Hopeful Escape from Escapism

 Sometimes you keep messing up with yourself, on and on.. repeatedly. You know what you are doing is not right, but you can't resist. Afterall sin is sweeter. Sometimes it could be almost impossible to come out of the vicious cycle of bad habits.

But finally a day comes when you realise, you cannot let that happen to yourself anymore. That is when you want to take charge of situation. When you cannot let yourself ruin yourself anymore.

Sooner or later (not too late) you have to realise what you really want, what is going to stay forever, and what is temporary fake happiness.

And when that day comes you will be ready to take all measures to make it possible and you will be eagerly waiting for fresh morning.

Let Everything Happen to You

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

- Rainer Maria Rilke

PS: came across this beautiful thought couldn't miss to document.

Airflow and Growing up a Child

Watching your processes is like watching your baby grow.

In beginning like a new born there are lot of troubles, with scheduling errors (equivalent to sleep cycle), inputs (equivalent to feeding) etc.

Then there are random unseen issues that keep occuring. Some one will touch the cluster resources or your kid suddenly developed colic.

Once they(airflow and baby) are settled and you are used to, you can't appreciate it immediately. 

Then one day you look back that your processes have run seamlessly for months now.. looking at those so many continuous greens gives you a realisation and pleasure, similar to realising suddenly that ohh your baby grew up..

Drawing boundaries is never easy

Last post I mentioned about the so called life lessons, where people suggest to accept life gracefully. To be more specific not to play victim card, as it can be more harmful than helpful; we should not try to gather sympathy and so on.

But how do we know while accepting the life and what it is getting us in to.. we don't over do. I just don't want to keep on accepting everything life is getting me in to.

Is there any award I am going to get for being brave, and making all battles around me as my own personal battles. I will not question the benefits one may get for being weaker.

Other than few words of appreciation, what else do I get for being brave. I did get peace of mind, no doubt, for accepting the situations as is. But physically and and in some sense mentally too, I am stretching myself.

How does one draw the boundary between accepting life and putting foot down/playing victim card/cribbing?


PS: After reading the post I realised, at the moment I am already well beyond the other side of boundary. 

Perspectives

What if two people with very extremely connected lives have extremely opposite perspectives of a situation. Suppose this situation is a major problem for one: for the other person it is just the way of life, with nothing abnormal in it.

From one's perspective every one does it. From other's perspective why should one do it?

Both one and other, have people around them who agree with their perspectives. There is apparently no good or bad.

How to find peace in this situation?

I have recently watched some videos on the theme of accepting life gracefully. They are nice, however not very natural to follow.  And thes one can face is, feeling strong disconnection with other (most likely temporary, but not a good thing).

Yet to find a perfect way to find peace with contradicting perspectives.

To a new found blogger friend

Have you faced this: that you read something and it is so overwhelming and it touched you so deep that you are not left with any option other than to pour out your feelings somewhere.. Exactly that is what happened to me today

Lately I have not had many close friends (whom I also get to meet enough). There are ones I label close, but for some reason we don't get to talk enough, or even if we talk, some how I have a problem expressing.. I guess all this is a topic of a separate post, which, if I can, will revisit some day.

So coming back to friends.. Once you have kids, their circle becomes your circle. So in last year I entered in to a circle which was essentially composed of  mommy's of my daughter's friends. We were similar kinds, similar backgrounds, similar presents; so offcourse I felt connected. But honestly, I never could feel a very deep rooted connect. Probably because I am never so much available, even to connect superficially.

However, to feel a deeper connection you may not always need hours of conversations..

Recently one of the mommies from the gang, let's say X, shared a blog post she wrote on friendship day. The post reminded me off few of those seasoned bloggers, whom I used to follow in good old days, and I was always amused by the fact how well they penned down their emotions, in such real way, without masking it, being very straight (exactly opposite of what I do, going all over the place). These are the people whose posts were most awaited on my blogroll (its like timeline for FB, where you watch other blogger friends are posting).

As I mentioned about good old days, the practice used to be, if you like a post from a blog, you go back and read as many as you can from the archives. So I kept her blog open in my chrome tabs, with the intent to read it some day.

