Time warp.

I started writing on the blog thinking that no one would bother to read my ramblings and so steamed ahead giving a free rein to my unbridled thoughts that were galloping like a race horse and probably bruised a few ego's and sensibilities on the way.

The range of comments I receive is an eyeopener to me .

I am a middle aged woman and I naively thought that only middle aged people like me whose opinions have been already formed and crystallized would read my blogs and unceremoniously flick them away like brushing of the crumbs after eating the cake.Women of my age would be cooking,seeing serials,make an occasional trip to the beauty parlour or work at their office's ,gossiping,reading magazines,busily planning shopping bouts and menu for upcoming festivals ceremonies,pilgrimages,or visit U.S to help their daughter deliver a baby or baby sit their son's child.The computer in their houses neatly covered by lace edged embroidered cloth till their son's or daughters return from their respective colleges or offices to claim it.

Middle aged men must be working in offices lording over their subordinates,keeping a ever watchful eye only on their bank balances,the computer an mere adornment on their tables, operated by young minions smirking gleefully, at their bosses ignorance.Then return home and relax before the T.V

The current generation[youth]were born with the computer . In their schools and at home.They have caught on to the Internet like a fish is to water.This is a cyber generation ,always on the line and in touch with all locally and globally. At home or in the office I suppose that they automatically surface the net in their spare time.

I suppose it is not their lot to trudge miles in search of books, magazines to replenish knowledge and information,or wade through crowded buses to see films and friends for entertainment and company or eagerly await the propitious tinkling of post man's cycle bell as he ferried messages across States and continents, the way we had to in our youth. The current generation has only to click and Lo'behold everything appears in a second on the monitors in the comforts of their cosy bedrooms or living rooms.

I am yet to fully comprehend the nuances and reach of this artificial[to me] faceless form of social networking into which I was pitch forked due to extra ordinary circumstances.I am learning one thing though as days peter into nights and nights into days that it is addictive and the fact that several youngsters from totally different backgrounds are reading my thoughts and views is a morale and ego booster.

Through Blogging I have gained entry into a totally new world. The youthful world I had shed 26 years back.The current youth are all intelligent and smarter than my set and it is they who are reading ,analysing,assessing and judging my language and content .Phew !

Vidat's legacy to me .

Alternative.

What ever I thought and dreamt has come to naught.I thought that there is a alternative to everything in life and breezed through life deriving confidence from this notion.

Life or is it death,which has taught me that there can never be a alternative to certain things in life.

I dreamt of visiting places seeped with history and soak in the magical memories of bye gone eras, conjuring heroic events and romantic stories.

Strangely ,suddenly a part of my life has become history .What use I have now of other people's history?

Flautist.

The koel is a flautist par excellence! An expert flautist can only successfully mimic a koel's notes but can never convey the ethereal spontaneity and that unmistakable yet intangible connection with the maker!

Yakkaka nakkaka, kavakal sogapar solizhukupattu.

The pain caused by words spoken carelessly or in rage or teasingly by another is deeper than any physical pain caused by grievous injuries or debilitating diseases.Intolerable physical pain vanishes over a short period of time and with it, its memory.But the hurt caused by words spoken lingers on and on . The person who spoke those words would have long since forgotten it but the recipient harbours it for a lifetime.

This is the nature of Words Spoken .

Rage .

When you see red , gaze at green, freeze it to a icy blue and thaw it slowly to mellow yellow.

Trinity.

To destroy is easy .It gives immediate and immense pleasure. It is a high followed by a terrible fall.


To create is tough .One has to strive ,very hard to do so . It is also a high that reaches a plateau soon .

To maintain is the most toughest part of life. It requires tremendous patience ,is boring and is long drawn out.But its benefits are ever lasting!

New years gift.

As I look back to the past year of service to visually impaired students I ask myself ,did I actually help any one?

