Love

LOVE.........a word that gets me thinking.....this I feel is a word which has many meanings to it. In the different phases and relations in life it takes a different meaning or to word it differently this emotion takes different forms or faces in our lifetime.



The Love that we feel towards our parents is totally different from the love we feel towards our siblings. The love we feel towards our friends is not the same we feel towards that special someone in our life. The beauty of this emotion is that it can be increased to such an extend so as to envelop all those people held dear by us over the years and also those new people whom we meet over the course of our life....

An emotion so strong that it makes man go to great depths just to prove the love towards a person......it sometimes give you those queer aches in your heart when you feel an avalanche of this emotion..........this ache in the heart maybe the reason why the pictorial representation of this great emotion is a heart.

Love I believe is the food for the soul.........an inspiration for us to stay alive and probing us to do greater things in life. Love a word......an emotion which has so many faces to it... which makes the world go round..... :)

Save the Girl child!!!!

India was a country where the birth of a girl child was considered as the arrival of the goddess into the household. A country where women were respected and revered I am not sure when and where this country took the wrong turn and started considering this very gender that they revered as a shame and a disgrace. The birth of a baby girl led to the parents to be stigmatized in the society.

Empowerment of women and a change in this outlook against women would happen only through education, it is often seen that the illiterate women folk in the village are the ones who scheme against their daughter –in- laws and see to it that they are blamed and tortured in case their grandchildren turn out to be girls building up resentment in the minds of the coming generation against the girl child. If the literacy rate among women goes up then naturally the literacy rate as a whole would go up and this stigmatization against women would come down as a literate women would not want their kids to be illetrate and women who has knowledge would not stigmatize against the girl child.

Literacy would help in correcting the wrong notion of girl child being a burden to the family and not being useful in contributing to the family’s income. We can see that educated women are achieving great heights in every field they enter today. Now a day’s women who are well educated and getting employed are given the same pay as their counter parts. The reality that women too can earn as much as their counterparts if well educated would bring down the discrimination meted out to them and thus helps in the progress of the country.

All those who read this would say that this does not happen now and is a truth of the past, but I think no, still in those far flung villages in our country they still have this stigma attached against the girl child. Though I would say that over the years there has been a definite change in the outlook and there is still progress happening in this direction but for this to happen at a faster rate we need to see to it that the girl child is also educated along with the boys.

Ice age...Stoneage..... Evolution happening!!!

Our QT ma'am from MBA class told us about a topic one of her ex student was doing research on; it was the shift in the behavior of men and women. She said that the researcher felt that women are taking on the characteristics which were earlier seen prominently among men and the men were changing in their behavior which was earlier akin to women.

The example she cited was the change in the way men wore colors like pink and pastels which were considered feminine and never used by men. They give more prominence to their appearance by visiting beauty parlor for manicures, pedicures facials and so on, so much so, that companies have come out with fairness creams exclusively for men. They also take active participation in taking care of the kids; they babysit them and are comfortable taking care of their kids even if their wife’s are not around.

In women she said they prefer black and darker shades to lighter color which were earlier considered feminine. Also earlier the fact of women working and earning was not there but today she says the women are keen on pursuing career making them sacrifice marriage and family. Earlier the women used to get married early at an age of 20 to 25 but today we see that women are not ready to settle down until they 30 and then also they think a lot before having a family because they feel that it will dampen their career aspiration which was the way men thought a few years back. The men on the other hand have settling down earlier in their life.

There was a recent article in the newspaper about the fact seen in the matrimonial sites, the article mentioned that they found that the marriageable age of men has come down with most of the men getting registered and married as young as 23- 25 . They also highlighted the fact that marriageable age of women has gone up they found the women registering to these site the age has gone up to 25 -30. The article also mentioned that they find that the women felt that marriage would curb their independence a feeling which was seen among men a few years back.

This has got me thinking if there has been a shift? Or has evolution brought about a change in the behavior of the genders. I feel this research is worth looking out for and I would be definitely looking forward to the findings.

Thulavarsham!!!!! Nature at her best

I have stayed in three cities other than Kochi........Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore and in each of these cities have enjoyed the rains. But I miss wholeheartedly the beautiful rains of my home Kochi.

In Kerala it rain all around the year or almost all round the year and we actually have two seasons when we are assured of rains one starts with the opening of the schools in Kerala on June 1st (give or take a day or two) which is specific on drenching the kids on their opening day to school and the other is during the Thulamasam (a month according to the Malayalam calendar) around September-October and is named Thulavarsham.

I personally like these Thulavarsham showers as it has a special power to it…….it is nature in all her fury. The day begin as usual bright and sunny during Thulamasam.....it gets very hot by afternoon…. even though it is bright and sunny you could hear a thunder or two as though a remainder of what is in store further down the day. By mid afternoon the whole place darkens up with heavy black rain clouds it would be as dark as evening 6 by around 3 in the afternoon. The sky lightens up with the lightening the whole place echoes with the thunderbolt. The electricity office normally turns off the power before these thundershowers as a precautionary measure thus adding to the ambience. The power of the lightening is really known now when it is dark both outside and inside the home .

