Life is an illusion

Something nice happened yesterday. I finished the book  - Death interrupted after a very long time. Which means I can start yet another book "Midnight library" by Matt Haig.  Like the previous book, this too has an unique - nonreal setting. If we could select alternate lives, any one of them, and live that life,  will we feel happier and more peaceful? Or that life too was just a beautiful unreal imagination, and flawful? In which case why do we keep regretting the choice which stopped us from having that life?  That is what the book tries to decipher. Nora is an thirty five year old lonely woman who lives with her cat Voltaire. She could have been a scientist, an Olympic swimmer, a musician in a band, a glaciologist, a happily married wife with a loving husband and their own bar in peaceful rural England. But instead she just works in a music shop called String theory as an assistant. So of course she is full of regrets. Of hundreds of them.  She is politely as...

What does this flower tell you? Nothing much. This is jasmine. Beautiful fragrance. Heavenly! But quite common in our place. Jaji mallige - we call it. Which is one of large varieties of jasmine. But as we can't get a whif of this from the internet, what on earth is this photo in my blog? Major reason is I wanted to click photo of a flower. And this place provided me with some privacy.  And this photo also tells you that, every Usha, Sasha or Nisha can't become instant professional photographers, just by acquiring a mobile camera. It does not matter how many pixels the camera boasts of. Google image search told me this plant on right side is called red ginger. The flower appearance is so-so. And no fragrance. Leaves look similar to those of ginger plant.    That reminds me, did you know that traditionally in our hindu religion, one should not offer fragrance-less flowers to the God? Who knew HE was particular? This tree has such beautiful flowers - pink trumpet tree. Bang...

Lola Petticrew as Dolours in Say Nothing  The day they gave us freedom, they split us into two countries. Thus generating a continuous hatred, wars and disharmony.  The similar thing might have been done in Ireland too. But slightly differently. The Northern Ireland is still part of the their country, and southern Ireland is an independent country - Irish Republic.  Irish people too have faced centuries of exploitation, discrimination and abuse by English people. And Irish people have struggled for centuries to get back their freedom, to unify their country and to get equal rights.  Here too religion plays a role - the Irish are Catholic and British are Protestant. The cities are divided into catholic and protestant zones. And the jobs, houses all went to protestants.  And the catholic Irish people - they started IRA - a paramilitary organization, which bombed building, robbed banks and used different unsuccessful ways to topple the British government. Unsuccess...

After a long time, we are having a fogless, cloudless clear sky with colorful clouds and orange sun, who tries to create golden crystals on my window. Beautiful!  And more importantly, it gave me hope that I will be able to go for early morning walks, without worrying that I may freeze myself to death.  Welcome Summer. We welcome your wonderful scorching days with open arms.

 I was relishing my morning/noon baths in super hot water in this freezing Bangalore. (Bangalore does not freeze and never reaches single digit temperature. But for the sake of exaggeration!) And thinking to myself "bechchaneya neerage, hachchalu soapage, kuchchukuchchemba chaliyage, swargakke kichchu hachchenda sarvajna". That is not a Sanskrit or Latin quote, But our good old kannada poem modified by me. Which translates to something like "Heaven is no comparison to having a very hot water bath in the cold weather". Bangaloreans will agree.  And don't you worry  about my fluency of multiple languages. We-  the great Indians will be reasonably good in at least 3 languages - Hindi, English and our mother tongue. That makes us smarter than the rest of you, as is evident.  Thus I have been relishing and cherishing and enjoying this hot bathes. Until we received the monthly electricity bill. The bill showed the consumption to be one and a half times our usual. I wa...

I am going to be slightly political here. And being somewhat courageous.  Not really though. I am just writing about George Soros. The one foreign national who is made a scapegoat for anything and everything in India - next only to Nehru, the one foreigner who is well known to Indians and well hated here - even more hated than Hitler. So I need not worry about angry comments from readers - (which readers?). And Soros himself - that a multi-multi-multi billionaire he is,  will certainly not bother about an old lady blogging in one corner of the world, whose social media followers are non-existent. So Soros - he is being awarded by the outgoing American president Joe Biden. According to reliable sources - our TV channels, he is being awarded for being anti-our-great-leader, which naturally means he is awarded for being anti-India.  Yes,  who knows   the plans of great Industrialists? Whom they buy, to gain what?  We, the common folk can not begin to imagine....

 I was asked a deep and profound question recently. What do I do for happiness? How does one answer that? One has spent an entire lifetime avoiding uncomfortable tasks, situations, but not exactly doing happy things either.  But more than that question, what bothers me today is what do I do? From morning to evening? Entire 15-16 hours in the day and 365 days in the year? How much of the unlimited internet browsing can one bear?  We have all heard the story of life of a man being only 20 years and then he begged the life-span of a monkey, a donkey, a parrot etc and made it into a large span of 100 years. But why did he have to do that? See we are born. We grow up. Then we do all that 'phoolo, phalo'. Produce offspring and raise them. Then our duty on this earth is done. It is time to leave the planet. Say tata bye bye.  I am not saying there aren't great men and women who contribute to the society  well into their late 90s and beyond. But what about the common fo...