I gave money to a student to buy her text books to pursue B'ed course,ticked the expected questions [I am quite an expert at this ,since I have been giving exams after exams till 24 years of age] ,read out ,explained English and Tamil lessons to P.G students,read out general knowledge and current affairs to a group of students who had applied to various competitive exams,filled up endless forms,attested them, and read out questions and answeres in the English portions of Net [U.G.C] and SLET exams.All of them thanked me politely at the end of each session.Yet I had a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that perhaps they were paying me lip service.All of them had completed their B ed and were in all probability passing time till they would be appointed to the highly coveted post of govt teacher with a starting salary of 20,000 Rs via the 2 % reservation assured to the physically handicapped.Until I was presented with a request from Muthu to read to him question and answers to qualify to the post of assistant in Banks .

He has not done Bed and felt that he was too old at age 32 to do so .The only option for acquiring a permanent job, open to him was to secure jobs in banks, L.I.C,Railways and post offices which are currently on a massive recruitment drive and are conducting competitive exams to choose the right candidates.

Muthu's English is very good though he hails from a obscure village in the southern districts.He was working at a B.P.O. office at nights and yet tirelessly visited the premises of the association of college graduates for the blind during the day for companionship and to update his knowledge through readers.

He asked me to explain the maths and logical part . My brain had gone rusty through constant disuse and the only maths I did for the past several decades was counting money and later sodexo coupons the contribution of Vidat to the household kitty while paying for goods purchased, even there I was liable to err,some sincere sales men handing me back the extra cash [ god knows how many quietly pocketed my munificence ]. I never buy from pavement shops as that entailed bargaining which meant that I had to divide and subtract a mental activity I wished to avoid.

But this man who was trapped in total darkness having but two slits in place of eyes and had requested me and I was visiting them to render service.There fore like night follows day I had to tax my brain which was chugging along in a leisurely pace like the toy train -Blue mountain express [Nilgiris]and to goad it to tear maddeningly at the speed of super fast Rajdhani Express.

I spent a whole week splitting my head that groaned and creaked at my self imposed goal of trying to grasp the nitty gritties of the long forgotten fractions, decimals and percentages.I spent one whole day trying to figure the position of that vexatious decimal point whilst adding or subtracting huge figures. Then I got entrapped in the confusing maze of directions .If x travels 5 miles north and turns left and again travels 2 miles etc etc what is his final position?How are these complicated directions[, probably helpful to ancient sea mariners] help a person working in a office where his maximum journey could be from his cubicle to the common room within few meters ?Do assistants working in banks ,post offices speak in code languages? It seems so as there were questions after questions quizzing one's memory regarding the place of letters in the alphabetical order.,and substituting one alphabet with another to mean something else !.Having somewhat succeeding in oiling the cogs and setting it in motion I entered the arena.
In the month of July Chennai is hot .Muthu and I sat in the cool shade of a huge clump of trees .I read out the questions and explained it.Muthu is very intelligent and he grasped the basics quickly but he took agonisingly 15 minutes to solve a single question as he would work it out in his mind as most visually impaired people though skilled in braille are wont to. But I sat through waiting for him to work it out in his own way .

The succeeding week I asked him to use his braille to work out the sums . He was reluctant to do so .Then I pointed out that in open competition these sums would be done in a minute the allotted time to each sum by the normals [an euphemism given to people like us---sighted by the V.I.] as they would be using rough paper and pen to do the calculations. And that if he wanted to compete with them it would do him good to shed his inhibitions.I came up against a stone wall which I succeeded in breaching by enquiring whether he was Shakuntala Devi the astonishing human calculator . He was one of the very few V.I. who has heard about her.He laughed and started using his braille.Slowly and steadily he started picking up speed and when I clocked him next, the margin between him and normals of the time taken to solve problems had narrowed considerably .
At the end of the month we had covered most of the syllabus and as I had another student waiting for my service and Muthu had by then secured the services of Engineering students studyingat M.I.T., I took leave. At which he burst out ''M'am no reader[ that is NSS volunteers from colleges ,educated house wives,voluntary retirees from banks and senior citizens ] has ever had the patience to explain the syllabus,format and types of questions asked .They usually select a page and read on and on for an hour and hurry away satisfied at performing their duty to the disabled without bothering to clear my doubts ".Then he said" Ma'am one knows sugar is sweet only by tasting it and not because some one said so.Only you had the patience to hear me out and clear my doubts.I will pass the exam and one day I will become a manager" .He didn't expressly thank me in words but it was directly pouring from his heart.

