Contemplations and Ruminations

Reading The Hindu has become a spiritual process these days, there’s just a sinking feeling of nothingness when you come across news about atrocities inflicted on little children. How do you reconcile to live with what you’ve just read and imagined? Recently an 8-year-old boy was sexually assaulted, had his throat slit and head smashed with a boulder. Girls as young as 3 years old and sometimes even babies are sexually abused and molested. Similar stories keep surfacing and the evil perpetrators don’t seem to fear anything, in fact gruesome child rapes seem to be on the rise and it is mind-numbingly baffling. How can one torture and traumatise a child in an unnatural and inhuman way, how depraved does one have to be to force his perverted carnal desires on a little child’s body. Aren’t they the littlest of lambs, the smallest in His fold… tiny playful little lambs. Who snatched them away, where was the Shepherd? How does one go about life, knowing such things are not a rare occurrenc...

Picture taken at Aveyla, Maldives . 

‘What you seek is seeking you’, this quote by the Persian poet Rumi is amazingly true, provided that which is being sought is in tune with our highest calling. Our highest yearning is to be one with the divine, to know that His spirit resides in us and in essence we are all spiritual beings with a purpose. This life is not meant to be dull, there is power immanent in all of us. Power from the Father who did not create us to be ordinary people leading mundane lives. He created us to love without measure and without boundaries, that’s when we encounter Him. That’s when we also realise divine love will seek us and find us if we truly desire it. A love like that just exists, it cannot be explained, it changes our lives by changing our rigid perspectives. We begin to see that everything we’ve gone through has been for this purpose, to experience the wonders His love can bring about. There’s no going back to the old confused selves;  when we feel His love working in us, we ...

Just a poem... 

Another travel post... we went to Maldives last month to celebrate Mom and Dad's 40th wedding anniversary. We (me and my brother) wanted something close by since nobody was interested in flying long distance, and Maldives seemed like the best option. But searching for a nice resort was quite time consuming, cause Maldives is a collection of numerous islands and tourism and fishing dominate their economy. So resorts are everywhere, some islands contain only the resort with no sign of local life or villages. And the pictures of these high end resorts are amazing, cabins right in the middle of still blue waters and perfect landscapes everywhere. It was manicured nature, clipped here and nipped there to make it picture perfect. I was slowly growing desperate, I didn't want to go to any of these places... somehow they seemed to lack soul, that earthy charm was not coming through. So I delegated the search to my sister, I was behind her night and day to find a nice resort that didn...

With all the free time I have now (thanks to Cooper) I thought of writing something here.  This is Cooper, a friend's dog, and whenever I go home to Nagercoil, we generally hang out together, talking and taking Cooper for long walks in the colony. This time was no different, we were on our walk when this stray little street dog started barking and I was holding cooper's leash... my hand in that loop when Cooper suddenly became way excited than usual and took off after the stray like Flash on steroids. He dragged me along and I couldn't keep up; I stumbled, fell on the bad road and bruised myself.  And since I had nothing better to do, I made a collage of the wounds to send to my sister... who found it hilarious that I fell. So anyway, went to the doc, got my tetanus shot and now I'm just taking it easy for the next few days. And one person has been constantly on my mind since this incident, Danny. I met Danny about 12 years ago in Santhi Nilayam , the special...

The recent death of the four nuns belonging to the Kolkata-based Missionaries of Charity in Yemen, is hard to take in. They became nuns for a reason, they wanted to dedicate their lives to serving God by caring for the infirm and weak in society. They weren’t a threat to anybody, they were just caring for the aged in a war torn region. The people who shot them dead must have been really scared of what they stood for: love. Why else would they have shot harmless nuns and kidnapped a priest? They couldn’t understand this brand of love they depicted, and in typical barbarian fashion they decided to deal with it by eliminating whatever made them question their vile beliefs rooted in selfishness, vengeance and a self-gratification ideology. Fr. Tom Uzhunnali, the Salesian priest supposedly kidnapped by the IS, was serving the spiritual needs of the sisters and so far there hasn’t been any news about his whereabouts. Official reports suspect that he has been kidnapped and one can only ...

