From a stranger I thought I'd never meet....

From a stranger I thought I'd never meet....

Have you heard about messages in a bottle travelling half way round the world and being traced back to the owner? I have always laughed when I hear such stories and say "we cannot seem to get messages from one floor to another without them gettting lost and did you just say messages in a bottle?" And yet I was the one who received this mail on saturday morning in my inbox with the title:From a Stranger You Thought You'd Never Meet . . . and the mail said:Dear Usha,On June 14, 2004, you recorded in your blog, "Today Julie Tisdale, a complete stranger...

Dog warning signs!

Dog warning signs!

The other day someone raised an interesting question on what we think about houses which display the board "beware of Dogs" and houses with high walls and warnings for dogs. The general opinion was that...

The Sound of one hand clapping

The Sound of one hand clapping

"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is one of the famous Zen Koans.These koans are like puzzles but they do not have defined answers but they are deep questions which act as triggers to the Zen disciple to ponder over life and come up with his own unique answers.The sound of one hand clapping!I have heard this sound in my heart beat when someone I care for deeply and love is hurting and all my efforts to reach out go unresponded.I have heard it in the sigh of mothers whose children have "grown up" and left them to lead their own lives. I...

The Journey is important

The Journey is important

The other day at a friend’s place , I met a group of people who were visiting Bangalore. They had returned from a day of sight seeing and the adults looked frustrated and irritated. The temple had shut by the time they reached it, food at the hotel they went to was not up to the mark and they were not able to take the safari in the national park. They said the whole day was a “waste”. Later I asked one of the children if they were disappointed at not being able to do the safari. I was surprised when they said that they did not mind it and they...

Second chances

Second chances

One of my favorite scenes from movies is the tango scene from Scent of a woman. Apart from the tremendous presence and character that Al pacino brings to the scene , it is memorable for his words to the woman who hesitates to dance as she does not know tango.It is not like life, he says, "if you make a mistake you start from tango one".Would nt it be nice if we all got one, just one option in our life time to go back and restart from a chosen moment in our past to "undo" and redo? But then, would we behave differently if we did not have the wisdom...

Parenting

Parenting

In the past 2 days, i met different people who helped me see the different dimensions of the issue of parenting.I met this charming old lady of about 70 who lives all by herself in her village house in kerala. her only son and his family live in bangalore and she was here to visit them. It was so charming to see her walk in the traditional dress of kerlala women - a starched dhoti and a towel to cover her chest and she was absolutely unselfconscious while walking amid the high fashion circles in the yuppiedom of Bangalore - Brigade road and commercial...

The X &Y of thinking

The X &Y of thinking

Many times we retract what we have said before with the excuse: "sorry I was not thinking when I said that."Which isn’t true because words do not happen without some thought (conscious or unconscious) preceding them. When we say "I was n't thinking" we probably mean, I was n't thinking again about how to present this thought in an acceptable way or /in a way that doesn't hurt the other person or /in a way that they can understand it the way I intended it. Of course we are excluding the kinds of speech like the words that kids repeat merely for...

La Marioneta

La Marioneta

In his comment on my previous post Pankaz the Pinchas Hodi referred to la Marioneta and pointed out that Gabo (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) described it as Kitsch. La marioneta was a short piece of poetic prose which was originally attributed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a farewell letter to his friends after being diagnosed with lymphatic cancer. It was later uncovered to be the work of a Mexican ventriloquist named Johnny Welch. How Marquez came to be associated with this poem was a mystery and he is supposed to have said that he would never have...

Kitsch

Kitsch

Kitsch is a beautiful word I heard first from a German friend who contemptuously dismissed popular American culture with that word. I did not know the meaning of the word at that time but did not know him well enough to ask.Dictionaries would of course give us the following definition.kitsch \KITCH\ noun1 : something that appeals to popular or low brow taste and is often of poor quality : a tacky or lowbrow quality or condition Since we borrowed "kitsch" from German in the 1920s, it has been our word for things in the realm of popular culture...

Romantic doormats

Romantic doormats

Some of us friends were chatting and someone mentioned the film Parineeta. After the initial wows and ahs of approval about how beautiful Vidya looked and how lovely the songs were and the "charm" that invariably pervades stories from that milieu in that era, someone disapproved. She said she didn't like the way women like Lolita and Paro tolerated men treating them like doormats. She said all that doe eyed look and feminine wiles made her sick. According to her these women represented all that women "should not be".And it was a crime against women...

Happy Woman's Day

Happy Woman's Day

Every once in a way we have this conversation - me and my inner voice."Describe the woman you are " says the voice."Dark skin, black hair, medium height" I said one year"You are describing your inheritence, not you" and it went away."Post graduate, banker and teacher" I started another year"That's what you do for a living..." the voice trailed and vanished."Sensitive,shy and silly" I ventured last year."That is your face to the outside world. Who are you?" the irritated voice stomped away in a huff.This morning it returned full of sarcasm - "Have...

It is a question of choice

It is a question of choice

Imagine this: Whole of the Earth is about to be flooded (or as Douglas Adams envisaged the earth is about to be demolished to make way for the intergalactic highway!!) and the rescue spaceship has arrived to transport you to another planet. You are allowed to take just one of your possesions with you - What would you take? You are allowed to take one person along. Who would you choose?Questions like this are so handy to liven up a party or a rainy afternoon. Some of the replies are revealing, some sentimental, and some plain funny as you can always...

Dressing up the dish

Dressing up the dish

Bangaloreans have always been fond of eating out what with the place being the home of inexpensive restaurant chains like the Udupis and Kamats and of course MTR , which used to be a tourist attraction along with Lalbagh and the Bull temple. But for the young people in bangalore, the scene has changed rapidly in the past 10 years and a lot of places have sprung up serving continental and exotic cuisine - an offshoot of the IT boom and the fantastic salaries and increase in the population of Yuppie singles. So "exotic" is no longer Chinese as it...