Drizzles and Mizzles

It’s May now and I look at my window upwards at the nearly cloudless sky. I have always liked the summer. I guess maybe because I loved the warmth. The scorching heat, of course was a bummer at times, but I thanked the sun’s presence because I knew how I hated getting drenched while going outdoors in the monsoons. I have always had a love-hate relationship with the monsoons. It was very unpredictable. I myself couldn’t say when I would love the dark, cold and wet weather or when I would hate it with all my life so much so that I would want to run away to the equator! And yeah, I’ve had my fascination with the winter too. I kind of secretly wished to live in the snowy regions, up north, maybe somewhere in Siberia. Every time I listen to the song My December by Linkin Park, I get transported to my home in the snow, somewhere…




Monsoons haven’t etched good memories on the slate of my mind. Maybe that is why I always hated them. I always wanted to go away to a better place, a warmer place with the onset of monsoons, in just the same way as I always went away to a better corner of my mind, away from the unpleasant memories. Strange naa, how you associate certain moods with certain things (tangible and intangible) and of course people in your life… the times have gone, the people have moved on, but when I travel somewhere physically, I also go down memory lane in the same place with the person of the past. And this goes on till the time that I keep visiting the place mentally and physically. Then the old memory wears out, fades away and a new one takes its place, takes precedence…

…at such times, I feel minds are like permanent rewritable discs. Things come, stay for a while, serve their purpose and have to go, to make place for the new stuff.




The rains always bring a story along with them…either from the past or they create one, twirling in our lives. Pleasant and unpleasant. Of love and of heartbreaks. Of hope and of deaths. Of the novelty in life and its discovery, and of us discovering ourselves, again…

Rains are the time when I sit huddled up, cozily and gaze at the droplets forming on the glass windows and ponder, to my hearts content! I wait with eager anticipation for the monsoons this time. I know I am going to cherish the gusts of winds that prevail before the downpour begins. And I wish I that I would grow wings and take flight in that forceful breeze… there will be fresh memories this time and I am waiting with arms wide open. And before we know it, the rainy days go by…


Music: "Precious " by Depeche Mode!

The Glass of Wine Of Love...

A couple of days back I was traveling in the bus. Just me and my thoughts, I letting them wander aimlessly and explore aspects of everyday life that I take for granted and move hurriedly on to do my work. So, I was looking out the window and I realized that I had suddenly understood the meaning of something that I had read in a book 2 years back. I had been seeking answers all the while regarding love, sex and other desires… and my questions about all these things would be “How”.

Around 2-3 years back, I had read a book by Paulo Coelho called “Eleven Minutes”. It is a story of a young girl/woman from Brazil who consciously and somewhat reluctantly decides to be a part of the flesh trade in far off Switzerland to survive. She becomes a prostitute who does her job with dignity, not once feeling ashamed of herself. She maintains a diary/journal wherein she pens down her thoughts and experiences as she tries to discover the spiritual or intellectual side of this carnal desire. There was one particularly interesting idea or statement that stayed with me. And while I never really attempted to understand it, but always wondered about it, the meaning became suddenly clear during that bus ride.

Here is the passage from Maria’s diary: (the sentence in bold & bigger font is what I’m talking about and is what intrigued me.)

“We all have a clock inside us, and in order to make love, the hands on both clocks have to be pointing at the same hour at the same time. That doesn’t happen everyday. If you love another person, you don’t depend on the sex act in order to feel good. Two people who live together and love each other need to adjust the hands of the clocks, with patience and perseverance, games and ‘theatrical representations’, until they realize that making love is more than just an encounter, it is a ‘genital embrace’.

Everything is important. If you live your life intensely, you experience pleasure all the time and don’t feel the need of sex. When you have sex, it’s out of a sense of abundance, because the glass of wine is so full that it overflows naturally, because it is inevitable, because you are responding to the call of life, because at that moment, and only at that moment, you have allowed yourself to lose control.”
This is nothing too abstruse to understand, but knowing it like it’s your own thought, is what I’m referring to.

The glass of wine - our life.
Love is the wine we all seek.

March 2007

On A Sleepless Night

And so I sit here by the windowsill

The night’s dark and chillingly still

Gazing up from my ivory tower

I see the faded moonlight shower

I wonder why I toss and turn

Have I got a guilty conscience?

The world deludes

All sleep eludes

I wait, and I wait

As my head hits the bed

For the blanket of slumber to keep me warm

To keep me safe from my raging storm

I wonder when I’ll fall asleep

Wonder if your word you will keep…

July 18, 2007

When I’m Sixty-Four: From the Governor's Diary

Saturday, August 11, is the 64th birthday of Dr. Duvvuri Subbarao, governor of the Reserve Bank of India.

