Light of the Lamp

 Hi friends,                    As I write this, we are touring Kashmir and Ladakh for 2 weeks and which will come to an end in a couple of days. Of course,  I will be writing about this major trip later.                As we are touring,  we were updated on the news of prominent figures around the world like erstwhile president of USSR Mikhail Gorbachev,  Queen Elizabeth 2, Carnatic vocalist T V Shankaranarayanan who was the nephew of Shri Madhurai Mani Iyer. But as they say, if it rains in Britain, people open their umbrellas all over the world. T V Shankaranarayan's demise made me sad as I had attended his concert recently.                      Queen's death did not affect me much as she had led a long life and one anyone cannot even dream of. Of course,  the news surprised me a bit as I thought she would cross 100 l...

 Hello folks,                         I am back after a long time with  yet another travel article.  I love to travel and write on the journeys though most of the time what I do is armchair travel which means I watch lot of travel shows. Forget Pondicherry. There are lot of places around us waiting to be explored which we may miss out seeing in our lifetime.  For me, during my school days, the erstwhile French colonies meant Pondicherry, Mahe, Yanam.  Pondicherry or Pudhucherry was in my bucket list and it was so near yet looked far off. We had been to Chennai from our childhood times but never to this quaint little place.  We had to go to Chennai for an event last month and after that, we headed to Pondicherry which was a smooth 138 km drive on ECR road or East Coast Road from Besant Nagar. It is a very scenic drive with small towns and greenery all the way.  On suggestion of our nephew, we b...

 Hello everyone,                           The word 'grandparents' for every adult usually invokes fond memories of their unconditional love and attachment. Normally,  one has 2 sets of grandparents,  4 sets of great grand parents, 8 sets of great-great grandparents and so on.  In Tamil, we address grandpa  as thatha,  great grand father as 'kollu thatha' , great - great grand father as ' ellu thatha'. The tree starts from parents and spreads out in multiples of 2. It is easy for us to know that there are 2 grandparents for anyone,  as we would have seen and interacted with them during our childhood.  But to imagine that one has 4 great- grandparents becomes a tad difficult.  Depending upon the seniority of a child in a family, one can consider lucky if he/she gets to meet at least 1 or 2 of the great  grandparents.               ...

 Hi friends, Disclaimer: My article may not be highly factual.        A wonderful new year to all of you.  This time, i would like to write a few words on the fairly new way of supplying cooking gas to the Indian households which is piped gas supply.  When my parents grew up in the post independence era, their families had to be content with laborious cooking on firewood or coal based hearths and kitchens which were blackened by the persistent smoke from the firewood. Slowly, the households in the cities started to use  the single burner, portable kerosene stoves. I am not fully clear about the expenses for these kerosene stoves, but we used to keep one kerosene stove, for which we used to buy kerosene from the ration shops. I still have the smell of the ' infamous kerosene ' in my nostrils when I write this here. 'Infamous ' because it is/or was the favourite fuel in the Indian movies to self immolate or pour on an unfortunate soul to burn them!!...

 Hi friends,                Wishing all of you peaceful and good days this last month of this year. As with every year, this year too has almost whisked past us forcing us to welcome the approaching year and to look back this year with introspection. As always, I am the person who not only like to travel, but record the details of the journey to a new place. This year also, travel was restricted due to the deadlier second wave of the pandemic during April-May. It was heart-wrenching to witness many youngsters and middle-aged people in India die of Covid. As a result of that, there were crowds in the Government health centers and hospitals to get vaccinated at the earliest. Lucky people like us could wade through the second wave, hoping and praying there won't be any more waves and human losses.                                  Our leisure travel was also rest...

      Hi friends,            I had the intention of writing something about Tokyo Olympics, the Paralympics that followed and India' s sterling performances in both these Olympics. But because of postponement for no apparent reasons, it didn't happen and the steam died down.                       Before I turn back again , another anniversary of the famous September 11 has arrived. This is a landmark anniversary as 20 years have passed after that fatal day, which changed the way America dealt with terrorism. It was my first trip to USA in 2001 and we were newly married. My husband left on September 4th, 2001 to California  via Washington to arrange for our accommodation. I was to travel around end of September. Technologically, it was the early era of cell phones and also pre social media.  I stayed back with my in-laws and tv, hotmail, rediffmail were the only other means ...

 Hi friends, #longread #longpostalert                 This is one area I was wanting to write for a long time. I am from a Tamil Brahmin family and it is common in our community to train girls in Carnatic music. When I was small, my dad arranged for a music teacher to come to my  house to teach me in person twice a week. Those days, the music learning was more informal meaning that I did not pass certification courses of varied levels as is seen today. I learnt from basics up to keethanas for about 5 to 6 years and stopped when I reached 10th.  My teacher or 'paattu vadhyar ' as we used to address her was short, soft spoken and simple and used to go to houses to make extra income other than from what she earned from  a school. My parents did not have a musical background or knowledge and so I learnt just like a 'good girl ' without asking questions or doubts.  We used to go to Chennai every year during our summer holi...

 Hi everyone,                In a multilingual country like India, it is of small wonder that there will be politics over different languages. A recent news of a hospital in Delhi banning the use of Malayalam among the nurses caught my attention.                          As many of us are aware, majority of nurses working in the Indian hospitals are from Kerala. There are many nurses working abroad because of better pay than in India. Nursing job is among the thankless jobs which involves long working hours and in shifts and the pay being less compared to doctors. One day, a Nursing superintendent of G B Pant Hospital woke up and felt that he/she was tired of hearing too much of Malayalam and issued a notice directing the nurses to communicate either in Hindi or English among themselves while in hospital, as it was believed that the usage of the unknown Malayalam language was ca...

 Hi friends,            Some invicible ice blocks are much more hard to be broken than the real ice blocks!                When Mr, Pinarayi Vijayan won a resounding success this year to lead a successive term in Kerala as Chief Minister, a large part of it is to be attributed to the hard work put in by the health Minister K K Shailaja to contain COVID 19 crisis so that the positivity rate was one of the lowest not only in India, but around the world! Fondly known as Shailaja teacher, because she was a physics teacher before venturing into politics full time, the health ministry under her made lot of progress and put up a bold fight against Nipah virus. She gained international attention and some countries were looking her as a role model for their own fight against covid.  Compared to many other states in India, the testing, tracking, spreading awareness and educating public about following covid protocol i...

 Hello,             Fellow Indians, stay safe , healthy and follow covid appropriate behaviour to save yourself and people around you. This is obviously one of the toughest times India is facing due to the careless behavior of one section of population and the politicians who cared only about their own survival.                                       By seeing the title, I think some of you would have guessed what I am going to write about. 'The great Indian kitchen' which was released in January in the online platforms is a powerful, silently piercing movie, for which there will not be the likes of it anytime soon. Much has been said and written about it that I will not go into the length and breadth of this classic Malayalam movie. Those who are yet to watch this, I recommend this a must watch. If a movie needs to be good and powerful, the story, direction, ...