Two Much

Last weekend the two most important ladies in my life arrived in Mumbai. Differing in their age, thinking, their interests, their height, & many things else, they were united about one thing, their opinion of me ! To them I had made my house into a typical bachelor pad which needed much undoing and undoing is what they did.

They waltzed in and out of Mumbai in a week but their being here meant a lot to me. They made my apartment a home. They are Shikha & Shruti, my wife and my li'l girl. Together they touched every part of the house and made it like a home, fresh smelling bedsheets ( Shrutu, I am never going to forgive you for your upturned nose !!), calendars which reflected the actual month of the year, home which smelt of incense and love, toiletries which seemed to say love and care, sticker's on the fridge for fun & toy flowers in a candle stand ! Spices in their rightful places, ice cream in the freezer compartment, clothes on a clothes stand and with all of this lots and lots of small, significant moments.

You tend to take some things in life for granted till life teaches you that there is nothing which is going to be as it is today, everything that has been granted to you is not yours, it can go as it came. So I hold onto these moments and am grateful for them. To the two of you, thank you for being there, for being so caring and loving, I miss you both & love you both.

Summer Holiday

Thinking about my daughter's summer holidays set me back to thinking how I used to spend them.

Now colored with the sepia tinted lenses of nostalgia, those days seem to be the best ever, full of fun, play, exhaustion, discovery, laziness, friendship and the time when you were left to do your own thing. There was no internet, no mobile phones, no malls, no satellite television, no cricket matches beamed live, nothing but in the immortal words of Amitabh Bachchan from "Kabhi, Kabhi", "mein aur meri tanhai..."

Here are some of the things I did in my summer holidays

Stole Mango's and Jamun's from the neighbours tree

Have a stone, a good aim, an ability to run when required and the patience to keep aiming for the right fruit till you got it and you are on. Armed with all the above I spent many a day in the quiet, hot afternoon, when everyone was taking their siesta, perfecting my aim at hunting down the raw green mango's or the luscious , purple jamuns that grew on the abundant tree's around our home in Delhi. The tang of the fruit, the thrill of the steal and the satisfaction of getting what you aimed for was fulfilling enough !

Discovered New Civilisations

An empty mind willing to be filled with knowledge, an active imagination, a Delhi Public Library card and the legs to run all the way from Sector 12 to Sector 8 in RK Puram, is all it took. It's hard to imagine perhaps, but the Delhi Public Library at Sector 8 had some of the best books ever and an ever hungry mind willing to devour them, from Hardy boys, Enid Blyton, Biggles, Sherlock holmes to the reference section which had the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica set, the place was a treasure trove for a young kid like me. Those books then were way too expensive and beyond the reach of my middle class parents. So i read & read & read, some times I was Julius Caesar in the Roman Empire and other times Emperor Ashok mourning at the Battle of Kalinga, another time I was immersed in how the World War 2 started and another time I was far away in the mysterious Indus Valley. The doors of my mind were open and the world just walked in.

Played All The Tennis Open's Vs Myself

Wimbledon was perhaps one of the few tournaments beamed live to TV sets in India, and it had me glued, not only to see the perfect manicured lawns, the metronomic athleticism of Bjorn Borg & the mercurial genius of McEnroe made for the most engrossing contest you ever saw. My elder brother of course was in another world altogether he was a fan of boxing and Muhammad Ali and once in a while he practiced his fledging skills on me, with comic and chaotic consequences ( but that's another story). Now there were no lawns, tennis racquets were expensive, tennis courts never seen, and no one to play any tennis with. I didn't let this daunt me, I took out my wooden TT racquet, imagined the TT ball as a tennis ball, imagined the skirting as the net, the two mosaic tiled portions as 2 halves of the court and I was set. Playing against the wall, I would play one point as Borg and another as McEnroe & keep the score as I had seen at Wimbledon, whenever the ball hit below the skirting, bounced outside the tile or bounced twice or went out of bounds, a point was scored. This meant of course enormously long sets ( & of course lots of concentration for me) & lot of irritation for my mom as there was the constant noise of the TT ball bouncing. But "tip, tap, tip" it went and like Forrest Gump I just kept at it & had the best matches ever between Borg and McEnroe that the world never saw.

There's more to come but that is for another day !

Those Jacaranda Blossoms

I remember the heat radiating of the newly tarred roads, empty but for 2 of us walking down the sun bleached road, expectant of what lay ahead. The entire road was lined on either side with trees ablaze with yellow Jacaranda blossoms. Somehow the stillness, the blue sky, those yellow flowers and heat remain imprinted on my mind even 20 years from that day. We , Pankaj & I were going to school to see our board results. Life then, looked back through a prism which is now twenty years thick, was so very different. I was just stepping into adulthood and there were now so many choices which lay open in front of me. Those black printed nos. against my name, on that sheet flapping in the breeze, seemed to hold a key to what lay ahead. Those marks would define where I could apply, how well I had done & would be the gateway to what lay ahead. They were in a way & they were not. Brought up, upto that moment to believe that this exam would mark my destiny, I didn't know how naive I was (or still am for that matter). The real key has always lain ,where those who have unlocked their future, know it lies, in our brain & in our will to do what we want to do. I wish someone had told me that then... that it is not the marks that matter but the knowing of what you truly want to do that matters. What you truly want can only be revealed to you if you are given the time and space to find that out for yourself. Instead, we were herded and shepherded into believing academic excellence is all that mattered. So I strove hard, did well, the marks came but the knowledge of what I wanted to do or dreamt to do, didn't. Do I know now ? Perhaps. Do I dare to do what I want to do now ? Haven't tried it..yet. Will I ? I hope so. This.... is one step in that direction.