Contemplations and Ruminations

Our flight from Chennai was at 4am, so after a small midnight prayer in church, after all the airport drama and the waiting, we finally settled into our seats for the four hour flight to Qatar. I was instantly asleep, and in Qatar after going through a security check again, we boarded the transit flight to Madrid. This was also mostly spent in a sleep daze... except when the food arrived.   This was some good breakfast: eggs, mushrooms in some gravy, sausage and hash browns.  A mid day snack: a calzone kinda roll which wasn't that great and an almond cake.  So we landed in Madrid (which was an quite an ordeal, it was like one of those autorickshaw rides, where everything bounces and careens out of control, I almost started panicking and thinking 'just because I wrote this article , doesn't mean it has to come true, Lord...' it was one scary landing) and the airport here is quite interesting. We follow the crowd and reach these doors that say baggage claim ...

Just got back from a madcap road trip across five countries in Europe and I am still reeling from the effects of the past two weeks. There were about seventy of us on this pilgrimage trip (thirty from my parish) and I was wondering how it would be... We landed in Madrid and traversed through Spain, to reach Fatima in Portugal, then went on to Lourdes and Paris in France, stopped in the mountains in Switzerland for a day, then on to Turin, Padua, Venice, Assisi, Rome and Milan in Italy. Stayed in eleven hotels and received wake up calls at insane hours like 4:30 am... the wake up call from our hotel in Rome was quite amusing. I answered the phone to hear Michael Bublé crooning to  'I want to go home...', those people at the hotel have a nice sense of humour. So we arrived in Madrid, roamed around for a bit, then reached the hotel and I started updating the family on whatsapp about our day. They asked for my room number to call on the hotel line, so anyway I'm still che...

The Colour of Paradise or Rang-e  Khodā (which literally means ‘The Colour of God’) is  an Iranian movie set in a beautiful little mountain village near Tehran. The film is visually appealing, in fact the landscapes and its accompanying sounds form an important character. They help to establish the world of the blind protagonist, a tender hearted young boy named Mohammed who is a student in a special school in Tehran. The school is quite amazing in the way they train and care for the visually impaired children. Mohammed’s father, a widower, doesn’t seem extremely fond of his blind son whom he considers a burden. When the school closes for summer vacation, he reluctantly takes the boy back to the strikingly beautiful village where Mohammed’s doting grandmother and sisters reside. The outpouring of love that Mohammed experiences from his grandmother and sisters is poignantly portrayed. So much love and warmth abounds in these frames, it’s almost like the beauty of nature ...

What with flights crashing and disappearing, the Germanwings flight that crashed into the mountains because of one man's mental sickness is quite difficult to fathom...  The transcript of the final moments of the ill-fated Germanwings flight that crashed into the French Alps on March 24th, 2015, gives the chilling account of what occurred in the plane as it went down. 10 am The airplane takes off. 10:30  The captain has gone to the bathroom and the co-pilot Lubitz locks the armoured door with the “Lock” button:  it is no longer possible to open the door from the outside. 10:33 The plane drops 3000 feet per minute. Air traffic controllers detect this and try to contact the plane several times but Lubitz does not respond. The captain’s voice can be heard as he tries to open the door: “It’s me!” The captain grabs an oxygen tank or fire extinguisher in order to break down the door. No response from Lubitz.  The captain yells: “For the love of God, open this ...

Suddenly I seem to be a part of so many whatsapp groups, first the college group was formed and we're just getting to know each other after thirteen years. Then a school group was created and the faces of school friends with their double plaited folded up braids came rushing in (to my mind's eye), today I got added to my church group. Needless to say there's been an influx of information... Anyway, this is the second edition of whatsapp quotes, that I keep saving on my phone to note down here. Here's a  link to first edition of whatsapp quotes  ...  in case you would like to read it. Cousin P:  It's the traditional disrespect and disdain shown for testers by developers. (Two nerd cousins who are into coding were discussing a product and one cousin didn't like what one of the testers in his company was doing.) Cousin P:  I'd rather be in 12 months of cold weather than slow roasting my ass in 120F heat. (While discussing the heat in India...

