Ninaivugal...Thoughts

All the members of the G-gang used to laugh at Prasad when he used to come up with this statement Shucks man! I should have been born a few years earlier. I would have been a millionaire. But then, over a period of time, we could realize what he said was just true. The IT (Information Technology) scenario around the time of 1998 was one of the best periods for a budding engineer to blossom. People made money like never before, investing in the stock market and reaping the benefits to the last pie. It was the time when the common man turned into a big man. Let us forget the IT boom and the resulting doom. Let us go back to the early nineties, no, the late nineties. Everyone knew that if you could come to the US for a couple of years, it was well within your reach to build a palatial home in Malleswaram, Bangalore . Make it three years, and you could enhance your home with the best of furnishing. There was a huge difference in the economy of the two countries - USA and India....

Ramu felt the sweltering heat hit him on his back from the solitary ray of the sun. He was lying on the ground in the backyard of his mother's ancestral home in the village, at a spot about three feet away from the well that was the only source of water for the entire household. He was at bliss in this part of the house, which was well populated with all kinds of trees, the vegetables of which found their way to everyday lunch and dinner. In spite of the covering from the trees, he felt a single ray of light peering through the gap formed by the branches of the neem and drumstick tree. He tried to ward off the ray by moving aside slightly, but as he was confronted by one more, its counterpart, he fell back to his original position. His laziness prevented him from making further adjustments and rightly so. The backyard, the well, the trees and the stone used for washing clothes gave a sort of aura to the place elevating him to an unexplainable bliss. He loved drawing water fr...

Boston, easily one of the biggest cities in US with considerable Indian population and of course, lot of Indian restaurants by the wayside. The suburbs have a good number of restaurants well balanced with North Indian and South Indian food. The weekends give us good time to explore these restaurants and rate them based on the delicacies served. Being a dosa freak, my eyes involuntarily go to that section of the menu which serve different types of dosas. In Bangalore, whenever I used to venture out to eat outside, even if I made up my mind for dosas, I would not feel complete without eating the Masala Dosa. Here too, it is no different. Though the menu lashes out ten different kinds of dosas, I would simply settle for the Masala Dosa. Habits die hard, and towards masala dosas, it is impossible. We have easily visited about ten different joints over the last couple of months. One bite of the dosa, and I know that it is nowhere, not even remotely close to what I get in Bangalore. ...

It sometimes requires a lot of effort to come out of your dumps, beat the blues and get into the real world amidst the thick of things. The last two weeks kept me busy with the unfavourable modes of life, and after sighing (a bit actually) and sulking, I came to terms with reality and now have moved on pretty well. A two weeks of hiatus from the world of blogging, I wanted to continue only if I found something stirring and moving to write about, instead of writing about the daily vagaries of life. What better topic can get more evocative than writing about the country! All Indian channels are beaming the news to keep us aware that India is turning 60, but that feeling lay hidden somewhere in the corner of my heart, and I had not truly felt the magnitude of the moment. Of course, the feeling was developing within over the last few days, but not good enough to express it in words. Some things are best left unwritten when the moment does not take you over. One has to wait for the righ...