Flash. Crackle. Cordite. Death.

The electric moment arced briefly across a humid Mumbai night. The mosquito flashed in an instant mortis. 
Resonating a sharp crackle before the cordite smell hit my nostril.
She won't incubate another generation with her belly distended with my blood. 

Covid 19. 
Fragile threads of RNA -- poised damocles like in an episode unfolding.
Like mosquitoes the contagion swarms and swills across the globe. Humanity is cowering in homes akin diaphanous mosquito nets, uncertain, temporary and thin in defense. Inevitability lies in the stepping out of our temporary and forced cocoons. Who will feel the bite? The russian roulette is what really bothers one. Who will survive? Inevitability? Maybe.

As I swung the bat to exterminate the mosquito, a portmanteau from two of the bard glimmered in my head

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

...As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods,

They kill us for their sport.

A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
and 
Act III. Scene II.King Lear Act 4, scene 1, 32–37

How to be a Jedi - Control Belief Systems

All humans work basis their belief systems. 
To control a person one just needs to control that person's belief system.

Belief Systems are driven by motivations of gain. Currencies are barter chips of sorts that quantify for a person that he or she has gained... something. The ability to quantify gain is key. 
Abstract concepts. phenomenon or 'things' are often not easy to grasp, hence a lack of comprehension can be interpreted as a lack of power. Hence, quantifiable objects, procedures are needed to satiate this seeming lack of power.  

Power is one of the highest currencies that define gain. 

Since power is abstract, ability to provide quantifiable tokens is a good way of establishing one's superiority in the power hierarchy.

Belief System

An oversimplified universal set has two main categories leaders and followers. Both leaders and followers have an ascending hierarchy along with the degree of power and usually corresponding quanta of currency. 

Examples of the such belief system controlling mechanisms:

Democracy|Proletariat-ism|Governing and Political Systems of all types
An abstract and utopian concept where groups of people feel that they they have the collective power of governance.
Governing Leadership have the power to set and impose rules. To gain Leadership the people can be given so called 'right' to a ritual where someone from the group is selected (termed elected) as the leader.
- leaders and followers have an ascending hierarchy
- potential leaders need to convince that they can maximize currency gain by controlling the governing system
- Currency can range from concrete gains like money or intangibles like freedom to do certain things or systemic improvements 
- Central premise - the groups have 'faith' or belief in the leadership. Leaders get the power to control the system and distribute currencies as a reward and retention mechanism

Religion

An abstract concept where groups of people feel that a deified higher power has control over things that they cannot control. 
Human religion centric leadership gains control over the larger group by claiming to have access and some form of control over the deified higher power as intermediaries.
Often the deified higher power is ascribed with control over natural and individual or collective cognitively non-predictable phenomenon like fate, weather, phenomenon connected to nature, large systems that cannot be completely controlled consistently due to various non predictive elements or very large groups and number of non-predictable participants and actions like entire economies, business system gains, health, performance outcomes in competitive scenarios with overwhelming inputs.
Leadership is such systems consists of convincing the followers that one has power to channelize the requests of the followers to the deified power holder.
Key acts of establishing religion leadership and gaining power include:

• Providing concrete and discrete explanations and focal areas for abstractions and methods for making gains from the deified powers. For example:
• Creating & popularizing humanoid (and hence concretely identifiable) alternatives for the deified power holders (creating gods)
  For example:
• Animism - Natural phenomenon are grouped or listed as humanoid gods (e.g. seasons as gods, like spring, summer, winter; natural phenomenon, systems & objects as gods, like wind, rain, lightening, forest systems, fertility, agricultural harvest, sun, moon, planets)
• Polytheism - Humanoid hierarchy of gods. The pantheon often have humanoid leadership hierarchy. Often a natural progression from Animism, where animistic gods are grouped in commonly humanesque social hierarchy (to enhance sense of identification) but  
• Monotheism - Central higher power as a humanoid god who creates and controls all abstract or overwhelming or unexplainable or non-predictive phenomenon or objects
• Guru driven cults - A person who assumes a god-like position
• Storytelling using metaphors to explain otherwise complex phenomenon, like creation of the universe and in the process ascribing power to the deified power (often referred to as a god)
• Myth creation to enhance retention through repeated story-telling
• Constructing and popularizing methods to gain from the god(s):
• Rituals 
• Barter systems (often connected to rituals)
• Gaining social power by listing acceptable social behaviour sets and Connecting Social behaviour to outcomes that are attributed as controlled by the god(s).

