Light of the Lamp

Hi friends,                      July-August is the Aashadha month or Aadi month or Ramayana month in Hinduism and it is the official start of line of religious festivals upto Diwali. The weather will also be pleasant in most parts of the country before the onset of  North-East monsoons which will precede fall and winter! This year, many parts of Karnataka and all of Kerala were lucky to receive copious rainfall which to some extent helped in resolving the Cauvery issue between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.                                                               Talking about rains, we went for a monsoon trek last week with a group of enthusiastic runners from a marathon group. We are with this group, especially my husband who is a good runner and into running for a long...

Hi folks,                Forget about writing, even visiting my favourite domain everyday reduced to far and few in between. It being July, this is shamefully my third post for the year. As much as possible, I try to keep updated with the current events around me, but when it comes to putting my thoughts here, it is just not happening.                          Every once in four years (not leap years) is the time when the whole world is gripped with high fever around one ball!!!FIFA fever is reaching its final stages with just the semi-finals and finals remaining. I will miss the liveliness, action, the noise that surrounds the whole stadium filled with fans dressed in the jerseys of their respective teams. Mine is not high fever which means that I stay awake to watch the matches that take place close to midnight (IST). I will miss the time slot from 7:30 to 9:30 PM for some days ...

Hi friends,          If I am back soon after the last post, it is out of passion and eagerness that I am doing so. Hmmmm, not that soon. Again, travel and some other things kept me away from this space. The palpable excitement that I felt on January 31st this year may not be replicated anytime soon, as I considered fortunate enough not only to be alive, but also at the right place to comfortably view the once-in-a-lifetime celestial, astronomical event which was 'super blue blood moon' or as I coined it, the 'BLUNAR ECLIPSE'. Nature had cooked for us an astronomical treat in 'one pot'. The rare ingredients are the totally eclipsed moon, the super moon (moon closest to the earth), the blue moon as it was the 2nd full moon in the month, the pinkish red color which became blood red as the part of the shadow of our earth fell on it. The visual treat was served to us in a platter 'free of charge' to be directly viewed opposite to the complex where we live. ...

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...