And this morning when I woke up at 4 and was unable to fall asleep,  I ended up reading X's blog (which had two more posts).

I realised how we all have a two way shell built. We never try to peep in to what a person's heart may be made up of inside; and other way round, most of us never want to let the guard off, and allow others to look inside our heart. When we open up, there is so much in common. So much to relate. So much to connect. Sometimes we find set of emotions which exactly mirrored our past or probably the present self too. 

Till we look inside we never would know how strong they are that we develop a feeling of affection and respect for them. Till we look inside how would we know that they have as weak and vulnerable a heart as you do.

That being said, I wish opening up was lot more easier. 

I have realised, it needs a courage, which I still do not have, to express myself, to express the state of mind, my vulnerabilities, my real problems, my dreams..
And similarly, I wish it was easier to look in to someone's heart, their true self. It would have been lot easier to make friends..

PS: If you would have noticed, the background which I built was longer than the actual(original) feelings I intended to express :P That's the true me :D

back home with a smile..

After a long time I opened my blog today.. it won't be an overstatement if I say I haven't seen for years now..

Initial posts looked quite naive and silly, too factual.. but as I went a page or two deeper, it felt really nice.. like a feeling one gets when one reaches back home from a vacation. Even though you have amazing time out there, home is home. I realise that I missed home only after I unlock the door and step in to one of the rooms; every time I can feel how comfortable I feel at home.. Before stepping in I was too busy to realise that I was missing an important part of me.

Now you know what kind of home I meant.. Stuck by Nostalgia..

I am smiling right now, and trying to convince myself it is not impossible to be a bit regular here.. 

Addendum

..to Déjà vu !!!

Another addition to the list:
- Not all screwed up interviews lead to negative results :)

So the moral of the story is, Believe in yourself (as AK says) and Believe in The One sitting up there (as Papa says). Together you can do magics...

Déjà vu

Its such a, I told you so kind off moment.

I had thought about it last week itself; that, may be again at the airport I will end up writing a blogpost, and the only good thing that can come out of a bad interview is a new addition to blog :D

Lots of similarities, yet so different.

-Family got together to celebrate and I ended up traveling, but I got to choose dates this time.

-Screwed up again, but not devastated, rather enjoyed.

-Failed but not offended.

-Reached early-tried preponing-didn’t work but I am chilled.

-Flight delayed but carrying back up to keep me entertained.

So overall I am happy this time, rather than frustrated.

That ways life is quite interesting. When some event is about to happen, we think of it, or at least I do.. Imagine how things will turn out, how will my reactions be, how will others in scenario look like, and so on.. To be precise a whole film of 2-3 possibilities plays in my mind, but always life does manage to unfold a very, new and fresh set of events..

That's called beauty of life..

Music and Love

While at work as always I am feeling sleepy :-| So I thought why not lets play some music, as it always soothes me and help me focus more.. For a change after a long time I thought of going to folder of English songs. I think last they were in my playlist it was may be 1-2 years back, and for some may be 3-4 years. There are many reasons that they never got to pop into my playlist; one is I was little bored of them, second became little more devotional so genre changed, third started liking Indian classical music more and last reason which is most important is I think I outgrew those feelings.. I always feel the music, so feelings matter quite a lot. That young courtship age when you are always thinking of love, you just get addicted to these songs.. you are smiling listening to them. But as you enter the more practical aspects of that love, when the same love makes you face some bitter truths of life and also brings in new responsibilities, then these songs don't strike a chord of your heart.. Not that you are unhappy but the chords change..there are different tunes..which are more real, more meaningful, more sensible..

Whenever I used to come across some song with romantic lyrics, I used to immediately share it with my better half :D :P I even have made those videos you make in video maker of pictures, with some romantic songs playing in background. Now when I think of those days I can't resist giggling on how silly and cute we were.. I think some of those still knock my heart :P but its just that I find it little stupid to share them now.. 