The Armchair Paradox

Heart-aches and realizations are wondrous murmurs. Unscheduled, variously encountered, and harbingers of change inevitable. 

Delicious and cloying is the inertia of rest. The warmth of the experience of a thousand languid mornings steeped like cats basking in the sun upon a tropical winter sunrise, seen from the cocoon of a sleep warmed duvet. 

Vicissitude by definition evokes those snooze button mashing reflexes. Memories ooze honey-esque to lull and dull every modicum, twinge, throb and instinct for inevitable, necessary transmutation.

The Bengali transcreation of আরামকেদারা (aaram kedara) for armchair and supine bliss is more apt than the English suggestion of mere support for the upper limbs in contrast. The trouble arises in getting off an aaram kedara. That it's wonderful? Undeniable!

So is slowly ripping a band-aid off, one hair pain twanging follicle at a time, from a progressing laceration.

Unarguably inevitable and essential. Maybe not so exhilarating. 

Just like shedding accumulated adipose, belongings, and task back-logs before a journey.

The first step that sparks of that journey of a million miles? Sweet chimera and delusion. It's rather unfashionable to dwell on the killing urge to sit right back. Straight after that step.

My landlord of the last eight years and I spoke of the chasm between the thought of change and the perspective of the hard deadline and it's sting of inevitability. In his acceptance into priesthood from laity he opined in wisdom, "...what if the armchair is just not there after I get off it?"

Epiphanies by the Arabian Sea...

A curious sense of peace tendrils like burnt cordite into nostrils once the coin drops into place. 
Clarity is not startling. It is something tinged heaviness of heart. 
Soul stirring like a rasping Adele wafting around inside the cranium while the legs rhythm out a tattoo on the sea link. 
The old man running by bare foot with the timing  chip tied to his leg etched in my brain. Nothing but a smile can warm the face to the cheers of everyone around for the man. Perhaps, that is when the consciousness stops nagging doubts about completing some freaky 22 kilometers. Blurring reasons about why. 
Is the heart's desire impossible? 
A whole world is still alive... Awake... Waiting

[Written - 03/03/2012]

And smile I did...

42.195km was never a figment of my imagination. On 19 Jan '13 I etched this traversement into my being. The trigger perhaps was when I paused in wonderment on a cold January morning two years ago when that old and frail gentleman moved briskly towards the sea link that I had exhilarated at crossing minutes ago. He had the timing chip tied with a black string around his ankle. Faded, yellowing, white baniyan and an equivalent white shorts framed the bare feet in motion. His smile was a fleeting moment wafting by...

Worli and the runners of half his distance raised raised a cheer and the moment passed into my eternity. Respect. I was a few days away from 35 years of existence. 

I've just wogged his distance and then read today of Walt Whitman...

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Wogging is my parlance of 'walking and sometimes jogging' ... For 6 hours and 35 minutes upon a whim. Emily Dickinson has an apt way of summarizing the experience...

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

I smiled at the Sunday morning along the way. Glee, cheer, and encouragement beamed back from the people along the way who clapped, offered biscuits and handed out refreshments and beaming countenances. Policemen and women beamed and cheered us on. Old women and young kids ran alongside cheering while I oscillated between the start and end. I started smiling somewhere along my second half marathon. Things got so much better after that...

The Mumbai marathon route feels like a moebius band. You start and end at VT (or CST). Quite magical in between the that sun peeks up over the city on the right and the moon that simultaneously shines bright on the left over the queens necklace and the breezy Arabian sea.

The day gets on with the business of getting hotter around the halfway mark of reclamation. The African runners gazelle by preceded by a meandering BMW holding up a board proclaiming their (ridiculous) timing like a nubile clad lass between boxing rounds and my muscles decide that the owner is definitely daft and start choking on all the random lactic acid in them. 

Not good.

Worli and the sea-face brings the India elite runners and the occasional weeping women elite runner, sitting at the edges of the event hanging their head perhaps in disbelief and the prostrating grief of failure. Each kilometer seems bloody too long by now. Shivaji Park never seems to get over and the sun now has me squinting between furrowing eyebrows at the meandering route that seems to want me to go back home. And sleep. 

It is encouraging to know that I am not alone as others endeavour along side ...

