Light of the Lamp

Hello folks,                        Happy New Year  and happy Sankranthi, Bhogi, Pongal, Bhigu or whatever to all of you. Hope all my friends had a lovely vacation spending the time whichever way you wanted. Getting back to the routine from the vacation does require an extra push and hope by now all of you are running a rat race seeing the next vacation in the horizon!                                        The year 2017 just whiffed past with the usual mix of memorable and forgettable, pleasant and unpleasant incidents. We are almost through half of January. Though there were innumerable incidents, calamities, political happenings last year, nothing much suddenly strikes my mind except the arrest of V. K Sashikala, the personal and political companion of the late chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Smt. J. Jayalalitha. Her dea...

Hi friends,                  This is my alternate take on the age old, (more than 30 years!) all-timer, musical hit of K. Balachander, SindhuBhairavi. I have watched it many times over not just for the sheer musical versatility which it offered, but for the intellectual discussions on music between Shivakumar(JKB) and Suhasini(Sindhu), the inimitable chemistry between them which I felt every time I watched, the other characters like the mridanga vidwan (Delhi Ganesh), Gajapathi who plays tamburu, the judge, the pure and innocent Bharavi (Sulakshana), Prathap Pothan silently in love with Suhasini who all make the film wholesome, lively and never boring even for a minute. The directorial genius of K. Balachander was visible throughout the film. It is surprising that he was not awarded the best film director at the national level. I have not watched Shri Sivakumar's (Surya's father) films much, and even today I remember him only in the role of...

Dear friends,                      Yep, finally we made to the city of empirical ruins, i.e Hampi. This was in our bucket list for a long time, and each time, when we planned to go, it got 'ruined' due to 'political', 'personal' reasons. But, this time, there were no reasons to stop us except the scorching summer heat and we did not allow it to 'ruin' our plans. Summer is an off-season to visit this place, as the temperatures hover around 40 to 43 degrees during the daytime. Still, it is better to book rooms well in advance, so that you get a decent and comfortable accommodation for good deals.                                                 So, off we headed to the northern part of Karnataka for the first time, and it was different and exciting as we usually travel South from Bangalore to visit places like Myso...

Hi folks,     Don't hit me, don't get me wrong!! I am not asking you to break up with your spouses, lovers or significant others. If some of you have watched the recent ads shown in the TV, then I am sure you would not have missed the one on OLX app, which is a site to find the buyers and sellers near your area. This one with the crisp portrayal of group of youngsters swapping the goods in style and with catchy phrases looked good enough to catch my attention. The two ladies bowing in a Japanese fashion and exchanging the headphones, selling sunglasses in a stylish way, exchanging a leather bag while skating, the smile of a happy buyer of 'bean bag or rocking chair?' are to name a few. More creative OLX ads which were not aired much in TV, can be found in Youtube. It does look sleek and innovative, but we know that when we get down to facts it is actually not so!                              But more...

Hello everybody,                                                                  Feb 13, 2017                                                  Happy spring season or 'Basant Panchami'. Like Arab spring which happened about 4 years ago, the spring movement is going on in Tamil Nadu. For the past one year, Tamil Nadu, especially Chennai, has been one of the most happening places 'nature-lly' and politically. Nature has not been very kind to the people of Tamil Nadu, especially Chennai-ites, in the last 2 Decembers. The incessant rains during December 2015 drowned Chennai and it was brought back to its feet by the goodwill of the ordinary citizens who rose up to become extraordinary to save Chennai. ...

Hello everybody,                           Did not think myself I will be back this soon. Wish you all a very happy and a prosperous new year. And why this strange title 'Happy New Year with Parker pen'? Did I go to a gift store to buy a set of greeting cards and then write in them the new year messages personally? Sounds so outdated right? In this era of FB, whatsapp, twitter, Snapchat when we still don't have the patience of sending the New Year 'GIF' photos or slides to thousands of 'friends' across the globe, who still goes and buys those set of attractive New Year greeting cards? But if you have grown up during 80s and 90s, I am sure many of us would have done that. I remember that I used to wait for each New Year to arrive to feel the fresh smell and the beauty of the new cards. Actually, we were spoilt for choices when it was about buying cards. Later on, my sister used to make greeting cards painstakingly, and I ...

Hi,       I thought I would not be writing this one at the end of the year as I thought it is becoming repetitive. But this one has become another annual ritual just like events and festivals. Festivals are both joyful and tiresome for women. Joyful because it involves the family gatherings , but tiresome because the lady of the house has to stand long hours in kitchen, but anyway one ends up doing it to the fullest due to force of habit, failing which one feels something short or emptiness. This may have to do with writing also, I feel now.                                                    When I write about the year that is about to leave us, the title will be same, but the contents are of course, different. Because the events that happen throughout the year are unique from the previous year. The two mammoth events that took place this ye...

