What's your pledge?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqcPA1ysSbw

I thought it was a wonderful video. Off topic, but have'nt seen a cuter couple than Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher in the recent past.

My pledge is to be a better person. To use my time well and to be of service to someone other than my little circle of family and friends.

What's Yours?

Forgive

Back in school we had a school prayer - a typical catholic hymn kind of a prayer that said "give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins - as we forgive those who hurt/sin against us" And then the choir would hit the hi c and go "Oh, forgive us our sins" again. I liked the sound of this tune, the feel of it as well. It was like I could be forgiven for lying to my teacher about homework or faking a stomach ache to miss PT. I always felt good about the bail out option God had for me. He would forgive me for all my sins. Little did I know that real forgiving actually takes a lot of character and it is as Godly as it gets.

I see a lot of my friends crib constantly about something some relative had said that made them mad. They would discuss about come-back lines, revenges and 'paying- it- back- in- their- own coin' remedies. These are the petty vengeance we carry in our day to day lives. Something the neighbor said about the dog poop in their front lawn, some naive comment about our weight or someone making our accomplishments look common/trivial are some of the silly things we might never forgive. We seem to be caught in our own web of un-forgiveness and nurture a slow poison that consumes us form the inside. For that matter, forgiving is more important to us than to the person in question that needs to be forgiven - since our unforgiven baggage make us vile, hurtful and most importantly the victims of our own hatred.
As with everything, forgiving does take time in different occasions. Now, if someone called you something you are not - you could just shrug, smile and go ahead with your life, but someone causing hurt to your family, your lively hood or something more precious will probably take time. Little by little, we heal with time and let go of the hard feelings we nurture for the person that caused them. So, sooner or later, forgiving is the only way out to keep our sanity intact and lead our lives with less complication.

We should probably look into ourselves and try to find the umpteen number of times we'd have said or done something unkind and it might become a little more evident to us that to err is after all human.

Imagine how a lot of heart breaks would have been saved by simply letting go of our hurt and forgiving whole heatedly. The idea here is not to be divine but just to be human and let love spread:-) Like Gandhi said - if we get eye for an eye, the whole world would be blind. A lot of human suffering big and small would have been saved if the policy to forgive would have been exercised. And the best part is when you forgive you let go and alight from the vehicle of revenge and suffering. God Almighty forgives us for everything they say! We should probably let go too... to imitate our creator and better yet, to save our own selves form a vicious circle of pain, suffering and revenge!

So...let's ask Him to give us our daily bread and forgive us our sins along with granting us the strength and character to forgive and hopefully, forget!

Mera Bharat Mahan.

For those who are immensely patriotic - fair warning - this is not a patriotic blog notwithstanding the very patriotic title.
So here I go exercising my freedom of blog (Speech that is. Hi hi hi)

I grew up with great reverence to my country. The flag was hoisted on republic and Independence day, there is sweet distribution and our netas and elders (big and small) give inspiring speeches and remember great leaders of the freedom movement to who we owe our free land, air and water. When ever it comes to talking about how great our country is ,we have outlandish lyrics in bollywood movies where the heroes sing accolades of our country in the lines of "mere desh ki dharti" and the more recent "yeh duniya ek dulhan - dulhan ke mathe ki bindiya yeh mera India" and of course you can go to any social networking site and see happy housewives that park their butts in lavish mansions in the heart of USA proclaiming how artificial this whole country they are living in is and how India is the best - east or west!! Of course, more often than not, their spouses who hold great influential positions in some wall street or Sfo based MNCs and bring home packets of dead presidents join them in singing praises of how great their Bharat is.
I met a guy who thinks that there is nothing in America. But he travels on his business visa time and again only to discover time and again that there is nothing in America. I almost have an urge to ask him if he is held hostage by his company and sent to the USA time and again as a punishment for some sort of crime. I am sure he'd tell me that he prefers coming here since it looks good on his resume. So why folks - why are we such hypocrites? We speak about unity in diversity and our own Maharastrians cannot tolerate our own UPites coming and writing exams in what they perceive as THEIR Mumbai and their opportunity being taken away by a UP wallah. We hate like we love. We kill innocent people in the masks of defending our religious beliefs. We speak about a western world where there is hidden racism everywhere and we secretly like the actor from our little community or vote for the leader representing our caste. We judge the westerners for their marriages and divorces and give lectures about how Indians are people who have great reverences for marriage, but we see hoards of unhappily married couples around us who cheat on their spouses, ill treat or even beat them up but the sacred union of matrimony is celebrated under the many denials and compromises a couple has to go through. We speak about how a woman is worshipped as a mom and incarnation of Goddess Shakti but grope her in public transportation, leer at her at ever opportunity and burn her up if she fails to bring home the dowry that she is supposed to come with. Interestingly enough, you are better of as a cow than a female fetus sometimes:-)
We judge all our western brothers and sisters for being sexually liberal, for test driving their potential partners for sexual compatibility but we probably have the most number of perverts walking around in the masks of respectable citizens. We leave our country out of our choice, get successful, make a career, buy this state of the art four wheeler and a westernized bungalow in the most prestigious real estate our city can offer and sit and judge our foster mother land for her shortcomings.
The next time any of us is tempted to say how fed up we are of living in the United states (or any other Country for that matter) we should shut our mouths, pack our bags, unpark our asses and leave to the euphoric great India where we meet like minded morons who think that patriotism is all about being a hypocrite and beating your neighbor up because he believes in the wrong God or is from the Wrong region. We should make sure though, that we end up in our own state to find an opportunity, lest we could be killed by the other state guys for trespassing :-))
Fellow Indians- wake up! Stop looking at the filth around you when you have so much of it heaping in your own self.

