் ஒரு காலத்துல படிச்சோமான்னு ஆயிடுத்து!) Lots of changes in physical appearances, but once we started to talk, the college days were back. There was constant and non-stop prattling, the flashbacks, our teachers, growing up topics and poking fun around generally. I had met three others and talked to a few more when I was in the US a few weeks back. After our meeting, I was trying to recollect all the 40 in my class, but couldn't move beyond 37. :-( I have asked for help from one of my colleagues to fill in the gaps. Each one of them kindles a tagged memory, which is something academic or something funny or some incidents at college or their nick-names :) and it is nostalgic walking through the disjointed and hazy memories of almost 3 years together before we went our paths. And while browsing our class' Yahoo! Groups archives, dug out a scan of three photos uploaded by a colleague back in 2004 of the undated old photos which were taken at the end of our academic lives before we dispersed to do our final year projects. Those were the times!

The class is now spread between the USA where the majority is, Canada, Bengaluru, Chennai, Malaysia/Singapore and Australia. A few of them are randomly in touch with the others, few more regular, a few incognito with almost no trace in the past few years. Some are entrepreneurs running their own companies, some are in regular jobs (like me) and some have chucked their jobs for the most difficult and demanding job of all, parenting.

We are still a long way from our silver jubilee re-union (the premise of "The Class") if it happens, but we have crossed around two-thirds of the way.

Memories, memories and memories! The more you stoke it, the more its embers glow! The four hours that we spent together over memories, priceless!!!

The memory rewind

There is a wonderful article from John Jordan in Forbes, titled "Do you remember your first e-mail address or Internet purchase?".

Reading the article pulled me back in time to old days and I could relate with almost everything that he talks of, having walked through them. The fall of the Berlin wall, the bombing of Iraq, the first cell phones a.k.a. the bricks, your first e-mail address(es), the first Web, the instant messaging, the first e-purchase, Windows 95, the first text message, search before Google, the tech stock empire, the first flat screen, the first online video, the last photo film, Facebook, going retro etc. Whew, what a list!

We just pass by events without realizing we are passing by history being made!

http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/16/google-amazon-nokia-technology-cio-network-internet.html

Thanks John for that amazing trip down the memory lane and recharging my nostalgian batteries.

Blah blah blah

I am not a conversationalist. You talk 100 words at me and I reply back in maybe 5 or less, sometimes in mono-syllables. I hopelessly go out of topics to discuss when in a crowd or a group. My brain is tuned to listen, listen and listen more. If I blabber, it is either when I have a fever, or it is travel time (the excitement peaks and I talk nonsense, it seems! and I am asked to shut-up and give a helping hand), or when I don't relate much to the topic being discussed, but asked for my views :-)

Some people are a mirror opposite of what I am. They can keep a conversation going no end, talk on everything under the sun, sometimes very witty as well. Envy those folks for that. :)

Went on Sunday to visit my cousin's farm beyond Kolar for a function at his place. Took my parents along and also my aunt (mom's elder sister) and her son. The trip took around 2.5 hours each way.

The chatter started once I picked my aunt up on the way, between her and my mom. Picked up momentum as we moved towards the grid-locked Old Madras Road with all kinds of construction happening around that place. The dialogue continued all the way till we reached the farm, save around a 10 minute break for breakfast. The return trip was no different. Started off once we moved out of the farm-house and ran in a non-stop fashion till it was time to drop my aunt off.

The chat (almost everything in Kannada) covered topics about relatives and their brood, bouquets for some and brickbats for some, their childhood (aunt was born in Kolar, my mom in Mandya, facts I never knew), their parents (long stories), people they knew from childhood, the never ending stream of people at their childhood home, places visited long back, those who are no more and those are still hanging in, memories of their sisters and brothers, bright times, sad times, neighbors, luck, Gautama Buddha, the changed cityscape, weather in Bengaluru/Singapore!, topics on TV these days, their temple (non) visits and their commercialization, health and a few more. All this even when both of them are regularly in touch.

All the while, I was keeping myself occupied at the wheel with my listening antennae up. The three gents in the car talked maybe a total of 15 minutes throughout the entire to and fro journey!

Women and their small talk!!! Mmm... :-)

All copyrights for the image acknowledged.

