Why I miss the rain....

Summer 2012 was strange because it almost forgot to visit my city, Madurai. We almost didn't experience summer because dark thick stacks of clouds covered the blue of the sky and it rained and poured on, till the second week of May. It still leaves me dissatisfied and I miss the rain because of all this.
a. There's water water everywhere, everything getting a great wash.
b. The temperature is pleasantly low before, during and after the rain.
c. The spectacular audio-visual enhancements such as the lightning, thunder, the various water sounds such as pitter patter, splash, swoosh, pounding, drumming, and dripping. I miss that.
d. The trees and plants are no longer covered in dust and sprout bunches of leaves.
e. The smell that fills the air when it starts to rain.
f. Walking in the rain and racing someone.
g. Riding a bike in the rain through the busy city roads, with your eyes crinkled and getting drenched to the bone. If you screamed or sang aloud no one would hear. Awesome.
h. Rain brings memories of college, which always opened in the rainy season. Transports me to my youth instantly.
We also feel re assured that this year we will enjoy good water supply and that farmers wont complain.

Praise the Rain!
 

Some one read my blog and mailed me saying that it was funny. This was not the comment I had expected to get about my random insights.

So I re-read my posts to see if I had written anything funny. My posts are a chaotic mess.I guess i don't like being predictable. So in order to write about unexpected things, I take the risk of writing in a disorganized way. There are a few funny lines here and there. But the blog is funny only to the extent life is, or only to the extent we stop to laugh at it, in middle of our other obsessions and observations. I hope this commentator had really read the blog. 

It’s kind of a funny story

The above given title is not my comment on the film. It’s the title of the film. Attractive title. Kinda funny seems interesting as well as funny. This would not be the case if the title had just been It’s a funny story or a very funny story.

The first scene is from the dream a boy has recurrently. He is going to commit suicide. His parents try to stop him. He jumps off and falls and wakes up. But this time he falls into water. The visual effect/ graphics in this scene made an impression on me.

Receptionist: WHAT DO YOU WANT

boy : i want to kill myself

receptionist: ok fill this form

It’s an ironic remark on how psychiatric treatment, which was taboo in certain times and places, which is scarecely available and is considered a mysterious mumbo jumbo in some others, is considered as being matter of fact and common these days, in some places. The boy displays intelligence of the highest order. He is intuitive when speaking to other inmates, changes track three moves before things go wrong . Very mature. The highly activated imagination, an inevitable aspect of an insane mind is portrayed in this film. For instance, the boy draws a city in the drawing class and each student interprets it in a different way. Then, he is transported into a hi-tech auditorium in his mind, when he sings in the music class. All the inmates appear in flashy heavy metal make up and costumes

There’s one punch line too…the moral of the story- “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” Personally, I know a third kind too…those who are busy going in circles.

I love noisy roads in cities. I dislike the quiet of the villages. Technically speaking, the badly maintained sidewalk is a symbol of lacklustre city life. It's polluted by dust, carbon dioxide, monoxide, the hooting of horns, the whizzing sound made by a variety of vehicles  and a million other by products of the frenetic traffic. But it's exactly here that my heart swells in joy and i feel totally at home. But in one way villages score over cities. There are many playgrounds for kids here. A teenager from a village told me that his village panchayat leader has purchased sports equipment such as nets and volleyballs and get to play these games every evening. Many young men from villages also speak longingly of the natural pools of water, or large wells, in which they would swim regularly. Sigh!!!! How many children today get to enjoy these things? Some builders however, make it a point to construct a swimming pool in their apartment enclaves as a value addition to tempt buyers. Let's hope this trend catches on.

Ten reasons why India doesn't produce sportsmen.
1.Schools have no or very little ground space. Parents only check if the buildings are good, not if there are sufficient courts for various games or if the school has purchased games equipment such as hockey sticks or nets.
2.There are only one or two hours allotted for games every week. One young person I used to despise in every way, once made a very sensible statement, "If I were the principal of the school, I would have one hour of games every day." Personally , if I became the director of school education, I would have two or three hours of games every day.
3. The games teacher handles the difficult task of space management, by asking the girls to sit in small groups and chat, while letting boys use the only available basket ball court or volley ball court.In case the school has no such facility, the boys still manage to play lagaan cricket.
4. Parents constantly tell children to study.Guests ask kids if they study well. No one asks them if they play well.No encouragement. Low awareness of the importance of games.
5.There are very few government schemes to help sportspersons. There are complaints of favoritism, as children or relatives of coaches and government officials make use of the schemes for personal profit.
6. There are no playgrounds in cities. The concept of the play ground has ceased to exist.The once popular haunts of kids, where children used to play games such as catch and blind man's buff, have now been converted into apartment blocks.
Am sure there are ten reasons. will write them as andwhen i remember.

cheers.

Very heavy in the heart after having watched a 1976 Italian movie, whose title google translated as "Ugly, dirty and bad". The movie on you tube has no english subtitles. The visuals spoke so much that there was no need to understand even a single word. It is about squalor and slum life. Not something totally new to me. I have read about it in stories and a couple of movies. The energy and the survival instincts of the extremely poor is portrayed along with all their gross ways of going about tackling the insurmountable odds stacked against them. The sound track became a little pleasant when children were shown.

I however, felt terrible when i saw the end. It was an uncompromising end. It showed no ray of hope or scope for change in the lives of all concerned. The movie begins with a  prepubescent girl beginning the day with an assortment of cans in which she fills water from a public tap. The little girl is shown as responsible for taking care of kids, shepherding them into a wired enclosure, as the parents go to work, taking care of them during crisis. The director shows her run to a hedge and jump on  a few stones playfully on her way to fill water. She does exactly the same thing in the last scene. Only now she is pregnant.

Haven't been recording any of the stuff happening....when stuff keeps happening all the time.... any way thought i would be regular if  i began with funny stuff from college. The notice board in one of the colleges i go to, is a blackboard, where info is chalked out. Primitive, but useful. Yesterday, the board carried the names of the staff who were in charge of issuing hall tickets to different groups of students. One gifted student decided to modify his teacher Deepa's name. He rubbed off the D, (gender bias intended, am sure it's a he) and wrote a P in it's place, making her name Peepa, which means 'barrel' in tamil. The enraged teacher went to the Principal and requested him never to put her name on the board again. She would do any duty assigned to her, But since it was a small college, it would be sufficient to put up the room number, where the students had to go.