So where do I start.... January was fun, been so buried under books, didn't really find time to jot down stuff here. January started off on a fun note; after a midnight mass under flashing lights that were really giving me a headache, yeah, my church in the village is really big on tacky lighting... it's almost like a contest here. The more tackier and multicoloured the lighting the more it depicts your devotion I guess, and every religious establishment takes this rule dead seriously. I'm not kidding, I even went and told the guy in charge to please switch off the flashing lights during the service and he had the audacity to tell me to go inside the church and sit with the humongous crowd. Anyway, I went back to my place and whispered to my brother in law about the lack of etiquette in church festivals, and my sister glared at us and asked whether we had any ourselves...  The church with the flashing lights and multicoloured stars... After the midnight mass, we ca...

So December has been really hectic so far, well the actual craziness started with my sister's birthday on November 30th, when the city (Madras) started experiencing torrential rains. We were cooped up inside enjoying the downpour (little did we know that more was in store), taking pictures and getting drenched in the terrace and making merry like kids... the rain always does that, brings out the kid in you. So anyway, the rains continued through the next couple of days and then mayhem took over, the city started fragmenting into islands. It was chaos everywhere, but the stories that kept pouring in about ordinary people pitching in to help the flood affected people shed some sort of light on the whole ordeal. We tried to help by volunteering in church and driving around searching for bread and water to deliver to relief camps. We lost power for a couple of days, and that was another experience hanging out in candlelight; talking, musing and wondering if others were safe (we had...

We reached Paris around 8 pm, it was quite cold and we went shivering to an Indian restaurant nearby. A few of us didn't want Indian food so we went to a pizzeria  Had some wine (Chianti) and pizza. This is the four seasons pizza that I ate. It was nice sitting here with the group and discussing stuff, I remember the song 'Take me to church' by Hozier started playing and then we started discussing that. Didn't expect to make friends on this trip, even now we stay in touch, so glad I met them. Another fun and tiring day came to an end, got back to our hotel and drifted off to dreamland. The next day, had some really good breakfast of croissants and peaches with nutella,  and then set out to explore Paris, which has enamored writers for ages. This was where we stayed, Hotel Ibis Paris Porte d'Orleans, pretty neat place.  A bridge on the way Visited the Miraculous Medal church first where mass was celebrated and then proceeded to Notre Dame C...

So after a nice breakfast in Burgos we started on our way to Lourdes.  Fields of gold in France  Driving through France was fun, the scenery is amazing like this field of bundled up hay.  Rugged mountains The castle of Lourdes in the center. Our quaint room in Lourdes As soon as we reached the room we had to walk to the Lourdes shrine for mass. We had mass in this chapel directly above the grotto. River Gave, near the shrine The massive shrine  The site of the apparitions The source of the water that Bernadette apparently dug up from the ground By 5 pm the Eucharistic procession started, and nuns were walking with this blue ribbons contraption. The Eucharistic procession The procession ended in this massive underground church   It started raining heavily by the time the procession got over and it was nice walking in the rains near this roaring river to a restaurant for Indian food at a Sri Lankan rest...

The past few months have been terribly crazy, so many things have been happening (mostly in my head), that there aren't enough words to make sense of it all. It all felt like the ground beneath me was cracking open, the familiar ground that I knew growing up was now shifting and rearranging itself. The catalyst that set it all in motion and the beacons that shone upon a path, have been of immeasurable help and I don't know what I'd do without them.  Anyway, I wanted to finish this travel post of 2015, before the year got over... so let's get on with that. So in the last post, we had just finished our candlelight procession in Fatima, Portugal. The next day we had a guide who took us around the premises, explaining the apparitions and the story of the three shepherd children, Lucia, Francesco and Jacinta. The main church was under renovation and we couldn't enter it, but to its side is the grave of Francesco, the shepherd boy, depicted with a lamb on his la...