Like this pretty young thing in Ogilvy told me - Sau mein se Nabbe beiman - Phir bhi mera Bharat Mahan!

Envy.

Envy, the polished twin of jealousy is green, mean and everything in between. Well, that is a bad rhyming. LOL. So back to envy - have you ever felt it? Yeah! - right? How do you handle it? How do you shoo shoo it away from your mind and your heart? How do you deal with the ways it makes your heart twist and twine? When exactly do you feel it? Is it a healthy emotion? Is it too vile? Well... most of us, nay - all of us have felt it some time or the other. I have decided to look into my own shade of green and do some introspection as to when and how it comes to me and colors my inside this shade that is otherwise tied up with prosperity and in the recent past with a revolution to keep our whole planet this healthy happy shade:-) What an irony! Green with envy or green with prosperity or green with a reduced carbon footprint?
The emotion seems to be as versatile as the multi tasker color it is associated with. The first time I felt this was when - I wish I remembered. So I'll look into the recent past and see when I'd felt it. Probably a few months ago I stumbled upon a very well articulated piece of writing and I was so green that I could not think or write like the writer that I spoilt two days of sleep in a row, got a unexplainable migraine and went on a blogging spree as if to prove it to myself that I am not envious but am actually a better writer than the person envied in question. I look back and see that any creative person who is better than me in my view is an object of envy for me. Sometimes I read Jhumpa Lahiri and go....wow! But somewhere deep inside I envy her to be so good with her expression. It might sound funny and downright absurd that I envy J K Rowling. Yeah...her of all the people. Am I even qualified to do that? - My humbler side kicks in and questions. I get this daily musings into my inbox and some of those make me turn a shade of green since I would not have thought of that thing to write about. Recently I saw a mom with three kids and felt the ever so slight tint of green in my feelings. I wanted to have a big family all my life. For that reason I envy Angelina Jolie too. Six kids and such a cute group. I envy her for her conviction and her love for her babies form Max to the newest additions (sorry not sure what they are called!)
But just like all positive emotions, good ole envy has a nice side too. Form envy emerges a feeling to outdo the object of envy, a genuine voice inside that actually admits to oneself the greatness of the subject of envy involved, and an urge to do something to match up to the object of envy could actually be productive as well.
Our envy is a reflection of what we want. What matters most to us. At a deeper level our envy is what we want our destiny to be. Well, I can envy Rowling all I want but can never create all she'd created. But it does make me motivated enough to create what I can. I strive to do my personal best and measure up to my object of envy. So if imitation is the best form of flattery, envy should be the best form of admiration.
So grab a can of green paint and color away the world with it. Be it envy, prosperity, environmental consciousness . Make sure that the world is filled with more and more green - the color of admiration!

Happiness.

