The Scribbling Eccentric

It was raining heavily when I saw her for the first time and even heavier the day when I saw her the last time....she had laughed or was it just the rain I do not know...but even today whenever it rains and I close my eyes listening to the sounds of rains I can hear her soft angelic laughter somewhere in the distance....... It was one of those years when we were supposed to think about studying and only studying. Any other thought that crossed our mind was considered an abominable sin. The incessant bombarding of physics, chemistry, math, and biology was at its full force. I still wonder how all of us survived it without getting our brains blown off. It was somewhere in the middle of all this struggle with my studies was when I saw her for the first time. She was always there but I seldom noticed her. The fact is she never did allow anyone to notice her as much. A little shorter than me, she was always covered from head to toe in a black robe, which they called "burkha...

We often come across satirical statements and messages on various social networking sites about how children in Indian societies are compared to their friends or neighbours in terms of their studies. All of us have had this experience throughout our childhood and have unwittingly hated the other kids with whom we were being compared with. I guess some of us are still searching for those “CHAAR LOG” (Four People) who are always interested in our lives and would say something dreadful if we try to do something that is not acceptable to widely accepted societal norms. It is rather obvious today that all parents are in some form of the rat race to get their kids to do post-graduation and get a well-paying MNC job. It doesn’t matter what the child desires or whether the child has an aptitude for higher learning. Recently I came across a video on Facebook summarizing HSBC's Value for Education Report 2016, which claimed that Indian parents are the most generous in the world. We rank...

Amit...I still remember how shy he was, it always amused me. Not that being shy was a very funny thing but given his size and look, I least expected him to look down at the floor and speak meekly when asked his name. And I thought I was the shy guy! But I wasn't aware that this shy giant would affect my life to such a great extent...... It was class 8 when I started to understand how important friends can be in your life. I had a bad fallout with a buddy the previous academic year because of some stupid reason and when I came back after my vacation thinking that he would like to patch up, it was all over. He had new friends who were better than me in studies and sports. They were the guys whom girls looked up to and I was the shy guy always pulling him back because I was afraid.....always afraid of something or the other. It was a bad start of the course, but I accepted my flaw and tried to have no bitter feelings against anyone (that never happened though). It was sometime du...

Recently during one of my bookish indulgences, I came across the cliched, used and abused anecdote from Mahabharata. Guru Drona, the teacher of all Pandavas and Kauravas, tested all his students by asking them individually to shoot a dummy bird’s eye and before shooting did so they were to describe what they saw. Obviously, what followed is known to all of us. We all have been fed with this story since childhood by our elders, teachers and even those storybooks and Tinkle comics. Even Mr Ramanand Sagar reiterated this in his televised creations. We were taught to be focused like Arjuna, who was the only student to reply that he only saw the eye and received adulation from his guru. The book in my hand however was not talking about it in the same manner as the aforementioned sources were. Here the author mentioned that Karna, the tragic hero of the epic, was studying in the same school as Pandavas and Kauravas, but was never acknowledged by Drona. He, therefore, embraced the Sun ...

What is the emotion that you go through when you think of a refrigerator? The question came out of the blue from my boss while we were discussing the idea of a promotional campaign. Though a simple question, it did stir a lot of emotions within me. For some reason, I could not answer the question and just sat there remembering what a refrigerator actually meant in my life. In fact, any middle-class kid with both parents working would understand how important such appliances were in our lives. They become our friends and pals. They are at times disciplinarians, entertainers or even nurturers. They were an integral part of our families, the unusual family members. As a kid, I and my sister spent several days in the company of nothing but these appliances and ourselves. Our parents were working and striving hard to fulfil their responsibilities not only towards us but also to the family in our native village in Kerala. However, as a kid, I never understood why they worked so hard and wo...