Light of the Lamp

 Hi friends,                Just as we thought the pandemic is under control in India, it is spiralling upwards and we are watching with helplessness and also hoping that vaccines will start working soonest bringing back the carefree life we had BC or before corona.              Well, the purpose of this topic is not to write about COVID. It is about the bird paintings  I have been into for the past few years. I would have mentioned before that I have ventured into artworks of different kinds after my marriage. I still don't have an answer as to why I did not draw or paint during my school days.  As they say, for everything there is a time. From pottery paintings,  I have done nib paintings,  acrylic paintings,  oil paintings,  pastels, water colour paintings and some mixed media. I love to sketch, draw faces, eyes, though I need to explore in depth in that area. Somewhere,...

 Hi friends,                Iam back again sooner than expected, as I would like to share something which will always remain close to my heart. As with any of us, the home where we spend our childhood years will be etched in our minds throughout our life. Wherever we go and settle or go out in search of better prospects or career, revisiting the childhood home stirs up sentiments, feelings of attachment similar to seeing our parents, brings up lots of memories. I still keep having dreams of my childhood home, though my parents no longer live there.                  Our childhood home was quite a charming one. It was at the heart of Thiruvananthapuram city and we just had to walk for less than 10 minutes to school. The area was Chirakulam road which was close to Secretariat and lot of other Government offices and banks. In MG road, there were lots of shops of different kinds, and hotels too. There w...

 Hi friends,          Rabindra Nath Tagore's Nobel Prize winning poetry Gitanjali, carries words of profound wisdom. 'Where the mind is without fear,  where the head is held high,  where the world has not been broken into pieces by narrow domestic walls, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way. ' I have mentioned before that Iam not a great fan of poetry for unknown reasons, but these lines of that great poet was and is still my favourite.  These words will be valid as long as the human race exists.               We the ordinary citizens live in perpetual fear of something or other throughout our lives. Sometimes,  the fear is less, sometimes it is more, but never gone. For the 'weaker sex ' and that too in developing and unsafe countries like India,  the fear is more .  We fear society and we shape our lives according to the ' expectations of the society ' , and not what we real...

    This time Iam presenting you some glimpses of childhood years my mother spent in Bombay decades back. Enjoy.  Hello friends,             If I were given a chance to turn the clock backwards,  I would love to revisit my childhood years that I spent in Bombay (Mumbai now) during 1950s to early 1960s.  Since my father had a transferable job in Telephones department,  we frequently shifted from one place to another.   I still consider my childhood years that I spent in Bombay as precious,  formative years. Our residence was in Jansukh Nivas, Kandivali. All our houses were single storeyed. During those days , the toilet facilities were common to the group of residents and naturaĺly they were away from our homes and less convenient. There were not even taps in the toilets and we had carry our own bucket of water. One frightening incident I remember even today was a natural calamity. In our next compound, separ...

 Hi friends,              What is your favourite colour? This is a question which is usually asked to children.  Blue for boys and pink for girls because men are from Mars and women are from Venus. The arrival of boys are celebrated by decorating the crib with the theme of blue colour while the arrival of girls is celebrated with pink colour. I do not know why blue is the colour of  'macho' and pink is the colour of 'delicates.' These fixation of colours for the genders should change.  If this change has to happen, it is for parents to decide to stop celebrating birthdays of their wards with blue colour or pink colour cakes.              Well, my favourite colour from childhood upto now remains green. In school,  I always belonged to the green house in every grade when rest of the houses were red, blue, yellow. It is not that I don't like other colours, but I like green more because it is the ...

 Hello again,                     January 19, 2021 will go down as one of the important days in the history for the Indian cricket. India or our cricket team won the 'Border -Gavaskar ' test series in Gabba, Brisbane with not so nail-biting finish. What made the win so special is that the last match was won with the absence of major stars like Viraat Kohli with the help of unbeatable score of 97 from Rishabh Pant. One of the players had to encounter racial attacks against which a police case has been filed. Of course, a win is always doubly sweet when it is won in a foreign soil and beating the hosts! Indian team won against all odds. It was celebration for whole of India which is united at least once with cricket as a religion. It is of no wonder, almost all the news channels were in the celebratory mood throughout the day! I have nothing against this game but I stopped following cricket matches for a long time except during world ...

