Ninaivugal...Thoughts

Kalady is the birth place of Adi Shankaracharya, the greatest spiritual philosopher of Hinduism.   Adi Shankara was the proponent of Advaita Vedanta - Brahman alone is real; the world is ultimately an illusion.  His ideal of non-dualism unified diverse schools of Hindu thought.  He played a major role in upholding Sanatana Dharma and spreading Vedanta.  Kalady is a quiet riverside village in Kerala, set along the banks of the Poorna river, surrounded by lush greenery and a serene, unhurried pace of life. Its temples, ghats, and gentle landscape create a natural atmosphere of reflection and devotion. When my wife and I had the initial germ of thought about Akhil's Upanayanam, I immediately went to my favorite, Sringeri, a place nestled in the beautiful Western Ghats, and we also thought about Kanchipuram, home of the Maha Periyavaa, a revered 20th century saint of the Kanchi Mutt, and in the eyes of many, a walking God.  My parents were here in the US in early 20...

 I don't know how to say this but our lives are governed by so much perfection these days that it can be pretty frustrating.  Write an email at work, and you suddenly are sending it through AI to make sure that we are dotting the i's and crossing the t's.  The sentence gets reworded dramatically.  It's all so exquisite and perfect.  That original sentence written feels like a hotchpotch of words.  The embarrassment of writing the original gnaws at you.  How could I have written such a bad sentence! The new composition has the perfect diction, tone and grammar with flowery and glittering prose.  Oh, if you don't want that, in a matter of seconds, it switches to a more professional tone.  If not that, it becomes friendly and casual.  If everything fails, it just rewrites into something totally new that you are left wondering what you actually started off with.  Yes, it's all awesome, but in the end, the end product is deprived of some...

There are songs that entertain. There are songs that move you. And then, once in a lifetime, there’s a piece of music that finds you — and never lets go. There was a moment of madness. I went to YouTube just to  feel  “Sundari Kannal.” But you have no chance of finding just the song. You end up losing yourself in the  pangs of nostalgia . How can Ilaiyaraaja create emotions out of  silence ? How does a single violin — just one humble instrument — manage to stir your soul so completely? That breakup scene between Rajini and Shobana… it has more silence than music. But it’s  that silence  that makes you weep. You lose yourself. You find yourself. You are caught in a web — memories, emotions, fragments of feelings you didn’t know still lived in you. They come. They go. And then — the violin. The interlude arrives like a quiet storm. The orchestra is so simple… yet so rich. It’s not loud. It’s not flashy. It’s  healing . But within the healing, there is...

Some iconic moments in Indian cricket post 2000 are etched forever— Kolkata 2001, Headingley 2002, Adelaide 2003, Perth 2008 and Melbourne 2018. Now, Brisbane/Gabba 2021 joins the pantheon as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time. There is a raw emotion when it comes to sport. Just like the   way you can’t fake humor, you can’t fake emotion in sport. What you see is what you get? At the end of the day, when the team that you support achieves the desired result, the overlapping of emotions between the players and the fans is something that can only be experienced by people who play or follow live sport. The oohs and the aahs of near misses transform from instant grief to a lifelong obsession of  what ifs  visualizing alternate endings. Chennai 1999 was one for the ages and the trauma of that result has had long term repercussions in my thought process. That game shattered my confidence and did not allow me to take anything for granted in life. The 2020–2021...

 It was Sunday evening. As usual, things were not on a level plane. The kids were yelling their throats out as though we had not provided them food for days. They had eaten an apple just about thirty minutes ago. At one stage, I had given up trying to understand these three feet creatures. They had their way with almost everything in our lives. I turned to my wife.  "What now?", I asked. "They have not had any outdoor activity. They need to exercise, run, and go around. We can't just keep them at home", my wife said with so much confidence that I thought if I had ten percent of that confidence, I would be successful with anything in life.  I shook my head out of habit before I recomposed myself to actually understand what it was that she said before shaking my head orthogonally in all directions.  "Next week, we go hiking", I said to everyone and no one in particular. So, this weekend, I took the kids for a hike in the morning.  My wife said, "No ...

Akhil loves storytelling time.  He imagines a multitude and wants to convey a million things.  It's fascinating how blissfully he con construct something totally random and make sense of it.  There is a Neato cleaning robot at home which Akhil is super scared of and so we have carefully hidden it.  Every bedtime ritual involves something about this robot. Appa, tell me Neato stoiee (story). First, it went along the lines of, "Akhil pressed the Neato button.  The Neato went near Akhil's kaal (feet), Akhil got scared and so Appa pressed the button, and the Neato went back to the charging station." After some time, who pressed the Neato button was a game by itself.  Sometimes, it was a dinosaur; sometimes, it was his friend, Mukund.  Sometimes, Akhil was the savior in comforting everyone who was scared of the Neato. Storytelling has evolved over time.  It used to be me leading him on a story. I used to frame whatever imagination I had in con...