Well, today marks one year since more than 200 girls in Nigeria were kidnapped in 2014 and so far, they haven't been rescued. I have thought about these girls quite often over the past year, wondering about their plight. I hoped that they would be rescued soon, the girls must have felt the same... that people would come for them. It's been a year now and I wonder what they are thinking...  How will it end?  This is something I jotted down after reading headline after headline of all the horrors perpetuated in the name of religion. I sometimes think this world is way too crazy to make any sense of it. When people take their religious beliefs too seriously, the very purpose of religion gets defeated. Isn't religion supposed to enlighten us and set us free, why do people then make the fatal mistake of letting it enslave them and turn them into raving fanatics? Religion is supposed to propagate hope, peace, forgiveness, brotherhood, love and joy. Any religion that d...

If you've been following my blog, you probably know about Tyler Knott Gregson , a poet whose poems tend to draw you in. I've written about Knott a couple of times here , and my sister even met the guy.   So it was quite a pleasant surprise when I came across this  on Tyler's instagram feed... I was like, wow! I had sent him a card for Christmas, and this is how I know he received it. Even the envelope has been put to good use by this typewriter poet. 

Been a while since I visited this place, I keep making notes (on my phone) of all the things I have to write about here, but I never get around to it. Anyway, here's the PK review I wrote for the church magazine...  Having recently seen this movie, I thought I’d write about it and let you know why it’s causing a furore among the religious fanatics. The movie tells the story of an alien, portrayed by Amir Khan, who lands on earth sans clothes (the prudes in society took offence to this and launched campaigns to clothe his cardboard cut-outs), but with a glowing pendant around his neck. Apparently this pendant functions as a remote control to his spaceship, and it gets stolen by the first human he comes across. The rest of movie depicts his search for this pendant which ultimately details his search for God, because the answer he often gets when he starts his search is; only God can help you, only God knows where it is. The alien has no idea who God is, so he starts asking arou...

I saw this movie recently while travelling to Chennai in the train and before I knew it I was transported to a sleepy little Italian village on the coast where beauty abounds in every frame. Beauty herself forms a major character, she is everywhere you care to look and that's what the protagonist Mario (Massimo Troisi) discovers after he interacts with a well known poet in exile, Pablo Neruda. The Cuban poet, Pablo Neruda (portrayed by Phillippe Noiret), arrives in a small island in Italy after being exiled for his communist beliefs. And Mario, a reluctant fisherman, longs for another job and when the necessity of a postman to deliver mail to the most famous person on the island arises, Mario lands this job. He hesitantly starts befriending Pablo and reading his poems, this awakens his soul to the beauty of being, of observing, of existing. As I sat there on the upper berth watching this movie while everybody was fast asleep, I was moved by this fisherman who found magic in meta...

I've written lots about my hometown, Nagercoil , in this blog... about how every trip home is like being embraced in earth's bountiful bosom. So you can imagine my surprise when for the very first time in my life, I felt bereft and speechless at her decrepit state. The past few weeks were exactly like the earth in Interstellar, a dust bowl, that's the only way to describe Nagercoil now. All her roads and mudukku's have been dug up, vehicles ply over these pathetic roads leaving a trail of dust in the air. There is a fine coating of the characteristic red mud on every visible surface... and amidst all the dancing and swirling red dust, people go about their daily lives, unfazed and undeterred, patiently waiting for their little town to go back to it's former glory of quaint roads and angel rays that flit and float through tree branches, playing shadows with the ground below. I was pretty much covered up like a terrorist there, a duppata covering my entire face ex...

Christmas turned out to be wonderfully surprising this year. After the midnight mass I ended up having Irish Bailey's and plum cake with nuns in the convent. Clinking our glasses to Sláinte! (the Irish version of 'Cheers' or 'drinking to your health') we sat around the dining table swapping stories. For a person missing her choir friends from the church back home, these friends from the religious fraternity made Christmas night pretty memorable. New Year's was pretty exciting too, it was great being back with family and friends... meeting the shepherd boys of 2006 ,   those small little boys who now tower over me... hanging out with the choir girls after mass, baking and eating the rum cake, and drinking bacardi while being extremely glad for a wonderful 2014 and hoping that the years to follow will be filled with good memories, exciting times and a lot more adventures... this is what I wish for all you readers too. Today being the feast of Epiphany or the...

