When The Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Pot-Pourri

It was one helluva month, what with the thesis defense and course completion. To top it all, the H1Bs were getting over even before it actually began. But, right now, the relatively free state of mind allows me to get back to blogging. I am going to be much more regular with my blog updates. It is like one of those television serials, "Amitabh Bachchan in a brand new avatar making a comeback like never before." I also wonder at all the movie artists who make bigwig statements like "This movie is completely different. Such a sensitive topic has never been handled before. It is a once in a lifetime role." What crap! What nonsense! It would almost make me tear my hair in agony at the cliched statements.

I do not want to create that artificial hype and aura about my comeback to regular blogging. There would be periodic updates on anything I find remotely interesting. I would have loved to write about India's world cup prospects, but the way they have damaged their reputation, nobody wants to know anything about Indian cricket for the time being. Anybody wants to be anything now, but cricketers. Today's news has been highly disturbing. Virginia Tech just went through a crisis and one just has to hope that such incidents are not repeated in the future. Depression is a bane in today's life. Rolla went into mid-March crisis, when one of the guys was involved in a mockery bombing case. Though there was nothing untoward, it was enough to send everybody into a frenzy. It is just not easy to leave anything unnoticed, atleast when the world is in a big turmoil today. Escalation of issues is better any day than to leave it unnoticed. It is better to be safe than to go for the cure.

Now, now, before anybody gets into any doubt. I am not a news reporter, neither a journalist nor a philosopher. I am a simple blogger and I should be coming up with better topics!

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