my fish

The one under the stone is an Oscar. He's dead though. The two silver dollars are also no more. The jewel fish now enjoy their retirement in a cement tank.

Dance of the learned

To understand Kathakali is like learning a new language and mastering it. It's tougher since you have to comprehend the sign language as well as the spoken (padam) at the same time.

A watery grave?

Nandagopal Rajan

It’s a long wait for me every evening. I wait, all dressed up for office, to hear the hissing and spluttering which announces the arrival of my daily ration of water. Often, it fails to turn up on time, and I have to leave, my mind full of fear that the tank will run dry in the midst of my morning ablutions.
But when she comes, she comes with a bang. Often with so much silt that I wonder if the water is being piped in straight from Lake Pareechu. Thank God my buckets are better than Nathpa Jhakri, or I’d have had to shut shop for desilting. But even they call it quits by the weekend, their innards so murky that I have to disembowel them and give them a good rinsing. Soon they are ready to take on the next day’s muck. Don’t get tense; I have better sense than drink something which has a chemical content more elaborate than H20.
I get a weekly supply of bottled water. Come on, stop smiling. It’s better than that piped stuff. Yeah, I’m sure it’s full of pesticide too, but at least it’s been filtered somewhere. But I’m trained to tackle contingencies like this. “In a disaster zone drink tea,” they used to tell us at journalism school in Orissa. Soon, we had the chance to put our survival training to practical use.
The Super Cylcone of 1999 made sure we had nothing else to wash down our Haldiram’s Soan Papdi, the only packed food available, except carbonated drinks. There weren’t many takers for colas in Orissa, they were just too expensive. After hearing the horror stories that the catastrophe bought with it, most of them associated with water in one way or the other, we were happy to be drinking the liquid “safely bottled” before the cyclone.
But that was seven years ago. This is my first summer in Delhi, and I already dream of the wells back home in coastal Kerala which used to nearly spill over after every monsoon downpour. But then we’d scorn at the sight of ground water, often coming up with weird excuses: “It smells of moss…where do the fish shit…it’s salty.”
I’m sure God Almighty is taking his revenge, subjecting me to the torture of having to bathe in water that reminds me of a particular sewer in downtown Cochin. I distinctively remember my chemistry teacher saying the smell was that of a sulphuric compound. I’ve been vaccinated against Hepatitis, but I’m still afraid of all the underworld connections my glass of water is making before making his appearance through my tap. I’d rather drink a glass of pesticide. 

Two sides, same coin

The best thing christian education has given me is the ability to understand how other religions
work. Though I am not very religious myself, I know for sure that I will never become a fanatic. You just cannot think that way when you have learned how other religions think. There is no one RIGHT after that, its always your right and their right. You just have to acknowledge there are two sides. All communal problems arise when you end up saying that this is what I think and I'm right. There is no scope of fanatical thought if you even acknowledge the other side.

To be continued

 

Desert moon

I'm a man of the night. I work when most of you are fast asleep. This nocturnal life style gives me the ability to understand the images of the dark better. At least I think so. This picture was taken at Connaught Place, Delhi.