Contemplations and Ruminations

The last few months of 2016 were crazy in so many ways. First there was the money issue (when the higher denomination notes lost their value overnight) which created a mess of economic proportions. The insane queues at banks and ATM's and all the scrambling that was happening to make sense of it all, made November quite memorable.  Around the same time, Trump came out victorious which I thought was pretty hilarious... a sort of validation that people are the same everywhere, based on who we elected here.  Anyway, after the chaos of November, December came with her own brand of drama. I heard of Cyclone Nada, but I was busy in Nagercoil then  enjoying a birthday party... Even that was fun, surprising the birthday girl who did not know that I was at the airport with dad. She walks up and down and I'm hiding behind the newspaper pretending to read it, then I see Manoj by her side, and they finally come out and she is hugging my dad and after that I walk up behind h...

My first time in Rome and it was a blurry of opulent and grandiose churches, nothing really stood out, except for the church of the holy steps . I remember that church distinctly because people were kneeling while climbing the steps (apparently those are the stairs Jesus climbed when he was sentenced by Pontious Pilate), everything else is just a blur... all the churches were crowded, teeming with people. The Sistine chapel was bursting with tourists, hardly any space to breathe, pray or reflect. In that sense, Rome didn't really imprint on me, it would have been nice to skip all the churches and crowds and just walk the streets, like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. But that wasn't possible, we didn't get to see the Trevi fountain either, which I was kinda looking forward to, had saved a few ten rupee coins to throw into the water, but that place was under construction so we had to skip it. Anyway,  here's the defining image of Rome, the Colosseum, we didn't ...