Little things in life!

The month of July had an enjoyable end. My wife's cousins and my brother-in-law had come and we decided to be with nature most of the time during their stay in Udaipur. One of the trips we took was to the magnificent Jain temples of Ranakpur about 80 kms from Udaipur.

Road to Ranakpur

The kings of the road

The clouds descending on the valley

Company en route

The magnificent Jain Temples of Ranakpur

During the trip we realized that simple things in life actually give us all the greatest happiness.

Being with family, spending quality time with them, away from the tentacles of technology (read connectivity, the internet and its services WTF -Wattsapp, Twitter and Facebook) and work, in the lap of Mother Nature, admiring architectural prowess of an era gone by tempered with a religious flavor made this trip memorable and surreal. 

With the batteries all recharged, its time now to welcome August with full vigor. 

Things to learn from a child!

My son is five years today. In these five years, time has really flown by and we as parents and my parents as grandparents have really enjoyed this journey, a journey of new findings and discoveries. The idiom that Child is the father of man, seems bang on as a child has so many things to re-teach us, the adults, who in the process of daily mundane activities and quest for more and more materialistic pleasures in life, seem to either forget or ignore.

The top five things to learn from a child from my own experiences are as follows:

1) Live today to the fullest- A child is oblivious to the fact that there is a tomorrow and hence tries to enjoy today to the fullest. It cherishes what it has in the present and tries to enjoy it. A paper aeroplane, on day will give him as much joy and happiness as toy one, on another.

2) Small things in life actually give happiness- Last week, my son was watching "The River Monsters" on Nat Geo and he called us to watch the same. His grandparents and myself came to watch the same but my wife who was watching her favorite soap, did not come at that time. We continued watching the "River Monsters" and wifey continued to watch her tele serial.and came a little later after her serial ended. As soon as she came, my son became excited and happy. The reason, he enjoyed the fact that all of us were watching the same programme on TV at the same time. A simple small thing that gave a lot of happiness.

3) Have empathy-  The son of our watchman got hurt while playing and was crying when we came back from an outing in which my son had a great time. The gas balloon in his hand, which he himself asked for, was a reminiscent of the joyful time we had. The decibel level of crying of the watchman's son on seeing the balloon rose as he too wanted to have the same. My son initially refused to part with his balloon but when he was told about the injury that the other baby had suffered and saw his wound, be did not blink an eyelid and gave the balloon to my watchman's injured son.     

4) Be imaginative- My son lets his imagination go wild and tries to find identifiable shapes and figure in virtually everything. His main interests seem to lie in nature's own lap. He gets great pleasure in observing passing clouds, gazing at the constellations at night and trying to follow the many birds that throng the trees. Sometimes, during the monsoons, in the rain droplets on the window pane he sees numbers, patterns that the droplets make while yielding to the gravitational forces and on other occasions he can trace the face of a bear in the sky. Imagination breeds creativity and creativity is fast becoming a scare resource in today's world of standardizations.  

5) Be inquisitive and never fear to question- My son asks a lot of questions. In his vocabulary Why and How, overpower most other words. He is learning the way of life through many innocuous questions and his buzzing mind acts as a sponge, eager to absorb things. He has an open mind and that again is a very scarce resource in the present time. He is never fearful of asking questions and solving doubts, a great thing to learn from children, as lingering doubts not only have an adverse effect on a person's confidence but also have an adverse effect on his overall productivity.

All members of Blue Caramel, whether in Udaipur, Jaipur, Jodhpur or Mumbai, lets all rewind and try to recollect the traits that all of us had when we were kids, these precious, innocent traits that overtime have got eroded due to our running the "Rat Race" for more materialistic pleasures at the cost of being a better human. 

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow!

The month of July has a range of emotions attached for me. Love, hate, happiness and sadness this month has been a witness to all. On one hand, the birthdays of some of the people I treasure most in life like my wife, son, uncle and cousin is in this month but on the other hand, this month also gave me the most unbearable pain and sense of loss, when I lost my grandfather six years ago.

Ashoke Chandra Mitter
 (My Grandpa's last photo)

My grandfather was a unique mix of serenity, aggression, religiousness, practicality, knowledge as well as stubbornness. He was fiercely proud of his roots and in spite of gaining name and fame in his chosen field, he never let it get into his head and always remained humble in life, contented but egged on by his values and principles, he had in life.

It is from him that I have been able to evolve certain ground rules for myself, taking into considerations things that happened yesterday and are happening today, so that I can have a tomorrow that has lesser number of regrets. His rules are :

1) Indulge in life but never overindulge- 
Grandfather was 87 years when he died but he still relished his malt as well as his food like he did in his younger days. He was fond of the good things in life and could never resist the chance to explore new eateries that came up in my hometown Udaipur or his own hometown of Kolkata, till the very end. But he never over indulge in anything, food, wine or for that matter in any aspect of life and that is a mantra to emulate.

2) Be disciplined and determined- 
Grandfather led a very disciplined but vivid lifestyle. A typical day of his retired life would start with morning walk and include a round of gardening (his passion), a heavy breakfast (he believed in the idea of having his breakfast like a king), getting to know about the current happenings through newspapers and news channels, 2 hours of prayers in isolation, playing with his grandchildren, socializing, consulting on issues of mining and geology, his areas of specialization and acting as the patron of community we lived in and last but not the least, religiously documenting whatever happened everyday in a diary that he kept for nearly decades of his life and he still had more energy at the end of the day, than most of us, the youngsters.

3) Today is better than two tomorrows- 
He hated procrastination. He always believed in getting things done instead of delaying them for the future. He tried to put forth the value of time to us and followed the idiom Time is Money.

       

The greatest distance!

Yesterday as I was enjoying the creations of Bach and Beethoven in a Sunday leisure mood, I inadvertently wondered about great distances probably prompted by the occasional appearance of the moon, in an otherwise overcast sky. I recollected Marco Polo's journey onto China, Vasco da Gama's foray into India and Columbus's discovery of America. Great distances these explorers traveled to garner fame for eternity. So, which is the greatest distance?

Roald Amundsen's trip to South Pole, Yuri Gagarin's space odyssey, Neil Armstrong's large step for Humanity, Thor Heyerdhal's Kon tiki expedition or even Phileas Fogg's of Jules Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days, who has traversed the greatest distance??

In my opinion, none, it is us all who traverse the greatest distances each day as we continue with our journey of life. Ponder carefully with what I am going to state now-

The Greatest Distance is between Today and Yesterday!   

It is a distance that is so large that we cannot traverse (at least not in the present stage of scientific prowess, where Time Machine is still HG Wells blockbuster).

But frankly speaking, since we cannot bring back yesterday, so let us divert all our energies onto our today, so that tomorrow when we look at yesterday (today's present), we don't have any qualms about our actions or inactions.