I give thee my troth

"... I give thee my troth"

You were that special unknown stranger

for years, I have been waiting for.

Bumped into each other at some crossroad of our journey,

Never having a thought that we would travel together so far.

At first, I thought I was just enchanted by your charm.

Sooner I realized that I had lost myself in the innocent beauty of your heart.

As we kept walking in the shade of companionship,

Our feelings started to resemble a lot.

When you asked for my hand in yours

I was more than happy but at the same time was quite worried

For I had to grow beyond the usual dad's little girl

-and take part in my own life's play, a character in lead.

Here I come, betrothed to you for a vow -

that you take good care of me as good as my dad

Ready for the seven steps around the holy fire and tie the knots of commitment for life,

With the only hope of all the woven dreams that we together had.

(Written - August 13th 2011)

[Dedicated to my Mom and Sister-in-law]

Ranga Shankara - Sattavara neraLU

Last Sunday, I happened to browse through the newspaper and found that there was a Kannada play called "Sattavara neraLu" (Shadow of the dead) Playwright : G B Joshi. Director: B.V Karanth.
Having heard that it is a good drama, I went to watch it at Ranga Shankara theater.
Indeed it was a different experience as it was my first time. I had never been to a live theater show before. I thoroughly enjoyed the brilliant theater experiments, effects with lighting and shadows, stage design. The timely lyrics of Purandara dasa literature like "illiralaare allige hoogalaare","kurudu naayi santhege banthanthe","aachaaravilladha naalige","aadhadhella oLithe aayithu","Donku baaladha naayakare","Lolalotte" to suit the mood of play enlivens Sattavara neraLu's theme.
Long live Shankar Nag's dream and a bow to the all the artists/directors/playwrights.


Below is the theme of the play - (Courtesy citizenmatters.in)

Subtly pulling a philosophical string and delineating a dreadful tune, Sattavara Neralu shakes the stable philosophical base and intellectually inquires into the eternally rooted and firm beliefs in our society.
Narayana is forcibly pulled into Sanyasa and made seer of a Mutt. A ventri vogue of king maker Krishnacharya, Diwan of the Mutt, seer is ashamed of his pretentious celibacy unable to suppress his un-satiated worldly desires and suffering the onslaught of intellectuals thronging at Mutt seeking philosophical and spiritual clarity subjected to scrutiny and judgement.
Diwan manages to send seer on a pilgrimage and receives news that seer moved heavenward. Diwan immediately builds a Vrindavan in the name of the deceased seer and carries on Mutt activities many years. But seer turned Narayana, actually alive, returns to confront Diwan, Diwan manages to maintain that dead seer is in Vrindavan. Frustrated seer reversed to mortal Narayana threatens to reveal the truth, but incorrigible Diwan challenges that devotees would blindly believe what they practice for ages in deference to and total disbelief of what is blabbered by Narayana because mortal Narayana is now bereft of the seer in him.

Fortress of solitude

A lot of people around me get freaked out by my silence. I guess, They often think what is wrong with this "lone lonely loner"! Some around me ask me to be more expressive. I get tired of people asking me - "Why are you so much quiet?" whenever I try to mix with people in a group. But very close friends of mine tell me not to change and be just the way you are!

I am happy not being a very social animal. Even being put in a big social group at family wedding/some party I feel a lot deserted! I will have very short replies for people's (irritating) questions and do enjoy killing time in analyzing everyone's reaction and body language. Social contact seems like burden to me most of the times. Majority of the society is too loud and outgoing.

I am totally bad in front of a crowd. I have my own fears to talk to a bunch of people. It would be much easier to give a technical talk than general talk as analytical part of your brain filters out any impractical words come out of your mouth! Sometimes I go blank in talking what is expected out of me, sometimes I even stammer with all the nervousness. It all depends on the exposure of the world around that I got when I was young. Well, I face my fears till today every time I am being laughed at and made fun. I fight my own fears only by facing them regularly.

