Life, Laughter and Everything Else

I am not a huge fan of Bolloywood movies. The song and dance, the forever affluent characters, the overdramatic endings, the all too typical storylines and the lack of variety makes Bollywood one of the worst reflection of the rich culture and heritage of the India. But now and then, a movie would come along that would touch the right notes here and there. I know a large number of my non-Indian friends who loved '3 Idiots', a movie that I felt hit all the right notes and then sadly plunged into the all too ridiculous Bollywood endings. Another movie that I felt a stronger connection to was 'Munna Bhai, MBBS', a story about an everyday gangster who decides to study medicine. One part I particularly like about the movie is when the hero points out to his friend an old cleaner who worked in his school, who scolded everyone who walked across the floor he had just mopped, who incessantly complained. And the hero goes over and hugs the sweeper tightly and tells him 'Unc...

To my dear friend, As you wished, a small portion of my writing, I write about you. The girl you seek is like an oasis in the desert.  She is a beauty to behold.. Somewhere lost in the middle of the vast sand dunes  You search for her in vain but alas she is far and few. Yet you search for her As if she was your penultimate aim But one day you will find her Like how you found the rest Only to find that someone found her before you So I tell you my friend Stop searching  And start living Because only in the desert is the oasis too far and too few

NS was a terrible time for me, not simply because of the brain dead and physically arduous trainings, but also because of the time it allowed me to philosophise about life. If you were not training and you did not have a PSP to squander your time away, chances were that you laid on the bed in your bunk thinking What next? Why am I doing this? Is this what life is about? What is life? What am I meant to do with my life? Is life about being happy? What is happiness? One question eventually lead to more questions and as expected, it was possible to come to answers for some and come to dead ends for the rest. This kind of thinking did to some extend build some maturity, not just in me but in most of my friends (which is why I have been having a change of mind that girls should serve NS). Then after NS came NUS. NUS threw even more questions at me about life as I found little meaning in solving the grotesque equations that lay in front of me. But NUS was smart. Unlike NS, NUS knew how t...

The person you see on top is known as a toddy tapper. Found only in certain parts of India, mainly in the South, he climbs coconut trees to extract the sap from the flower, that he pours into the pot hanging from his waist. Once he collects it, it is left to ferment and the end result is a strong pungent alcohol the locals love. Why am I saying this? If the British had not conquered India, if they had not abolished the caste system that defined what jobs the people from each caste did, if they had not put an end to a practise that reeked of inequality, that man on top of the coconut tree, that would ave been me. Not that I am ashamed to have come from that position (here the position referring to my lowly caste and not to that on top of the coconut tree). Just that yesterday when I talked to a friend of mine, he was lamenting on how different things would have been if only....The dots are his life story. The "How different things would have been if only" is everyone...