Nothing is same without you…

Its May 25th, 2011. A year today since you left me… I think of you everyday and still I miss you. A very very difficult year is behind me. Not knowing you have come into our life, being ignorant and then finally losing you forver…. terrible.

It has been raining since early morning… in sync with my mood today. Not a day passes by without wondering how my life would’ve been if you had decided to stay with me. The pain I went through on that fateful day is only a tit-bit of the agony I go through everyday without you in my arms.

What would you have grown up into? A boy or a girl? Fair skinned or brown? Unruly hair? So many imaginations kept running in my head for a week that I knew  you were within me. I wished you to be a girl and chose the name ‘Samiksha’ and by chance if you were a boy…. sorry, no name was in mind. But then, you decided to crush those happy thoughts and pushed me into an endless abyss from which I am yet to surface.

Life would have been so much better for both of us  if you had stayed around. What was the hurry? Why did you leave? Would be fun if you decide to come back.

Missing you, baby. Please come back….

பார்த்தேன் சிரித்தேன் யோசித்தேன்…

முதல் முதலா தமிழ்ல எழுதறேன். கண்டபடி ஸ்பெல்லிங் மிஸ்டேக் இருக்கும். கண்டுக்காதீங்க :)

ரொம்ப நாள் கழிச்சு நல்லா சிரிச்சு ஒரு படம் பார்த்தேன். அதான் 2004ல வந்த 50 First Dates.

ஆடம் சாண்ட்லர், ட்ரூ பேரிமோர், அம்னீஷியா மற்றும் காதல் தான் கேரக்டர்ஸ். படம் ஸ்டார்ட்டிங் டு எண்ட் நல்லா சிரிக்கலாம். இது உலக சினிமா எல்லாம் இல்லை… ஒரு ஆர்டினரி ரோம்-காம். But கண்டிப்பா பார்க்கவேண்டிய படம்னு தான் நான் சொல்வேன். நான் விமர்சனம் எல்லாம் எழுதபோறது இல்லவேயில்லை. பயப்படாதீங்க :)

இந்த படத்தோட செண்டிமெண்ட் “Falling in love with the same person over and over again”.

சிம்பிள் ஸ்டோரி லைன்… ஆனா செம லாஜிகல். நம்ம தினசரி வாழ்க்கைல இத்த ஃபாலோ பண்ணாலே போதும். வீட்ல ஒரு பிரச்சனையும் வராது. சிம்ப்ளி fall in love with your spouse again and again… everyday. நடைமுறையில் கஷ்டம் தான்.. ஏன்? நாம் நேற்றைய சண்டைகளை மட்டுமா நினைவில் வைத்திருக்கிறோம்… சென்ற வாரம், சென்ற மாதம், சென்ற வருடம் என சச்சரவு பட்டியல் எல்லாதையுமே அந்த சின்ன மண்டைக்குள்ளே போட்டு நாமளும் குழம்பி நம்ம வீட்ல இருக்குறவங்களையும் குழப்பி…. உஸ்ஸ்ஸ்ஸ்

ஆனா சும்மா சொல்லக் கூடாது… சிலர் இதுக்கெல்லாம் அப்பாற்பட்டு இருப்பாங்க. நேத்து சொன்னதையே மறந்துபோய் சந்தோஷமா இருப்பாங்க. நாம தான் என்னடா இப்டி இருக்காங்களேன்னு மண்டைய ஒடச்சுகிட்டு புது பிரச்சனைய ஆரம்பிப்போம்.

ஒரு வகைல பார்த்தா இந்த படத்தோட ஹீரோயின் போல இருந்துட்டா நல்லதோன்னு தோணுது. ஒரு வாக்கியம் உண்டு “Never go to sleep angry”. எவ்வளவு பேரு இத follow பண்ணுறாங்க? சத்தியமா நான் அந்த catergoryல இல்லை. இனிமே try பண்ணலாம்.

என்னோட கருத்து… நல்ல நினைவுகளை மட்டும் நினைவில் வைத்து லெட்ஸ் மேக் வே டு எ ஹாப்பி ஹோம் :-)

Not Me….