Let me share few from my old playlist which are making me smile at this moment :)

- I wanna grow old with you - Adam Sandler

- Love story - Taylor Swift

- All or nothing - Theory of Deadman

- All you need is love - Beatles

- I'll meet you there - Owl City

- Vanilla Twilight - Owl City

- When you nothing at all - Ronan Keating

- Crazier - Taylor Swift

- Words - Boyzone

- Cloud number nine - Bryan Adams

I think the list is little long, but hope you have got fair idea of what I mean :D

Btw Sarabjeet shouldn't go unmentioned here, who introduced me to most of these songs.. He knew my choice so used to send me now and then.. 

पुराने संदूक में मिले कुछ लफ्ज़

१. 
बड़े confusion में है ये मन। 

कभी लगता है कि रात की घड़ी का कांटा बहुत तेज़ दौड़ रहा है,
इतना कि उसने एक चक्कर पूरा भी कर लिया, 
और हम खड़े देखते ही रह गए। 

कभी लगता है कि और तेज़ क्यूँ नहीं दौड़ रही ये रात,
बड़ा मुश्किल होता है अकेले इतना लम्बा सफ़र तय कर पाना।


२. 
इतने दिन हो गए, 
फिर भी तुम मेरे छोटे से मन को नहीं समझ पाए। 
हर उम्मीद तुम से शुरू हो के, तुम पर ही ख़त्म होती है। 
बहुत चुभता है, जब ये ख्याल आता है..
तुम्हारी जगह किसी और का सहारा लेना पड़ा मेरी बातों को। 


PS: Don't remember when and what made me write these.. It is always so stupid, that after a period of time it becomes difficult to find the relevance of something which you once wrote from bottom of your heart..

a metaphor

Fighting against one's destiny is so much like betting against an infinitely rich adversary, with p < 0.5.

Happiness is..

There is this happy page on FB, which I follow, where you can define what Happiness is and they post a corresponding cute drawing for you.. Everyone has got different definition/criteria of being happy.. there are so many small small things which make us happy, which might be insignificant/trivial for others. That page always reminds me of this poem, which I came across a year ago, and is stuck on my desk since then..

Happiness is when

you find some rice

in the rice bin you thought was empty

and you know you’re all right for another month

Happiness is when

you’re reading along

aimlessly in a book

and come on someone exactly like yourself

Happiness is when

you’re sick of reading a book

and just then someone with a familiar voice

knocks at your gate

Happiness is when

you’ve got some passage

that is supposed to be so difficult

and all by yourself you figure out the meaning

Happiness is when

sunset finds you in some country temple or mountain village

and they say "Stay the night!"

and you do.

- Tachibana Akemi 

PS: Pardon me for too many poetic posts :P may be its a kind of loss of words :-|

Poetry@ In Her Shoes - 2

This is in continuation with earlier post. When Maggie is at community center, an old blind fellow asks her to read something for him.. and she reads the following poem:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-Elizabeth Bishop

I liked it for the simplicity of its basic theme, for the truth it holds within its heart. Its not too difficult to cope up with any loss. I think all the losses are manageable. Its just a matter of getting used to the loss, accepting the facts, coming to terms with the situation.. At first there will be a pinch (or may be a spoonful) of salt, but eventually you'll be okay.

PS: This pattern of writing poems with stuff in brackets is still amusing me.

Poetry@ In Her Shoes - 1

Last month I watched another chick-flick, In Her Shoes. It was a nice and entertaining one..  Loved Cameron Diaz's acting. Her's was the main character (Maggie) and she did justice to it. Despite of Maggie's nasty deeds, you end up liking her character.. and you will definitely  love it when the plot moves to community center for old people and she starts helping them. 

So what I liked the most in the movie was the poem she reads in her sister's wedding.  The poem is beautiful and the way she read it made it more touching. I had searched the wording on internet, and it was lying on my desktop forever. Today I was reading again, and I again loved them, so thought why not share with you.. 

I carry your heart with me, I carry it in my heart,

I am never without it, anywhere I go you go, my dear; 

and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling.

I fear no fate, for you are my fate, my sweet

I want no world, for beautiful you are my world, my true

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant,

and whatever a sun will always sing is you.