It takes a certain kind of lunacy to think of running a full marathon, it's a completely different kind of fervid madness completing the darned thing. Especially if you haven't really trained for it and have never done anything red oddly   

23 Jan 2014

Shimla...

I met Shimla after penetrating darkness, and clouds that I mistook for fog, in a Himachal state transport bus. It seemed like yet another two horse town with pandering hotel touts and alarmingly only vegetarian momos.

That night poured its guts out to wash into a morning where the veil of clouds lifted to reveal a façade of human greed for habitation thrown like acid on a mountain's face. The British apparently built a summer capital called Shimla to grow up to a healthy twenty-five odd thousand as population in its middle age. Fast food and obesity was not a rage then. Now, the main city of Shimla crams in more than, a reported, 2.5 lakhs and then tops it up with a teeming infestation of tourists during 'season'. Sweet!

The population obesity muffin tops and spills over the mountainsides to places like 'New Shimla' and other inevitable additions. From a distance, my first morning in Shimla, smelt crisp and clean as a sun dried bedsheet after the Mumbai air. Then, Shimla 2.0 showed up like a scab on bruised mountainsides.

Imagine a seven layered wedding cake--with the layers kept up on tooth picks. That, is a building perched in 'new' Shimla. A night of torrential mountain rain gave way to a morning of soil gouged mountains. The inhabitants of my guest house excited thronged the balcony to speculate whether the alarmingly tilting building on the mountainside would topple and exterminate the inhabitants. The inhabitants of the afflicted construct in turn all gathered together, and unlike rational mortals, craned over the tilting edge to peer at the underside of their building. Underside? No really! Somebody wanted to build some more. So, the vegetation and pine trees holding the mountain surface around (translated to 'below' in mountain parlance) the building was cleared. The rain thought "Whee!" and pissed down and washed the soil away. Tada! Precarious building.
   
An army of people were clambering around in the disintegrating soil shovelling the draining soil one shovel at a time while others were draping livid blue tarpauline in fervent hope of denying the rain gods glee.

Ask someone and the response comes pat... Shimla has Mall Road. And assorted temples. A very sharp transition from British architecture to concrete invocations to a pantheon of gods and goddesses atop mountains. The local patois pronounces Mall Road as Maal Road. The ironic realization hit me when I first paid a tenner to ride an elevator to the roughly kilometre long stretch that sells and displays 'maal' of every hue colour and description in rows of shops. The trade then cascades down to Lakkar Bazar and Lower Bazaar that makes the cynosure of trading in the city. 

Shimla is a prime example of an opportunity lost for telling a story. The railway station lists the 'points of interest with a distance next to it like a take-away menu card has prices sans descriptions. I asked the gentleman at the Mall Road tourist office why the Scandal Point is called so and received repeated directions to it and exhortations to read the plaque there.

Yet, Shimla discovered on foot and experienced in contemplations the version I will recall.

The Clouds...
Stay long enough and the clouds you seen in the distance will come sniffing at you like a dog sniffing you awake on a cold morning. The warm sunshine snuffed for a while, the clouds will envelope you in a dampish cold steamish embrace... Once done sniffing, they will move away or even aerosol you a little before losing interest in you and moving away. The clouds make some of the most surreal lightscapes I have seen outside of an aircraft flying thousands of feet aloft. Travelling between Solan and Shimla, the sunsets are breathtaking with the clouds swirling around an orange orb. Edward Munch made ice cream in the sky with a swirling cloud strokes that swirled a palette from orange and magenta to lilac, purple, and mid night blue to bring in the evening. The clouds play peek-a-boo with our solar lantern and glow edge of the hills to fire with a brooding grey on top. Then night comes, the cloud curtain  draws back to show the sky ablaze with a billion stars on an inky blue-black night. 

The Flora and the rocks...
It is in the space between habitation that Himachal comes into its own. I experienced Himachal in a cusp of seasons as the rains furied, then abated leaving behind soft sunshine before the roll on to winter starts. Left alone, the conifers tower on either side of the black tarmac ribbon. The deodars reach out to the skies and make the sunshine glimmer in your eye. The creepers cascade down the boughs of the tallest trees like a cataract frozen as leaves. The cheel sprouts a livid young bottle brush green covering the mountainside. The sunshine spurts out in fingers of god through a cloud filigree to paint the rolling green landscape in light and shade. 
Little wild flowers sparkle pink, orange, red, yellow, lilac, indigo, and white like stars on earth through the fern fronds, grass, and green carpet shivering in the mountain breeze.  

