Light of the Lamp

Hi my friends,                        'I' am not going to write the review about the Tamil movie 'I' six months after its release. In these days of instant communication, a cat is not killed due to curiosity as it does not have to wait for a long time to know how the just released movie is faring in the box office. On the day of the release itself, a movie is celebrated or obituarised through the social media. If a matrimonial alliance of our friends or relatives is fixed, we do not need to wait till the day of the wedding to see how a groom/bride looks like. I have seen many a prospective boy/girl's in the facebook's friends' list before seeing them on the D-day. The social media and the likes have killed the natural 'curiosity' in us if not the cat. So much for the boon and bane of the current technology. Now, I wanted to write about 'I', but seemed to have deviated a little bit and touched curiosity!       ...

Hi dear friends,             As I start penning some lines in this space, I am saddened by the political turmoil that is happening in the Aam Aadmi Party. The common wo(man) elected him with a historical majority, that few parties can boast of, to give Arvind Kejriwal another chance to clean up the mess with his 'broom' in spite  of him getting down from the power after 49 days last year. But this broom, instead of collectively cleaning the political mess 'created' by other parties, doing more 'insweeping' which seems to threaten to wipe out this fledgling  party. It is with the ouster of Shri Prashant Bhushan & Shri Yogendra Yadav, who are the founding members along with Arvind Kejriwal, the face of the party looks ugly and a seems to have a bleak prospective. Shri Prashant Bhushan threatens to form a new party as he complained of the dictatorial attitude of Shri Kejriwal. What will be the future of this party how will they fulfill the prom...

Hi pals,                    Did you miss my posts recently? If there are handful of you who follow my blog closely, you may be wondering whether I am running out of topics! It is true to some extent. I am searching for topics to write. If writing was fully in my blood, I would be busy posting something every other day. But that is not so. I am a Jack of some trades if not all, and of course, master of none. If I focus on one thing, the other things do not happen. I would want to do a multitasking of all my interests or hobbies,but that is not happening as I hope it should. If I do a painting, my mind will be more focused on that one only. My other passion is singing and listening to music, and for some months I have been conducting classical music classes for children in my vicinity. As a first time teacher in that area, it does involve lot of preparation and relearning as getting back to basics. Carnatic music is an ocean in which I h...

                                                   OPINION  »  OPEN PAGE January 18, 2015 Updated: January 18, 2015 00:03 IST Lost and found: a tale of luck and equipoise School Improvement Plan ?  -  Facing challenges that are holding school back from reaching its goals www.schoolserv.in Ads by Google DEEPA NAGARAJ COMMENT     ·    PRINT    ·    T    T    in Share 4 TOPICS social issue people social issue Life’s lesson: think with equanimity while under stress, and do not act in a hurry Let me share an experience we had recently as a family, that taught us not only how to think rationally and with equanimity while under stress but also how not to act in a hurry when faced...

Hi everybody,                           As the year 2014 downs the curtains, everybody gets ready to welcome yet another year. Another year? Yes, every year seems to arrive and disappear so soon before we realize. What each year means to us depends on our personal achievements, happenings or failures. Those of us who are hale and hearty should thank the almighty that we are alive to see the next year. Here, I may sound a bit preachy or philosophical, but each passing year will make us more philosophical.                          Every year turns to be a mixture of sadness, happiness, hope, despair, frustration mostly because of various acts of humanity. We, as humans, are united only during the acts of God which are cyclones, floods, earthquakes. Acts of terrorism, killings, rapes numbs our minds for sometime. Deaths of famous personalities or our relative...

Hi friends,                  Wish you all a happy holiday season ahead filled with fun and frolic. December is the month of the year when the regular and hectic schedule comes to a pause almost automatically , if not for all, to enjoy rest of the days with our friends and family in a place we choose to have. Like everybody else, I also yearn to travel and explore different places, be it in our own country or abroad. We choose a place and book rooms in advance so that we would go there during the third week of December. It has been my long cherished dream to visit Hampi in Hoskote which has magnificent structures of the erstwhile Vijayanagara empire. Hampi seemed to beckon me for a long time, but Thailand or rather Bangkok called me in a louder voice. Yep, it was a place that I had visited once before, but she called me again and there I went!                             ...

Friends,                          I hope all of you had nice Dussera vacation this year before heading back to work. This Gandhi Jayanthi was celebrated with a fervor of different kind. Our honourable Prime Minister announced on this day with a mission to clean up India - Swacch Bharat Abhiyan. October 2nd is also observed as the birth anniversary of another great human being and former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who is more remembered for the slogan 'Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan'.But his birthday is always overshadowed by the same of the father of our nation.                                   On October 2nd this year, along with Gandhiji, another celebrity who made into news was our veteran singer K J Yesudas. He was invited by a voluntary organization to deliver a speech for Gandhi Jayanthi celebrations. Had he made a general speech a...

          Repeating the line from Elton John's 'Candle in the wind'- It seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind. Hi friends,                  For more than a month this space has been remaining idle and I keep searching for topics to write. It can be 'writer's block' or simply some other excuse. But now I am back again and not with happiness that I have found something to write, but with a heavy heart. September 19, 2014 will remain a sad day for me and other music lovers due to the sudden and untimely death of U Srinivas who was more recognized as Mandolin Srinivas. If chess is to Vishwanathan Anand, saxophone to Kadri Gopalnath, so was the western instrument Mandolin very unique to U Srinivas. It takes so much courage, commitment and will power to bring in something new and make it widely popular especially in the ocean of Carnatic music. Like guitar and violin (or fiddle), mandolin is a predo...

Hello,                  What is aimlessness? It is when you do not have any specific purpose in your life. Does all of us go through a phase when we feel what the purpose of our life is? I believe everyone of us do have that feeling when we think where our life is heading and how should we take it forward. Some of us will term it as 'midlife crisis'. Save for the poorest strata of the society who struggle to live each day, rest of us do go through this phase. The landmarks-when during our childhood we make lasting friendships during our school days, score high marks in the exams, win prizes in the competitions, get into professional courses, finish our college and land into dream jobs and get the taste of our 1st pay cheque, and ' if lucky', marry a person of our dreams, become a parent, and then see the same cycle repeated with our children. Majority of us do fall into this category, and if not, try extra hard so that we can 'fit in' the s...

In Copenhagen, there's a long-term commitment to creating a well-functioning pedestrian city where all forms of movement - pedestrian, bicycles, cars, public transportation - are accommodated with equal priority. Bjarke Ingels Hello friends,                             Yes, this time I want to write about the travails that a pedestrian faces when he chooses to walk on Indian roads. When is the last time that you walked to a nearby kirana shop and and purchased some miscellaneous items and walked back? Did you walk to school or college which is nearby to your house on a footpath or a pavement? Sounds old fashioned and impossible right? Am I talking about something that is a generation old? Walk and go to a shop or school? Who does that these days? Who goes to that shop walking these days? We go to a supermarket and buy groceries in a bulk or place the orders online to be delivered at our doorstep. Children ...