Here is the deepest secret nobody knows,

here is, the root of the root and 

the bud of the bud and 

the sky of the sky, of a tree called life;

which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide,

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.

I carry your heart, I carry it in my heart.

-E. E. Cummings

PS-1: I do not know why every version (available on internet) of this poem had lots of stuff in brackets. If anyone of you has some idea, why it is that way, then please share. 

PS-2: I apologize for playing with the punctuation of the original poem.

Amazon Story (contd.)

So the Amazon Story doesn't end here and here.

I do not know about Amazon.com but Amazon.in is really a good for nothing shopping portal. Last time they screwed our order and people told me that it is a rare case, and that they are new in India so they are growing and improving. I thought okay, may be!!! We trusted and placed another fresh order only to realize after 3 weeks (order was placed of 29th August) that something or the other went wrong with all the 3 items in that order. Here is a summary of what happened

1. Item No.1 was delivered in a week's time. It was a charger cable, for which not just the specifications but the title itself said that it is black in color. But what we received was white in color. We wrote to them. We got a call in a day or two, saying that please don't use it, we will collect it from you and your money will be refunded. I think replacing it with a black one would have been a better policy, instead of asking the customer (indirectly) to order from somewhere else after a delay of 10 days. Then why shouldn't we place the order somewhere else..

2. Item No. 2 was headphone. Its expected delivery date in order list was 2 - 6 September. But the item status never changed to anything else from Shipping Soon, till they removed it from the order list (will it come to it later). We wrote to them, since we were not allowed to file claim (even after the delivery date was gone). We were informed that we will soon be contacted by the seller, who never did so and finally we filed the claim. Now that headphone was quite urgently required. If the Amazon/seller couldn't provide us (forget about in time), shouldn't have we been informed a bit early. Why did they stay numb over it and waited for us to poke them.. 

3. Item No. 3 was a book. The expected dispatch date was 23rd September (which is today). And the email I received says that my order is cancelled due to insufficient inventory. Can someone tell me why does it take them so long (more than 3 weeks) to inform me that they don't have something for which they already taken the order. I don't know what system/technology they are using to communicate. If I was told earlier, by now, I could have bought it from somewhere else. After the things went wrong with first 2 orders, I was already uncertain about the third one. I really tried hard to maintain my confidence and waited patiently. After all they say Shop with confidence. But they proved themselves.

And that is not the end. Their system smoothly manages to delete all such orders from your account. So that you can never go back and check, when you ordered and what you ordered. No where in my order history I can locate these items.

The way our case was dealt last time, was in itself very frustrating.. and still we got back. Why in the world I should order with them again. They might improve but I think I will never come back to them. I am really irritated with the way things are dealt. And when such things happen twice in a period 3 months, its too much to digest. I think I am better off with flipkart.

PS (for regular readers) - This is not the way I wanted to come back after so long :-( But amazon has infuriated me to the core.

Joy of turning old

Few months back I had watched the movie Awakenings (starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro). The movie was, no doubt, amazing. I was stunned by firstly Robert De Niro's acting, secondly the story.. the way dilemmas of patients and their families was pictured, and also the courage and innocence of Dr. Sayer's character. Anyways, this post is not for the review of movie. You may read AK's post for an interesting review.

As usual after watching the movie I googled and came to know that it is based on Oliver Sacks' book of the same name. I read more about him, went through his works and list of books. I was curious about his work, and felt that I should read atleast one of  his books. Actually he had occupied some quiet-small corner in my brain. And finally, last month in the discount frenzy, even after all that Amazon mess, I have managed to get hold of his book The Mind's Eye.

So I think I should now finally come to the reason which made me write this post. Actually yesterday morning I read an article by Oliver sacks in New York Times. I don't know why, but I really enjoyed reading this article.. there was that feeling, when you want to re-read something. The article is totally about his feelings on turning 80.. about what his life has been.  It was something like, how happy and satisfied a person is on turning old.. but at the same time, just like most of us, even he has that feeling, that he could have wasted less time and could have done many more things. Its about a person, who is not looking at the gloominess of old age, but at the positive side, that there are few things, which you cannot feel unless you are old. I am quite awed by the following lines..