When Shelly met Coldplay

A gazillion stars wept and splattered their dying tears across a cloudless sky in vain. The Queen's necklace Arabian sea lapped fetid around the feckless concrete tetrapods

Chris Martin crooned

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

I'm gonna give you my heart

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

'Cause you light up the path

I don't care, go on and tear me apart

I don't care if you do, ooh

'Cause in a sky, 'cause in a sky full of stars

I think I saw you

'Cause you're a sky, 'cause you're a sky full of stars

I wanna die in your arms

'Cause you get lighter the more it gets dark

I'm gonna give you my heart

3 Nov 2014

Orange Eye Flights

Orange... The colour of flight... Departure... The colour of the orb driving the blue black from  the horizon into grey and blue as the tears of slumber interrupted dry upon the flight dessicated cornea.

The orange luminance  calmly stares back through the journey acned port hole panes. A sea of cotton  candy clouds mist and shroud the morn and mocks the sleep left behind, cools the purring affection of the warm pools of kittens left behind with slumber on pillows that smell home . 

Early morning orange eye business flights. The orange orb eyeballs the reddened eyeballs peering at the rising warmth. Slumber denied, the eyes that look, feel straight out of a chlorinated pool. Only the body around eyeball is unrefreshed and the soul unquenched.

Day over, business done, the orange dribbles  zip away on the tarmac as flesh and bone urges aviation fuel enflamed metal to fight. The halogen orange that pools amongst the darkness of the moments before leaving a city cohabitated for hours for business. 

The twinkling arteries of a city throbbing and pulsating with traffic. Contrasted by the Swarovski crystal bits of whites of habitation spied upon from the vantage of flight.

Habitation congealed instinctively together among the depths of darkness leading back home, the sighting of life many leagues below an airborne diving bell. The strength of a city laid out hollow man orange arteries and veins, nude and undressed beneath a microscope. Metropolises throb thick.bustling with traffic engorged roadways and petre off to outskirts where the traffic blood flow is scant and the orange of the highway illumination is spread further. The darkness is quick to dart betwixt the orange,  to reveal the lack of life flow. Orange arterioles over swathes of dark seas that cognition matches from repeated traversing. The yellowing orange of a coastline murmuring to the relentless brine. The brine knows the unseen horizon, now blind, waiting for the orange to scimitar it back, at orange eye flights ferrying reddened eyeballs.

The Fat Lady's Swansong

They say that is not over till the fat lady sings. Summer's fat lady's aria has plumped the mangoes sweetened the litchis like dew drops of nectar and enveloped us in her rather warm swansong of heat and beads of sweat. We sweat, we hope, we sigh, we chafe, and breathe the heavy stupor pushed at us by the swirling ceiling fans. We walk the dingy Mumbai sea line and thrust our necks like dogs from a car window at few the gusts across the blackish brackish swill as the city curls its lips and curves a halogen orange twinkle at the corners at the end of the Queen's Necklace. ATMs for free and Cafes in exchange of money offer air-conditioned moments of futile weekend relief. The weekend, the summer, and the land's end are all slipping away in time while we honk and nudge like lemmings to check out the waves through darkness.

Monsoon is waiting in the wings and has sent a sprinkle of little initial relief and and her Midsummer-esque fairy seems to say

'I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone. 

Our Queen and all her elves come here anon.'

The waves await the high-tide and expectantly slap and gurgle with a fishy smell at some random rock and bits of concrete in at the Bandra promenade. Countless nameless couples get all affectionate at the turn of season and nuzzle and get selfies in place waiting to make it to the newsrags on a new day, ignoring the BMC exhortations warning against being idiots and tempting the sea to sweep them into its bosom at a surge, in exchange for some random indestructible plastic flotsam and jetsam they must've offered to the waves a while ago with the multitudes that eat and drink and litter like it's a basic excretory function.

It's a good time to be at Candies. It's past the discount hour and dark outside and smells of heat and not enough drizzle. The food is cheap. Cyril's generosity fills our bellies with more cookies, and chips and diced up cake bits than we have bought in our last couple of visits. 

(This was written as monsoon clouds were embracing Mumbai... Somehow, feelings granulated to words agreeing together are like a sigh that seeks conclusion ... Often not requited. Lying in the draft box, a revisitation evokes something within akin to a hint of wistful fragrance. 

