Gathering of any sort, where there are more than a few unknown faces, is certainly not for me. I prefer the comfort of friendly known faces where each one is stripped of his or her mask. I enjoy and cherish the time spent with the few friends I have.
Voyage of the Damned is another beautiful book describing the Nazi politics. It brings to light an important point, which normally tends to get ignored in most of the books with similar settings, that not every German was a Nazi or Nazi follower. There were good Germans, who were proud of being Germans and were also good human beings.
I have been feeling very disturbed the last couple of days and I really don’t know why. I tried thinking about it but every time I would zero in into a cause, it didn’t make me feel any better. So I tried to go through as many reasons as possible to figure out the reason for my unrest. Then it slowly dawned on me.
This book delves on the other significant central character of the epic Ramayana, Sita. It’s written in the same simple, easily flowing signature style of the author. No big words, no heavy philosophy, just simple interactions of the regular people, which though are not as simple or straightforward as they appear.
The current breed of Indian writers is a brave lot. They are not scared of experimenting with the set-in-stone mythologies which have been part of our ‘cultural upbringing’ diet for generations. The Rama of Ramayana and Krishna of the Mahabharata have been humanised, making their follies look more acceptable; Ravana is no longer the blood thirsty brute nor are the Kauravas just power hungry brothers.
We’re already two months into the new year and I decided it’s not to late to revisit my resolutions which I had made last year. Yes its true, I’m not joking. I had in all my excitement made some simple resolutions in the beginning of 2016, with the naivety of being able to follow them through. What I didn’t know was that life loves throwing bouncers at us every now and then. And inspite of years of trying to dodge them, we mortals still haven’t learnt to predict them or even avoid them. Anyways the bottom line of my story is that I don’t know where the last year went.
A lot of my online friends,(well, I seem to have more of them than the real life ones!), have taken the 100 days of happiness challenge. Sounded weird to me. I mean, can you really limit the number of days you can be happy, or appear to be happy? What about the rest of the days of your life? Aren’t we supposed to be happy then? Or was I missing the point? Then one of my ‘real life’ friend explained the concept to me.
I saw her on YouTube. A most impersonal first meeting. Thousands more would’ve seen her too. But images of her stayed in my mind all night, making it a long sleepless night. When I switched on the TV next day for the morning news, there she was again. Dressed in a tan color overcoat, looking over her father’s coffin, draped in the Indian tricolor.