Light of the Lamp

 Hi,             "In a world where you can be anything, Be kind."                                                    Unknown.         The months of January and February are seasons of weddings, especially in South India. Recently, we attended a wedding of one of our nephews. The celebrations and rituals lasted for 3 days in a resort and there was lot of fun and frolic, catching up with extended family members after a long time. After the traditional nischayathartham (betrothal) in the morning, we expected that the bride will take hours to dress up for the reception. But voila!! Here she enters in a simple saree devoid of heavy makeup, very minimal ornaments making the whole evening look like more of a casual affair. The 'performances' for the evening included bride's father giving a speech about his daugh...

 Hi,         When I informed my neighbour and relative that we were going  to Ooty with our running group, they blinked and confirmed twice when I said I am going to see that hill station for the first time! In my school,  my classmates used to circulate this small poem :              'First do your duty,             Then marry a beauty,             Have honeymoon at Ooty,             Bring back a kutty.(child)'  My husband dismissed it by saying what sub standard poems we were circulating!              Majority of the readers would have gone to Ooty and so I do not feel I should give a grand description of the place! My first and perfect impressions of Udhagamandalam was shattered when I saw many of the places there was spoilt by commercialization and over population which has led to ...

 Hi,                   This is the post I wanted to write about for a long time.  Most of the runners who are into long distance running  will have lots of stories to tell. But, only the fellow runners can understand that language which a layman will find it boring.                                                I started my running journey four years ago. The inspiration to start running for fitness was from my husband who is an expert and a fast runner and is highly respected in the running groups. Within few days, I realized that running is not easy and it is going to be a long and struggling journey!! My husband is now an ultra-marathoner and I am yet to run my first full marathon (42 km). I have never been into any kind of sports during my childhood. This makes my journey maybe harder than others, not to ...

 Hi,          I published my last blog post 'Love hate relationship with British monarchy'  exactly 2 months back  but I found this topic lying as a draft from June 24th, unattended. I felt some connect between raagas and dosas but I was wondering how to put them in words.  As a woman, I do cooking. As a Tambrham woman, I've learnt carnatic music in my childhood (something 'mandatory ' for girls in our community to sing before the prospective groom and impress 😂😁).                        I revisited this page after a long time to proceed with this topic. The real learning starts only when we teach and it is true with any field. I started learning more when I started teaching music to children in my neighbourhood. The more I learn, the more I feel that I have learnt nothing. I love dosas just as I love ragas. Just like dosas being my comfort food, listening to Carnatic music everyda...

 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...