Uncaged it is now, to be all without...)

Morning opus

Waking up to a morning dream is living in a reverie for a moment.
Divinities conspired and a handful of relevant stars just clicked into the right location to blossom the moment.
Like behind a roaring cascade the monsoon poured torrents between the foliage outside and picture of contentment within. Mommy Catty nodded off looking at her trio of kitties congealed into a happy and warm pool of purrs hugging a pair of boots. Either armpits of mine had warm curls of a cat each when a dream illusioned a fragment of happy unreality.
27-7-2013

The morning palette

Another morning rolls in to drench me with the sounds, smells, and experiences of this city. The window of green leaves, cloud of sparrow twitters, and purring kitties at my belly is a contrast to the impatiently honking and hurrying torrent just across the balcony.

I will soon dive in and kayak through the rapids of petrol, diesel, CNG and God knows what fumes. I'll jostle on auto-pilot and think of work till I reach my coop for the day. To exchange life and time for baubles to continue the moebius strip.

Another morning will soon be there...

Silence in motion

The silence moved with me. Pondering while I read of Ancient Evenings and of Distant Music from a slim little novel from happier times many light years away.  Kincaid and Francesca circled as moths around their flickering flames of yearning.

The Harbour line rakes whoosh in always behind the advertised time and whine away old and less shiny, stuffed with humanity as in an indifferent teddy bear. A little musty, well worn, and weary to the look, peeking from the open seams. Comforting though in a I-know-this-and-not-changing-anytime soon sort of a way. 

Reading about how "... in a universe of ambiguity, this kind of certainty comes only once, and never again, no matter how many lifetimes you live..." makes for a strange transport on a Saturday evening. The "Why"s of a giving swirl in a cranium stilled.

Peregrine spirit musing on sliver of memory. Beatitude. Wistful. A memory that weighs the heart.  

Given along with Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Experienced apart. Felt.

Planet Death Star

The whispers scampered like rats on Facebook. The man is dead. RIP. Good riddance too (in a more muted tone). I expected to wake up to a identical and boldface headlines. A rather uneasy peace greeted the morning and I began to enjoy unusually peaceful and non-stifling start of a ride to office. 
Diwali has its good sides I thought. Till I reached Kalanagar and saw the throngs. Buzz flies and security sniffed at impending death. Necks craned at other craned necks and khakis squinted at the traffic flowing by just so that they could ignore the ignominy of randomly parked cars and bikes bang in the middle of a busy Kalanagar junction.
I flowed on towards work like a popcorn in a stream, weaving along and getting soaked in the day.
By the time I reached office I'd started to feel that something was amiss. It itched somewhere like a unreachable vexation. Dramatic mails releasing the happy children from the school of the production flow saw me leave a deserted floor at an unearthly early hour and the anvil of realization hit me on the way back... 
The traffic police! Whoa! Where were the hectoring sentinels amiss from their vigils at the junctions? The traffic flowed serene and obedient reflecting aeons of disciplining. 

The stormtroopers registered increasing on the mental Geiger counter as I neared Bandra and hung like a shroud around the vultures waiting for a news of a death.  

Mumbai's Planet Death Star proved all of those words. For the remainder of the Diwali week the bandobast was only around Planet Death Star leaving the traffic unattended and obedient and a city on skeletal security. I stopped on the flyover on my way back. The news of a reviving heartbeat had still not withdrawn the death vigil and the dotted the night while the Diwali smog shrouded the night. A city, waiting. For Bal Thackeray's breath.

  

Roaring landscape and a little bliss...

The Mumbai-Pune ride is like an old friend. The conversations are silent and filled with each other's thoughts--whispered like a track looping through the hills and the brain. The rattle bump of Mumbai gets over a little after Panvel and soon Khadala is bit too close too wait and savour. 

Winter in the morning air rushes by the journey, happy, crisp, uphill and soon envelopes in a welcoming uptake. The tarmac eases like fading vestiges of Mumbai and past Panvel it is placid and like a magic carpet.

