Memories

Pongal, Sugarcane, and the Art of Holding On

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The Tamizh month of Thai comes with promises of new beginnings. My grandmother always used to say, “Thai pirandhal Vazhi pirakkum”—when Thai arrives, new paths emerge. Pongal is not just a festival. It’s a connection to home and to a different time. A time when life was carefree, when simple acts nourished the soul, and joy didn’t come with a price tag.

My fondest memories of Pongal begin with Sakkarai Pongal. Bubbling in a mud pot over a stoked fire of fresh pieces of wood. The pot brimming with jaggery, filling the air with the richness of ghee. And then, sugarcane. Thick, juicy, and wonderfully messy. Sugarcane is a festival in itself. Chewing through it feels like embracing life’s natural sweetness, mess, shaff, and all.

These days, traditional festivals are more than just about food. They’re my tenuous link to my roots. They transport me back to memories of innocence, laughter, and togetherness. A quiet search for belonging, perhaps.

For those of us living far from home, these festivals become something more. They are no longer simply celebrations but yearnings—yearnings for the familiar sounds, smells, and sights of a life left behind. Pongal, like so many other traditions, brings with it a longing for a time and place that feels so close yet so far! It’s a reminder of where I come from, even as I navigate a different life filled with its own rhythms and routines.

It’s easy to stay blind to that longing. Life in a different home, with its own traditions, aromas, and sounds, is a new reality. A rich one at that. Yet, I can’t deny the reality of the longing. Dipping into nostalgia won’t change the reality of distance—of time and geography. But making the effort to celebrate, even in small ways, perhaps soothes the soul. Pongal made on a gas stove or shared in a simple gathering refreshes me beyond what the jaggery can.

These traditions dig deeper, clearing the confusion about the “why” of what I do every day. Sure, they can seem like symbolic motions. And yes, symbols can sometimes feel superficial. But not this one. This one puts a little spirit back into the soul. I don’t have a perfect answer if you ask me why that is. Perhaps, I don’t want to find out. Besides, I have some Pongal to dip into and sugarcane to chew on.

This year, I’ve reminded myself to carve out time. To pull out old pictures. To tuck into some Pongal. To relive the times gone by. Perhaps even to sit down and write. After all, holding on to these traditions, even in small ways, is like holding on to a part of yourself.

( Here’s something that I wrote in 2009. Something things done change. Even as change dances all around me).

Embracing Grey

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When it rains, it pours. Especially so if you are in the Western Ghats during the monsoon season. The rain brings alive many emotions.

I nurse a hot coffee—dark brown with a sting that somehow never fails to awaken my senses and keep me attentive to everything around me: the falling rain, passing clouds, and winds that seem eager to howl but end up whimpering as the rain pelts down.

Arundhati Roy once said, “The rain was beautiful to watch. The way it slanted across the road, forming fine curtains through which everything looked different.” Some writers and their words latch onto seasons. For me, the monsoon season calls for Arundhati Roy. Roy equals the monsoons.

Blinding sheets slip into to faltering drips and then offer a mirage-like pause, only to be followed by blinding sheets again. Meanwhile, my coffee is disappearing from my cup.

Bob Marley said something to the effect that some people feel the rain while others just get wet. I can’t stay in either camp for long. Sometimes, I want to soak it all in. Other times, I’m happy just to watch.

You see, life is never black and white. It’s a whole lot of grey. The rain reminds me of that. It’s never just this or that.

A whole lot of black and white is just grey masquerading as one of them. That thought gives me comfort. It helps me lay the quest to find and settle into one of those black or white territories to rest and find a small space on the margins.

Margins.

The rain pelts there as well. Perhaps it’s not about the margins, as much as it’s about the rain. “There is no place more comforting than being in the embrace of a rain-washed landscape,” said Kamala Das. And I couldn’t agree more.

It’s all grey. And it’s nice.

Peddling In Memories

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2017 hurtles to a close.  Well, the year is going at the pace at which every year has gone by.  A clutch of stuff that got done while a heap that stays in the ‘to be done’ mode make it ‘hurtle’.  Green pastures, unspoken aspirations, dormant desires, dry deserts, severe floods dot my year.  Peddling in memories is an acceptable indulgence this time of the year. From newspapers to magazines to every other Tom, Dick, and Harry.  I am another random Tom who is going to peddle in memories of 2017.

