Light of the Lamp

 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...

Dear friends,                      It has been quite a long long time since my last post here. I logged in here and found that I posted the previous article more than 3 months back! That is a long gap! If a blog needs to be active and popular, one should constantly update it with any interesting topic. Since mine is not a blog which specializes on one subject, I am free and happy to write on any topic I feel passionate about.                                             As I would have mentioned in my previous articles, one of my passions is travelling to new places and observing the limitless possibilities a place offers us. Travel relaxes and rejuvenates our souls from our stressful routines, broadens the outlook of life. It is no wonder that a person like me looks forward to grab opportunities to explore places in and o...