It is not me anymore….

Days are gone, I know

Ideas were a blessing in disguise, a boon.

Days are here, I know

Hints are a badger.

Days will come, I know

Proffers no more sprout….

It is not me anymore.

I was Him… The Kite Runner

The optimist pleasantly ponders how high his kite will fly; the pessimist woefully wonders how soon his kite will fall. (Quote by - William Arthur Ward)

Last night I got to see the world acclaimed movie ‘The Kite Runner’ after postponing forever to watch it only after I read the book (which never happened). Just loved the movie every bit of it. To actually know that the movie was shot in China and not in Afghanistan is itself hard to believe.

No no. No review of the movie here. All those childhood days spent by Amir and Hassan flying kites, brought back memories of my own childhood (as usual). I was transported back in time to the days when we had the kite flying season, the hot hot summers. My brother was a very avid Kite Flier and with me having to say, I was his Kite Runner. 

Being 5 years younger than him made him the BOSS and me him supporter. I wonder who in the world chose the summer days as the season for flying kites. May be its the time of the year when kids have enough time to make or buy ‘n’ number of those crazy kites and tan themselves to look like urchins.  I do not know how they make kites any where else in the world except how my brother and his friends make.

It is an art making kites that can actually fly. Lots of paper thin(???) scrap papers or polythene sheets, home made glue, newspapers, those thin sticks on the leaves of coconut trees, twine, spool, etc filled our small house’s living room. Most of the trial kites made were from newspapers. Forget about all that and listen to how these guys made me their slave during the kite season.

As in the movie, fellows did not just fly kites for the fun of it, it was mostly to cut the kites of others. So you see, we needed a lot of strategy in doing this. Core competency was in the twine that gets wound in the spool of the kite. I was like this Hutch puppy back then (literally) going around my brother the whole day during the vacations. So I was asked to help (??) with the processing of the twine. You have got to make a paste of some ingredients to apply on the twine, let it dry and then spool it up to the kite. Now, a non-kite flier could never guess what makes that yucky paste… it has powdered glass pieces, eggs, Maida (all purpose flour) and neem tree glue (the brown sticky thing secreted in the tree – the deeper the cut made in the tree, more sticky glue is obtained).  As a fan of my brother, I was honored with the job of powdering the glass pieces, getting the neem tree glue while its still sticky (am confused if we used this glue), make Maida paste in the right consistency. After all this is done, the experts break in the egg into this, apply it to the entire bundle of twine and the end product is what is called Maanja. I have no clue why its called so.

The maanja takes 2-3 days of preparing time before its gets attached to the Kite. The swing bars, push-up bars in the playground and the clothes line posts are used very effectively to dry this twine. No gloves those days… so polythene covers played the role. Role up 2-3 polythene bags to your hands and start working the maanja on the twine. After 3 days the cut-throat weapon of the Kites community is ready.

All the hardships vaporize in to thin air when we see our own kites soar up into the clouds like colorful hawks, out there to catch its prey. The kite flying competitions that we had with kids from neighboring colonies, foes turning into pals, sharing kite and maanja making secrets, all was fun. As soon as a kite was cut, me the Kite Runner for all of them on the ground & on the terrace shouting out, ‘I’ll get it, I’ll get it’ until I get it. I loved the funny, cute, wiggly tails that the different kites had. The sad part was, I always chased those kites and wanted them for myself, which never happened. The owners claimed it back :(

Unlike in Afghanistan, flying kites in not banned in the city where all this happened back then. But unfortunately,  summers for the kids now has no place for the Kites. Its more of video games and movies. I wish and hope the parents who had the fun and thrill of flying kites in their childhood encourage their children to cherish the taste of it.

New Year Resolution...

