Memories from Childhood

Life

The memories of childhood linger on with us however far we have traveled on the path of life. It appears as if everything happened just yesterday.
As a young kid I used to love the rainy season, which we call ‘The Monsoons”. I still love the rains. It is the time when the frogs from the neighborhood pond, used to have a field day. I used to love the croaking sound, in the dark nights while slowly sliding into the realms of sleep. It used to be a kind of lullaby, I loved. The ponds have eversince disappeared and it is only occasionally that one hears the croaking.
Another thing about the monsoons was the paper boats. I was fascinated by the way it traveled on the stream of water flowing after a heavy shower. The view was almost like real, only downscaled.
A glimpse of responsibility at age, ummm 10, I think. On a day when we were let off from school way too early from the regular timing, I , my younger brother and the still younger sister who usually were picked up, didn’t know what to do. It was when the school had almost a deserted look that I decided that we could walk our way home, though I had never done it before. I clearly remember, having our sister in between, holding hands, the three of us making headway in the adult world. Though we got picked up midway, I am still proud to have a go, my first, I guess, as the big brother then.
The weekly watering of our garden and vegetable patch by canal water in our childhood home was something I used to look forward to. It used to be so much fun directing the water from one place in the compound to the other. The sight of the water running over parched land and quenching the thirst of mother earth was just awesome. I used to be fascinated with all the twigs and assorted flotsam being carried with the stream and often wondered from where it must have traveled to our land. Walking over the morning dew in our large front lawn was another of my favorites, leaving the marks of my footsteps which would soon disappear as the dew would turn into vapor as the sun would progress on its daily path.
Cycling to and from school, too is a part of my fond memories. It used to take us about twenty minutes from home. The path was along a canal and through the compound of, one of its kind, Forest Research Institute. The winters used to be very chilly. The road to school was full of slopes in stretches, generally favoring us while on our way to school and against us when coming back. We used to ride our bicycles till we were in the final year. While going to school, it used to be mostly solitary and introspective, with meeting friends on the way, coming back was a whole lot of fun with everyone together and in an animated mood.

Life goes on, memories keep following.

The spectacular FRI at Dehradun.

Forest Research Institute

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Humor

The grin that follows, the funny side of life, is always a welcome break from the supposedly serious matters which we pursue on a daily basis.
I remember a time when I was training on board T.S. Rajendra at Mumbai. An instructor had this peculiar habit of talking in plurals, so much so that we started calling him Mr. Sharma(s). He was great in his subject which was seamanship but not so much in English. One night some boys played a prank and hid bathroom slippers of a few cadets.
When it was reported to the duty instructor which happened to be Mr. Sharma(s), he mustered everyone, close to midnight and started his speech.
"It has been reported that some cadets have lost their left pairs of slippers and some have lost their right pairs. I request you to return both the pairs."
Everyone was grinning under their breath.
Once, three persons, a chemical engineer, a mechanical engineer and a Microsoft engineer were traveling together when their car broke down.
The chemical engineer suggested may be it is the impurities in the gasoline that has caused the problem. The mechanical engineer suspected overheating of the engine.
The Microsoft (Windows) engineer didn’t have a clue. He suggested, “Why don’t we close all Windows and open them back and may be it will work”.
Like it happens in the Windows OS.
A Dennis the menace cartoon quip I read lately, in which Dennis asks his mother aboard a jet. “Would it be alright to go to the bathroom while we are flying over the cities?”
Heard at the home of a Supreme Court judge.
The wife was scolding her husband over some petty matter. “Do you have any brains?”
The man who spent his whole life deciding the fate of many a lives was being questioned about his abilities at his own backyard.
A miser in an Indian small town, decided to fly kite on occasion of a festival. He went to the rooftop of his two storied house and while he was busy concentrating on the kite his feet slipped off the roof and he started falling down.
The miser that he was, during his free fall, while passing in front of the kitchen window, shouted to his wife, who was preparing the afternoon meal, not to make food for him as he would not need it now.
He was worried about unnecessary expenditure rather than his life even in these last moments.

Todays pick is the vegetable flowers.

The Onion Flowers

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Total Surrender

Spirituality

Total surrender? To whom? You might ask. To a fellow human being who happens to be your loved one. No, I don’t imply that at all. Here the total surrender is to the one who created you and me. The Almighty Lord.
But why? And the answer to that is that all our happiness that we have been searching for, ever since we were born, lie in this domain. Unfortunately, we never looked up here, for whatever reason. Life’s ultimate and I may add, the only objective is be able to make this choice and be happy ever after.
It essentially means to remember him, which ever way you deem correct, wherever you are, whatever you are currently engaged in, whatever state you are in, throughout the day, at regular intervals. This like most other things in life requires practice. It may not seem a very pleasant act in the beginning, but as one perseveres and goes against one’s own mind which wants to do things that seemingly are more interesting, one does start liking it. This beginning to like remembering Him is not an ordinary physical act. It is the signal that He has admitted you in the “Total Surrender” club and would sponsor your membership, no matter what.
Of course, this does not happen as fast as we would like it to be. Certainly not at the click of the mouse button, as many geeks would like it to happen. It will take years to say the least but once you start experiencing its results, you would not regret it. For it is the most exhilarating experience you ever had in your life and sex and the desire for good food are absolutely nothing in comparison. One gets into this state of bliss which one has to experience to believe.
At present, I do my remembrance routine every quarter of an hour for most part of my waking hours. It has changed my life completely. The whole perspective has changed. I do not have to work as hard for things that I had to struggle to get results. Everything seems to fall in place by itself. I feel so good. It is He who is the doer not you which is a subject matter of another post, another day.
Give it a try as you have tried so many of those get happy tips. There is absolutely no doubt that you will gain from it, one day. But please do not leave it midway. Even if you do, you can start from the point you stopped even years later. That is the beauty of it. We all have seen this, done that. Let’s try this and make our lives truly worth,that it is meant to be.







The picture for today is a Purple Jacaranda against a backdrop of a blue sky.

Jacaranda Blues

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