Contemplations and Ruminations

(November 30th, 2020) Last week I saw some rather captivating images on Instagram under the hashtag of folktale week and I was rather impressed by the mystical and creative work that artists were posting under a folktale prompt, and I decided to give it a shot and see what I could create with the prompts mentioned below. Folktales, or folklores are stories, typically legends or myths, passed on orally and culturally and they usually depict something deeper about the race, people or geographical location from which these fantastical stories originate (I made up my own stories here though). The prompt for day one was Birth, so this is what I drew… a picture of how fairies come into being. All the whimsical longings and yearnings of human beings are collected to create a sweet little fairy that dreams of spreading sunshine and magic when we’re struggling to find our own. Day 2 of the folktale prompt was Ritual, and here’s a mother teaching her child the phases of that celestial ...

I never expected to be on another trip so soon after my last trip to Europe in September 2013, but here I am sitting in my sister's house in New Jersey, trying to complete my travel posts from last year. Well,what can I say... the horizons keep beckoning and I keep following... Now for a sneak peek of what I've been gazing at over the past month... Manhattan in the distance and the Hudson in all her serenely swaying beauty... Now getting back to Lyon , the gastronomic capital of France and one of it's largest cities, which we (me, Nam and Vinod) decided to explore one fine Sunday in October 2013. Lyon is just a two hour train ride away from Geneva, and once we got off the train we decided to head first to, Pérouges, one of the most beautiful villages in France , located near Lyon. After visiting Yvoire , we made it a point to scout out other beautiful villages near any city we visited. So we asked around and surprisingly no one knew how to get to Pérouges, so we ...

So June edition of the church magazine is out... And this is the article I wrote... Lessons in Life from a Helium Balloon This is a story I heard in church when I was about ten years old. A bunch of us were being prepped to receive First Holy Communion and during the retreat that is usually held just before the big day, a priest told us this story and since then it has always stuck with me. I remember sitting in church with my friends, when this priest walks in and starts telling us this poignant story. A man was selling his balloons at a fair and to attract the children running around, he would cut the string of a helium balloon from time to time. He let loose a red balloon first, and watched it as it soared across the skies. He then cut the string of a blue balloon and it too went soaring up and out of sight. Noting that the kids were riveted by this display he let loose another white balloon that danced and flitted out of sight too. This little marketing trick work...

I love the BBC reproductions of classics, they transport you to a completely different era and its hard not to fall for the ruggedly leading men, who are flawed, witty, kind and intense. Here are a few stellar adaptations of some timeless English classics, I know many can't stand these period dramas... but I can never get enough of them.  Jane Eyre: I can't tell you how much I love this book and the character of Jane Eyre, I loved everything about it... the calm and morally upright Jane, the intriguingly flawed Edward Rochester, the surprise in the attic, the way Jane deals with the surprise and her beahaviour towards the wicked aunt and the heart-searingly beautiful ending. For sometime, I used to go around calling myself Jane Eyre after reading the book... anyway, I loved the movie and the TV mini series that I saw. Anything with a BBC imprint on it is bound to be good, and the 2011 movie version  with Mia Wasikowska and Michael ...

So it was a lazy Friday afternoon, and we (me, Sajeeve and Jude) were kinda bored so we decided to play this game and I had no idea it would turn out to be this sacrilegious. So if you are a religious fanatic please do not continue reading this... I am pretty sure the story we concocted is blasphemous in at least 3 religions, Jude (a cousin) seems to think so anyway. I was too busy laughing and trying to bring some modicum of sensibility (not to mention respectability) to the story but my cousin Sajeeve is blessed with a very fertile imagination and once he unleashed it there was no going back... So here it is...  Karen : She was moping the floor and singing along loudly with the radio. (I was thinking along the lines of a cute M&B... she a hard working woman and he a wealthy arrogant guy who gets drawn to her calm, strong & sensible nature) Sajeeve : But deep down she was contemplating if she could forsake her conservative principles. (This is when I knew the ‘cute f...