       To Take more photographs of The Bold, The Beautiful, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, The Friends, The Desperate Housewives, The Kite Runner, The Weddings, The Funerals, Children of Paradise, Children of a Lesser God, Party (Wedding) Crashers, The Animal, The Wild, The Road not Taken, A Bend in the Road, The Mystery and all other things that interest me... and did I miss A Breakfast at Tiffany's, A Life Less Ordinary, A Pretty Woman, A Roman Holiday...

So CHEESE :D

So Visit http://opticaltrance.blogspot.com/ to get a glimpse of my shots :)

Lust for a cost comes with a cost….

Last week I planned to have a movie marathon and in the process happened to watch this Korean movie titled ‘Samaria’ or ‘Samaritan Girl’ by none other than the great director Kim-Ki-Duk. With it my movie marathon halted for a whole week. The movie affected me so much that I went around telling anybody who would listen about the theme of the movie.

As the thought kept haunting me, I came across a news snippet on a similar subject - http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/24/hongkong.teenage.prostitution/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Yes.. the Samaritan Girl is a similar story happening in Seoul (if am not wrong) where two young girls Jae-yeong and Yeo-jin, both in early teenage try to make money to get air tickets to Europe, their dream destination. Jae-yeong is the one who does the ‘job’ and Yeo-jin handles the calls, clients, cash in a diary and keeps a look out for cops for her. The movie gives a glimpse of the family background of Yeo-jin, who is the daughter of a loving cop dad. There is not a mention about Jae-yeong’s family at all.

The story is presented in a way that Jae-yeong actually enjoys what she does and calls herself ‘Vasumitra’ – a mythical famous prostitute in India, but Yeo-jin has her own reservations about what they do to save money. She keeps advising Jae-yeong not to get emotionally attached to anyone but as you could guess, our Jae-yeong does get attracted to a musician, one of her clients and all goes wrong. In one such situation where Jae-yeong is with a guy and Yeo-jin loses few minutes in alerting her when the cops come to the motel, Jae-yeong jumps out from the second or third floor of the motel and is hurt really bad. In the hospital, Yeo-jin tries to get the information about Jae’s parents but she wants to meet only the musician she had fallen in love with.

Yeo-jin tries to persuade the guy to come visit her dying friend but the cost she had to pay becomes her virginity. But alas… Jae-yeong dies with a beautiful smile even before her best friend brings the musician to her. With this ends the part of Vasumitra.

The second part of the movie is the one that does justice to the title of the movie… the Samaritan Girl. Now the heartbroken Yeo-jin feels guilty for what she has done and wants to get rid of the diary and money that stays as the testimony to their action. Just when she burns them off, she realizes that she can do better than just burning it off to get away from the guilt. And here comes the Kim-Ki-Duk twist. She wants to return every penny earned to the rightful owners… but how? After having sex with all those men - as a tribute to Jae-yeong. This was the part that ripped my heart. Girls that young do not know what they get themselves into and what more they do to get out of the guilt feeling.

The scenes where older men meet Yeo-jin is really painful, especially when one elderly guy calls up his own school going daughter to check if she is in the tuition and not with any guy like this girl he had slept with. Now comes the next stab in our heart. Yeo-jin’s dad who happens to be a cop comes to a motel to investigate the murder of a young girl and sees his daughter in the hands of a man in the opposite building. The ‘almost dead’ expression on the father’s pain is just….. With this ends the second part of the movie.

In the final part, the father sees the innocent sleeping daughter of his in their home and weeps silently thinking what has happened for such a fate to befall his daughter. He stalks the men trying to meet his daughter. He even encounters one such guy in front of his family, hits him hard and asks ‘How can you sleep with a girl younger than your own daughter’ and leaves the place. The guy realizes his guilt and commits suicide by jumping off his multi-storied apartment. Yeo-Jin meets another guy again in the park and her dad knocks him to death in the restroom there. Yeo-jin sees the corpse, does not realize who has done it, scores out his name from Jae-yeong’s diary and throws it off, indicating that she is through with her tribute. Her father sees the diary and appears to understand something and that his daughter will not get back to this.