"At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60."

Just wanted to share the article. I hope I have motivated you enough to read it :)


PS: Sometimes background turns out to be longer than the main content :P

I've got a thing for music

The music. I can hear it everywhere. In the wind... in the air... in the light. It's all around us. All you have to do is open yourself up. All you have to do... is listen.                                       

     -August Rush

Happy World Music Day!!!

I had been planning to write about my adventures with music since, like, ever. I remember that I had even thought of a very fancy title as well, which I can no more recall :'( and that is the loss of publishing posts in mind, they could get deleted without warning. So better late than never.. And anyways there was one benefit of the delay.. I am more and more into it, the thoughts, likings, inclinations have become more concrete. Just came to know that today is special, so there could not have been a better moment to share my quest into the world of music.

Since my childhood I was quite keen on listening to music. It was never very specific type or genre, but while studying, specially Maths, I always preferred having something in my ears. Ones I remember from school time are Bhai Surinder Singh Jodhpuri's kirtan tracks (used to be my favorite), Bally Sagoo's cassette (don't remember its name) which had that celebrated (atleast for me) Ragamuffin mix (mind you I ain't saying the famous Gur naalo ishq mitha). Anyways as I moved on to Banasthali, I used to get cassettes recorded with favorite tracks. My choice used to vary like anything. Sometimes I wanted soft romantics, sometimes kirtans, sometimes dhol dhamaka bhangra kind, sometimes some BSB or Enrique, or may be Saturday night and Brazil too. With time, things became more and more convenient.. in 3rd year we had PC in hostel room ..in M.Sc. Papa gifted me a MP3 player. But the choice was always a mix of the above list. 

Somewhere around last year (unable to recall the exact time of transition) I got some inclination towards classical musical. Not that exactly the Classical Music. But I started enjoying the classical beats (i don't know what one calls them) which appear in songs once in a while, like dha dhin dha, actually its hard to enlist like this. But off course I can give some examples. Like first 2:30 mins of Jab pyar kiya to darna kya (Mughal-e-azam), Thumak-thumak pad (Ankahee), Kali ghodi dwar khadi (Chashme baduur). There were (are) many such songs for which I developed eventual appreciation. Like the starting part of Piya Bawri (Khoobsurat). I think I had mentioned earlier as well, about the pleasure I am getting in listening to these songs..

Then one fine day at sikhnet.com I stumbled across Bhai Inderjeet Singh's collection which had lot classical kirtan (in gurbani kirtan we call pakke raag). And to add to it, he has also mentioned the raag in which the shabad is sung.The complete Guru Granth Saheb is in Raags, that was my only awareness about raags. I had never before known the musical end of raags (might sound funny). So that was the first time when I felt the music of raags.. things became more technical and at the same time more enjoyable. I started listening more and more to those shabads. Then I started eating AK's head, that whether there is a way to identify underlying raag of the song.. or can she identify the raag from that dha dhin dhin beats.. I was (and I am still) totally unaware of the technicalities playing around. But one thing was sure, they were quite intriguing. I started searching on internet. I stumbled across an interesting research article, on use of Hidden Markov Model to identify Raags. But somehow (unfortunately), that was not something I was looking for. I wanted to feel those small differences in rhythm. I wanted to see how things work. I was happy to see that there were others who shared a common anxiety. But everyone suggested that one should listen more and more and enjoy.. technicalities follow.

Then in the month of February, we heard that Prof.K.B.Athreya (Godfather for Statistical theory of Branching processes) is visiting IISER Pune for a week, will be giving a series of talks on not so technical topics of Mathematics and one talk in our Dept. And we also got the news that one evening he will also talk about music. We decided attended his talks, and as expected he was amazing. As AK is already in to music and I was falling in so we decided to attend the lecture on music as well. Then we came to know that actually SPIMACAY has organised the lecture. That was the first time that I came to know that such a society exists. Not just that, there were many terms that I heard for the first time. Taanpura, the names of raags in Carnatic and Hindustani music, Shrutis, notes, relation to Mathematics, Melakartas, and lot more. What resulted was less of information storage but more of curiosity. Because an hour's time was too less to understand so much. It was like throwing words of the tone verb, adjectives, prepositions to a kid in Kindergarten.