First off, how exciting and thoroughly wondrous was the whole Chilean miners rescue mission... it is indeed an event that will go down in history as one of the most meticulous and miraculous rescue operations ever carried out. To finally see each of them emerging victoriously from the unimaginable ordeal they must have endured over the last two months was awe inspiring. All the hugging, laughing, crying and kissing the ground are some of profound images we'll remember forever. I especially loved the second man (Mario Sepulveda) who emerged from the mines, he was like a rockstar pumping up the crowd and chanting a slogan (apparently some football based slogan). I think he is the one who said that he held the hand of both God and the Devil and finally God won... God held on till the end.  This precisely sums up their predicament right from day one when the world finally came to know bout these trapped 33 miners. They kept their wits bout them and rationed out the food they had ...

A few sisters from the congregation I work with had gone to their convent in Madhya Pradesh once. They wanted to buy chicken and the shopkeeper couldn't understand what they were trying to tell him. One sister finally said "Aanda ki ma..." (mother of an egg). Mother told us this incident and I couldn't stop laughing, I found it really funny. This happened a few months back while I was preparing a list of the board members to get somethin registered. The sisters are telling me the names of the other sisters on the board one by one and I am typing them up, when they read somethin like Sr. Geeree Goree and I was like, 'what was that?' So they read it again the same way and I was like 'what kind of a name is that?' I looked into the registration file and finally found her... Sr. Gregory.

Okay here's somethin my friends can't put up on their blogs... but it's too funny to leave out. I heard this from a cousin... a very very crazy cousin. He was at home lazing around... watching tv, when his friends drop in, this guy and girl. So they too make themselves comfortable and everybody is watchin tv, when all of a sudden the girl starts crying... after a few minutes the guy starts crying. My cousin is staring at them dumbstruck... he asks them okay what's up? Then out comes the stick and my cousin is staring at it, wondering what the hell it is... apparently it was a pregnancy test stick and it was positive, and these two (who were boyfriend and girlfriend by the way) were really tearing up over the 'positive' sign. The guy was crying more than the girl it seems... anyway, my cousin then drove them to the Gynaecologist office. So there he is sitting in the office with his friends, when his dad rings up... my cousin was kinda quiet on the phone, so his...

Yesterday all of us happened to meet online, anju, shil and me. And we weren't exactly in the best of moods ... we were all bugged with somethin or someone. Since we weren't exactly being rays of sunshine, anju said lets make up a story (each of us tells one line as the story progresses). And this is how it started ... Anju : Once upon a time .... (yeah, anju is hopeful, she likes stories that start like that and end with happily ever after) Shil : There was a handsome boy .... (and shil is a hopeless romantic! She's forever hooked on romantic stuff. Very soon she would have brought in a beautiful girl, and eventually love would follow along with babies!!!) Me : Who was gay ... (I was in mood to listen to any romantic ... crap. Sorry shil ! So I made the guy gay ....) After that the story went downhill .... he eventually meets a penguin and the rest is not important. But since I screwed up the first attempt, I decided to try again ..... So we did try again and this...

Had choir practice and we (the english choir) finished practicing early. We were sitting there on sand under an open sky and waiting for the tamil choir to finish their practice. We finally got bored of waiting and so nam asked me to tell them all a story. It was one mixed group of people like the picture up there .... anyway I told them the story about King Oedipus. They were all disgusted by the oedipus story. Heard this story from a professor, and I found it very amusing. Here is the gist of the story .... Oedipus was the mythical king of Thebes (son of Laius and Jocasta ) who, unknowingly, killed his father and married his mother. At Oedipus birth, the Delphic Oracle prophesied that he would kill his father. Seeking to avoid such a fate, Laius had the infant's ankles pierced with nails and had him placed in the wilderness to die. His servant, however, betrayed him, handing the boy to a shepherd who presented the child to the King and Queen of the neighbouring land who ra...