Like holding your breath in a pool and looking up to a total internal reflection, the azure sky cleanses the mind of stray thoughts... That's when the roar of the engine becomes one with the ride. The traffic, the lumpy way of the paver blocks and the acne marked lunar-scape of millions behind, the engine-growl is not a constant clearing of throat to get rid of the cloying pollutants of the city when you wake up. Rather it reflects the gradient and the curve that reveals foliage and the verdant mountains that waft by like a Forest Essentials advertisement. The mountain looping by is addictive and lulling. The upward gradient and the lonely temple with monkeys whooping across the road is careful designed to pause the greenery and granite and record it in the peripheral vision of the mind. Khandala is soon behind and the slow scourge of a growing concrete Pune is soon rolling in.

Over too soon, the ride still croons of a little vestige of bliss. The laziness that wreathes Pune helps...

Gently Orange Inhaled Grey

Submerged in a misty grey chill of an impending winter the morning soiled odours pulled away without a tug. Bobbing like a marker cork in a wave test pool I wafted through the obvious signs of receding industry speeding towards my karmic cycle of labour-linked sustenance.
Granite ballast shards treacled by motion paved to horizon. Unwhitened by the tooth paste promises flashed on televisions and grease spray recipients of millions of axles whirring by, the oft shat on sleepers banded by steel are keerrrruping through early morning consciousness like a comb running through teeth. The rails are the ignored travellers' yin and yang-burnished, shining, use-shined on top and rust browned laziness impaled to inexplicable perpetuity.
The sun has been holding its breath for a while as it dives gradually and relentlessly diving through, making the clouds paler with progress. The clouds clung on to the sun's progress with viscosity preserving the modesty of the mountain tops  like strategically draped limbs of a glow lit nude portrait.

The sweaty labourer smell of wild marigolds is flowing orange. Fleeting fields of wild marigolds hit the senses like an over ripened fruit with with a wrinkly squishy skin and sweet cloying ripe papaya flesh desperately holding a lot of slimy seeds--the fields of marigolds are exploding. Showering snaking blue windows and hitting the face with orangeade splashes of millions of beads of tangerine, marigolds lull to a slumber.
Surfacing from briefly from slumber is picturesque along Western Ghats falling off sharply green and the-rains-are-over-browns, pulling wool over eyes to stretch vision towards deeper greens and cloud wreathed spires of calm.
Another return...

Already...

Navigating darkness is a necessary in a 'party' skill. Semi phosphorescence filled with people who seem to 'know' each other. Skeletal fashion wonton wrapped  creatures swaying decidedly little to the thump-bump-bang-thwang emanating from the cochlea killing  boom boxen. The faithful at the bar is trying to grow a mullet (no... Really!). Wedge heels and pencils, stilettos and flip-flops alike sway and wave green pints. Short rolled up sleeves hold biceps nurtured with great effort and much chemical... And the odd happy plump. In tights.
The alcohol really helps ... Soon the music is swaying to the head. Happy people make an awesome sight. Of entertainment and of amusement to the red balloons punctuating in the darkness. DSLRs twinkle many in the nightscape... Orange biriyani punctuated with kheemaed proteins of forgotten provenance  and red wine... Jostling and losing to the Bacardis and Teachers. Still can discern that the rancid walnut on the cake... More alcohol ... Perhaps...

Dora Dora

Sun beams light the leaves in yellow and green
Sparrows are fluttering like leaves in a breeze
The world outside the window is a tempting one
Where pigeons await to provide a little sport
Striped like a tiger built like a cat
Doradora was christened while behaving like a brat
Largely found sleeping whether in the house or out
The appeal to play is fierce at oddest hours

Towards tranquility...