Though I am scared of the thunderbolt I love it…. the power, the fury I feel that this is when mother nature is at her best. The lightening and thunder would begin the evening performance the speedy winds would be added to this already powerful performance and the last addition would be the heavy lashing rains which is a treat to the eyes and is very soothing to the heart and soul. I realized the beauty of the rains in Kerala after I saw the rains in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

I can assure you that an experience of the thundershowers in Kerala is really worth it. Sipping hot coffee in the candle light at 4 in the evening with darkness all around…… the occasional lightening and thunderbolts……Oh how I want to enjoy once again this magnificent spectacle in Gods Own Country ....the moments we feel ourselves to be so insignificant before God and nature… :)

Weirdo....

A favorite pastime one summer vacations among all of us kids in the colony was cycling, most of us had our individual cycles and used to cycle in full speed in the colony lane. The younger lot who did not have cycles used to play the traffic police giving direction to us and so on. This pastime ensured that none of the uncles or aunties in the colony could walk down or come out with their vehicles when we were on the cycling spree. Not so frequently our parents fed up of the racket made by us would allow us to go out on the road (that is beyond the colony lanes kind of the busier road). Eventually so as to aviod being nuisance we moved into the church grounds to cycle. The church is a very old one almost a 100 years old which has lots of spare ground filled with trees making it shady even during the peak afternoons thus it being transformed into our new cycling path.

One evening when we were cycling in the church grounds there came a guy who was passing through the church compounds, it is a shortcut used by many. He seeing us kids play came by and asked one of the younger ones as to where do we stay. Seeing that he was speaking to the younger ones all of us who were cycling came to where he was speaking. Neets younger sister Geet who has never said truth in her life till then informed us that the man was a drunkard who was not from the neighborhood and was asking them where we lived. She said she was scared and asked us not to tell the truth saying that he might come in the night and may rob us and go (idiots that we are we believed it). We said to him that all of us kids (round to 10 of us)belonged to two families living in an area far away from where we were playing and that we had come to a relatives place on the other side of the church. He started asking us our names and we made up names and told him and we watched him till he left the place and even trailed him to make sure he left that area. To tell you the truth we were scared and the rest of the evening was spend in discussing about the guy and what would have happened if we had told the truth.

We have church family get together every first Sundays evenings in one of the families houses. In one such church family get together soon after guess to our surprise whom we ran into? The same guy whom Geet had told was the drunkard and was from some faraway place. He was a new person to the neighborhood an advocate a new member to the church. And during the entire get together he gave us odd looks because we were calling each other different names (obviously we had given him wrong names) and we who belonged to another part of the city were being introduced as sons and daughters belonging to different families in the neighborhood. I am sure he would have been thinking whether he was weird or were the kids weird. I am sure the reason for this is Geet the liar. Even today when we see this guy in church or on the road we giggle among ourselves remembering the day we all had turned weirdoes :)

Anne of Green Gables

This is a classic by L.M. Montgomery which is a favorite with people all over the globe. The beauty of this book is that young girls who read the story of Anne actually fall in love with Anne girl and taking example from the book try and imagine her as their playmate when they need one. The language of the book is simple and easy and that makes it endearing for the readers. This was a book I read during my school day from my school library.....later on I came to know that there are further series to this book which portrays the life of Anne further on... this lead to the quest of finding the remaining books in the series (thanks to internet and e-books free downloading) I got the full series through net and having read the entire series I feel it was worth the search. None of the books in the series is dearer to me than Anne of Green Gables but that does not mean that the rest of the books are not good .Maybe because I read green gables first when I was so young and became a favorite then it still holds the same place in my heart. One thing I am sure of is that if I have a daughter then Anne of Green Gables and it series is going to be one of the classics she is going to gifted sooner than later in her life. :)

Work life

It has now been almost 6 month since I have joined work, all those images and dreams during college days about work and life as a whole has given way to bitter truth.

In my dream I saw myself as the highly popular marketing personality working for an FMCG company ideally located in Bangalore as it was the city in which I did my degree and fell in love with (this was seen before the campus placements took place) . This dream of working in FMCG Company came to a screeching halt as soon as I got placed in a software firm through campus placement.

According to the placement talks and presentations given by the company into which I got selected. The dream took a bit of a deviation to fit myself into the software scenario. I saw myself as the jet setting lady who markets software solutions to the potential clients who are located all over the country...working on my lappy at airports and client locations .......not being able to see my family for months on end nor being able to contact my friends as I would always be on the move.

This came to a complete screeching halt when I faced reality, the project I got after joining was not exactly of the dreams and imagination I had...... it certainly did not need me to market any of their products (as the are still just making it).........the beautiful city of Bangalore in which my dream was always set in ......... got transformed into Hyderabad.......the thought of the busy lady who do not see her family for month at end got transformed into virtually being home every weekend (happy about this dream going wrong)....... the client location did not spread across the country but got fixed to a state and city..... Hyderabad. So much for dreaming and coming back down to earth with a thud face down ...... ;) OUCH!!!!!! tat hurts :D