I started googling more and more. One raag which clicked me most (for reasons unknown to me) was Raag Malkauns. Search led me to many videos/tracks on internet. And then eventually I realised that the kind of music I enjoy the most in classical base is Gurbani kirtan. And then Google is always a saviour. I got lots of resources, which gave the shabad tracks along with raag details, like Gurmat Sangeet Project and Gurmat Sangeet Darbar. I think we are really lucky to get access to infinite amount of resources on one flat looking box. So nowadays I am listening to Bhai Avtar Singh, Bhai Gurmeet Singh Shant and so on.. Though the inclinations have made a substantial shift, the tendency of getting addicted to a music piece still remains same. I have found some of the kirtan tracks quite addictive. Back in school days when papa used to play these guys then I used to get uncomfortable.. like frankly speaking irritated. I think I have evolved over time :P

Last month I visited Manali for 4 days. We (me & my better half) stayed in a hotel which was a little inside a lane. We used to walk down that lane everyday in the morning. On the way there was a Music Learning Centre. Everyday morning I used to hear same tune (probably students must be practising) which I was almost certain that it has to be Malkauns. I enjoyed listening to it. There used to be strong desire to stand there for a while and enjoy. At times I felt an urge for entering the building and discussing with the teacher (whosoever he/she is) more about the music being played. That music brought me nostalgia.

After coming back to Pune, we (me & AK) came to know that there is a possibility that an online course could be conducted to teach the Magic and Logic of Music for people like me. The syllabus also redirected me towards TaalPulse, a software which serves as Lehra, Theka and Tanpura machine. In the meanwhile AK always tried her best to answer my questions, which at times used to be little dumb.. She explained me the working of Tanpura and Theka, how the taals works, how the tanpura is simplest and most basic (and still pleasant to listen), and why harmonium isn't considered to be perfect.

We together prayed for the course, but it didn't work out. The day I got to know that it hasn't I was very disappointed.. frustated actually. I was actually looking forward to it. What next.. Google!!! And now I got hold of the following two books: Nad: Understanding Raga Music and Nuances Of Hindustani Classical Music. Both the books are intended for people who like music but are not exposed to the science behind, who will be happy to know more, who think that some basic knowledge will allow them to enjoy more.. I was happy again, excited!! I am really looking forward to read them and dive into this beautiful world of rhythms.

I really think that I have got a thing for Music :)

PS: 0. As always the post has turned up as SUPER long.. Really should look into the ways for summarizing my feelings :-|

PS: 1. Amidst of planning an article with AK, MBR expecting some research article, I am writing this. I wish technical writings were as easy and free flowing as blog posts..

PS: 2. Why is that I always need some special occasion or Muhrat to express my feelings.. be that sparrows or music .

Ode to Hindi Cinema

I have always compared Bollywood with Hollywood and hated the fact that we can never come up with movies as good as the ones made in West. I don't know why, but I have felt that I do not feel like watching even 5 minutes of almost any bollywood movie. I know there are exceptions. There is Wednesday, there is Taare Zameen Par, there is Lagaan, Iqbaal, Dor, Dharm, YMI, which I have loved and praised. But such a list is definitely small.

But there was a time in Indian movies, which was different. Calling that era Hindi Cinema rather than Bollywood, makes me feel better. I know I have earlier also praised some classics of that era, but that doesn't stop me from repeating the same.. that I can watch Chupke-chupke and Golmaal any number of times.. that I went literally Wow for Khoobsurat when I watched it recently and realised how I had missed the way this movie entertains you.. how Ankahee and Ek Doctor ki Maut made me realise what great actors we had.. the sweetness and innocence of Balika Badhu.. the way Masoom makes me cry every time I watch it. I think it was all real CINEMA.

