Mental Excursions

Dance baby dance! The whole country is Natu-natuing over the Oscar Award for the best original song. You may smirk and make faces at film music, but admit it, it is official now. Indian film music has arrived. Have you seen the video? The music is fast and upbeat, the steps energetic, the atmosphere is charged, the two male actors Ram Charan and NTR Jr, are fully clothed and look good dancing it, everybody is smiling and enjoying. Most of all, we are thrilled that a Bharatiya (Indian) song whether we know the meaning of the lyrics or not, brought the coveted statuette home. The chartbuster already won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards a few days ago. No need to stress how much we Indians (especially from north), love to dance. No celebration, whether in the neighbourhood, a school/college function, wedding, religious occasion, is complete without singing and dancing. The happier you are, the more your insides yearn to move and shake it. We can dance to bhajans (devo...

  All in the eyes of the beholder I merely lived through the 24 hours of the International Women’s Day this week, absorbed in my own little world and can boast of no accomplishments whatsoever that day or otherwise. But something stirred in my mind and I shamelessly admit that I had rather a good time thinking about it. Men of letters have written differently about women. Unlike scientists who are precise and want proofs, poets dream and imagine and then indulge in word play. They may compare a woman with fairy, angel or sorceress, based on their personal experience. Yet when it comes to physical beauty, they generally draw parallels from nature. What I deduced after a lot of calculation, was that most comparisons are with features from various branches of natural sciences like: Botany: flowers trees, plants or their parts Zoology: birds, animals Earth sciences like planetary science, meteorology, geology etc. Caution- nobody dare call me a misogynist and I do not focus o...

No colours for me on Holi, please! Amitabh Bachchan (L) in the baap  (father) of all Holi songs- Rang Barse Does it happen with you that you express your dislike for something socially accepted as normal or even great, and everyone tells you how wrong you are? For me Holi or rather my dislike for playing Holi is one such issue. I have checked with several people and found that there are others too who cringe at the thought of this festival. Some, however, allege that ‘others’ force them to indulge in this battle of smearing of colours. On the night before the full moon night of the Hindu month of Phalguna (Holi), bonfires are lit on crossroads and other open spaces to mark Holika dehan (burning of Holika) . The story is that she, on the orders of her brother demon king Hrinyakashyap, had agreed to sit in a pyre with her nephew Prahlad with the intention of killing the little boy who sang the praises of Lord Vishnu. Holika was blessed with the boon to remain untouched by f...

Ramblings of a wandering mind Aren’t there times when there is a jumble of thoughts and ideas in the head and nothing is clear? Now, in my case, at least, that is not some serious matter of philosophy or psychology. It is the simple issue of having nothing concrete to talk about because there is a crowd of images flooding the mind and none seems important enough. My major ones relate to travelling from Mumbai to Ahmedabad by road, which did not take many hours as we drove past several towns, but raised several questions in my head, that even after spending several hours in the company of omniscient Googla baba, I could not find the answer to. I became aware that the impressions I have of places are pre-conceived notions of a frog in the well or are based on anecdotal evidence, both of which might not be true, after all. I have not lived in Mumbai and the big city overwhelms me. So, I did not follow others’ suggestions to visit any touristy place and confined my physical and tour...

Time for a test of love? Not to put anyone under any kind of pressure, but I heard today, the 11 th of February, is Promise Day. Let me walk you through it if you haven’t paid much attention to the matters of the heart lately. Most of us by now know that 14 th February is celebrated as Valentine’s Day, the day designated for love and romance. You may love your partner or spouse your whole life, but 7 th to 14 th of February, the whole week or rather a week plus one day, are reserved for expressing it to them , loud and clear and mostly , to the rest of the world too. So, whatever you had planned to do in this shortest month on the calendar, leave it and jump into the arena. There is a date sheet for observing 7 th to the 14 th.  Each day has a name - Rose Day, Propose Day, Chocolate Day, Teddy Day, Promise Day, Hug Day, Kiss Day, and of course, Valentine’s Day respectively, which have attracted so much attention in the recent few years. The understanding is that the...

Any time is chai time! Are you too a teatotaler? You read it right. One of the questions nobody should ask me is how I take my tea. Seriously, helluva lot seriously, I would say! Not only that, if you like my kind of tea, we are friends forever. Maybe most of us Indians feel the same about this beverage which cheers but does not inebriate. Tea is one’s go-to drink when they are happy, sad, pleased, annoyed, with friends and family or alone, feeling sick or absolutely fine, doing something or not, working or jobless, during a break from the never-ending chores or free, travelling in a train or in a bus, in winter, rains or autumn. You can have a cup of tea even during the hot summer evenings because loha hee lohe ko kaatata hai (roughly translated: you use iron to cut/sharpen iron). Would a coffee drinker understand that? No. No wonder, coffee is not my cup of tea. You may rattle off the names of 50 types of tea you know, but the first thing you look forward to when you wake up in...