The RBI website very aptly says that few personalities are so close yet so distant to India's populace as the governor of the Reserve Bank. Central bankers are traditionally conservative and publicity shy. This reporter chanced upon a page from the governor’s secret diary and has reproduced it here.


Dear diary,

How time flies. Before I know it, another year is upon me. As I turn 64, I am also about to complete a fourth year as Governor. When I took over the helm of the central bank in September 2008, I was accosted with the biggest financial crisis we had faced in our lifetimes and as I write today, I am again faced with the double-whammy of a long brewing crisis in the euro-zone and a slowing domestic economy.

A year older is supposed to be a year wiser. I am not too sure about that, but yes it does come with loss of hair. The one I cracked the other day about my receding hairline does seem to have caught the media's fancy. (http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/Chanakya/The-price-we-must-pay/Article1-893361.aspx)

Although I admit I am not big on making birthday wishes, I can't help wonder what if I could really ask for anything as I turn a year older.

The thought caught my fancy last Saturday on my way back to Mumbai from Hyderabad, when a pesky, young wire reporter accosted me with an unusual question. I am generally asked about interest rates and the currency -- nothing I cannot tackle -- but I wasn't quite prepared when she asked me "Governor, your birthday's coming up. What would you wish for?"

"Well, I have many," I said.

Probably not a good enough answer. She persisted.

So, I told her "I hope that the last year of my tenure as RBI governor is less crisis-ridden than before."

Well, one knows one cannot tell the media everything. So, let me pen some thoughts for myself.

1.  To cut or not to cut:

My former boss Pranab babu is now happily ensconced at Raisina Hills taking his long walk on the lawns. Mr. Chidambaram, the new man at the helm is someone who I have a fair acquaintance with, having worked at the Ministry and the RBI. So my first thought was ‘the working equation will be good’. Yet, why do I see some ominous signs? In his first briefing to the media, Mr. Chidambaram says interest rates are too high and sometimes one needs to take calibrated risks to stimulate investment. Is he hinting at a rate cut? I have asked the government to get its fiscal house in order. Let's see how this plays out. Why the FM alone?  A businessman travelling by the same flight as mine last week, yelled out at me from the back of the aircraft, "Sir, please lower interest rates, sir please!" It isn't easy to pacify anyone.

 2. Keeping the market happy:

I have been accused of springing surprises many times.  Economists say the markets ran for cover when we 'unexpectedly' cut banks' compulsory bond-holding requirement by 1% last month. I was accused of a similar thing in June when I kept rates on hold, belying hopes of another rate cut after the April policy. In fact, a foreign brokerage said the RBI has displaced the Malaysian central bank as the least predictable central bank in Asia! Fair enough. But, I must say it is not the Reserve Bank's intention to surprise. A central bank governor has to do what he has to do.


3. Push Financial Literacy:

Many people think of the Reserve Bank as a mysterious institution, as a monolith which has no relationship to people's daily lives. Most people think of it as a currency printing office. In fact when I go to schools, children ask me, "why don't you print more currency, because that way India can become a rich country?" and, "we probably don't have enough money because the governor is not able to sign notes fast enough."

It may be amusing. But, without financial literacy you cannot have the economy firing on all cylinders over the long-term. It is a must for financial inclusion and hence growth. (About printing more currency, I'm reminded me I should follow up on that plan to introduce those durable, plastic notes)

4. Pray for a More Rains, there's still time:

After I topped my civil service exams in 1972, my first posting was as a sub-collector in the Ernakulam district in Andhra Pradesh. District collector and sub-collectors play an important role when it comes to rains and water. We have to assess the ground situation to decide whether to declare a drought or flood based on the behavior of the monsoons. It was then that I realized my emotional well-being, my career prospects depended on rains." Now, about four decades later, I still remain hostage to the monsoon. Now, at the end of my career as the Governor of Reserve Bank, I realize that my entire performance will depend on rains and not what I do about interest rates. If there is good monsoon, it is ok. Otherwise the Governor of the Reserve Bank is to be blamed.

Put Me To Sleep, Mother...

In the space, she lay at the heart
Sinister loneliness moving like a dart
Acrid walls looking down upon her
Her life, she recalled, seemed a blur.

And now again she called out
Accosted by another dizzy bout

“Put me to sleep, mother,
In your lap
Drug me into oblivion, mother,
From all that crap
Release me, mother,
From that addictive trap

I was breathing my freedom and my flight
And you think mine’s a sorry plight?
How do you say that I lost myself to this rapture?
That my life’s in smoke-tentacled capture?”