 Hello,                  Happy New year, dear friends!! Wish you all a vaccinated, corona free year filled with more health, happiness and travels! Last year taught us many lessons. One of them was to be thankful for what we have which we took for granted all along. All those years of before corona or BC, as is now known, we just plan a trip within the country or abroad, look out for best of deals and head out. During the last year, for some months, getting out of the house for that breath of fresh air looked very precious! Let us not curse the last year and write off as a forgettable one. We need to evolve as better human beings from the lessons that the mother nature taught us last year. With these thoughts, I am going to write a few words on our trip to Mysore to begin this year.                            I think I have completed 10 years of blogging by writing on ...

Hi friends,                  I left this space which was lying as a draft waiting for me for 6 months!! At that time, I would have thought to write about something which I obviously don't remember. When I checked the list of posts I published last year, I found that it was 12!! This is only the 3rd one and that too at the fag end of 2020. There was so much diversion for the past few months. For properly typing  an article in my blog, I prefer the desktop. I could not sit in front of desktop for the past few months! This year solely belonged to COVID 19 and it may still be so for some part of the coming year until the COVID vaccine reaches the common people all over the world. During the initial days of total lockdown, our country had negligible cases and there was no community transmission, but lot of fear around! But as the lockdown rules were relaxed slowly to get back the economy and life back to normal, the cases spread but the fear ...

Light of the Lamp: Our Europe trip - Part 1 Amsterdam : Dear friends,                      It has been quite a long long time since my last post here. I logged in here and found that I posted th...

Hi friends,                   As I write this, the entire world or most parts of the world are under lock down of varying periods imposed by Governments to save the humanity from that invisible virus which is now ruling the world! Corona, because it is shaped like a coronet, rules the world right now! Corona is a mystery, corona is invisible, corona is an enemy, corona is fascinating, corona is entertaining ( because we are all glued to the tv and social media absorbing everything about corona), corona is a peacemaker, corona is a leveler, corona is 2020's Olympics' single large player, corona is a killer, corona is for now invincible.                                What started off with flu like and breathlessness symptoms in the province of Wuhan rapidly spread across all parts of the world and most countries of the world are currently in the lockdown to stop...

Hello,                   Happy New Year to everybody. Let this year bring us new hopes, peace, happiness and some more light in our lives. And what better way to start this year than writing something about the festival of Lakshadeepam (means lakhs of lights) which was celebrated last week in Sri Padmanabha Swamy temple of Trivandrum. I consider myself very fortunate that I was in Trivandrum this time of the year as this festival occurs only once in 6 years. My trip during this time of the year won't take place usually, but this one was half planned. I will be cherishing this trip for a long time as we had so much fun going for movies, attending a musical concert by Shri Sanjay Subramaniam, visiting the first ever wax museum in the city, making a trip to Jataayupaara (rock of Jataayu bird-the mythological bird of Ramayana), celebrating the Pongal festival with my parents, a meet up with my school friends.         ...

Hi friends,                    Hope many of you have taken time off this last week of the year before logging on to year 20s. Yep, we entered the millennium with usual fears and hopes, crossed the 'teens' and now ready to get into the next decade with usual hopes and apprehensions. I thought I will continue writing about the remaining part of our Europe travels, but for now I am touching an unplanned topic.                                                      Recently, we attended a wedding in Bangalore where the wedding organizers were spreading awareness about 'zero-waste' wedding. We enjoyed the traditional, Tamil-Brahmin wedding feast and I did not waste anything what was served on the plantain leaf. My husband follows the principle that what is served on a plate or a plantain leaf should not b...

Hi pals,                        As promised I am back with more of our Europe travels. We  had to travel by bus from Amsterdam to Bad Bentheim and from there we traveled by connecting trains to reach Berlin Hauptbahnhof which means Berlin Central railway station. Traveling by train (not the tube or metro ones) in Europe was my dream, as the trains will be much cleaner  and less crowded. It is also a good opportunity to see the changing landscapes from one place to another. Though dozing off is common during these journeys, I tried to stay awake to my best to see and enjoy the landscape. There were acres of farms with no people, some places had trees with fall colours. We could see the typical Dutch homes at first, and then when the train set foot in Germany, the changes began to become visible. There were some car manufacturing factories like Volkswagen along the way. We reached Hannover and from there we had to cat...