Life, Laughter and Everything Else

It is not often I do a reflection But when I do I look deep and Try to find the reason Behind the things I do And the things I don’t It is interesting how things have changed While everyone continued to toil away I lost trust in hard work And settled with mediocrity Maybe it was NS Maybe it was NUS But suddenly the little pleasures mattered And the sacrifices lost its way Because the way I saw it I only had one life to play away Though only the man With food in his stomach And money in his pocket Can afford to philosophise Until the day I stand on my two legs I might never learn the cost Of that extra inch of effort But by then it might be too late Then maybe it is time For me to sit down And forgo some pleasures And undergo some pain So that the day does not come When it is too late

" Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company"                                                                                                               ~Lord Bryon There was a time when I was a kid who spent his evenings killing red ants with stones and walked around the front lawn with a big stick in my hand and with an even bigger air of a king lording over his subjects that were caterpillars and all other kinds of insects one would only find on Discovery Channel. That was the time when my father was a sailor, the time when I lived with my mother and the time when people used to write letters. I remember the postman in his khaki uniform who dropped a blue inland (a type of po...

I was never really born to be an artist. When I was 8 years old, my parents enrolled me in a tabla class. This however was not meant to last as during the first lesson, I grew impatient with my tabla teacher for making me drum in the same slow, dull and repetitive tune. At that age, starting on the basics did not make sense to a kid who straight away wanted to be able to drum away like the guy on TV. And so my parents' dream of seeing their son become a tabla player crashed on the first day itself. Then about 2 years ago, I enrolled myself in a guitar class. Not really because I had a thing for guitar, but more because I heard girls had a thing for guys who could play guitar and so I saw it as the final solution to my predicament. Soon enough though I found out that even girls were not a strong enough motivation for me to prick my nails on the metal guitar string and so, my second experiment came crashing down as well. So I went back to what I had been before that. I becam...

Recently, I happened to be manning a booth in campus for my CCA to sell cards and other items to raise funds. Next to my booth was another group selling food items to raise money for their own community trip to Vietnam. What was interesting about them was that there were 2 guys and a girl seated there, next to each other. In the period I was stationed at my booth, I glanced at them once in a while to see what they were up to. Sometimes,  they were conversing, sometimes they were looking bored, but most of the time they were fixated on their smart phones. Over the last decade, perhaps no piece of technology has evolved as fast as the normal handphone. I remember just about 10 years ago, I used to own a Motorola Handset that looked quite primitive next to my friends' Nokia Handset which had the ever so popular Snake in it. Before you knew it, handphones started having colour displays, then along came the Motorola Razr that made phones fashionable and stylish and soon enough there w...