Today I have another addition to that list. Purab aur Pashchim. Yesterday, while browsing channels on TV, I suddenly saw and then stopped, and then I did not turn the channel even for a minute, for more than an hour (+there were no adverisements to disturb). I was totally spell bound and awestruck. Totally surprised that although  i had watched it earlier a few times,  I had once again failed to realise what a classic piece of art it is. So many scenes gave me goose bumps and so many scenes left my eyes wateryy. Somehow, I am feeling so great about everything in the movie.. Every actor and character left a mark..  Ashok Kumar with his calmness and strength, Om Prakash with his helplessnes, Pran in the denial and then the regret, Madan Puri with his expressions in all those situations when he feels sorry for his daughter and ashamed of the way she is brought up.. and offcourse Manoj Kumar.

Music was simply adding to the serenity of the movie. Those moments when Hare Rama, Hare Krishna starts it feels so divine and true.. and the peace you get with that tune and those 4 words. Hai preet jahan ki reet sada, I anyways have always been a fan off.. specially the starting lines. First time I liked Om Jai Jagdish Hare so much that I could feel it (specially in the climax, when Saira Bano is back and it starts with Vishay Vikar Mitayo)..so much that it made me think of composer and realise that I don't even know who wrote this famous aarti.  FYI it was composed by Pandit Shardha Ram Phillauri. 

I couldn't help it putting it for download immediately. And first time it is happening that even after download  is complete, I haven't removed it and allowed it to seed for others. Just because I want more and more people to watch it. For people sitting in far away lands, to know what India is.. and to remind people within, what our country was (I know thats not one of  the best and most ethical ways to share and circulate).

PS:1. This is a post which came with impulse. Thanks for bearing with the length and all the jhol-jhal vali Engreji.

PS:2. Sorry again for being so iregular. I am still writing posts in mind, along with the most appropriate titles. I wish I could share with you someday :-|

memories generated on World Sparrow Day

I was doing some random surfing, and came to know that today is World Sparrow Day. It is celebrated to raise awareness of the sparrow and other common birds to urban environments, and of threats to their populations.

Although they say that Sparrows are the most ubiquitous birds on earth, but I have really missed them in last few years. We used to have so many in our balcony in Kanpur. We used to feed them everyday.  I loved their chirping, the noise they used to make. Everyone at home was fond of them.

There were some more regular companions as well, like jungle babbler, laughing dove, common myna, quarrelsome parrots, naughty but cute squirrels. 

We used to put variety of grains at least twice a day along with water. When we used to go out stations, I was always so worried about their food :-| When we moved to Bhopal it was a complete end of the story. Hardly any bird visits there.

I am really feeling nostalgic and I am almost teary now, remembering my dearest birdies. Thankfully we have some pictures of them as memories.. and there are so many small small incidences associated..

Jungle babbler

I was very fond of these guys. They used to come in groups and make lotsss of noise. But sometimes they used to shake or move so much that their feathers were all swollen, and they used to look like a feathery ball. Back then I didn't knew their name, so i used to call them  चूज़े वाली चिड़िया :P

Laughing Dove

This was the quietest bird in the balcony. We used to call it घुघ्घी. You might be able to relate if you know the famous song from Pinjar. They were only two of them.. used to sit for long, watch and observe the situation, and then delicately walk towards the plate and eat. They didn't like much of interference.

Lonesome Pigeon

Papa longed so much for pigeons, but they rarely visited. Here there are so many, but unwelcome :(







Here are some random pics from their usual gatherings..

And here is our favorite squirrel, doing some naughty, cute and funny acts. They were so brave and fearless, that if you sit and don't move for a while, they won't mind crossing over you. I remember once, in summer afternoon, mummy was lying on on a wooden takhat taking her afternoon nap, fully covered with shawl. And these kept on crossing her, even when they came to know after first time, that a human being is sleeping there :D They used to take panga with the parrots. One day they had a big fight, and the parrot lost the battle after having a severe injury that it bled. Actually both of them were fond of groundnuts..which made them bang their heads :P

   

And finally the parrots.. They were quite human friendly. Eventually they became so close, that they used to come and take groundnuts from our hand. I think my brother can provide you a better picture of them.

I know post has gone far too long, but I hope all those had patience to reach the end, enjoyed :P

PS: Sometime back I also wrote a kind of poem using these sparrows in the backdrop.