Every year, setting up the crib is an experience... when we were kids, the crib was made with this sweet smelling wild reed that dotted the landscape back home. I don't know what they call it, but the scent of the freshly built crib wafting through the house spiked the excitement levels. The reed though it smelled nice and looked great, was a time consuming project that involved dexterity, planning and patience.  So over the years, buying the reed gave way to other forms of constructing the Nativity scene... it became much easier to form a basic structure in the shape of a hut and then put a different spin on it every year. like the one in 2013   and  2012 ... Here is this year's crèche, named it the Interstellar crib... cause of those floating specks of light wafting through the time space continuum. You can't see it here, but it sort of looks surreal with only these specks lighting up the nativity scene.  And with a little bit of light, it become...

I've written about Tyler Knott more than once on my blog... how I came across his poems , how one poem of his evocatively captured all I needed to say after my recent trips, and how the phrasing in his poems is what gets your attention even though you don't necessarily agree with all that he says. So when I read on his instagram account that he would be visiting New York in November (2014) I was behind my sister and brother in law to attend his book signing event at a Barnes & Noble store. I had to plead, and make deals with them to ensure that they would attend the event. They assured me that they would, but every now and then, they would resort to blackmails and threats. If I said something they didn't like or if I pulled their leg, they would be like... 'do you want your poems signed?' So anyway, after all the trauma they put me through, they finally did go to meet him and they got my poems signed. Here is the man himself, Tyler Knott Gregson signing a...

I started documenting my trip here and inspite of nobody  reading it, I've come to the final post of my 2013 Eurotrip. And there is only one way to describe it, like warm sunshine spilling over my being, shrouding everything in a warm hazy glow. Like Gene Kelley says, 'There's a smile on my face for the whole human race, why it's almost like being in love .' That perfectly sums up my three months roaming with the siblings in Geneva, France and Germany.. You know how a book can take you to faraway places... that's what I've been doing since I fell in love with the written word. Now to finally discover the world beyond books and pictures is nothing short of incredible.   In a way the special school was like this too, those years are always shrouded in warm hues of sunshine. It was great being with those kids, every day in school was an adventure... I used to wake up thinking what is going to happen today, it was that exciting. I should visit the school...

So this is the November issue of the magazine with a few articles by me. Thomas Rhett's 'Beer with Jesus ' has been included here and I wrote something about the entertainment industry which might be a bit preachy...   Entertainment is not what it used to be When you switch on the TV or listen to songs by the biggest names in the music industry, you cannot help but cringe and wonder at the abasement of it all. How did this degradation seep in? When did it become cool to objectify women and let derogatory comments pass off as comedy? Most of the famous shows today have this cool character whose life revolves around drinking and sleeping with different women, perfect examples would be Charlie Harper and the legendary Barney Stinson. These characters are the epitome of being cool and having it all, and they have the best lines on the show. This is the idea that is being propagated to young people who watch these shows, that your life is enjoyable only when you drink...

So Autumn was just starting when I was in Geneva last year and all the colours of fall were pretty fascinating. I would pick up lovely autumn coloured leaves and preserve them in a book while I explored so many beautiful places with my sister. She would scan the ground too, to find leaves that declared the poetry of the season. And if my brother was with us, he'd stand at a distance away, pretending that he was in no way related to us sisters who were running around collecting leaves.  This is what I made for my brother, framed autumn leaves. It's pretty easy too, collect pretty autumn leaves and preserve them in a book. Make sure you preserve them properly with no folded edges, just place the leaf gently between the pages of a book and let it remain there for a few days. Gently stick the leaves to a chart paper; I used a black chart paper here. Then use a transparent nailpolish to gently brush all over the leaf to give it a glossy look. Write a few lines (or not), and ge...