But nowhere was mother to be found
In helpless agony, her head she did pound
Nothing could she do at the eleventh hour
Deserted her trapped daughter in her ivory tower

Muffled yet loud
The sobs reverberated in the room
Soft as the cloud
Her pillow solaced her gloom.

Her hymn floated and hung in the air
A dying song, audible and bare
“The world could be pink
What do you think?
Or is it blue?
Could be any other hue!
I see you through the purple haze
The needle pricks and my eyes glaze…”

Her pupils hoped for a purple haze
Her tower engulfed by a golden blaze
Life dropped, thudding to the ground
Silence killed all other sound.

“…Put me to sleep, mother,
In your lap
Put me to sleep, mother,
In your lap…”

Blurry

This post concentrates on motion/action/blur pictures.
I have been trying for quite some time to get some good motion pictures, but never really succeeded. most of the time, the subject would get cut out from the picture! There's a difference between film cameras and digital cameras, I've realised when it comes to taking motion snaps. Digital cameras, it dawned on me, in my case, react slowly as you press the button. In the case of film cameras when you are getting a motion/action snap, the roll gets moving asap. So I calculated the time when a vehicle was approaching my camears frame and pushed the button as it the subject was just about to enter the frame. Release the button when the vehicle is in the centre of your frame and Voila, you get the snap you've been wanting! It took a lot of trial and error for me to reach this exact calculation and its partly my camera's fault. I dunno what the heck is it problem with focussing on it owns like all cameras do! Sigh...

Stuck in the traffic, I had been waiting for the red BEST buses to pass by. The man's white shirt, methinks gives a nice contrast coupled with the RED bus in a blur! I took a lot of 'blur' ics with this man in focus and the vehicles and people moving about. This is the one I liked over the others!

This third picture is the one I liked better than the rest for the barbed wire is clear and so is the man that can be seen through the rickshaw, whereas the vehicle goes by in a blur! :D

All photographs have been taken through a glass window and that's the reason for the 'dull dawn' effect in the picture. (light 'grey tint' cover on the car's window).

Music: 'Amazing' by George Michael!

Meine Fotografieren blindlings

My blind photography...

50-50

Back to my Obsession: Trains!! :D

A random click, this one, without a preview to what I was capturing as the camera was placed on the ground. Luckily the picture was divided in two halves: the lower one taken up by the ground and the upper half by the surrounding environs. (D-lighting used here).

Music: "Shiver" by Coldplay!

The Montane Solitude

Quiet as dead we lay,
On that dark solitary night.
Thinking of life at play,
And of our melancholy blights.

We talked that day,
Of stars and mountains far away,
Of fate at play and
Of life; so akin to fragile clay.

Jolted and turned to frays,
We had to go, part ways.
But with hands resting underneath our heads,
We were counting silent stars instead.

I said I talk to the moon
And you said, “Talk to me,”
I said the stars are my only friends
And you bore me a, “What about me?”

I looked into your eyes so brown,
And held your gaze for a little too long.
Hot in the face, you looked away,
Unsure of keeping the promise you made that way.

In our fears, in our fights,
In the taste of tears on those lonely nights,
Standing on the vertigo heights,
Anxious for our fledgling flights,

We took the plunge,
Unafraid of the cheating grunge,
We buckled over, we knuckled under,
Defeating the afflictive thunder.

But now,
It was time to leave; upon us it dawned,
You on your way, I on mine,
Both leaving the mountains behind.


Music: "Porcelain" by Moby!

Motion, Thoughts, Emotions...

Ain't got anything spectacular to say...
Though I was jus randomly thinking about certain things...completely irrelevant information, but it just intrigued me to know that docs in Belgium are going to amputate Mozart the Iguana's penis (maybe they already did. Stale news this is!) because of an erection that has lasted more than a week after a mating session. Luckily, iguanas have two penises.

Sidney Sheldon passed away.... Well, I dont really look upto his style of writing. He even has all the same masala for all of his novels but I admit I enjoyed reading most of them. But I was a crazy fan of "I Dream Of Genie"....Sigh....I was one crazy kid who would just get glued to the television way before the show started. I also had a crush on that Nelson guy! ;-)

Motion

Motion

1600 hours.
Really strong sun.

Kite
Motion

These Kites were quite close.
I didnt need to zoom in!
Motion

Thoughts, Emotions

Dinshaw Wachcha Road. Outside K.C College.
Guy selling the really popular raw mango slices with the usual masala to go with it.