Life is easy kya karein

When I wrote the post on Makar Sankranti, I had friends sharing customs from so many of their festivals. I wasn't able to collate all of it. One interesting thing was Pongal is celebrated for four days. First day Bhogi is about cleaning the house and lighting a bonfire of all the discarded things in the night. Second day is to worship Surya or the Sun. People make Kolam with rice flour outside their house and on the doorstep. Third day is Mattu Pongal dedicated to cows and buffaloes. Fourth day is Kanum Pongal where apart from going to the temple, food is made and offered to the birds on a banana leaf. India respects Nature in all its festivals. I was wondering how festive is Lohri in Punjab and then we went to Amritsar. Amritsar was a long pending thing in our list. The Golden Temple is divine beyond any imagination. The way the area is developed and the sound of Kirtan all over is so humbling. The beauty of Harmandir Sahib strikes you. It is mesmerising. No one is chatting in ...

Makar Sankranti is not just a kite flying festival. There is much more to it. The sun moves its position  towards the Northern hemisphere. It signals the end of winters and the onset of spring. Sankranti comes on 14th January every year. All the 'Tithi' fall in place. Another festival is Vishwakarma Puja which happens on 17th September every year. The Indian calendar or 'Panchaang' is the world's best calendar. It gives you not just past and future days and dates but gives you the same for years to come and years gone by. It also tells one the planetary positions and the movement of the stars and the planets. The eclipse and 'Nakshatra' movement are predicted much in advance. This all has been done by our 'Rishis' much before the advent of telescope and computers. The world follows lunar calendar. In India, we always had sidereal calendar which means that we knew not only that the sun is the centre and planets are going around it, but we also calcu...

Every morning, when my house help walks into the house, we have a little chat. Her first question to me is did the kids go to school properly. I nod and ask about her two boys. Then the conversation veers towards her relatives and what she is dealing with them. Sometimes she tells me how she has to go to for a funeral or a wedding and how she plans to manage her jobs. This year we were at home on New Year's eve. On 1st January, she told me she did not clean her house on 31st December which is a ritual as they have prayers on the New Year. She said the boys were making the decorations for that. It is a creative bunch of boys in the Chawl.They are good in sports, music, dance and creativity. Our issues are so similar. We worry about our children. We feel bad by weird behaviour of our relatives and neighbours. We worry about what to cook for lunch and dinner. We think alike and empathise with each other. I speak less and she understands more. She is always upset when my other support...

The Kamala Mills tragedy is still on my mind. I am shaken up by it. I had been to 1 Above, the restaurant which caught fire and where all the deaths happened. It just did not have a good vibe. The elevators were not working in the supposedly cool building which houses so many TV channels offices and studios. The staircase is not very big. It was full of empty plastic bottles of mineral water and cold drinks along with coffee cups n cigarette stubs. Did not feel very safe as we trudged up six floors to reach the terrace. The side entrance was narrow. The left side was like a store room and the right side had some 50 odd gas cylinders  lying in a straight line one on top of the other making a corridor which we had to cross to enter the restaurant. Terrace was all artificial plants, poles, curtains and candles with wooden furniture. The air conditioned area which also looked illegal had an extremely narrow service entrance opposite the toilet. The food was bad and so was the service...

Every place has a feeling. In today's fast world, who is listening to it. Last evening I had gone to Sasson Dock for the Street Art Project. It was the last day and we finally managed to reach. A young gentleman who has worked with Julia, the curator,  was showing us around. This was not like an art gallery with paintings or sculptures or some new age modern stuff. This was real as real could get. Each artist and I think there were about 30 of them, got connected to the soul of Sassoon Dock. The art made you realise what the Metropolis was doing to your mind and soul. This was not the cynical liberal Art, which just criticises what is. This was Art with passion and love for the place. Panditji, to whom I go for Bhagwadgeeta Satsang and Ramcharitmanas, uses a word called "Sakaratmak Bhaav". Loosely translated it means positive feeling but it means also not negating what is and going beyond that with a trust in the universal design. This St+Art was all about that. Karan w...

These days the bed time stories are all about my childhood "Jatras". Jatra is a Gujarati word which means a trip to religious places. In Bengali, Jatra is a popular folk theatre form. Jatra comes from the word Yatra which means a journey. As a child, we went for a lot of Jatras with my Grandmother Bai and the entire family. Every Jatra is clearly etched in my mind as a soulful experience without a fancy resort,Tibetan chants and a spa. Our context of travel was oneness and being one with God or a journey towards becoming one with God. Never had these fancy words in my vocabulary then nor this 'holier than thou' attitude. They were the only vacations I had as there was no luxury of Nani Ghar or Mamar Baadi. Nani is the maternal grandmother and Mama is the mother's brother. Both these relations are very close. Most married women used to travel to their parents house with their children during vacations. People did not marry in the same city or town and for a marri...

Thoughts and feelings have a way of going away. Yet we give so much importance to them. There are so many thoughts that come in the whole day. I cannot even imagine recording so much. Low energy phase is on. People are chilling in the winters. The climate is telling us to back off and release the pedal. It is the same noise of the construction of the Metro and building repairs around me but the dust and noise is bothering less. Last week of the year is that dark part of the night when you are in deep slumber. A friend said that if  a year passed by too soon, then it was a good year. Bad times pass slowly. All along, I used to think, if the year passed by quick then may be I did not do enough.  All mothers who think they are cool moms are actually hyper moms who micro manage their kids' lives. Then the other category of mothers always think they cannot relax because they have children. I want to know what the children ate at a party. When children are invited for a birthd...