Places, unvisited

I have lived in three (or four) cities so far and I have noticed that there are a few places around in each that I thought would be nice to visit, but never visited in spite of all the time that I was there. All this dawns late. Leave alone other places or states where I sightsee, the cities where I lived in are ignored probably because of familiarity which is captured in the adage 'Familiarity breeds contempt'.


The textile city, Coimbatore has its share with probably Siruvaani ranking at the top and maybe Thadaagam and Anaikatti following close. Coimbatore has the sweetest water that I have ever tasted. That comes in from the Siruvaani reservoir around 30+ kms from Coimbatore. The problem with soft water is in bathing, as the soap seems to love the water so much and doesn't wash off. :)The closest I was to there was a wonderful childhood trip to Alaanthurai, a village on the banks of the Noyyal river (Does it run still, at least in season?) which is on the way to Siruvaani. Thadaagam (Anuvavi Subramaniar Temple) is there because of stories told by one of my primary school classmates about that place (memories in stone about a Murugan (Subramanya) temple, lots of steps to climb and the mendicants et al) and Anaikatti (a forest reserve) are places that I saw only on bus-boards when at school, but still loved them for the Calvinesque flights of fantasy. Those places are inside forests and are elephant territory. The Anaikatti mountain range was visible from our home and it's peak always was a point of intrigue to me. Beyond Anaikatti after around 40 kms comes the Silent Valley range in Kerala.

The temple city, Madurai has a few on my list including the Thirumalai Naik Mahal. The place which finds a presence in Maniratnam's Bombay (the song, Kannaalaney in Tamil/Kehena Hai Kya in Hindi). I don't know if the place is good or bad, but having been in Madurai for a long time, that is a black mark. Never visited the Alanganallur Jallikattu, which finds its name in the papers in January and is Tamil Nadu's equivalent of the Spanish bullfight, but with bulls let loose on a crowd of bull-fighters. I side with PETA, but this is something that I think that flavours Madurai as a region. Maybe irrelevant, but I haven't seen Subramaniyapuram, the movie. For all its gore, the movie seems to have recreated the Madurai of yore very authentically. The beautiful temples around Madurai, like Thirumoghur or Thiruvaadhavur. These two temples were close to where I lived but I have visited Thirumoghur only once and loved the raw mango that had fallen on the prakaaram. Another is the campus of Madurai Kamaraj University. I never even ventured in that direction. :-( And the biggest of them all, I have never seen the Chithirai Thiruvizha (Chitra Festival), in person, a gala 12 day event that concludes in the marriage of Meenakshi, the Goddess Supreme of Madurai. The legend has it that Sundareswarar and Meenakshi (incarnations of Shiva and Parvati) are getting married at Madurai which is visited by all Gods. Sundararaja Perumal (an incarnation of Vishnu), who is the brother of Meenakshi comes from his abode (the Azhagar Kovil temple at the foothills of Azhagar Malai) around 20 kms from Madurai to give her hand in marriage. He grants boons to all those whom he sees, being so happy at the marriage of his sister as he comes towards Madurai and therefore gets delayed. This phase is called Edhir Sevai (Reception Welcome, crudely translated) which is a celebration as the procession winds to the city stopping at the many mantapams that have been erected all along the route. As he enters Vaigai river to cross it, he hears that the marriage is over (Meenakshi being given in hand to Sundareswarar by Koodal Azhagar, another incarnation of Vishnu) before he reaches the venue and turns back. The crowds are seen to be believed. Meenakshi Amman temple is always a joy to visit for the architecture and the vastness of the temple and the streets around. Look at the base of any of the Gopurams and look skyward at the towers and you realize how significant you are in the scheme of things.

My adopted city(!) Thanjavur, the rice-bowl of Tamil Nadu, to which I love my visits anytime more than anybody else at home :-). I haven't yet been to Saraswathi Mahal library there or to Thiruvaiyaaru for the Rama temple. There are lots of places around there which are worth a visit. Have visited a lot of them, but there are always hidden gems. Drive out of Thanjavur along the Cauvery belt and it looks green-washed (like Mandya near Mysore). Acres and acres of paddy and winding roads through it. Green swamp after swamp. Visited Siththannavaasal, famed for its wall paintings, near Pudukottai, sometime back. The place was good and remote, but marred at places by vandals scribbling their name on the rocks or the all-too-common "I love you"s which has led the Archaeological Department to cordon off sections of the cave. We don't know how to preserve history. :-( But to ASI's credit, you should see the Brihadeeswarar Temple in the night or evenings. So gloriously lit and it looks ethereal from the prakaarams around. The temple gopuram is clothed in a color that reflects beautifully off the aged colored stones that form the temple. On pournamis (full moon days), it is so lovely that I don't have words.