The ever so connected digital lives that we lead makes everything easy. Including, peddling in memory. I don’t have to hunt between the whorls of the brain to recollect a chance interaction or a chosen meeting. In all probability, a trail would emerge from somewhere.  From my calendar or mail.  Perhaps from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram too. And several other places. So, it’s easy.  That is the indulgence that I am going to allow myself. I call it indulgence more because I am running against time on a few other projects. But this must be done too. Scan the year through the trail I have left behind.

Well, why would you care? Seriously, you shouldn’t. I have ordinariness imprinted on me.  From the life that I lead to the occasional prose that I post. Maybe you could make good use of your time and do something useful. For a start, how about finding how this year has gone by and plotting the next year.  And maybe, what I put down here may trigger a thought or two and you do your own exploration of your 2017. If a few things emerge for you, if you are game, we should grab a coffee and have a conversation. For no other reason other than letting each other know that we are all in the same boat. Some pulling the oars and others watching the waves.

And so I begin. Game?

Within the first few minutes of scanning my feeds, one realisation stands tall. Through the year, I have been inconsistent on social platforms.   I recall how I began booting several apps off the phone as I began to understand how much they control my life. Available for access, sans notification at a time, place, emotion and setting of my choosing.  That in itself is a significant shift. More on that later.

As soon as I put consistency of use as a barometer, it is easy. The one app that strings all 2017 and its attendant passing is my ‘calendar’.  It holds a trail of the meetings, the conversations, the people, the places. The ones that I have declined and the ones that remained. It is a treasure trove and I like a deep-sea diver who has found a ship that sank ages ago, begin the examination.  With curiosity and compelling intent. I want to know where the year went. Suddenly, peddling in memory is, as the daughter says, ‘easy peasy’!

With a short, simple stroke of my finger, the year emerges on the iPad screen. I have a quick first go at it scanning through the months. In seven-eight strokes, the year is over. I see the empty patches and periods filled with ‘back to back’ meetings. At times, I notice myself lingering. At other times, the hurry in glossing over a bald patch is palpable.  Even as the finger does its dance on the screen, flicking a month away like a speck of dust, I catch myself looking inwards.

Specific events show up. Like a meeting that went well and another that went downhill. One where very senior managers in a company tried hard to load a big monkey on my back much to the annoyance of the monkey too. I smile. But only to quickly realise that I must not drown in the easy pit stops of ‘events’ like these. I am keen to trade these ‘events’ for ‘themes’ and ‘direction’.

After about an hour of pondering and a mug full of coffee disappearing these are the four bundles that I am left with. I feel energised. Perhaps it is the coffee. Perhaps it is the ‘being awestruck by the prowess of hindsight’ moment!

‘Productive’ is a label.

The number of interactions / meetings / experiences that I thought didn’t lead up to ‘productive’ results are many. It looks like litter falling off a faulty garbage truck! All over the calendar.  At least, that was how I thought of it when the purpose for which the event showed up on the calendar went down with a whimper.

But hindsight presents a different the view at the end of the year.  While that meeting or interaction may not have lead me to the desired result, the experience was invaluable. That experience often, I realise, lead me to learn something new. Or meet an interesting person and my curiosity helped me power on in another direction.  And thus, the realisation: Every experience counts.

Especially so, if I gave it some time to reflect on how the experience was. Reflection is underrated. And no one has the time for it. But without it, the experience is almost pointless.  Reflection on a periodic basis is important. (Once in a year, is not good enough for ‘periodic’. I made a mental note of that).

Projects and proportions.

Projects and work have a way of evolving.  To expect that they follow a steady pattern in a dynamic world is round pegs in square holes in a shaking lotto machine.  Massive chunks of time thinking through every possible outcome have often come to naught.  One month they are there and the next month, they just disappear. Because there is something outside of what was thought through, that emerged.

Our plans have to be nimble enough to respond to the response of the world, to our first steps!  I realise what I keep realising again and again. I realise I have to draw more comfort from direction alignment whilst getting sharper with making changes ‘as you go’. Put the big milestones in, strike deals but always stay prepared for change.

I realise I have to sharpen my stoic resolve to move on irrespective of outcomes: Good and bad! And the spaces that they have filled on my calendar.  The longer I expand the arc of time the easier it is to see a different perspective of real success and failure. Plan the big milestones and projects but what happens is a function of what happens! So, keep moving and allow for grey. Grey is a good colour.

Henry Mintzberg, a fantastic thinker that I follow writes about ‘PAT problems’. Problems were the problems and solutions come in a box! With the amount of precision dominating our lives going manifold (‘you will reach your destination in 9 minutes’), I seem to be inching towards precision where it’s not needed. If the reason for doing what I decided to do is expansive the answers cannot come in easy made-to-order boxes. Even though that’s a seductive promise many meeting invitations seem to make.

