Season's Greetings

It's that time of year again. Where one festival seems to follow the other. With weddings and parties and get-togethers and dances and phone calls and cards and emails. Family, friends, old friends, new friends, acquaintances, classmates, neighbours, relatives, random strangers . Everybody.

Everything seems bathed in this special glow.Twinkling from lamps and little strings of light put up in homes to giant blinking hoardings put up outside shops. Sales and more sales everywhere, rip-offs too. But its Diwali too special a time to worry about the little things or get in a snit over.

Firecrackers light up everywhere. Sparklers and flower pots and atom bombs and rasi bombs too. And yet nobody seems to mind or at least they pretend not to. Children run about happy and smiling. The glow in their faces mirrored in the glow of the chakras.

Markets overflow with people. Organised chaos if you will. And yet nobody seems to mind. They have people to see, sweets and clothes to buy, greetings to send and joy to be spread. They have things to do and so do the rest they know.

Happy Diwali everybody!

I love Diwali. Bring on Christmas.

Comments

The one with all the food

While I've already done the Happiness is tag once before, I've had food on my mind an awful lot lately. I'm comfort-eating myself all the way to obesity, but I just can't bring myself to care somehow. Anyhoo, Happiness is.. A steaming cup of tea and Parle G biscuits Brun maska and chai Cheese maggi (Double points if it's eaten in a ramshackle hut in the middle of nowhere in Ladakh) Fresh off the tawa alu ka parathas dripping with butter Mutton and cheese burger from Bembos Fiery Mangalorean sorpotel and sannas Tibetan momos from Dharamsala Mashed potatoes with salt, pepper and butter Candies classic roasted chicken Biryani made with fragrant rice and melt-in-the-mouth mutton Cheesy bhajji with warm buttery pav Paya soup from Bara Handi nalli marke Blueberry cheesecake A jar of Nutella and a big spoon Hot McDonalds' french fries sprinkled liberally with salt Rajma-chawal and fried fish Reese peanut butter cups Mangalorean chicken curry and panpoles/Neer dosas Ch...

Remembering Avanti

Day before yesterday, on the 8th of November 2008, Avanti Desai would have turned 21. Instead 15 days before her birthday, as she hurried home to celebrate her grandmother's birthday, Avanti met with a train accident at Jogeshwari station. Just like that. Gone from our lives forever. Leaving behind a huge void and the world a lot more gloomier. And when I got the call first thing in the morning, I couldn't believe it. I thought it was a cruel sadistic joke, but as the calls kept coming in, I realised it was true. Even at the cemetary,, it still hadn't sunk in that Avanti was no longer here. The worst moment though was watching her disappear into the crematorium, it was horrible and I couldn't believe we were leaving her there, and through the next couple of hours all I could think of was of her going up in smoke while we stood there in the bright sunshine. It seemed incomprehensible at first, to think of Avanti as dead, to talk about her in the past tense, to get...

The Roaring Twenties

So here I am on the eve of my 30th birthday, my very last day of being 29, just about 4 hours left of being a twenty-something. A couple of years ago, I remember snidely chuckling away to myself, when a favourite blogger of mine turned 30, believing that it was so far away, it could never touch me. I'm regretting that now. And to be honest, I thought I would be okay, I really honestly truly believed that I would be greeting this new decade with a casual insouciance and indifference that would normally be characteristic for me, but I'm not. I'm terrified of how quickly my twenties have zoomed by and how little I've accomplished and perhaps that is what is upsetting me. On the cusp of another decade on this planet, well, I feel like a bit of a failure. No, scratch that, I feel majorly like a failure. I'm drowning in self-pity and anguish at wasted opportunities, at thrown-away chances, at my inherent laziness and procrastination, at my never-ending ability to p...

Gentle Whispers

Search This Blog