Bangalore/Bengaluru. City of my first breath. I am all so comfortable with South Bangalore, visited most of the places with very few exceptions, but the other 3 directions almost draw a blank except for passing through when we go somewhere or to visit some distant relations once in a blue-moon. Long list of "should be visited" here. The Visveswarayya Museum (in spite of all complaints about non-maintenance), watching a cricket match at the Chinnaswamy Stadium, visiting the Nehru Planetarium, take a leisurely walk on the Mahatma Gandhi Road end to end. My office abuts M G Road, but the times I walk along M G Road are not leisurely at all. Now even more messier because of the Metro Rail work. And there is the Cubbon Park, Ramohalli banyan tree, Nrityagram at Hesaraghatta. A few random visits towards Malleswaram, Rajajinagar. Went to an office outing yesterday in North Bangalore on the Tumkur Road and the city has changed and how!. I don't know how the people in those areas cope, but it is a mess with all kinds of construction. I used to travel the leg towards Tumkur (almost 60 kms one way) for my final semester project at TVS Electronics and it used to be a lovely and smooth ride. Now it an awful crawl.

One thing I have figured out from all this is that I seem to love temples and forests. :-) So, more kshetraadanam (pilgrimage) in store for me later.

All copyrights for photos duly acknowledged.

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead

The day India stood stupefied on an attack of immense proportion that it had not seen till date, a gross violation of its' self. This day, last year was when Mumbai was punctured.

There are so many people who give their lives for the sake of the country and there are so many who do not even know what hit them and perish. Unfortunately we remember the soldiers and their families only in times of crises (like Kargil). May all the souls of the people, including the unfortunately misguided perpetrators, who died then rest in peace, so that we have a better tomorrow..

The soldiers posted into a war zone wake up each day not knowing if that day would be their last. Their families suffer, day in and out and hoping that their beloved ones are safe. I bow to you, the soldier, who places their country above everything else including near and dear family for their supreme sacrifice in times of peace and also in war. [My brother went recently on a trip to the Himalayas driving around 3000+ kms across 2 weeks on his motorbike and he states that we better worship the jawans who live in extreme conditions and a terrain so difficult that we better quit cribbing about life in the cities]

The poem below from Tennyson drips of sorrow and is based on the family of a soldier, dead, and has a very silent and poignant feel to it. There are critics of this poem who state that this reinforces female stereotypes of living for husband and children, but I see it as a moving statement of the effects of war, orphaning the near and dear.

Here it is, from an English text-book of my school days,  now long forgotten.

Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead - Alfred Lord Tennyson

Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
'She must weep or she will die.'

Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stept,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
'Sweet my child, I live for thee.'

A poem of a lifetime from Robert Frost

One of my most favorite poems ever. Beautifully evocative, and with a hauntingness to it, like Wordsworth's The Solitary Reaper. This poem was hemmed into me since middle school. I studied at Chinmaya Vidyalaya, Coimbatore before moving to Mani HSS and interestingly the correspondent for both these schools at that time was Chinnaswamy Naidu, a person of wonderful elocution. He used to end each of his speeches with the last 4 lines of this poem which are just engraved into my brain. Whenever I read this poem, my eyes well up for no particular reason and which I let be.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Needle in a Haystack

Search for a Needle in a Haystack. It is an common axiom, but how do you experience that?

Copyrights acknowledged for above C&H strip

My father (now retired) was a Professor in Agricultural Economics at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU) at Coimbatore. There were international students studying there and he had one such student studying/working under him from Nepal doing his Masters. He had come with his wife as well. I recollect faintly that they used to come to our house in the University staff quarters on some occasion or the other. Around 20 years later, after the student had moved back to Nepal after his studies, my parents went on a North India tour of religious places like Badrinath, Kedarnath, Varanasi, Prayag etc. This was a few years back. As a part of the tour, there was a visit to Nepal (Kathmandu).

