Books I Read

In last few days I have read quite a good number of books. To name a few

6 books of Famous Five series,

Few short story books like Akbar Birbal, Taneli Raman, Seikha Chilli etc..

The Ambler Warning by Robert Ludlum

Space Trilogy by Aurther C Clarke

The Time Machine by H G Wells.

Two books are still in progress:

The Universe in a Single Atom by Dalai Lama, &

The Tibetian Book of the Death

Each book pulls.

Famous Five series took me to my childhood.

The novel The Ambler Warning fascinated me with the plot and the depth of research on human psychology.

Space Trilogy took me to Mars, Moon, and International Space Station. Amazing!

Hope to read many more in the coming days....

Abdul Kalam

Today I went to the Book Fare, going on in Pragati Maidan in Delhi. I was in one of the stalls by HACHETTE Publishers browsing through the books. Suddenly, I saw a security personnel in Khaki (with gun) standing by my right. To his right was our former President of India, the Missile man, MR. A.P.J.KALAM.

In the faintest of my dream I had never expected to see him from so close!

He went to all sections browsing thorough the books. I was standing and looking at him... people surrounding him... many running to get his autograph in books written by him... many taking pictures from their camera phones.... :-)

As far as I am concerned... I could hardly do anything except for looking at him... Twice I took out my mobile to take his photo but could not click...Twice I felt like taking his autograph but could not move an inch. I do not know why!!!

May be it was the KALAM EFFECT :-)

Hope to get many more such pleasant surprises and such EFFECTs...

29 Winters!!!

On 17th January, I completed my 29th year of existence on this "beautiful" planet.

29 YEARS have passed.....My God.... the very feeling itself gives goose bumps in my stomach!!!!

Almost 3 decades of existence!!! My birth and growth is synonymous with "new" India's "birth" and growth.

1st decade carried the legacy of licence-raj... an era of science & tech ushering into Indian mind... when companies like Wipro & Infy too have taken birth and were growing... tragedy too mired this decade as the assassination of two eminent national leaders, Indra Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi and the communal violence against the Sikhs after death of the former leader.

2nd decade brought into the much needed liberalization in Indian economy... it was freedom from the shackles of license-raj... now many things were bound to change... the biggest being birth of risk-takers, new generation of entrepreneurs... confidence in the market started increasing but not before the famous stock-exchange scam by Harshad Mehta came into fore...

3rd decade saw a revolution in the telecommunication sector in India... Mobile phones which were once privilege of wealthy became commonplace so much so that mobile phone connections have crossed the land line connections and 50% population uses one... :-) Three cheers to Mobile revolution...

Also the service sector has changed the face of middle class... people have become more privileged.... this is evident by mall-multiplex-brand culture making a mark on Indian consumers...

On personal front... I grew from a child to an adolescent to a "fully grown" adult... the journey not being a smooth one...

The fear and cheer and I-do-not-care attitude of childhood...

The confusion of adolescence when things were changing inside me... I did not know whom to ask what is happening.... ;-)

The so called maturity of the adulthood... when I got (delayed) admission into an engineering college... then a software job... and lost it soon... Now back to the same state where I was in the beginning of this decade but with a difference; I am not alone :-)

Days come and go…

Days come and go…

And years pass by.

The question remains

Do we really flow

Like the river does.

Or is it just

An another day.

All hue and cry

But no Glow…

Slow But Steady March Ahead...

2009.

-----

A year full of

event... movement...

introspection... retrospection...

pain... gain...

hope... mope...

fright... light...

divine...benign.........

The above may sound poetic... Actually it is not... It has been what it has been... I am happy and positive now about "My Life"...

Shall I call it My Life?

NO... I have no right to call THIS life MY LIFE...

I only have the right to lead it the way it should be led...

With this resolution I slowly but steadily march ahead into 2010...

~Sattu

:-)

Silence...

After a long time words seem to come out of the oblivion. Welcome!!!

Things have moved on since I blogged the last post [or posted the last blog, whichever sounds good :-)].

