Tid Bit from My Diary

A couple of weeks back I took a break of 10 days and went to Kolkata. It was a great feeling to be back and spend some time with the family after a solitary stint here. We took a step to further enhance the experience and made a dash to Agartala, the place where we spend our childhood days. It was an indescribable feeling to be back in the places which meant so much to life there after more than 15 years. Those were the places like my school, the streets, the play grounds, and above everything our home where I lived for so many years. I will not go into describing that aspect in this post. I wish to introduce two temples from my childhood land. The first one is the Tripureswari Temple the temple of the Mother Goddess of Tripura who protects all her children. The other is the  Bhubaneswari  temple immortalized by the great Rabindranath Tagore in his novel 'Rajarshi'. Agartala is the state capital of Tripura an erstwhile princely state now an undisputed and integral part of Indi...

Petrol... petrol... give (pronounced G-EVE) more petrol... Do not hold the steering so hard... If you required so much of strength then no women would be driving a car... Give indicator....... stop the indicator baba! Do not look behind while taking a left or right turn... even if Sultan Qaboos is behind you, he will stop! These are some of the dialogues that one has to get used to hearing if he has to take classes to get a Driving license in Oman. Muscat is a friendly place and for me it was all the more friendly as it was full of old friends. The piece of inside news that I received after landing at Seeb International Airport was that having a driver’s license was like having another degree. I was quite excited at the idea of giving a test without having to study for long. I smiled to myself and said it must be as easy as a blood test! But the reality struck me quite soon. Our family never owned a car but my father had a Government car at his disposal which it used to be park...

koii dost hai na raqiib hai teraa shahar kitanaa ajiib hai Soon it is going to be three months that I have stepped into this new country and this how I can describe this place today. The line above is borrowed from a poem which has been immortalized as a gazal by the famous singer Jagjit Singh. For those who are not conversant with Ürdu I would like to translate it into English. Your city is quite a strange land where there are no friends neither are there any enemies… now Raquib is a word which cannot be truly expressed by saying enemy. Enemy poses a threat to you and might hurt you or inflict deadly blow. While one’s raquib is the man who is loved by the girl you have fallen for. This can be a cocktail of a competitor and an opponent. … so it is quite an intense word ... isn’t it! I am having such a feel about this place because I find people here are too busy with their own life and their circle of trust. I still haven’t figured it out if this is a big city syndrome or a smal...

Today is a day of national celebrations… our Republic Day. India was declared a Republic on 26 of January, 1950. This day has inspired me throughout my life…. So here I am dedicating some time to my much neglected Blog Space. Probably I needed the inspiration as much I needed the time! Poster of Incredible India in a foreign country makes us proud There is a strange relationship that a child shares with his mother. The same is true between one and the motherland. Since childhood the Independence Day (15th August) and the Republic Day (26th January) has been very special to us. On these two days we used to hoist the national flag in our house without fail ... We were taught that each and every citizen had the responsibility to hoist the Tricolor in their house. The flag had to go up before the sun rises and come down at the sunset before it gets dark. While the schools and Governmental bodies used to have permanent flag poles we at the household always used to improvise. I have so...

Best Wishes for 2010 to all my friends and your loved ones. The absence of both the eves from my home turned this New Year’s Eve into quite a boring state of affair. These days I am the whole and sole moving creature in my home and moving so fast at work that it leaves with neither time nor the temperament to jot down a few lines for my blog. Initially I had decided that I would welcome the New Year in a deep state of meditation sitting in the serene posture of Buddha. That did not happen but instead I found myself reflecting on the changes I witnessed in my lifetime. Thoughts were drifting and swaying in all direction till I started to think about New Year greeting Vis-à-vis sending cards and letters. The world of this small-town boy was finite and very small as I grew up. We had a few friends but fortunately they were real to the letter “l” (pun intended). We would meet at least once most of the days and we could touch, feel them, hug them and even fight with them unli...

All eyes or to be more realistic many eyes and ears had been focused in the direction of Copenhagen during the last two weeks. I would feel left out by not making a statement about this much talked about “Climate Summit” as it had a grand closing yesterday. The climate summit was not surprisingly given contradictory ratings by various countries as some terming it an unprecedented outcome while other saying it a good start and a few terming it an outright failure. Probably they have to come back to Copenhagen or maybe Mexico to take this further. What does it really mean to us lesser mortals? We quite do not understand the difference between 2° temperature rise and 1.5° rise and how can a nation control that. It is particularly difficult for someone like me to perceive this extremely relative affair concerning temperature. I feel cold at 15° while my friends live comfortably at -25°. I guess it will be prudent to leave this complex issue of climate ...

The New Year is synonymous to change as we bid goodbye to the old and welcome the new. This year I am very nostalgic about the Bajaj Scooter as we bid farewell to this icon with a heavy heart. The scooter has been a part of the life of every Middle class Indian and even if they did not own one. The Message from the president said: “ We have sold the last of our Chetak scooters and Bajaj Auto will not be building any more of these classics. Bajaj Auto has"retired" the Chetak tooling and closed the plant ……” I remember those teenage days as I first learned to ride a scooter and it wasn’t easy to synchronize the clutch and the gear and the accelerator. A smile crossed my lips as I thought of the college days when a friend wanted to try the scooter and nobody was ready to ride his pillion. I had volunteered and he managed to get us airborne followed by a nose dive to the amusement of all others. A few years later I moved to Delhi and I had my own scooter, a Bajaj chetak an...