The monsoon rains serve but to sizzle and calm the dosa griddle that is Mumbai. The vapour from the quenching still hangs around the bustle and vigour of the mornings waiting for the glowering heat to return in a big sweaty odorous embrace. Travelling towards Pune is not unlike scuba diving from the depths of the ocean. The pressure of existence and survival eases as one travels without. Both the road and train journeys have their own kinaesthetic zephyrs of their own ready for discovery along the travel.
Travelling on a train to Pune is enamouring. Doubly so when the monsoons are at the fag end of dispensing their succour and perhaps rest and look with a maker-like contentment at their own handiwork on the seventh day. The journey is an imploding dive into a gradient but like a fractual. The more one dives through it the patterns are resplendant with myriad curiosities. The metronomic clackity-clack of the Deccan Queen blurrs away the city of bustle and concrete greys towards the browns of the suburbia rapidly. Blacker sewer flows fuse in a blur of motion to browner little streams.
A compressed look at the journey is like the childhood wonder of glimpsing and running a finger along the neatly arranged colour gradients in a large box of pastels.
The dark skies blur into the grey black concrete of a hurrying city. The girders and strum-throbbing heart-strings of ever growing construction fuse as one moves towards the movement blurred unending billions of granite shards of the rail-track bosom. The grease streaked sleepers kreee-rup rattle like running comb teeth over dentures, while the glittering streak of rails lead towards the warmer rust and the browns of soil. The specks of green have started already like the ilshay-guri rain mist as one rides into impending rain. The greens of moving landscape soon start soothing like a chamomile tea kicking in. The foliage gradients take off towards the already calming verdant blur. Bright uniform rainfed swatches of the farmers' toil rush to meet the natural darker greens of nature's spontaneity towards the horizon.
Enter the Western Ghats in a crescendo lofting the experience towards the clouds covers. The olfactory senses lessening sweat grime soot and more of the seas little wild flowers dotting the greens with pinks and yellow, the moss clasping the mountainside, and the spray of the cataracts cascading like hundreds of rivulets of milk tumbling past. It's like swirling slowly into the clouds. The clouds around the mountains are drift closer and swirl as cotton candy mists softly wisping the dense flora covered gentle undulations. Through the mists glimpses of ant-like vehicles tendril and stream on ribbons of tarmac past Khandala, Lonavala and beyond.
The speed too eases soporified by the mountainous gradient towards a brief halt triggered by an unseen signal. Enough to show signs at Malavli beckoning at the forts and Buddhist caves of Karla. The sleepy eyed doggy on the plaform cranes to look briefly before quickly resuming slumber as we move towards a soporific Pune.

Stay at Home Dads... (excerpts from a Facebook parley)

Josh shared a link on Facebook Why Men Can't Have It All; with a comment that went...
‎"Many men buy into this mentality or stereotype without thought, and assume that they are not good caregivers, that not much is expected from them as fathers, that they are bumbling fools when it comes to family."

Just wondering how many women (even those who are educated, earning and, apparently, more emancipated) would be fine with the idea of a stay-at-home husband who prefers to be with his children.

I was reading about Mary Kom and responded with a link... As women's boxing joins the Olympics, Rahul Bhattacharya profiles the phenomenal Mary Kom—five-times world champion and mother of two—who has had to battle against far more than just her opponents in the ring...

This article about Mary Kom is an interesting 'proof' about the silent man behind a successful woman. Also how a woman CAN succeed... Even after becoming a mother...

As usual, I thought that I was supporting the cause till I was told

 ‎Ignatius, this is not about a 'silent' partner (man or womam) behind a 'successful' one. This is about men and women both believing in stereotypes rather than themselves. And that women can succeed despite having children is no longer a debate.


So I responded...

Jasodhara, :) interesting deja vu of you scything down points like you would like in a debating competition :D

I realized that you were focussed on the woman's perspective while I was thinking about the man's...

Allow me to qualify my statement... being a silent partner does not mean 'not believing' ... Perhaps, the silence is proof of a greater belief and strength, especially since the traditional stereo type is supposed to do otherwise. 
How many men do you ever see voicing a positive stance in any of such 'discussions'?

Perhaps you did not consider that I was trying to reinforce your comment about women (and men) being unaccepting about men as primary care givers and yes, adhering to stereotypes... The article is about an exception that proves the accepted rule...

It is a clearly demarcated category... Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stay-at-home_dad
Also read http://www.callister.co.nz/fathers-as-primary-caregivers.pdf  and about the societal back lash about gender role reversal

Even books like "Do Men Mother?: Fathering, Care, and Domestic Responsibility (Andrea Doucet)" (relevant excerpt at http://goo.gl/1wdF5 )

reinforce what is commonly shown in media--If men are primary care givers, then they are:
1. Losers (lost a job because of an economic downturn, wannabe writers..etc. *always* with a superbly successful )
2. Eased/dropped into the role as a passing phase (e.g. Kramer VS Kramer, Chachi 420 etc.)
3. Forced into the role (single parenthood etc. "In the Pursuit of Happyness")

The number of men who choose the role to actually help the woman have doubled over the last decade (read http://www.nwherald.com/2012/08/02/more-men-choosing-to-be-primary-caregivers-at-home/aeq343/)

Do read a few samples of men writing about being in the role... Most of them are defending their positions and choices (example... http://www.orble.com/myth-of-the-stay-at-home-dad/) ... and not celebrating it...