This unspoken gratitude was the best reward for the services I had rendered to the V.I.for the past one and half years and all the stress I endured in that process seemed worth wile.

Six months later at 8 in the morning Muthu who had not once rung me up till then was on the phone . He sounded excited and happy . He said" Ma'am I have been appointed as assistant in a post office after clearing the written exam and interview. I'll be joining next week .Thank you I can never forget your help.At my protest ,at this flattery he reiterated "You gave me the confidence to compete which nobody did".And hung up after receiving my best wishes.

That day was January 1 2010. It is by far the best New year gift I have ever received.
I suppose if one helps even a single person and make a difference to his life that is 'service'.

Mrs Venkobarao.

I saw Mrs Venkobarao when I was 13 years old,walking in the R.R.L.staff colony where we were put up with a faraway look .Her thick hair was matted and tousled resembling a tailor birds nest and was carelessly dressed.I remember the inhabitants of that colony young and old nod their head sympathetically behind her back. Some kids called her batty.

One of them explained to me, a new entrant to that colony, that the year before ,her eldest son 18 years of age died whilst swimming along with his friends in a natural pond a mile away . His legs got enmeshed in the slush at the bottom of the fairly deep pond and and became entangled in some roots when he jumped into the pool.He drowned whilst his friends escaped.With ignorance and optimism of youth I wondered how a woman who had two other young sons, good looking and nice could crumble so abjectly under the weight of her sorrow,refusing to snap out of it even after several years .
Now I know. Why do I remember this woman after a lapse of 40 years that to with minutest details. Simple I am in a similar situation. I don't know what happened to Mrs. Rao . Did she snap out of her grief and accept it ?All that I know is that when my late brother visited Hyderabad few years back he met her 2 sons now grown into mature men,holding good jobs ,married with kids of their own and generally well settled in life.I hope that they have lost that sad expression I always associate with their memories.

Now why was I remembering Mrs Rao?In my circle of relatives and friends the woeful situation I find myself in has no precedence nor any parallel. She is the only person to have some semblance of affinity to my situation.The unbearable loss of the first born son.

I didn't know the importance of a first born son to a woman till one day after 2 years or so after Vidat's departure when I remarked that whilst my husband and second son could regain their balance quickly and continue with life as before I couldn't ,at which my second son remarked gently" Ma he was your favourite . He was your pet" . I said'' No ,to me both of you were and are like my two eyes' '.He walked away unconvinced.

I never thought that Vidat was my pet . I was comfortable with him ,yes .But pet ?He received more spankings and scoldings for being naughty than his younger brother ever did.Yet was it true?

I looked up in the Internet and there it unfolded. A woman feels complete, physically and emotionally by her first born son. No other child has this effect on her .

No wonder I remembered the sorrow of a woman I had seen 37 years back when my first born son departed.

Typing

Vidat's request asking me to blog,which I had put in the back burner assumed the urgency of a condemned man's last wishes as days slipped by and I hadn't the heart to overlook it though it would entail the shedding of the straight jacketed existence ,marked by ritualistic cooking, cleaning, shopping and a cranial activity that had gone into a deep slumber like that of Rip Van Winkle,I had worn to avert martial discord for the past 25 years.

I didn't know the ABC of the alien creature called computer.I learnt the basics under the gentle prodding of Vidat after he created this blog for me which I noted down in a book as I was sure that I would forget his instructions if I merely stowed it away in my memory.

Earlier I had thought much to the amusement of Vidat that all that need be done to start a computer was to press a button like in a TV .I didn't bargain for what I was up against when in my enthusiasm to be up to date and in par with my youthful sons I was confronted with a complex procedures to followed just to get it started!All those numerous switches ,handling of the thing called mouse that tested my dexterity sourly,icons and and labels that kept popping up with the sole purpose of confusing me ,left me baffled .I was petrified with fear lest I click something and erase settings and programmes and earn the ire of my sons .

Exercising my parental authority I had kept my children out of bounds of various house hold appliances and matters .The entry of the computer into our household signified a noticeable shift in balance of power . This new gadget unknown to my generation and viewed gingerly from afar played into my sons hands beautifully to keep me out of bounds!It was a holy cow too sacred to be touched .