I think Happiness is one single thing that could be singled out as just one thing that people singlemindedly pursue, whether it is Beijing, Bangkok, Paris, Sidney, Dublin, New York or Timbuktu. We look around for things that make us happy. A friend to share a joy or sorrow, a new shawl, A tube of sparkly lip gloss, a new shag rug for the living room. M S Subbalakshmi singing "Bahvayami Gopalabalam", a nice book to read, falling in love, owning an Ipod, going on a vacation, getting time to exercise, having a clean home, money, success, fame, health...all these things just lead to one simple feeling - happiness.
I just looked around to see what happiness means to different people. Some find it in working a lot, some find it in shopping, some look for it in creating things, some discover it in depriving others of it :-) But the ultimate destination of all pains taken is to enjoy the fruit of happiness. finding true love, having enough to not worry about finances, having people you love around you, having a pet, being in pink health, having a head of lustrous hair....All these things are just happiness waiting to happen to you around the corner.
But is finding it the ultimate goal of life? Why do religions speak about finding God in pain, why do poets dwell on sorrow and proclaim that the sweetest of songs are about the saddest of thought? Why do tragedies become classics and blockbusters? Is it just the yin and yang of a human brain? Or does it have more to it?
May be all sadness also ultimately leads to one thing - happiness.
The pursuit is on right now, right here in every nook and cranny of the planet. Sometimes compromises are made to get to it - sometimes it is found in the sorrow of others unfortunately, sometimes it just exists there but we are too caught up in finding it that it just doesn't occur to us that it was right there all along.
Before actually going on an odyssey to look for it, we all should just stop and look around. We will be astound by the joy we find in simple things. A flower in bloom, a child's smile or a playful puppy playing with the carpet fringe. Happiness - as complicated as it is simple. But is it not our own mind that makes it look this way or that?

Instrument.

My older sister made me turn a little shade of green when she played a Carnatic composition on veena during my visit to India. She started learning a year ago and is already half way thru being above amateur level. The younger sis is already a trained vocalist and as if it is not enough, she is learning, nay - gulping down piano notes like a glutton. Glutton of music notes that is:-) I see that playing an instrument was a age long dream of mine. I used to yearn to learn how to play Violin. I still do actually. Mandolin Srinivas is an idol I seriously worship. Lisa Robertson of QVC makes me admire her that much more just because she is an accomplished violin player. Give me a trained musician that plays on an instrument and I'll be all over him/her.

Just the other day, on the eve of Christmas, I saw a band of young musicians play Christmas carols in the mall. Sarat and Aarti went for a stroll and I tried and captured as many pictures of them as possible with my SLR. I wish I had a camcorder instead of a camera since the former would have captured the sound waves that penetrated the air making it look and feel like Christmas. I listen to Chaurisia's flute and dream of creating music like him. I would actually easily be impressed if someone would as much as whistle. Music, specially instrumental has always been a magnet that attracts a log of iron (that would be me!)

Sneha's sister plays the Tabla, My maternal uncle learned Mridangam and I actually wanted to learn it with him but I was too young and too ignorant of the fact that one day, very soon, I'd be three decades old and would regret, deeply regret, not learning it. Well, I seem to be surrounded with people who are proficient in one thing or another and I sit here, pondering over what soul-stirring music does to me.

The best visual, actually audio visual that comes to mind when I think of my Jaipur vacation is this grand old man, clad in the dirtiest of dhotis, wearing glasses that seemed to be piles of pieces cut out of a Pepsi bottle, playing a tiny, uncomplicated instrument. I captured it in my camcorder and I can re-live the whole experience of being in Ameri palace just by recollecting that soulful melody. So be it the old man begging for alms or Yanni playing accolades of The Taj - instruments have always been instrumental in inspiring me.
For now, I play the keys on my laptop, envisioning it to be a piano...wait, I am Norah Jones! May be I am not playing music, or may be I am - in my own melodious way! And while I am at it, may I actually ask the audience to leave a trace of their effort of listening to my music?

Upkeep

It has become almost an ordeal for me to keep the home neat and tidy. I seem to diligently scrub, mop, clean and wash all day only to find more scrubbing, mopping, cleaning and washing waiting to be done. The car gets dirty, the carpet loses its spring, the television screen attracts little specks of dust and the the stainless steel kitchen sink becomes dull and jaded by the end of the day form all the soap scum. I seem to vacuum and scrub, vacuum and scrub, vacuum and scrub ( not in that particular order) whole day and get sick and tired of it.
The upkeep applies to everything. My hair that shines and bounces the day it is washed gets slick with all the overactive oil glands in my scalp the day after it is washed. My skin gets all shiny, flushed and red by the end of the day and the tummy growls of hunger from time to time indicating the want of fuel to keep the body machine going.
Relationships require upkeep as well. I stay in touch with the people I wish to stay in touch with and lose touch with the people I wish to lose touch with. Or it is more like if I maintain the chain of communication the relationship exists - otherwise it vanishes.
So, Maintenance is more of an appropriate word. I cuss about the cleaning ever day and being the order obsessed Virgo I am, I succumb to the pressure of keeping the house clean. Aarti contributes to my nerve grinding by scattering her toys through the length and the breadth of the house, leaving melted ice cream spots on the floor and getting her moonsand into the carpet an area rugs. I am not even mentioning the laundry that gets piled up everyday.
So I just wanted to give maintenance a philosophical twist. What if we let the debris of ill thoughts pile up in our mind? What if we do not give much importance to cleansing our insides that produce toxins of feelings day in and day out? Does our mind require as much upkeep as our bodies and homes demand? Or is it just convenient to mask our mental ugliness with the likes of hypocrisy and false virtues? May be it is. That is probably the reason why we see so much of hate, hard feelings, jealousy, selfishness, vanity and harshness around us. We perhaps spend more time looking without and maintaining the external things that exhibit themselves as a reflection of ours and the soul that actually matters gets tarnished in the heap of filth accumulated form non-maintenance. How wonderful it would be , if we could just take our souls out and rinse them under the tap like those cylinders that come in the home air purifiers? Would all the scum run in water and leave us with crystal clear souls?