Bald is beautiful.

On a whim, I decided to search for white spaces on the calendar. Where I didn’t have anything written down.  There were a few. Most of it revolves around the Daughter. A sigh escapes. And another stays. The first one with relief and the second with mixed emotions. Other than the time with the daughter on her special days, the calendar points to this huge need to ‘maximise every passing moment’.

Commute times have been filled with calls. Lunchtimes have been over meetings. Coffee has a business flavour and dinner, I realise, has often been a function of projects.

It brings me front and square of certain facts. The number of books I have read and the posts I have written is perhaps at the lowest ebb. Ever. Let’s not even go in the direction of the movies I have watched.  The visits to the doc notwithstanding, it’s a slippery slope and I am stopping right there to summarise.

More downtimes and pursuing passions is necessary. While grey is a good colour, white spaces are important for gray.

‘Just Data’ is an incomplete view.

The data on my calendar is a treasure trove. I have far more to dive into and sit with.  As much as it reveals, it conceals a lot too.  It doesn’t cover how many times I missed a sunset or a saw a beautiful one. It doesn’t cover the sighs and the smiles beyond the obvious. And in those nuances, there exists a world.

I recall dropping my daughter one day at school, and she asked me ‘when do you plan to go to school?’. It doesn’t find a mention in the calendar but a space in time that holds a question of reckoning!

The lens of viewing the world through the calendar gives me a stark picture of how time went. But time, just by itself is not complete. Filling time up is easy. Leading life in a linear bullet train wearing a straight jacket embossed ‘growth’, fueled by the pursuit of ‘more’ is common.  That’s the gravy train to several of life’s attendant complications. The trouble is we never know when we boarded or for that matter, how we did.  However, we board, the option to get onboard to jump off at stations is a choice that rests with us.

So, Peddling in memories..

So, it’s been a good year. Its been full of experiences, conversations, right angles and frayed edges. All punctuated by a hurry and hurtle that has given way to a new grammar. Let me be honest. It’s not as though, I dislike the hurry and bustle or that it didn’t lead me anywhere.  Like a swimmer at sea who has been negotiating sharks, I raise my head to take bearing. While I have covered a very good distance, I realise I need to take a new bearing.

I grab my finished mug, collect the four bundles and head to the terrace. I reckon I have to build vast spaces of empty white. That will tell a different story perhaps at the end of the year. Perhaps there will be more music, more stories, and more prose!

From the terrace, I look at the vast expanse of the sky with its patches of clouds.  And as they change form, I wonder which I other lenses I must pick to look at the year though.

 

A Pink Bicycle, A Rearview Mirror, and A Zillion Memories

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You can’t drive forward while staring only at the rearview mirror. But every now and then, a glance back reveals pieces of you—the roads you’ve taken, the people who’ve shaped you, the moments that still linger.

This random pink bicycle, caught in my mirror at Nariman Point, wasn’t just a cycle. It was a portal—to childhood races, to friendships that felt endless, to laughter that echoed down familiar streets.

Memories don’t hold us back. They fuel us forward. They turn a mundane day into something meaningful.

What’s in your rearview mirror today?

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“You just have to part the curtains”, she says.

We are at a resort by the sea. Tall trees and dense vegetation keep us from seeing it but the sound of the waves reminds us if its presence.

The night went by in a quick ruffle. A bit of a bonfire taking with it some time and leaving us with a richness of time well spent.

And now it’s morning. Am still in bed but I can hear people speaking. She shouts for me. Excitedly. “ There’s a new bloom”, she says. In slumber laced baritone I ask, “where”. “ You just have to part the curtains ”, she says. I do as told and wonder which is more profound.

The fresh bloom against the morning dew or her invitation to ‘just part the curtains’

Growth pangs

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We sit in the balcony. Me, the missus and the little miss. I stare aimlessly into the sky and swishing the humid air around. She sits with a mild frown. A frown that announces her irritated wondering on why her mother is insistent on her finishing an odd part of a silly thing called ‘idly’. It is part of our routine. The acrobatics and drama that are required to feed her.

The missus’s unwavering resolve to feed her an extra piece of food than the previous time, whenever that was, stays on course. A morsel of rice more. Two pieces of ‘bhindi fry’. A silly portion of a small idly. Whatever. It just had to be more than the record before. Progress is painstakingly slow as you can imagine. Nevertheless, there is a score that is kept meticulously in her mind. A challenge that the missus has worked on with zeal. Like a cricket statistician who will announce in the middle of a dry game, ‘this is the first time two runs have been scored off the third ball, bowled by Mr.X, when the Sun is out and two pieces of cloud dot the sky’. Or something like that.

