Life is in the details

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things...

This is one of my favorite songs, not just for the movie, or the music, but for the lyrics themselves. Put alone, one really wouldn't pay too much attention to raindrops on roses - you'd probably want to run home and escape the rain. Or for that matter brown paper packages - you'd rather rip the package open to see what's inside. But the things mentioned in the song, are small, everyday things that are... for the lack of a better word... sweet!

So some say that the devil is in the detail, I say that life is in the details. Managers tell us to focus on the big picture all the time. So in life, we look for the big house, the big car, the big career, everything! But somewhere down the road, when you have a minute of reflection time, you don't think of that BMW in your garage or your palatial villa in the French Riviera. You think of that rainy day when you sat drenched with a few friends in an Irani restaurant with a cutting chaai. You think of the classes in school where you convinced the prof to give time off so you can play dumb charades. You think of that one night where you sat with friends playing truth and dare all the way to the morning! Yes, life resides in the details.

The number of places where tea has lodged itself into my slot of unique memories is huge! The 12.30 random tea with a friend after a gruelling assignment. A 2.30 tapri chaai after a crappy movie. The piping hot cuppa after stepping into the house from sub zero temperatures. The insane desire to drink tea in the backyard after a first sighting of snow! The 4 am tea with a friend complaining about a painful project client. The memories are plenty. But the core anchor is not just the tea, but the company.

So, life is in the smaller things in life. It is not always a big picture story. A walk in a nippy weather, with a random conversation sitting atop a rock, talking about books, life, friends, people, is a memory that will be cherished forever. A movie with a bunch of friends within the confines of a campus, on a surprisingly, relatively free evening is divine. At the end of the day, its these things that I would want to look back on and smile at, and think back about a life well lived.

One line thought provokers

I don't certify that these are profound existential questions. But these are some random thoughts that keep crossing my mind, every time I get reflective.

1. Why does the mind pursue unrelentlessly an object it cannot have?
2. Why do some people act with animosity towards others, and on purpose cold-shoulder them, but refuse to give reasons about why they act the way they do?
3. Why does one still wonder about such people who bear a grudge they refuse to explain?
4. Why is it so difficult to sever ties with people who you once cared about, but who don't care about you any more?
5. Why is work : reward never = 1:1?
6. Why does hope spring eternal?
7. Why does every low urge one to think that the high is just around the corner, when in reality there is no light at the end of any tunnel?
8. Why is Sub Saharan Africa, the way it is? Isn't the bottom most point of this region called the Cape of Good Hope?
9. Why do I never learn, in spite of multiple lacerations?
10. Why do I always draw a blank, whenever I am in dire need of something to think about?

Trends on Tuesday : Perils of the social network

Today's post is certainly going to ruffle a lot of feathers, as I talk about a trend that has been catching up over the past few years. Social Networking and its implications on humanity.The world is growing closer by the minute. Technology aids people to stay in touch at all times, with distance no longer being an impediment. That said, social networking sites on the internet were a boon to people living today's super fast lifestyles, that leave one with hardly any time for physical fitness let alone social and emotional improvement!

Simply using these sites to get back in touch with people you left far away as you moved along the pathways of life is fine. But expecting these sites to supplant face time, or for that matter be an indicator of one's social quotient is grossly misplaced. So, if I have 400 friends on Facebook, ideally I should be considered one with a strong network. But perhaps I need to pause and think about how many of these peoples' lives am I intimately aware about. How much do I know about these people? Are they really friends or mere acquaintances? Is Facebook really my bookmark of friends, and my way of staying in touch? Or is it a glorified address book, that contains their contact details while having people tweeting feeds about what they're doing in their lives?

Facebook is perhaps a wonderful platform for people to establish their first time contacts with long lost friends. It is perhaps brilliant for marketing or endorsing a cause amongst your peer group. But it sure as hell is not the right emotional medium to announce to your friends that you are getting married!! But in today's world, where people are on the move all the time, and technology is so addictive, with cell phone updates available to Facebook, the emotional connect gets lost somewhere. It is suave to actually tweet - 'had a blast at office party last night' and put up a zillion pictures with a bunch of tagged faces. But ask me how many meaningful conversations I had with people last night, and the answer would be a dismal 1 or 2. Where was the time amidst posing for all those pictures???

Then comes the incessant need to keep putting up status updates and random inputs about one's life. Now why does the world need to care about whether you are running on 5 hours of sleep? Does the world need to know that you are having a tiff with your significant other? Why should the world know personal details about your life just because of your want for something to tweet in the first place? You may argue that I should perhaps not read these messages if I didn't want to. Well, fair point. But all I ask is, what about the fine art of exercising discretion on what can and can't be shared? What is wrong in keeping a few aspects of life strictly personal? I'd put in a post a while ago on a similar trend with respect to gtalk tag lines and here it is.