I think it is possible. It just requires practice. All we need to do is weed all the bad stuff out and keep our souls clean. Would the world not a wonderful, clean place that way?

There's something about Ash.

I think I'd spent enough time trashing Ash and loving the likes of Shobaa De, Suhasini and Russell Peters to have agreed with me about what they thought of Ash's acting skills. I still want to hold that opinion about her acting skills, but for once I have decided to look at Ash and not hate her for what she cannot do. Instead, I'll look at her and love her for what she has achieved.

Somehow light eyes do not go well with me. May be they do if the eyes in question belong to one Mr. Roshan. But light eyes and ladies with light tan complexions are a bad combo. So I looked at Ash and thought - she is washed out! I looked at her smile and thought, it is too crafted, I looked at the way she giggled and thought, it is too forced. I looked at the way she settled in the Bachchan household and thought she is way too smart. So, since resolved not to judge anyone, I took it seriously and looked at Aishwarya like I'd look at my own elder sister and Lo and behold, she actually is a woman that all women should be proud of.

When did we come across a thirty five year old actress who is not yet demoted to character roles? (discount Sridevi, she is exceptional) When was the last time we saw an Indian woman's face in a global magazine? Well, may be there are some women who won international acclaim but I failed to notice them. The last time I was in Shanghai airport, I stopped and stared at a hoarding of Ash - promoting L'oreal mascara, and felt that Indians are finally making their mark. Then suddenly I am reminded of her acting skills and I force myself to hate her. I went to Walmart one day and bought Aishwarya's lipstick called something like Aishwarya's beige. It gave an immense sense of achievement that an Indian face made mark on the side of the likes of Halley Berry and Kate Moss. I look at her international projects - The Pink Panther for instance and I forget that she is a poor actor and just focus on the long way she had come without any Godfathers in the film industry. We see and accept Shahrukh romancing leading ladies half his age, we approve Chiranjeevi shaking a leg with someone half his age and one fourths his weight. We live in a male dominated society, a male dominated industry and isn't Ash an achievement to all Indian women?

I get turned off by all the hoopla about her being the prettiest woman in the world - Like I said, I find her pretty but not strikingly or stunningly pretty. "You are straight - that's why" my kid bro offers me unwanted explanation. But may be I am just not straight (no pun intended) enough to give credit to where it belongs.

Aishwarya Rai is a role model to all Indian women. She made our country proud. She is the first international face India had produced. She has made it on her own. She is a bad actor but that is okay.
Yeah, that is really okay!

Ash, I think I liked you all these days. I was just a little hypocrite:-))

A New Beginning

Somethings about New Years is fresh, anticipating, hopeful and exciting. It is like getting promoted to a higher grade. It is like the excitement my siblings and I had on the first day of school. We would talk about the location of the class room, the view from the generous windows, our teachers and our bench mates. We would be excited about what we have on our plates and speculate about how the new Math teacher would be - strict and grumpy or friendly and easy to get along with! We would make plans to utilise our time well and resolve to top the class, brush our grammar and math and give it our best shot - strangely similar to how we look forward to live a New year and how we find ourselves a little nostalgic about the past year and how we grow up and mature in the process of living another year of our lives.

I look back to get a recap of the year that was. I think I'd evolved more in 2008 than in any other year in the recent past. I took that extra step to go and pursue a project in Advertising - something that I'd dreamed of doing all my life. I was there in the midst of a terrorist attack in Mumbai and saw what it can mean first hand and wondered what the world was going to!

My family had lost a member - my uncle Murali Krishna Mocherla (who also happens to be my dad's cousin and best friend in growing years). It stuck me how our time here is transient and how we should just live our lives and love all we can while we are here:-)

So the year itself was a mixed bag. I learnt that we are the only people that come between ourselves and our dreams and we do not do something only because we don't want to do it.