Being an introvert loner is not so bad at all. It's cool when I don't attract much attention. I feel that I'm on my own and I'm free. I don't have to care about what people will think about me. I don't have to be the "life" of the party to enjoy all the action going around. I have a lot of time to spend for myself and most importantly it helps me to work independently as a individual contributor even though I work in a team. I don't make enemies with anyone. I am good at burying a lot of secrets within myself. I get to go for solo bullet rides exploring around which helps me to get along with nature more closely. When people get my trust they have a real friend in making.

The bad thing about being a loner is that when you are tested with a lot of emotional turbulence you tend to easily lose yourself! One has to be strong not to let it overcome and become a phobia or a disorder of any kind.

I dedicate this random thought to millions of people around who live(or agree to) in their fortress of solitude. :)

Temet nosce

After a long time I get to blog something. Thanks to the power maintenance for couple of days being done at office.

"Temet nosce" - A Latin phrase meaning "Know thyself". I chose this title based on the aphorism written on the plaque above the Oracle's kitchen door in the movie "Matrix", one of my favorites. The post itself briefs you about why the use of this strange title at the end.

Being a teetotaler in a farewell liquor party of an ex-colleague/new year booze party with present ones, you get to experience a lot of offline faces of your colleagues and bosses, some good- some bad - some even ugly! The best part is that you alone remember everything after coming back. ;)

I always wonder why people are so desperate to get so intoxicated with the drug called alcohol? Some strange answers that I got were like: they get drunk to be happy as they feel at liberty to talk anything mean! Some get simply drunk for the thrill-seeking. Some people drink in opinion that someone thinks big of you! While some others think its social to be drinking at party like these and while others drink because of peer pressure.

Many asked me to give up my beliefs and tried very hard to make me succumb to the so called luxury. I was looking at everyone's face to see if someone out there really felt what it means to be yourself and I was so happy to see that at least someone believed in me in giving a nod of disapproval not to give in.

I really liked the compliment that was given to me sometime during the conversation - "A silent warrior". So true that we all are trying hard to fight the battle within.

He always awaits in your subconscious
poised to greet the luxury when you give in,
while I stay wide awake engaged in
the endless covert fighting with my own evil twin.

He laughs at me with exultant joy;
Jeering at all my weaknesses.
While I stay tranquil amidst the uproar
Letting him not know about my failures.


Neither of them take a break ever
indulged in a series of confrontations within
Putting the blame on each other
Tending to unite yang with its yin.

With all the constantly running inner dialogue between my evil twin and my own conscious mind, I still somehow feel that I am a stranger to myself! Do we really "know ourselves"!?

Live.Love.Rewind

I am directly picking this title off the Sony Handycam's Ad. Today, we (our family) had been out on Deepavali shopping spree. Bro and SIL bought a new Sony Handycam to gift ourselves on the occasion and to treasure moments with yet-to-be-born my nephew/niece :) Never to miss the moment of all his/her first's in life... be it first touch, first smile, first words spoken, first step, first masterpiece, first rock show, first make up and most important of all those first words calling me "mama" ;) and so on... :)

At the Sony world/center, There was showcase of a lot of electronics. Above the display of Handycams, there was an large LCD TV which was looping through this advertisement below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBohbQB-55o

It is all about a father reliving the moments of his daughter from childhood to her marriage. A lovely cute ad indeed! This took me back to an incident of which I was a witness a couple of weeks back. I had been to Malleshwaram,Bangalore to pick up my mom from her evening class of psychology. I was waiting outside in car for the class to get over and was just watching strangers around to see their actions, reactions, instincts and do a micro level sociology study of people and myself. That's my favorite pass-time! :D
As I tuned in some soft FM music in car stereo, I noticed an auto-rickshaw stopping next to car on the other side of the road under a street light. A pretty girl in her mid 20's stepped out with a lot of luggage to find her residence. I couldn't help watching her. I was a little safe as I had hid behind the tinted glasses ;). No sooner her father came to place and talked to her giving her a good tight hug and helped her with her luggage home. There was so much joy in his face on seeing his little kid come back home after a long time and all the expressions on his face told how badly he had missed her - Life is just fleeting moments of joy worth waiting for and the uncertainty is what makes life more beautiful. :)

Cheers! and Happy Deepavali.