By trial and error and reading my notes I managed to start the computer and go to the blogs. Another huge problem cropped up.I could write on reams and reams of paper with a pen, articles regarding my views and experiences ,but how am I going to transfer them onto the blog as I was totally unfamiliar with typing .Of course every one belonging to my generation attended typing classes .But I missed the bus .I bravely started punching the keys .It took me an hour to type a single sentence.Fed up with my snail pace I embarked on the mission of finding a Guru.

Vidat had learned to type in Porur.Watching his fingers glide over the keys of the computer effortlessly like an expert pianist I had thought that typing was easy .No it isn't .It takes me hours to type a paragraph and that is one of the main reasons that my articles are short.I was beguiled by Vidat's expertise in making hard job look easy who had true to his nature had excelled in that field .It was his wont to excel in any field in which he had put his heart into. .
I searched Tnagar far and wide .My' padayatra' took me to several promising destinations that invariably drew a blank.The institutes had either shifted to the suburbs or had disappeared altogether.Finally I located a typing institute operating from a highly dilapidated house stalked by a stern old man supervising docile kids clicking at the machine .My relief was short lived when that old foggy glowered at me through his thick glasses and demanded how I could learn typing by allocating only 3 hours a week ? My explanations that I had a house to run and several other work fell on deaf ears .I backed away at his belligerence.

I came home blistering under that old man's tongue lashing.Would I able to weather his temper if I made a mistake which I was sure to make?But I had to learn to type .I kept mulling at this when I remembered the suggestion of the female typist who occasionally types my documents to go about it on my own and that constant practise would simplify my problem.This view was seconded by my second son.I took their advise and here I am plodding on doggedly.

I have a lot to blog but my lack of typing skills is hampering the process .This is either a boon to my viewers[if I have any] to be privy to my thoughts in small doses or a bane to such viewers who revel in my emotional outpourings!

Park

In the past 1 year I have added pounds of flesh owing to the renovation of the park .It was a cool,shady, quiet and green expanse in the heart of bustling Chennai.All the middle aged people living nearby trod it regularily and majestically to shed extra flab,to de stress , to socialise and to meditate.

It was a lovely stretch of greenery with lofty trees and green lawns that reminded me of ooty and Kodaikanal. Fountains sprinkled water and rows and rows of flowering plants bordered the lawns.I could watch butterflies flitting around,clear the problems creasing my brow undisturbed and connect with nature and rejenuvate my flagging spirits.

All this turned topsy turvy when the Corporation cast its evil eye and descended with axes to chop of those friendly trees in name of renovation.Most of the walkers fled the scene and started trampling in a smaller park few kms away.I stuck on to my favourite green space though half of it was denuded by then.Walking in the park now was more or less like taking part in a obstacle race since the Corporation workers had dug up the well paved walk ways with vengence and had dumped the rubbish on the path!Uncowed by all these hurdles but all the while regretting all this wanton destruction I perseved and continued with my morning constitutional.

One day a strange smell emanated from the park .I saw 2 bulldozers on the rampage .They were busily shovelling and dumping the filth cleared from nearby sewers and from the faraway river bed of 'Cooum' the mega open drain of Chennai on the lawns .

The once lovely park became a nasty stinking place .That was the last straw and I lost my nerve and didn't visit it there after.

Now suddenly, after the park groaned and reeled under the uncalled for degradation nearly for a year with the Corporation going of into hibernation there is a bee hive of activity.Walk ways are being laid and red soil being strewn around and platforms are being raised. All this is in readiness to host the grand old man's daughter's pet project Chennai Sangamam to be held during Pongal.

The ruthless felling of trees and raising concrete platforms in name of beautification is to provide a stage for the scion to hold her annual mela and launch her to a promising political career.In the process the tax paying middle class who have been unceremoniously dislodged from their favourite walking space now trudge pathetically along dirty narrow roads dodging speeding motorists,and filling their lungs with black smoke .Middle aged women in their incongruous sports shoes and sarees and balding men in bermudas march on obeying the doctors advise to shed sedentary habits to keep their BP and sugar in control, cursing their fate for being born into the middle class that props up the populist moves of the politicians by sincerely paying taxes but is visited by ennui on polling days.