Hi,          A wedding took place in a hotel in Kochi  on November 25th which shook the whole of Kerala and made the Malayalees (that includes me)! sit before the TV screens and the internet. It was between the famous on-screen pair, Dileep and Kavya Madhavan who 'officially' became the off-screen pair from Nov 25th, 2016. Dileep had earlier married the popular star Manju Warrier but got divorced sometime in 2015. They have a teenage daughter Meenakshi. It was second wedding for Kavya too, who had divorced a Dubai-based  banker. Dileep is a popular Malayalam star, though not a super star like Mamooty, Mohanlal, Suresh Gopi, and hence is not known much outside Kerala. When he announced all of a sudden that he is going to tie the knot to Kavya on 25th morning, the whole of Kerala came to a virtual standstill that morning. All the Malayalam news channels were telecasting live their wedding. Everybody absorbed every moment of it like a sponge. The boons ...

Hi friends,                  As another year is seeing its sunset days and many of us waiting to have an annual break, I scrolled the list of articles I penned so far. They are a little less compared to previous years, with two of them being penned by my dad. As I have mentioned before, I always love to explore new places and whenever I go somewhere, I take care to make note of details and of course take a lot of snaps. I scrolled down my blog to see if we visited new places this year, and realized that Thiruvannamalai is our first trip and that too at the fag end of the year. Will we explore one more new place before the year ends? I would love to do so.                                 It is almost customary for us to go to my in-laws' place in Hyderabad every year for Diwali. But this year, it did not happen due to miscellaneous reasons. To ward off our disap...

                                                             On plastics menace By S. Muthukrishna Iyer  Hi folks,  I am publishing yet another article written by my Dad, Shri. S Muthukrishna Iyer titled "On Plastics menace". My dad is a retired Engineer from VSSC, Trivandrum and has published 3 books  in his name of which 2 are in Malayalam and 1 in English. He is passionate about writing on current topics and and also some grave issues that might be a threat to the coming generations. He also gives talks in various seminars about some topics, mainly on energy availability for the future generations.        Here, I would like to put in some of my words. As somebody who has been living in Bangalore for more than 5 years, I could see the changes and the awareness created on the menace of p...

"Oh, well, there is a difference between privacy and secrecy"  -  Laura Schlessinger Hello everybody,                     As the nine days of fasting, feasting of snacks (read as 'chundals'), pujas are on (Navarathri or Dussera), there is a chief minister who is fighting for her life from September 22. It is almost 3 weeks since J. Jayalalitha, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, has been admitted in the Apollo hospital citing 'fever and dehydration' as reasons. But, as the days passed, the chief minister still remains in the hospital and the period is obviously too long for the simple 'fever and dehydration'. In this age of flashing news (also rumours) every other minute through all kinds of channels and social medias, it was looking strange and conspicuous that there were no updates on her health condition in the news channels and the leading English and Tamil  dailies of Tamil Nadu. Few words somewhere would mention t...

Hi,               I don't know how many of you follow the Olympic games of 2016 going on at Rio in Brazil. But when I talked to some of my friends, they do ardently and passionately follow some events in Olympics and also sports where Indians are involved. This time, largest ever Indian contingent (about 120 people) went to Rio to represent the greatest sporting event on earth. So naturally, some more medals were expected this time. I wanted to write this article after I, rather the whole of India, witnessed Dipa Karmakar's stupendous performance in gymnastics.  But it got postponed to another 2 days, and now I am sitting and writing after Sakshi Malik became the first woman wrestler to win a medal in the Olympics and which came as a huge relief for the medal starved country.                  I am sure my fellow Indians would not have heard of 'produnova' vault in gymnastics which is life threatening...

Hi,               Now that summer months are over, and the rainy season is on in some parts of our country, it is the time of cold and other infections. As such our country lacks cleanliness and civic sense and it is not surprising that the infections and fever are common among children and also among poor. So it is again, as you sow, so you reap. The two incidents which recently happened in the North East are the death of the famous writer Mahasweta Devi and the ending of the 16-year-old fast by the Manipuri iron lady, Irom Sharmila. Smt Mahasweta Devi stood for the oppressed, mainly tribal population, and fought for that marginalized society against the powerful Government and corporates with pen as her weapon. She is the winner of many prestigious awards for her writing and social work. Irom Sharmila's fast was to protest the enforcement of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) in Manipur, giving Army special privilege to detain people in the na...

Hi folks,                      I would like to present an article written by my dad, Shri S Muthukrishna Iyer, recollecting his childhood and formative years. Deepa. This article could help ‘seniors’ to recollect their childhood days. More importantly, it could give a glimpse to children on how their grand parents led their lives   “Change is permanent” is an age old saying. Universe underwent significant changes over billions of years. Changes which took place on earth very long ago include continents formation, and formation of unbelievably vast deposits of coal and petroleum underneath earth’s crust as a result of millions of years of weathering on biological matter. The changes which took place on utilization of these fuels in a very large scale after 1900 A.D. are beyond description. The young are unfamiliar about the life of those who lived, say, until about half a century ago. A glimpse on the younger days o...