Words are nothing but an indefatigable outpour of emotions from deep churnings in some remote corner of the heart. The more they are used the more thirsty we feel. The more we silence them the more our Self opens up. Words have always betrayed me; when I need them the most I could not find the least. The more I spoke, the worst I felt. I was bewildered. It was in this state of internal mayhem when I came across a phrase; SILENCE IS THE LANGUAGE OF GOD. A simple but a strong statement. All these days I wondered what it meant.

It is only recently that I started experiencing the essence of this statement. Again, words fall short to explain the essence. It is an experience (to feel) in the core of our heart; an on going realization. It is like peeling off the upper layers of onion to find some more inner layer. I am enjoying the peeling off!!!

Gandhigiri or Gandhi's Chapal???

What is this hue and cry about Gandhian artifacts?
It seems they have become more important then the Gandhian ideologies, which he followed first, preached then and finally died for!!!

I could very vividly recount from the film "Lage Raho Munna-Bhia" where the Gandhian character potrayed by Dilip Prabhavalkar says that let all his status be felled, let all his photo-frames be removed from walls, let his name be erased from all buildings, roads... If we want to keep him somewhere then keep him in our HEART.

And here what are we doing: creating controversies out of things which even Gandhi would have hardly cared about.

I strongly feel that we should stop showing this hypocritical "LOVE" for Gandhi by caring so much for his chapals, observing dry day on 2nd October and, above all, calling him Bapu, THE FATHER OF NATION. More that respecting him by doing so, I feel from the inner core of my heart, we are INSULTING him. We, like a sincere-disobedient child, are going far-far away on those tracks, which in all his earnest he would have abhorred.

Has Gandhi's glasses, chapals become more important than his GANDHIGIRI? A question we all need to ask ourselves.

Every End Has A New Beginning

Yesterday, I typed my last email from my HP email id. It was a "bye-bye" email. Earlier I decided not to write but now I am happy that I wrote one. Surprisingly, I was not sad. Though some of my "ex"-colleagues told that it was an emotionally charged email.

Earlier I used to wonder how would my last day look like and yesterday I experienced it. It was a bright sunny day with clouds coming and going (a precursor to my life :-)).

Day has moved from Yesterday to Today and so has Life in search of a NEW beginning...

Adieu, sayonara, do svidania, bye-bye

American Dream... Indian Reality

Every morning we get up with American Dream in eyes to the Indian Reality as soon as we come out of bed. Everything around us is going bad and added to this is terrorism, now rampant on streets.

Our "great" political fraternity cannot come together even for one common cause of fighting terrorism which ,I am pretty sure, cannot be a vote-bank for any of the political parties, regional or national. TERRORISM IS NOT GOING TO SPARE EVEN THE "GREAT" POLITICAL PARTIES. Why are our political leaders so paralyzed to understand this? When will they realize that enough is enough? It is such a shame to the "largest" and "the most populous" democracy of the world.

Terrorism made its first appearance almost two decades ago but still we are no where near to taking a concrete step, leave alone finding a permanent solution to "this" menacing problem.

Can I dare to say what Commodus, the emperor of Rome, said to Maximus in the movie Gladiator, "They ravaged your wife again and again and again and she moaned like a whore"?
"TERRORISM IS RAVAGING INDIA AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND SHE IS MOANING LIKE A WHORE".

But until when?

The Music And The Song Of The Wood

A river that has

meandered through

the caverns of rough weather,

has lived a life long enough.
And moved and moved before wither
Into the wonder that stood
with open arms and with shelters
for all.

It is but the deep blue waters.

The turbulence and chaos,
the restlessness that grows
mounts and mounts when
the river flows.
The calmness and peace,
that movement, that ease
comes and comes with...
she, sea and the breeze.

All pains are gone.
Gone are the belongings.
All pleasures are gone.
Gone are the longings.

What remains is the music
and the song of the wood.
Once she travelled by
in her early childhood.