A very funny pdf is doing the rounds these days, describing the Ramayana on Facebook. No offence intended to anybody, but just to give a flavor of how unwittingly funny life is on Facebook, I'm attaching a snapshot of this pdf here -

But this is a trend. An American Presidential Election was won with the support of Facebook. The current generation lives and thrives by social networking through Facebook, Orkut and Twitter. I am an ardent fan as well. And not keeping with the times and trends will only leave one behind as the world marches on. So what can be done? Complement Facebooking with some phone and face time. Let us not let go of the human connect and make way for the humanoid connections. Let networking not be related only to TCP/IP. Let the age old medium of person to person contact co exist with peer to peer software connections.

That said, now let me put up a link to this post on Facebook and Orkut! Didn't I tell you it's addictive??

Victim of circumstance

Thomas Hardy was a great man. Yeah like he needs the greatness certificate from me. Cut to Return of the Native. Barring exotic names, another high point was the conversion of seemingly benign episodes into having super disastrous consequences. One of the most memorable ones - Mrs Yeobright visiting Clym. After a rather acrimonious start to her relationship with Eustacia Wye post the latter's wedding to Clym, she decides to try to patch things up and goes over to Clym's house. Wildeve - Eustacia's 'ex' is in the house, since he has come a-visiting. Eustacia sees her mother-in-law through the window and hurries to usher Wildeve out the back door. and while at the porch, she hears Clym saying 'mother'. So, she assumes that he has opened the door and let his mother inside and so, she lingers longer in the garden. Clym, however has muttered 'mother' in his sleep. Mrs Yeobright, meanwhile, receives no response at the door, and she knows full well that both her son and her daughter-in-law are in the house, since she saw Eustacia looking at her through the window and she also saw Clym's gear by the door. So downcast, she starts going back and exclaims that she is a 'broken-hearted woman who was cast off by her son'. Sad and depressed, she trudges back homeward and is bitten by a snake. Venom combined with exhaustion from heat, kills her. And in true Hardy fashion they all lived sadly ever after.

The juxtaposition of circumstance and a certain behavior in a certain situation - somehow provides a number of stray episodes in life. More often than not, our hugely volatile moods are an offshoot of these episodes. So in a way these episodes, provide the spice of life. So failure to meet a bunch of friends on two disparate occasions once on account of health issues and once on account of work issues, gets misconstrued as an exhibition of snobbery. The Hardy admirer in me screams to say that I am 'an overworked/ill individual who was cast off by her friends'. But no one reads Hardy today and so no one would even bother to hear my sentence, let alone listen to it. So when I get angry with a friend, - who was supposedly in 'the inner circle' - for not having called when he happened to land in town, (my logic was that international flight tickets and trips halfway across the globe do not happen at 1 hour's notice), and scream at him for his gross lack of motivation to keep a friendship, I guess somewhere I should hear him say "The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible."

Thoughtful Thursday : Girls as best friends....

A group of girls as best friends for life, with no tiffs whatsoever and staying in touch very regularly. True? Yeah as true as the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. What is so different in women being best buddies? The answer lies in inherent traits and societal mores! No, I didn't pick that up from a 'Chicken Soup for the Bored Soul' book. But, yes, thick friendships among men and those among women are different.

The pleasant memories are plenty. Late night talks about anything and everything. A breed with the uncanny ability to appreciate chick flicks and see the art within those movies. Blasting the 'male dominated world', while at the same time giving a nonchalant shrug, saying 'who cares, since girls just wanna have fun'. The never ending shopping binges. Only a lady can understand another's relentless poring over a choice between two nearly identical shades of lip color. D-uh! Men are almost always color blind. They can't tell a red from a green - a weakness that shows up in their driving skills!!!

But being female is not always so hunky dory. As kids, girls bicker and fight over the pettiest of things. 'Whose dress is prettier', or 'Who is taller, fairer, cuter'. These bickerings graduate to higher levels as the girls grow, with the result being full fledged cat fights! Even among seeming 'best friends'. Jealousy and a certain degree of perennial comparison between one another, doesn't allow two women to be as open with one another as two men would be with each other. A dash of over-sensitivity just seems to add more fuel to a fire. So, when she doesn't invite me to her pet dog's christening ceremony, I get angry and refuse to talk to her for the rest of my life. More often than not, I really don't end up talking to her. But reason dawns upon me so much later! And by then maybe she is already married and has a litter of her own!

And one day, coffee in hand on a rainy day, at our respective homes, when the kids are asleep, the last work email has been checked and answered, dinner is finished and the dishes done, gazing out of the window, looking at nothing, the old memories would come flooding back, and one would long for those days of yapping, pajama parties, and good old girlie banter. But by then our close-knit small world has literally been exploded sending the shards in different directions. And all we have are the memories and the hated phrase - 'if only'....