Lineage, Lifestyle and Learnings

We as students read history right from our school days to get to know of all the irrelevant facts about who did what, when and where and how! I am not a historian but I believe in saying that "history repeats" because anything and everything I am currently experiencing in this world has been experienced by a lots of others somewhere in the time-line. We study to learn from past mistakes, gather data for prediction of life events, know about cultures but the history itself looks and probably is so much biased if we go only by the available writings.

Coming to a very small scale of geological time frame, If you ask me a simple question of what my great grandfather did for a living and his story of life. I have no clue! We do not know much more than our grandparents in our lineage. As a parent, does one really give knowledge of how social and financial life earlier was to his/her child? We are afraid that the youngster might develop some kind of impression over the family, relatives and hide some of the facts as we bury them deep down within ourselves. We are afraid to expose our problems in front of our children and make them understand the reality of life.

Today, we live in the era of technology, booming shopping malls, hyper-markets and multi-national business enterprises. The lifestyle of people, a generation earlier, were lot different from what we are going through now. Even the morals and values are not remaining the same. The attitude and pace over which we are leading life is changing very fast.
A simple instance: Nowadays, If a grandfather tells his grandson that he didn't have something called TV at his time to watch the kid shouts back to him saying that you are cooking-this-story-up for making me not watch the TV! Having the company of upper class society friends in junior school, the kid even comes and asks the parent if we are poor in just owning a Maruti Alto while his friends travel around in Honda city.

I have several open questions on my mind on my above bizarre random thoughts:
Why is society failing to learn from past and teach next generation? Is it the high rate of inflation over decades? Ever increase in economical gap between upper and middle class? Is it that we have lost the habit of reading Indian novels which expose rural side of our country to relate to our ancestor's life? Is it that we are losing something in over protecting our kids so that he never sees what actual suffering is? Are we shedding moral values down the drain in our pace of earning money and make a grand living?

"Mute" spectator

Today, I left the office at around 6pm and took the way out of campus via the rear exit of Manyatha Tech Park as this avoids me hitting bad evening traffic on Outer ring road. It was a beautiful dusk. A bit sunny as sun was still visible at the horizon shining over the yet-to-be-completed tall concrete buildings around.

I dropped at nearby shell service station for refueling my Enfield Bullet. After top up of fuel tank, I reached out to get a filling of the tires with Nitrogen gas. There was a guy, station worker at that Shell petroleum outlet, who was busy doing his work of setting the PSI units to prescribed values and filling up the front and rear tires as fast as he can. He waved at us and called upon all two wheelers in the queue as he was working parallel on all front tires of all bikes at once and then setting the pressure to a higher value for the rear tires to work smarter. (A nice efficient scheduling algorithm indeed!) But there was a man with his scooter who was in need to break this algorithm and wanted to be FCFS! (First-come-first-served). He was very upset of the way he was waved and asked to wait for filling up of every other bike's front tires to get his rear tire done. He went to manager with a complaint that this worker is showing hands at him and asking others to move ahead of him and break priority. Manager rushed to the place as the guy was still continuing doing his work of filling air. Manager revealed that the guy is deaf and dumb and does show only hand signals to communicate. I said to the man in scooter that he was doing his work in parallel so that it saves a lot of time. But the man left grumbling over the petty issue making a big fuss. The manager who stood next to me said that even though god has given him everything, he shouts over this poor guy who is deaf-mute. At least this guy isn't begging or stealing but doing a service at station for earning some money. The man was already long gone with his two-wheeler to even lend an ear to those words. I stood a "mute" spectator after listening to what manager said as my thoughts lingered around the same but the guy was busy filling up gas for the next car in queue without knowing what all had happened until now.