Aarti grew up - turned a year older and lost that baby fat and is blabbering a lot of sense. She is ready to be a pre-schooler and has emerged a personality of her own. I am thankful that I finally see traces of me in my baby. She seems to be a bigger bathroom singer than her mom and is very very artistically inclined. I just hope that I can get her to write as well..but that has to wait for some more years:-)0

For the year coming, I should probably and ideally say that I'll be more productive, lose all that weight I wanted to lose, keep my home "better homes and gardens" perfect, write and read every day, keep in touch with all my friends and family, vacuum my house twice a week, spend more time with Aarti, not crib about Sarat's late hours , to write the book I always wanted to write (not sure if it would fiction or non- fiction. LOL) to learn a foreign language, to travel to Europe, to take a terrific roller coaster ride and to properly learn a fine art.

But practically I just want to make the right choices. The choice of spending time praying instead of Internet browsing, the choice of eating right, living healthy, talking only things that are fair, making people around me happy and living a life that is meaningful. I resolve not to be the best person around, but to just be my personal best!

I resolve to age well and gracefully as in accepting my stray greys and piling up birthdays, I resolve to be a child at heart and a grown up in my thinking. I resolve to smile more, to crib less and to compliment others often. I also resolve to take time for myself, to go on a walk and actually stop to listen to the birds and to get a clear connection with my Heavenly father. I resolve to be more open minded, less judgemental and genuinely interested in people around me. I resolve to listen more, talk less and make people around me happy for choosing to be around me:-) I resolve to give more and make a difference in a stranger's life. To spread my love beyond my family and give a piece of my heart to people who need it.

I probably will blog more, read all the New Yorkers that are piled up in hope of being read one day and spend my time wisely.

New Years are new hopes, new avenues to explore our true potential, new chapters, new anticipations. Here's hoping 2009 will make all your dreams and resolutions come true.

God Bless you all!

The nonagenarian beauty.

Sometimes it is hard to associate old age and beauty, specially when the old age in question is actually 92 years. That is ancient by all standards. Isn't it? So what comes to mind when you hear 92 years? Scantily clad scalp with a handful of sparkling silver strands. Texture - texture and texture. As in well defined wrinkles on skin that hangs loose on a thin frame, hard hearing, poor eyesight and immobility. Well, it is pretty much how I imagined it till I met this nonagenarian beauty.

I found out her name in our second meeting. Kumudamma. So Kumudamma can give Aarti a run for her money in enthusiasm and curiosity department. Her gaze looked preoccupied but she spoke pristine English. Yeah, English of all the languages which made my interaction with the Tamil speaking beauty possible. I found on in our eventual meetings that she speaks Hindi too with the same ease. She used to narrate her visits to the USA. The way she went to New Orleans for MadriGras and saw Niagara, Disney land and all tourist attractions in the USA for that matter. She used to ask endless questions and tell endless stories though some of them were repetitive. Her zeal never died out though...she would tell her twentieth story with the same animation as she would tell her first. From our conversation I'd learnt about her Doctor daughter and son and numerous grand kids and great grand kids.

She would sit there on the garden bench every evening, the garden that looked like a mini oasis in the concrete jungle of Mumbai. "What a wonderful place to be" she would exclaim - looking at the expanse of the lush green lawn before us.

One day I helped her stand. She stood tall though she wasn't very tall:-) The texture of her skin felt like that of a plush toy. She was as frail as a new born, as curious as a toddler, as inquisitive as a child, as enthusiastic as a teenager, as active as a young mom and as wise as a 92 year old. Kumudamma taught me one thing - that age is indeed a number and a life well lived has more to it than a huge landmark birthday.

She taught me to look at life from a different perspective. To actually stop and enjoy the cool evening breeze or to be genuinely interested in the person you are talking to. She personifies to me beauty, strength and a fighting spirit. Above all, her love for life is infectious.

The many lines on her face and body unfolded to me the joys and sorrows she must have lived, the love she must have spread and the inspiration she had given to numerous people like me that had crossed her path.

My ubiquitous camera captured a few of her images. "You are beautiful" I meant and exclaimed as I took a close shot of hers. "Thank you" she giggled with stars twinkling in those pre-occupied eyes. I am sure I did not imagine that color in her cheeks as she thanked me:-)

pic 1 - Kumudamma lounging in the garden amid the concrete around.

pic 2 - The beauty herself.

The chili red Chantal.

It's brewing time. Meet the new accessory on my stove top. An actual tea kettle. Who'd have guessed that I'd develop a passion for tea since coffee and tea were never a habit?
I fell in love with the architecture of the kettle, the loop, the silhouette and most importantly the color. Red, the color of passion brews passion. Chamomile, herbal blend, green tea bags immersed in hot water form this slick pot... Ah, the simple pleasures of life!