LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL

Life is Beautiful

‘A thing of beauty is joy forever.’ An age-old saying and you have probably heard it a million times by now. So, why am I telling you this again?

The world record holder for being the oldest living woman died at the age of 115 a few days ago. She was suffering from various physical ailments but still wanted to live. The most common blessing is, “Wish you a long life.” Almost all the patients on their death beds plead, “Doctor I do not want to die, please save me.”

Do the arguments in the last two paragraphs relate? Yes, of course. One wants to cling to life for ever. Why? Because it gives him joy - joy forever. We can thus, substitute ‘life’ for ‘a thing of beauty’ in the saying. And then, by comparing the two equations a safe conclusion can be dawn, ‘life is beautiful’. Hence proved.

But, is it only this mathematical calculation that tells us that 'Life is Beautiful'? Of course not! Even if I could not have derived this relationship, we knew it is true.

All of us entered this world without our consent but are we not glad for this? Like a good buffet of food, life lays out dishes of all tastes for us. Like any beautiful bouquet, it has flowers of varied colours and fragrances. The love and the hate, the joy and the misery, the enthusiasm and the depression, all remain with us like the two sides of the same coin. This is the beauty of life. You learn to value the daybreak while basking in the glory of the night.

A funeral might make you feel low but the birth of a new one is sure to cheer you up. That’s the beauty. That’s life. Like a charming smile on a wrinkled face, it never fails to make you love itself.

THE WAY I LEARNT ENGLISH IN SCHOOL

The days spent at school have been the best of my life. Of course, I did not realise this then. The routine used to seem boring and the strict teachers used to be perceived as the equivalents of villains. My friends and I took pride in coining unique names for the teachers and missed no opportunity to break the rules. Though, now whenever we meet, ‘the golden memories of the school years’ is the topic we all relate to nostalgically. The knowledge, the values and the character that my school instilled in me will always guide me through life. Among all the things learnt at my alma mater, the English language is the one with sweet and bitter experiences

English not being my mother tongue, or of any other students, this alien language took time for us to get acquainted with. Ours being an ‘English Medium Public School’, the prime concern of the teachers was to make us ‘Englishmen’. After the basic ‘ABCs had been hammered into our heads, we were made to memeorise the words and sentences. After three years of schooling the torturous grammar lessons started.

Why ‘is’ is ‘is’ and why ‘was ‘is ‘was’? Why does ‘go’ have three tense forms while ‘give’ is satisfied only with two? Why is the ‘time’ not ‘in’ my watch but ‘by’ my watch? Ah! The list is endless. Many of these questions would still have baffled me had it not been for my English teachers over the years, who used to patiently resolve all my doubts.

Now that we were learning to read and write English, how could ‘speaking’ be far behind? O! The concentration camps started—25 paise fine for any word uttered in Hindi. The parents revolted with the idea of punishing the children and not themselves, and the punishment was flipped to ten ’Sit Stands’ per wrong word. You can well equate the number of ‘Sit- Stands’ I had to do when my fine used to go up to even Rs 200 a month.

I still credit that exercise regime for my strong legs and ‘somewhat’ good command of English.

I Love o Eat

I LOVE TO EAT

The most weird saying that I have ever heard of is ‘Eat to live and not live to eat.’ Oh! What would life be without all those mouth watering dishes I have grown up on? If I were to eat only to keep my biological mechanisms in place, God would better not have given me the tongue to decipher different tastes. Even the nose would have had little purpose if the aroma of the great masalas were not to be a concern for me.

Well, you have guessed by now that I am very fond of eating. But it would not be an exaggeration if I confess that I live to eat. My eyes, nose, tongue, skin and ears, are all hooked to the kitchen when my mother is cooking. I mean that I feel good to look at, smell, taste, touch and even listen to the noises that the whistle of the pressure cooker and the ‘Tarka’ of the daal make. With all my sense organs working full time to give me the pleasure from food, my brain and heart naturally give in.

Anything you offer me, I will never refuse to taste it and beware if I like it, (which has high probability) you might not get even a grain of it back. Anything on this earth that can be eaten turns me on but sweets are my favourite. Indian ‘mithais’ and English baked desserts lure me equally. I can never resist the spicy ‘chaats’ and ‘golguppas’. Chinese, Thai, Continental, North Indian, South Indian and the Italian cuisines are my all time favourites. Do you find the list long? Is a favourite meant to be only one thing? Well, sorry then, for food, I can not help breaking this rule.

My Weekend Acivities

MY WEEKEND ACTIVITIES

The weekend is always welcome. Well, I can put this in quotes as this seems to specify something of a universal truth. The usual human of the modern world labours all through the week, to reach a Sunday and, if there’s a Saturday added to it, it is a bonus deserving a Thanksgiving dinner.

The weekend, ah, and the pleasure that it brings with it, does not probably require an elaboration. We are all too familiar with this gift that comes after a week of struggle. They say, unless you have not experienced darkness, you would not be able to appreciate light, and who knows it better than the robots that we have become, shuttling in and out of the offices, just to reach home to throw ourselves on the bed, dreaming of that coveted Sunday to arrive.

This precious day, has a lot of jobs assigned to it, on the list posted on the refrigerator that obviously gets lengthier with each passing day of the week. The shopping, the laundry, the repairs, the phone calls, the visits, all pile up only hoping for the weekend to get more hours. But alas, that never happens; and I, like many others, end it, waiting for still another weekend to arrive.

All the activities planned for this seemingly everlasting day, get a blow with the getting up late activity, which is never scheduled, but occurs without exception on all the weekends. Endless tasks and appointments, too, take a backseat with the Television becoming a possession that refuses to leave me on this one day. And should I reveal further, the much longed for weekend just flies off seeing me lazing around and almost forgetting all my promised so called-weekend activities. But, the time is still just enough, for a movie or a long tete-a –tete with a friend.

Oh, the weekend activities, is it what I was supposed to write about? Well, but this is my story, all plans and no execution. But, I love all of those weekends, loitered away with promises of shrinking the list on the refrigerator, the next time. Howsoever hard I might try, I know I can never get my name entered in the Guinness Book of Records for having spent the maximum weekends in this manner, because, I know, there would be many others vying for this title.