The same day, he packs some food and suggests to Yeo-Jin that they visit her mother’s grave and  spend the weekend in the country side. And they do just that. During the trip, Yeo-Jin expresses a desire to drive the car but is scared to try it. In the next shot, we see her father driving the car in a very remote jungle…IN the river water, not on the banks and the young Yeo-jin fast asleep in the car. Her father gets out of the car and when Yeo-jin gets out too, she calls out for her dad and the next thing we see is her father strangling her to death and burying her. But wait… that’s only a dream or possibility. When she wakes up, we see her father painting the pebbles on the river bank in yellow color to pave a route and teach her how to drive within the painted path. While she is at it, we hear her dad calling up some cop and providing them the location of their whereabouts. Just when we see Yeo-jin getting a hang of driving on her own, a patrol-car pulls in and the father silently leaves with them.

Yeo-jin tries to drive fast to reach her dad but gets stuck in the muddy bank and with that the  movie ends. Its left to the viewers to assume what happens next. What will she do all alone? Will she get back to prostitution? Or, will she be more responsible being alone? Will her dad be released soon to take care of her daughter? Is teaching her to drive mean that her father things she is a grown-up now and has to handle things on her own? Too many questions… and there can be equal number of answers.

It was a beautiful story and I felt these kinds of movies should be showed to all teenage school children to educate them the consequences of their immature decisions. Wish I could do something about this….

So Long Farewell….

Greatness is not in knowing history… but in creating history… and she did.

This is in continuation of my post on (Tuesday, September 30, 2008) about our Visalakshi Avva only that in less than a year after that post, she is no more. Her soul left her material body on July 26th, 2009 and I really do not know where her soul wanders or does a thing called soul exists.

Talking about dead people’s soul, I had a weird fantasy when I was a kid. My paternal grandma was dead before I was born. So I used to wish so badly that her soul becomes my best friend and help me in the exam hall with answers without anybody’s knowledge. I used to wish she would convince my parents through magic to take me to a restaurant someday… or to Kodaikanal hill. Going to eat-outs did happen… but the tour part never happened :-D. May be my granny had other plans… if only the ‘soul’ really existed.

Jokes and juvenile desires apart… the truth that hits hard is my Visalakshi avva is no more. The great lady who strode this earth until a month back will never again be available, at least not to our mortal beings.

On 19^th of July - Sunday, avva had fallen down and hurt her leg. Her 86yr old body was not able to take the strain and made her bed ridden. It was a shock to all of her siblings. We always used to tease that avva would live for another 10yrs at the least and watch all the current mega serials (soaps on TV) come to an end. But as fate would have it.. avva died without knowing the end of those stories.

On Thursday (23^rd), when mom called me to say that avva had collapsed into coma and wanted me to come there ASAP… I had no control over the tears that knew no boundaries. When I reached Pollachi on Friday, avva looked to be in a deep sleep, only that she did not want to wake up when called. She never came out of her coma. The day had MANY people visiting her.. her surviving siblings and their off spring, her cousins, grandpa’s relatives, etc. All had come in the anticipation that it would be her last day.

But the brave woman that she is, she was struggling to come back to normal. I say this because the many doctors in our family kept telling that she is a will-powered woman and her pulses were getting stronger. With hopes that she would recover, me and mom came back to CBE on Sunday (26^th) since I had planned to return to B’lore the same day. But within few hours we got to hear the much anticipated, not at all pleasing news. Avva passed away at 3:45pm on 26^th July, 2009.

We rushed back to Pollachi and I was in a confused state looking at avva’s body. No tears came. I was only able to murme “why did you wait for us to leave and then die”. I know.. it sounds weird. Avva moved on without any trouble to herself and others… in other words, peacefully.

We the grandchildren present were Radha akka, Arthi, Jagadish and myself. All the others were off in alien lands not able to be here nor … I do not know how to end this sentence. I believe all of them were as speechless as we were. I saw Radha akka weeping silently and understood how much she loved avva. And there was Arthi with no commotion at all and of course Jagadish who was running around doing all that is required for the funeral. Maama, avva’s eldest surviving child, was inconsolable, but he composed himself as was required.