Today, the little miss is more than the handful that she is usually. With a couple of playful pirrouettes that permeate joy in their silly incoherence she tells the missus, ( in an exacting tone and intonation that I get spoken to several times), ‘Have some patience please’. She then pirrouettes one more time and smiles. That naughty smile that emerges from the corner of her lips give away the fact that it is a calculated strike. Our silence signals to her that her mission is accomplished.

The stunned silence is only interrupted by a muffled chuckle that I would have typed ‘ROTFL’ were I online! The silence returns. Sometimes the future arrives without telling. We always noticed the daughter imitate one of us. A small sigh here. Or a comment there. But this is impeccable.

It announces a few things. That she has a sense of humour. That she is awesome cool in soaking up something and redeploying it someplace else with a telling ease. A few more thoughts flow. It takes a minute more for me to accommodate the thought that she is growing. That she is changing. Change happens in small packages. And then these small packages coalesce like an irreverent assortment of patches of cloud that announce a coming together by thunder and rain! It puts me in a tetchy frame of mind. Growth pangs, if you will.

Like the other day.

We were busy shaping a very pliant assortment of play dough with all our might. Me and the little miss. As the play dough took shapes that an adult would describe as a useless lump of waste material, her imagination flew into another sphere. I tried clambering on to her flight, tossing pressing worries aside and co-navigating vast alleys of her imagination. After about two hours of intense work with the play dough, we had a few more lumps to show. And that was that. But to her, it was the world. Of particular interest to her was a sad red lump of what was intended to be a car. In a matter of minutes her tiny fingers messed around with it for some more time. Before she announced “Appa, look at the boat”.

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The deformed tyres of the erstwhile car, she announced,  were herself and me.  With seamless ease she belted a story.  “Once upon a time there was a boat”. Immaculate imitation of how I read her, her bedtime stories. I was, in more ways than one, listening to my own voice with the sing song intonation and all that. My ears perked waiting for the next few lines. By then, her mission stood accomplished. ‘That is the end of the story’.

That was two-three weeks ago.

Today, with the threat of the idly safely dispatched, we sit down and say goodbye to the moon. That too is part of our routine. She waves and says, ‘Goodbye moon’ as is our wont. Over the last three years and so many months.

Today, for the first time, she says, ‘Appa I dont like the moon. He is not waving back.’ Its a subtle shift. Or rather a significant subtle shift. That a response is sought from the likes of the moon and a disappointment pervades in the absence of a response.

I stare into the moon and its unblinking radiance, becoming ever so present to how fleeting time is.  Change is inevitable. It signals progress. Growth is good. The slipping of time, like sand through the fingers, causes pangs.

Open palms

Daughter Diaries,

The little miss is under the weather. ‘Nothing serious’, the good doctor said as he wrote his medicines.   The weather itself has been overcast and hesitant. I don’t take to such stuff well. The hesitant overcast skies or the suffering miss.  Give me the piercing Sun or the pouring rain. Maybe even the angry winds. The indecisive in-betweens that are neither here nor there, aren’t nice. A strange low envelopes me and even my usual panacea, the good old coffee and conversation, doesn’t do much today.

I wonder how it is with you, but I have a habit. When the bad times strike as they often do, after doing all that I can do about them, I take a quick flight to into the past that brought a smile, via objects. Like a memento carelessly bought on the sidelines of a conference.  Or rereading a book and relishing the  careless scribble on the margins, far too much more than what the author and the publisher would have liked. That’s what I do usually. But today I reach for my phone and scan through some pictures.  Pictures evoke not just a memory but a range of emotions that are entrancing. An indescribable assortment of photographs inevitably triggers a spectrum of emotions.

The goat

In a few moments the screen of my phone fills up with pictures of the little miss. Pictures from various times. Like the time that she was a cuddly little thing. Or when she clambered on to the first car seat.  The first tentative touch of a goat. Then comes the picture of her open palms.  Ah, the open palms! That was some story.

The picture lingers on the screen. As the screen stays filled with her open palms, it inevitably stubs out the frown and a smile that seemed singularly impossible, sneaks onto the face. Almost like a Pavlovian auto response. My memory races to snatch those moments from nowhere and gives it a rebirth of sorts.