Review the second part of your reaction (successful mother...)... It is in context to the man helping the woman go ahead and succeed... 

I cannot think of a movie or novel where the gender stereotype in such relationships has a positive note for the man (example  Jack Forman & Julia's relationship in Michael Chrichton's 'Prey'). Women have it far easier (and better) in each such (fictional) situations...

If one were to answer your original question, the 'studies' seem to indicate (at least empirically) that you'd find more accepting women/moms in the west (Canada, Australlia, New Zealand, and US) than the East... Of course I would argue that the patriarchal tendency is equally strong in both cases...

Once upon a rain in Mumbai...

I noticed how I end up writing something when the rains start. I remember the electric atmosphere in Pune when the people in the office ran out and greeted the first showers on the terrace. I felt the rain, bathed in the energy, and rode back  in a cooler evening.

Rain Clouds gather over #Mumbai... #Mahim

Mumbai rains have a certain 'incessant' nature to them. It pours in sheets and lulls you in the initial moments into a certain soporific and temporary feeling of niceness. For a few moment the heat recedes. There is a cool breeze on your face and suddenly the Actinomycetes break out into a spontaneous aria flooding your senses with the aroma of a wet and joyous earth.

The grime, noxious fumes, the cavernous heat and the flurry of the Mumbai you know is suddenly different. You wake up to leaves and trees washed clean and dripping droplets of glistening freshness. You actually look at the grey and muted sky instead of nervously twitching to jump at the next fleeting local train, bus, auto rickshaw or taxi.

Clean and verdant Khargar after the first rains in Mumbai...

Mumbai has been kind to me. Especially the rains. When love turned her back and frowned it wept for me without while I did within. I have fond tactile memories of the change from walking out into murky evenings to fresh rain-cleansed-pink-light-polluted-yellow-sodium-vapour-lit journeys back to a home where rain quelled catties and kitties flowed in to greet my evenings.
If I ever write fiction, I might end up starting on a rain cleansed zephyr-like pavement before a Bandra-Kurla bus stop. Feeling the aerosol rain in my nostrils before stepping out to a squelching 62 bus ride lit all spectral and fluorescent, hurtling  through the night.

#Bandra Kurla Complex... evening at Bharatnagar bus stop during a pause in the first spell of rains

This city doesn't sleep. Nor does it let you. The quivering alertness keeps the adrenalin flowing. The first rains are perchance the only (temporary) respite to keep you from teetering off. A little release. This city is like the waves washing up brown and murky white foam on black shores and listless concrete. It roars in and gives hope, baubles, a few trinkets, hope--like heroin to a junkie, and then takes away--like the receding wave till you are left staring at the grains of your soul. Hope piled on greed, greed laced with lust, lust blinded sometimes in the dazzle eyed high beams of some form of trust, to a vertiginous and Promethean turn of liver pecks. Till one regenerates like the Promethean liver and becomes one with the cycle.  

But then--don't they say one has to be cruel to be kind? When you are done feeling good, you realize that you are now going to trudge through muck for four months, get stuck in insane traffic and perhaps drown in whiplash of a cloud burst. Really? Maybe not. Travelling to Saki Naka everyday, especially through the aftermath of some rain is training enough for Spartans. As the aeroplanes scream down overhead waggling the landing gear towards the tarmac some 30 feet away, I skid through the rain-water and oil laced concrete towards my office or grid down both my clutch plates and soul precariously thwacking trucks on either side. Ever noticed how it often rains ONLY in and around JariMari. Just out of spite. To leave you no option but to splotch your feet in the gruelly brown thing that passes for water. To inhale the fumes of a million stuck vehicles rumbling noxiousness into your being. The rain pours down in sheets, the your own little space in the helmet becomes your private little sauna and then your own little hell. Water pours in sheets and torrents from the heavens and seeps like acid through pores and cracks that never existed. The heat saps sweat in your rain coat and the fetid water sogs the crotch. Limbo. Cold, uncomfortable, resignation inducing and repeated till you submit.

The drains overflow. Brown becomes black. Black ooze becomes oil slick and chemical. The monsoon starts and continues with ferocity. The city media dusts off their standard fare of roads disintegrating and visuals of people wading through water. You are the disintegration and the wading through water. You are part of the entire Mumbai rains phenomenon now...