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Showing posts from June, 2009

Kula Deivam and the Act of Returning

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Kunnathur, rebuilt — familiar, and not. When I was growing up, I spent most summers with my grandparents and extended family. My maternal side was based in Pudukkottai, my paternal side in Gobichettipalayam—Gobi, for short—in Tamil Nadu. Like most families, ours has since scattered, pulled toward larger cities and better livelihoods. The structure is new. The pull is old. Back then, our visits were unremarkable in the best way. We stayed home. Visitors came and went through the day. When we were in Gobi, there was one outing we never missed: a visit to our kula deivam at Kunnathur, about twenty-five kilometers away. We would pile into a van or a bus, pack food, and set out like an informal family pilgrimage—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, all together. My paati would make sweet pongal and offer it to Goddess Angala Parameswari, an avatar of Parvati. There were no restaurant...
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The lost years

We walked into the new millennium, almost ten years ago, and life just seems to move on at such a rapid pace that some of the years seem as if they have never existed. We are in the mid 2009, and somehow, the last ten years have all, but been forgotten. The realization seems to hit hard when it dawns that it has been more than a decade since I have passed out of my tenth standard (grade). But, if you ask me when India last won the cricket world cup, I would say, Oh, that was about 17 years ago . It just does not seem like 25 years ago!!!! The years best remembered are captured by events - small or big. The most unforgettable moment of my few years of existence always has to be that one moment - running to school, just across a couple of streets from home, to check out my tenth standard results. It just feels like yesterday. The other events always seem to revolve around that single focal point. Second PUC (twelfth), Bachelors and Masters seem like a culmination of efforts that ...
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Kansas Mallya

The boring routine of everyday evening was further compounded when the usual "humorless" suspects of the group caught up at my place. We were languishing around, and were laughing at our wisecracks, as our low level humor was hitting rock bottom. Some of the jokes (if I may call that way) did not deserve a second hearing, but there was no stopping us. We were watching Godavari , the romantic Telugu movie. If Emani was with us, he would have been proud of us. He would have also tried to impress us with his trivia about Telugu cinema. Not that we cared about all that, but as I said, anybody in the group can talk, whether anybody else wanted to listen or not. It was always one way traffic. When somebody talks, not that the other person would talk, it is just that there would be nobody else to listen. All said and done, the movie was good, and I like Kamalini Mukherji, and thanks to Dhake, I realized that the other girl in the movie was Neetu Chandra (Man! I really liked ...
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