Before and After

I had a new haircut!!!

yiipppeee!!!

I'm all set for the summer heat! 

:) 

 

:(

And so it has happened yet again.
Why?
Why is it that this phase starts just a few days before exams?
Why does this feeling creep into me, of wanting to run away, tear all the notes and books and break away from everything?
I love this subject. I have enjoyed studying it all year, then why suddenly this phase of no-enthu ??
Urrghhhh....
Why am I brooding so much? Why am I starring into space and letting my mind wander? Why am I not focusing??

I brought this upon myself.

I am solely responsible for this.

41

My very best friend, Anupamaa turned 41 last Saturday.
41 !
I admire her for many reasons, and the thing she did on her birthday added to those reasons.
She got herself a tattoo!
Right across her forearm for all the world to see!
Isn't that cool or what?!

Peelu, Peeli aur Peellum!

This is the third consecutive year that they have visited the clump of trees right outside my window- this pair of orioles.

Orioles!

Flying around the branches, a flutter of bright gold and yellow, not just one, but a pair!

A pair, searching together for a home. A home to start a new family in a city where space happens to be a luxury even for little birds. And yet I imagined them setting forth on this seemingly daunting task with zeal, with a sense of adventure in their hearts, with the kind of excitement that grips you when you embark on a new journey. But at the same time this very zeal made them seem vulnerable. Vulnerable to all the big bad ugly crows out there, to the telephone wires and kite strings.

As I saw them wandering around the branches, a bunch of brightest yellows and black I couldn’t help but be thankful for how lucky I am. I had seen such birds only in wooded areas before and here they were, in my own backyard!

Eurasian Golden Orioles are found in many parts of the world. Those found in Europe are known to fly all the way to Africa in winter. I could not find out if the Indian versions are migrants or not. One website labeled them as Residents while some other site called them summer visitors. So I do not know where these little friends of mine go for the rest of the 8-9 months of the year.

I do not even  know how and when I got attached to these little birds. I didn’t want any harm to come to them. Sometimes I even had wild urges to snatch them from those unsafe surroundings and keep them close to me, away from harm.

And as they flew out of sight every day in the morning I found myself praying. Praying for their safety. Praying that they should come back home when the sun sets. And come they did! As if on cue they arrived as the sun sank in the horizon, settled on some branches and cried out in their distinctive voices. And every single time I rushed to the window and clapped at their return. When it was dark, they flew out somewhere else. I imagined they had a nest on a nearby tree somewhere.

There came a time when I was not at home during evenings when they returned. So I had not been able to see them for a while. But one lucky day I was home and I heard their call. I rushed to the window, this time with my handy cam. The male flew away, but the female lingered. I followed her movements till she almost flew into a sparrow sitting on another branch.

“A sparrow? No, that’s not a sparrow, its too big for a sparrow,” I thought.

“And what is that tinge of yellow on its back and neck?”

And then realisation dawned on me- OH MY GOD!! They had a baby!!! They actually had a baby!!

I felt like a grandmother, as I jumped and clapped around. My dear Peelu and Peeli had a Peellum!  

And so my Peelu, Peeli and Peellum go in search of food everyday, soon they will disperse, and Peellum will grow up and start a family of his/her own.

And I hope they come back next year, for yet another beginning!

(The author wishes to thank a dear friend for naming them :)

Whats the worst that could happen?

I shall not freak out this time, no

I shall not be jittery this time,

No biting nails, 

No pacing around the empty room,

No smsing ppl at unearthly hours 

asking for pep talks,

Afterall, 

zindagi mein kabhi exam 

di nahi hai kya? 

This ain't your first time,

Whats the worst that could happen? 

Of weaving baskets and stitching cultures

The following is an excerpt from a book I am currently reading. The author was what they call an organizer, working on social issues, trying to improve the lives of African Americans residing in Chicago. The author's work was focused on people living in the Altgeld Gardens Public Housing Project which was mainly a black community. Altgeld Gardens was sand witched between a garbage dump, a sewage water treatment plant and the Calumet river, in the waters of which swam fish deformed by the river's toxic waters. The people who lived there happened to be those who had lost their jobs to outsourcing and globalization.
Here is the author talking about jobs lost, lives wasted and cultures crushed:

"...the scene took me back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betlenut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
I'd always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now though, as I thought about Altgeld...I saw those Djakarta markets for what they really were: fragile precious things... "
"...For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet river, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that's been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Atlgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair. "

The author happens to Barack Obama and the excerpt is from his book Dreams from My Father.
It is indeed comforting to know that someone with so much power today has such sensitivity and honesty.