Rain Again!

It's raining as if pouring out all the pent-up frustration. Like it's June. Like it took pity on us.

Tithi

I'm eagerly looking forward to the release of Tithi, the movie which won the First Timer's awards at Locarno this time. Mandya Kannada is something special as such and to have it spoken by non-actors would be even better!

Recall

Pappa and Aayi want to attend Swara-Suprabhata tomorrow - a Hindustani vocal concert at 7:30 in the morning and I just called up Sapthaka to find if the tickets had to be bought - the newspaper didn't say anything about it. The senior person who picked up said they'd never organised anything with tickets so far and I didn't know what to say - I just said it was our first time with them. Then as it usually happens in Bangalore, he asked me where I was from, when I told him my name. I told where I was living but I should've guessed it, he wanted my native place. I said Honnavara and he was happy, he was also from there. Then I knew he wanted to talk more and I handed over the phone to Pappa and then they proceeded to realise that they had met before. And guess what, he was the father of Dhananjaya Hegde! Suddenly the melodious voice from my childhood rang in my ears again - Navibbaroo Andu HoLeya DaDadalli Nindu....beautiful memory and I still remember the young boy's concert very well.

Taking a Break

I knew I hadn't written all these days and when M brought up the statistics to highlight my absence, I was embarrassed. I really can't define what had kept me occupied all these days. May be just that my mind was a plain mess, may be it was lethargy, may be it was just the lack of time...anyway, I want to pull myself back a little bit at a time.

I told you that my old boss was leaving and he offered to take me along and I refused, right? This was way back in January. After that a whole lot of things happened and I've not come home before 8 o'clock after that. :-) Does it define everything that entailed? I don't know, but that summarizes a lot of things as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, for the next two months I got a new boss, a guy who knew nothing about what we were doing and whose boss didn't think greatly of him. So for some time, we were under the dual pressure of teaching him things and delivering 'better' because he wanted to gain his boss's confidence back. But before he settled down, we got another new boss, this time a guy from the 'other side', the guy with who my peers and I had quite few differences in the past. But for some reason, the same peers and also some of my seniors thought I was going to be singled out for some bad treatment by this new guy. People spoke to me and said I should be careful what I talk to this guy and disagree with him as less as possible, knowing my reputation of not always agreeing with my bosses. Some of them even called up and laughed at me and asked what I was going to do now. I didn't know what to think.

Now, after about three months, I still don't know what to think of him. He was very nice to me to start off with, we had or rather I had a couple of rounds of fights subsequently, we get along splendidly most times but I'm still not happy. I'm feeling like the proverbial donkey with a thankless job. My personal life is almost zero and I'm becoming a workaholic but with no satisfaction by the end of the day. So, now is the time to do something about it, right?

A Little Misadventure!

I was about 7 year old then, Manjanna 8 and V had just crossed 2. We were in my grandmother's place for the summer as usual and Manjanna's and ours were the only families in by then. Our coconut plantation was the best playmate we had - we created frog-leaps in the backwaters that ran through the plantation, we made tunnels in sand, we climbed the young coconut trees, we exchanged stories(mostly exaggerated) from school, we chased away the stray calves and so on. The cool breeze and the calm environment was so inviting that many a days we went home only for bath and food, that too when someone came to call us.

One of the afternoons like that, we were there and there was nobody else around. Our youngest uncle had gone home just then for bath and we three were roaming around. Noon time usually brought the water up till the embankment and that day was a little more than usual - we couldn't see the stones marking the embankment. Manjanna and I started splashing the water with our feet, not really bothered about V and we were hardly at it when I realized that V was drowning! All I could see was her face and two hands stretched upwards and I just grabbed one of them. But she was too heavy for me to lift up and if not for Manjanna's strength, I don't know what I would've done. We brought her up, shaken but not injured much except for a scratch on the chest. We went home immediately, asked V to keep mum about it, told whoever questioned that V's clothes had got wet while washing her hands! I was very proud of V for being so brave and supporting of the whole scheme and it was not until the next summer that we became over-confident and bragged about it. Of course we got scolded badly, but I guess that was more out of relief than of anger.

Red(-Letter) Day!

I've decided to switch to reusable sanitary pads. I'll try them first for home usage and then upgrade to all days. I know there will be initial trouble with drying them out, changing and cleaning them but yes, I'm determined to make this change back.

I say back because actually I'm not new to them. I used them till I was 18, primarily on account of economy and I had to pretend I knew what they were talking about when my high-school friends went and bought disposable sanitary pads from medical shops, wrapped in black covers. Actually in a place like mine, disposing biodegrades is easy - we just turn them into compost for our trees - but we just didn't know what to do with plastic so cloth pads actually suited us. But I became conscious of 'better standards' when I started my Engineering and switched to the dumping kinds. Now it's just turned a full circle for me I guess.

But I also realize that if you really want to make a difference to your surroundings, it's not enough if you just tick your box and say I'm done. You'll have to persuade others to do it too. I don't know too many people who I can talk to about changing sanitary pads but I want to talk about reducing plastic usage though. When I went to my place this time, the edges of our grounds were littered with plastic and it almost made me cry. People like Auntie are already actively involved in reducing this but universal apathy, she says, is frustrating. There are problems at every level. Usage of plastic covers is very very high(I found chips packets the major culprits) , people don't even want to segregate them(especially the urban population) and then finally dispose them anywhere they please. So, the obvious first step is to reduce the usage itself, right?

Relief!

K L Rahul, finally! People were almost treating him like a crook and finally some breather. Now all sorts of connections are coming out - people who trained with him in Mangalore, people who knew him in childhood etc. I have a connection of my own - I studied in the college where his father teaches! I wonder if he was one of the kids who used to come near our ground with their bats.