It was a while ago. I recall standing at the window, staring into the overcast skies, phone affixed to the ear. Struggling to listen keenly. My playtime with the little miss interrupted by a phone call from work, that I couldn’t ignore. The travails of work struck when the little miss and me were attempting to shade the big cat that we drew on the whiteboard.

The call sucked my attention and my eyes stayed affixed to the clouds and the phone firmly glued to my ear, as the conversation lingered. In a short while I hung up and continued staring into the clouds. A deep searching stare. Thinking about the just ended conversation. Searching for answers to questions that can’t be asked here, for there aren’t any convincing answers.

It was a shriek from the missus that shook me out of the sepulchral trance.

Now, imagine opening the familiar bread basket in a famished state, hoping to find finely buttered bread and instead finding a big thick black scorpion that was poised to sting you. Would you not let go of a scream? I would. That is the kind of scream that the missus unleashed.  It is a different matter though that vagaries of a wandering cockroach or a lazy crawl of a lizard for that matter, get the missus to have violent goosebumps that would cause you to think she was practising Kathakali. But this scream, even by her usual standards was something. Something was clearly amiss.

I rushed to find them frozen. She and the little miss. The missus standing. With hands covering her ears, eyes firmly shut, as she typically does when the extremes confront her. The little miss, frozen in surprise, looking at the missus. I looked at both of them, a lost traveller desperately seeking clues to the old road.

‘Look at her hand’ she says.

 Hands

I was on the phone for precisely two minutes and thirty three seconds. When I closed the call, the phone had announced that. Add another thirty seconds for that silly trance. But that was all it took for the little miss to train the whiteboard marker on to her palms. Both palms. With ambidextrous efficacy that would give Sourav Ganguly goosebumps.

In a fleeting set of seconds, there was a striking resolve to teach her some lessons. Enough was enough. Residual silliness from the call, plus the missus standing there with her striking classical pose all got me particularly wound up further. Heavy breaths announced anger’s grand arrival in me.

I had to raise my voice and speak about it all. ‘In a stern voice’, I reminded myself. After all, she has to know about the ill effects of these board markers. It was really going to hurt her as I would have to empty half a bottle of hand wash in scrubbing everything off.  Plus it was going to be intense effort.

As I was about to make my debut in launching a ‘stern voice’ at her, the little miss looked up at me, opened her palms, put on display the lavishness of the black whiteboard marker’s effectiveness,  topped it all with a smile dripping genuine happiness asked, ‘Pappa, Nice?’

If there was a better example of a magical transformation, it doesn’t exist.  The little devil dismissed my silly frown with two magical words. But no, its wrong to call it magic. A magician does tricks. This was no trick. This was no illusion.

My anger melted like a flake of snow, dismissed in careless abandon by a flame from the bonfire. My sermon on the ill effects of the board markers will have to wait for another time. I scooped up the little miss from the floor. She smiled, put her hands on proud display and asked yet again, ‘Pappa, Nice?’

‘Very nice’. I said. There was nothing else to say. There really was nothing else to say.

I looked up at the missus. Her hands were still on her ears. Her eyes stayed shut. For a couple of moments, silence got an accented presence in our house. This topic was sure to return.  That’s a story I’ll tell you some other time with some stiff coffee and if you promise to pass around the smiles for company.

‘Lets go’. I remember telling the little miss in a hoarse whisper.. Amidst laugher and giggles we ran to the bathroom where the hand wash awaited us with a bristling drip.

Ah! Memories. They lift the mood.

Smiling Neigh #WINS

Word Cache,

These horses hold their sway at a small temple in the interiors of rural Tamil Nadu.  They convey colour and sense of raw presence through the lens of the camera. 

Through the lens of the eye, the statues almost jump at you with a neigh of a horse in motion. Especially when you see multitudes of people thronging the precincts with hope and fervour. Cooking the traditional pongal , dancing to hard beats and an alien but alluring tune.   All in reverence. In honour of the lord.
For the ill to be warded. A child to be cured.  Or even a prayer of thanks, for all that has been and in subtle way, asking for the ‘nice’ to perpetuate! 

Today, for some reason, these horses with their vibrant colours and reverberating neighs come before my eyes as I review an assortment of thoughts that I want to share at #WIN 

There are a heap of real cool people coming in today. I have had great fun putting my thoughts together, not to mention dealing with the countless memories that came rushing back of Sundar, Ghost Particle, Manu and several others! People who I aspired to hang out with on blogs ten years ago and who went to become wonderful friends. Yes. Its I hope My Story will resonate with a few that come. 

Follow #WIN on twitter today. And of course, wish me some more luck!