Experiences

How relevant can a play that was first staged in 458 BC and won a goat as a prize in the Festival of Dionysius be to our lives now? I was cynical. Damn it, the hole burnt by the 75 USD I wasted on that completely puerile, award-winning musical on Broadway with a far shorter history still smoked in my purse. But it was a beautiful day outside – sunny and warm after 10 days of gloomy, cold, and wet weather. The play was happening practically next door and was priced at an affordable 14 USD. I’d never watched a Greek tragedy in my life and I had promised Geetha that I would come back and bore him with it. So off I went to watch what I thought was an ambitious presentation of the entire trilogy of Oresteia by Aeschylus by the Bradley University Theater group. Of course I had my reservations: I wondered how were they going to make me care about a story so bloody and unrelatable – hell, the plot outline sounded like a handbook on “How to kill your family and come up with convincin...

They announced on TV that it was going to be a white Thanksgiving. They showed impressive satellite photographs with an ominous haze over the Midwest. It reportedly snowed in other parts of Illinois and Ohio, and even in Boston, but here in Peoria, it was zilch, nada, ille. It rained all day on Wednesday though—icy, pissing rain with the wind-chill driving the subzero temps even down. I sat up half the night on the eve of Thanksgiving, not wanting to miss the first snow of the season and the first snow of my life. I went to bed a disappointed woman and stayed in it most of Thanksgiving as a protest against the unsporting weather. But little did it care. On Friday, I realized to my chagrin how deceptive the bright sunlight was. The six-minute walk to the bus transit center almost froze me to death. And when I struck out like a dude in the evening to capture the winter sunset, it took mechanical devices to get my numb fingers unstuck from the camera and straighten them. Satu...

I sit down heavily on the tree stump and reach into my satchel for the bottle of water. Almost empty—gosh, how long have I been walking? I look at my watch—12:00 noon. It can’t be! I started the trail at noon! It was one of those mornings—I had gotten up late, missed the bus I was supposed to catch and had reached the Nature Trail center much later than I had planned. I remove my watch from my wrist and examine it—obviously, my brand new Swatch “Sweet Sarong” had stopped around the time I started the trail. Strange! I give it a final futile shake and wear it back. I look around. Where am I? I could see that I had climbed higher up on the hill. The forest is considerably denser than the trail below. It is definitely chillier and gloomier here. I shiver and pull my jacket around myself tightly, as a strong gust of wind rustle the trees and shower fall leaves all around me. What trail am I on? I pull out the map. I open it and grin sardonically. I am extremely directionally cha...

Have you ever walked and walked around the outer perimeter of a commercial airfield following the fence, on a hot summer day, wearing a suspiciously prison-break-looking orange top? I am the idiot who did it, twice over, and this is my story. The last air show I attended was when I was seven, in Thiruvananthapuram. The show was canceled because the air-force personnel were not able to control the crowd, who insisted on watching the show standing on the run-way. Ever since, aviation display and I have politely avoided each other. ‘Maybe it’s time we got reacquainted,’ I thought as I set out enthusiastically for the Prairie Air Show this morning. It looked like a piece of cake—take the local bus to the airport, watch the show, and come back by the same bus. But when Priya rushes where angels might want to take a rain-check, could disaster be far behind? Of course the air show was at the other end of the air field, in what seems to be a different county altogether. Of course I ...