My anna (Magesh), an introvert, didn't have much to say (at least to me). His sad, broken voice asked me “I feel like seeing avva for the last time… will it be possible for you to send me some pictures”. That explained a whole lot of things to me. Later on, I did manage to send few of the photographs to anna and my cousins living abroad.

Meanwhile, Ramu anna had sent across an e-mail to all of us about what avva meant to him. Wanted to share that with you all…..

Date: Monday, July 27, 2009, 2:00 PM - From Ramu Anna:

Like every other grand children, I also have enough sweet memories with my Avva Visalatchi. Who is not famous but if someone could write a book about her, she has enough in her life as famous as any other great souls lived in this earth.

Though she provided a shelter to our family during our tough time, she started filling my memory after I was four. My first memory about her was, going with her to local bargain vegetable market where people buy things in small quantities (Kurru). Later years, I remember my chittis wedding and how she managed every single activity such as negotiating contracts with different peoples like manavarai alangaram (wedding hall decoration), Jewellery Sekar, Adikai head cook, buying groceries from wholesalers and etc.  I remember, she hosted her home for her niece and nephews wedding too. Later when I was 6 or 7, I regularly going with her to ration shop and also timber mart to buy Woodstock and also wood dust. It was sometimes fun and also boring if the queue was long. The reason she took us, we could get extra since I was an additional headcount. Later years, Radha also joined with us. When we start each academic year, she brought us second hand books from others and also prepared note books from unused pages from previous year. She took me to hair dresser asked him to do a close cut so that I don’t need a hair cut for another 3 months. She personally worked with our tailor to stitch our school uniforms with folders and each year shed removed stitches and we used them for at least 3 years. From that age, I learned every basic thing such as how to live even with limited fortune, necessity of survival and also taking care of the family, why and how to help others with what we got.

Later years, we continued living with her. Many many good memories. Some of the best things that I got are only from her. For instance my first cycle, computer science course and also due to my poor higher secondary marks, I used her help again to get UG college admission.

She was like a Ala Maram (Banyan Tree) for us. She raised her children and also helped raining their children. I am very sure; every one of her grand children has similar stories like mine about her contribution to success of their life. I never remember if she kissed me even once but I know she was loving me and her other grand children to the core. A great soul full of love but never afraid of anything including her own death.

I have seen very closely at many times on how she worked on every possible thing to spend and manage her fortune, helping her family, her sibling's family, her children and grand children but I have never ever seen she has requested any help from anyone or at least from us.

With full of tears in my eyes. I am saying this, she never gave me an opportunity paying me back, so Avva made me lifelong Kadankkaran (debtor) for her.

Ramu –  grandson of Visalatchi Ka

Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:45:35 -0700 - From Me

Hi All...
   As ramu anna rightly said... avva was just more than a mere grand mother to all of us. I think we all carry a trait of her in us... and are glad for that.
I've attached few photos from her funeral.. a few snapshots of her last stint on this earth... Missing avva a lot.

Thursday, July 30, 2009 12:01 PM – From Ramu Anna again

Vanima,

Thanks for pictures. Though it is sad to see, it is very consoling by accepting the fact about the successful journey completion of our avva.

We need to understand the fact she has fulfilled her dreams and wishes in a nice way and here we are to continue ours in the same manner.

I don’t why every time I think or write about her, tears are just coming. I never thought myself, I would be grieving so much for her death.

Avva is simple, courageous, hardworking and No selfishness.

Thanks a lot for those pictures

Ramu

Thursday, July 30, 2009 7:55 PM – From Amutha

Hai all,

When I heared avva being sick and it's about time. I didn't quite know how to react... I was wondering , is it because I am here... But when I read ramanna's my tears started rolling without my knowledge.

All I was hoping was that she would b there to see Arya but she had her own plans.

I am sure that all of us will have our own memories of her.

Thanks to Vani for keeping us updated good or bad

-Amutha 

And my reply to Amutha just read…

What are cousins for...