The moms were there and dads were too
best men glowed, bridesmaids glowered
they tilted heads and swelled with joy
as the coupling saw each other’s eyes
with bright exuberance and wild passion
exchanging bands with studded jewels.
Though an entire congregation witnessed,
none would’ve guessed how it all ended.
Tag: postaday
Untrodden Path
Perhaps it’s not that uncommon, but I don’t often see a monkey sitting in silence, taking in the beauty of the open land.
I took this photo at the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Thekkady. Most people ride the boat there, but we took the untrodden path and cherished the lake from a distance. And, we found a monkey that agreed with us.
Small
A Simpler Time
If there’s one thing about my childhood that I cherish, it’s the endless sea of tea plantation and me trying to stand straight on a sloping ground that’s more slippery than a bathtub.
I like to think I had happy summers and Christmases there in the Nilgiri where an uncle of mine owned a tea estate. Every time school closed for a holiday we’d pack up our trunks, pick up a truck, and head up the hills. And no matter how many times we’d been up there, round and round the hairpin bends, squashing against each other at steep curves, and spilling juice all over the seats, the trip would be filled with fun and laughter. Plus, when we cousins got together, we’d just hang around and find reasons to drink more tea than usual.
It was a simpler time when ego was unheard of, and adolescent mood swings were in the unseeable future. My uncle’s house was set deep inside an estate, and we’d often take walks around the house exploring unkempt trees and unfamiliar plants. We’d find a new fruit each day only to hear from the well-trained estate folk that we’d discovered poisonous plants. We’d run around barefoot and come home crying with a bruised knee and a guilty-looking cousin. And our biggest problem was coming back before the bears got to us.
But then we got older. What once seemed impossible became the ugly reality. We had grown up, and in the process, lost our innocence to society’s poison that our estate friends failed to warn us about. We drifted apart, seeking joy in movies rather than the open lands. We once walked into dense nature just to live the moment, but as our hair grew, so did our passion for attention, and our attraction to selfies. We are cousins who don’t even visit each other anymore. Some of us married, some happy, some looking, and some others still finding joy in brewing tea.
Life doused our faces with reality, yet the memories linger of a childhood worth cherishing.
Olympics Aftermath
I just read that to glitter for one month, the city of Rio de Janeiro had displaced 80 000 of its citizens.
If that doesn’t shame a country, I don’t know what else does.
The Olympics is a big deal, sure. It’s a mass congregation, the world’s largest sports convention, the holy godmother of all sporting events, yada, yada, yada.
And while the rest of the world saw the sugar, spice, and all other things nice, reality shoved its ugly face on the people of Rio. They wouldn’t have liked the idea of the entire world coming to — taking over, rather — their home.
It’s not just Rio. We saw a similar picture the last time Olympics went to London and Beijing before that. Countless glorious venues now lie barren and play host to a meagre number of tourists. And to make matters worse, the Bird’s Nest costs $11 million a year just to maintain. And nothing worthwhile came off setting up the Olympic Village either.
As for Athens, the first Olympics I cherished, went $15 billion above their budget to put on a show that’s now in disarray and disuse.
Millions of people thrown into the labour of making these stadia, setting up seating, and fitting in lightings— all for attendees staying less than a month. So much time, money, sweat, and blood shed for the vain pride of hosting Olympics. And at the end of glow and show of sportsmanship, the rings get rusty, and we go back to hating each other.
Nothing about the Games was a game to Rio’s now homeless, squashed under its crushing weight.
And here we are, just days after the closing ceremony, complaining on Facebook that another country outperformed us in track events. We should, instead, be ashamed; blinded by our so-called national pride, we ignored a nation that groaned under the pressure of treating us assholes for a fortnight.
We somehow played a part in uprooting the lives of 80 000 people, and that makes me guilty. Some of those people were school children, pregnant women, infants, and single-meal breadwinners. Even budding athletes.
Come to think of it, Rio 2016 (and every Olympics before that) could’ve destroyed a generation of future sportsmen and women.
The Chaos Within 