Experiences

I am writing this blog post sitting cross legged on a dainty white bench, under the shade of tall trees, surrounded by the chirps of birds on their dinner route and the racket of cicadas, who seemed to have hatched a little late this year. Chipmunks are bounding around, standing on their hind legs and gnawing at the food they find from time to time. In front of me is about 50 yards of gently sloping lawn, a longitudinal patch of greenery tucked between wooden picket fence on one side and a line of trees which look like the seven trees that Ram sent his arrow through to kill Vaali treacherously on the other. It is a balmy evening, cool under the trees, with a soothing breeze. Wireless connectivity is excellent. I’ve found meself a little piece of summer idyll, right at the back of my hotel property. This is the sort of perfectness that has driven lesser mortals to write poetry. But I, gentle reader, shall desist. I shall give you an account of my week-long birthday celebrations i...

We all know that summers in the western hemisphere are made of long bright days and balmy nights; endless blue skies and glittering waters; disappearing clothes and abundance of skin; playful little boys and girls; big bad bikers and innocuous bicyclists; open air concerts and handicrafts fairs; and cold sweet ice creams and tangy lemonades. And July 4 is gloriously in the middle of it all. This weekend was sun, sun, sun. People and fireworks too. Not to mention food and books. Sprinkled with music and movies. Sweet things are indeed made of this. Saturday, 9:00 p.m., Deerfield : This year, 4th of July fireworks came to me. This is my fourth in this country and I’ve had the privilege of joining the festivities in four different locations: Torrance, LA in a trailer park, Peoria, IL on the riverfront, Chicago at the Navy Pier, and the football field across the road here in Deerfield. The crowd as usual was awesome. People started trickling in with their folding chairs and picnic...

The movie works because the story does. So the first credit should go to Valmiki, and for the Tamil version of the movie, Kamban. These two gentlemen gave not only a solid story to work from, but pages and pages of beautiful poetry, full of metaphors, similes and poetic nuances. Suhasini’s dialogs sound fantastic because she has done a brilliant job of adapting poetry into simple rustic and colloquial language. Vairamuthu’s lyrics soar in this context. The movie is packed with delightful and fresh visual interpretations of the scenes we know so well—be it Sita pining under a tree, or Hanuman meeting her bearing Ram’s message, or a Bacchanalian celebration of the Asuras. Watch the movie for the fantastic cinematography by Santosh Sivan, if nothing else. Kamban is also responsible for the humanization of Ravanan that we see in the movie. In the Tamil Ramayanam, Ravanan is depicted as a fantastically talented man and a great king. His single weakness which leads to his eventual downfall i...

An Ethiopian taxi driver in Columbus, OH, offered marriage to me. He felt that his US Citizenship made him irresistible. When I laughed, he chided me: “No no, I am serious. Take my card.” It took some amount of firmness to dissuade him. He was driving me from the Columbus airport to the Greyhound bus terminal. The meeting was at Cincinnati, but the airfares had been prohibitively expensive. So the smart of idea of flying to Columbus and taking the bus from thereon had been hatched. It was thus I landed in Columbus, bright eyed and busy tailed, on Tuesday morning. My driver handled my rejection gamely with “You Indians only marry Indians no?” He then proceeded to show me the meager and underwhelming landmarks of Columbus downtown. It was disappointing really, because from the air, Columbus looked like the modern day cousin of the “village we know so well”. There were neatly arranged houses in tidy neighborhoods everywhere. From 20,000 ft, it certainly looked like peace was reigning. But...

In Holland, Michigan, single female travelers of my skin color are clearly a rarity. The old man sitting at the window of one of the many downtown restaurants nudged his wife and pointed at me. The old couple on my left at the restaurant couldn’t stop staring at me or the food I ordered. The middle-aged couple on my right were startled when I requested them to take a picture of me with my camera. The vacuous young woman at the counter of the local museum asked me, “Have you come to look at the museum?” when I entered. The lady at the cafe couldn’t understand my simple request to open a juice bottle. Hell, a lot of people didn’t understand me in Holland. It was all mildly racist or I am just spoiled rotten by Midwestern hospitality. I should cut the Hollanders a little slack really. This is a small town the size of Peoria, (population about 250,000) on the western side of Michigan State. It is situated on the eastern end of Lake Macatawa, a dinky little lake (6 miles long and 1.2...

When you secure yourself a table at the sunlight-flooded coffee shop at Borders, overlooking the modest spire of the Northern Suburban Church and the uninspiring mien of Stein Mart, trying to find a little corner of peace on this summer-adjacent Saturday on which you have been stood up by not one, but two men, to ruminate about how it was thus, Bill Bryson’s “Notes from a Small Island” is the last book you should choose to read. You were perhaps going for sombre. What you end up is being this bundle of unholy mirth and almost toppling over in the effort to laugh silently so as not to make a spectacle of yourself. I like Bill Bryson. I found his “Short History of Nearly Everything” the kind of science book I wished I had in school (he explains Avagadro number as the number of popcorn kernels required to cover all of US nine miles deep!). His “Made in America,” a densely packed account of American history examined through a linguistics prism, was unputdownable. I love his breezy style, h...

Dandelion. Dent-de-lion. Lion's tooth. What a heavy name for an ethereal weed. If only one could swing on its many parachutes and float away into some magic world, as Disney characters very often do. If only they didn't make the back of the throat itch. There were thousands of white gossamer dandelion seeds in the air this surprisingly summer-like weekend, floating silently and gracefully like first snow flakes of winter. "They cause allergies," S frowned and warned her son and me to steer clear. "Here, blow it," six years old T brought me a seed-head in the park this morning, while his mother was away. He watched me blow it with delight. Then he took the stalk from me, ran with it like it was a live cracker, and threw it away in the air some distance away. Sun dappled shade in the park, inquisitive chipmunks and sparrows for company, a friendship sealed with a gift of dandelion...heaven! S lives in Oak Park, a western suburb of Chicago, establish...