When they were there, my father thought he will check out if he could find his student. All that he knew was the name and that he would be working as an economist. There was no idea of whether he worked for the University there, or the Government or in any other body. With just basic information, he did a name search across directories, called up people, talked to different departments he could have been in and traced him out. The student was so happy on getting to know that my parents were there in Nepal, immediately came down to the place where my parents stayed, along with his wife and children, spent a long time with my parents, got some home made food as well. They gave a gift to my parents before they took leave.

I cannot even imagine doing like what my Appa did there. He did that without the resources that we are all used to like Google blind searches, Names database etc and relied on plain old people networking. When I go out driving to some new location, I don't ask for directions even if we think we are off-way :-), but take a gut-feel route and then try to 'recover'. Though I have a few of my Masters' classmates in Bengaluru, I rarely talk to them and at times feel bad about it. Early this year when I had to go to my company HQ in Sunnyvale, got hold of a few classmates who were around there, met and talked old times. All of us are settled in our own ways and in our own cocoons.

Appa goes every year with Amma to the University Pensioners Association meeting that is held yearly where it is a kind of re-union and they get to network again with people they knew well for lots of years. This year, they went there a couple or so months back and there are large portrait photographs as memories in front of the landmark building at Coimbatore, with those who had come in there with their spouses.

Hats off for an attitude and network like that and to Appa and Amma for all the wonderful memories.

The what-meter

Students have their own creative way of passing time in classes, especially if it was boring. In those non-cell phone days, doodling, passing chits around, reading something else, playing some paper game or gazing out of the window (or at the opposite sex)  etc, and it still is! :-)

While doing my UG course, I had a Physics teacher, say X (no name out of respect), who had a quirky mannerism. X used to use the word 'what' in almost all spoken sentences. For example, You know Bose-Einstein statistics, what?, The equation for relating inductance and capacitance is what, inverse of 2 times PI root (LC) what. The relation between joule and watt is what ..., What are you doing there, what? etc

I used to be a quiet, attentive, "teacher fearing" lad and in the good books of most of the lecturers including X (was anonymous for the rest :-)). To get over boredom during X's lectures (each class period was around 50 or 55 minutes), used to divide that time into intervals of 10 minutes each on the notebook margins and measure some of X's most frequently used words like 'tell me', 'what' and generated statistics out of it as 'whats per minute', 'whats per hour', peak 'what' intervals, plot a running graph and see the shape of the 'what' curve. I called it the what-meter and shared it with close friends. It used to be fun doing it and the counting used to be on hand and then transferred to paper once the count gets to five. The margins of my lecture notes from X's classes would have lots of dashes and crosses.

Obviously when you do it more, your attention will be on the 'whats' and not on the class. One fine day, X was discussing some serious topic, quantum mechanics, I think and when someone in the class asked a question, X shot a volley of 'whats', like 'what what what what what what what, repeat it' or something like that. I just couldn't control my laughter and burst out laughing aloud. The whole class was stunned and X ordered me to get out of the class and not to get into any of X's future classes because of my lack of seriousness.

After the class ended, scared out of my wits at his outburst, went begging behind X saying sorry and making promises not to repeat it again. After walking behind X two floors down to X's desk, X said that it was not expected of a student like me to behave that way in class and I was pardoned and warned not to repeat it again.

And thus ended the saga of the what-meter!

Rain-swept silence

The summer rain pours in torrents,

Drowning the worldly noise.
Making the most of its time,
Washing the world of its grime.

The leaves and the ground are fresh,
With all the dust finely swept.
And then embraces a silence,
As the rain stops to a close.

Only a few drips and drops you hear,
Before a time of deep calm,
You just watch, bewitched,
With your memories blank.

Then the chirps start to sound,
Along with it the tweets of the birds.
And moments later, the worldly noise engulfs,
And with it, your inner voice as well.

Those few wisps of silence,
Where the time stood still,
The frozen thoughts shall wait -
Till the rain again casts its spell right.

This is partly experiential. Have you ever observed clouds passing by lying on an easy-chair or the short silence that follows a heavy rain? Watching the clouds flow by, lulls you into a state which is really an experience. You live, in the moment, for the moment and to the moment.