And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of Khaled Hosseini’s story telling is that most – if not all – the dramatis personae exude goodness and love. This was true of his first book, The Kite Runner and it is certainly so of the third I have read – And the Mountain Echoed.

It is a tale that spawns decades and continents. It is a weave of an amazingly constructed web – of separation and reunion, longing and fulfillment, centrifugal and centripetal pulls that cause drifts in opposite directions. Khaled Hosseini is not afraid to scoop up every human emotion and color his canvas with it. He is aiming at your heart and knows how to tug at it, gently but relentlessly.

At the very root is the love of a young brother Abdullah for his little sister Pari, both of a family living in penury in a village in Afghanistan of 1950s. The two are separated early in life and the rest of the story is a collage of many seemingly disparate lives that inhabit France and the US and Greece and Italy and, of course, Afghanistan through its roller-coaster history, and seem to bear barely tenuous six-degrees-of-separation connections. And yet, you hope against hope that somehow a miracle is lying in happy ambush to join dots invisible to the naked eye.

It is a beautiful story, told by a generously loving heart. Recommended!  

Unaccustomed earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Reading a story by Jhumpa Lahiri’s is like watching a slow moving stream. Events move ever so slowly, even pausing and lingering in a swirl and evoking curiosity about the direction they are headed in. There are no overtly cataclysmic and watershed moments, no tipping points that explain the past and reveal the future. In other words the stories mirror life itself, mostly linear and zigzagging and uneventful but quietly shaping us all the time, gathering possibilities and potentials at every step.

The stories, all set in the backdrop of the life of Indian immigrants in the West, are about longing, aspirations, love and deep seated emotions that are rarely, if ever, allowed to leap out of our skin. They are also about death and how it posthumously defines and shape others around us.

The prose is lyrical and alert to details, perceptively diving into each character and then out to rest on every detail that might add depth to the tale. No words are wasted and yet none are denied expression. The eight stories are a pleasure to read.

Post Script: Inside the back-cover I found the portrait of Ms Lahiri. Her gorgeousness brought back the silent remark I had made to Him when I first saw Yahoo! CEO and President Marissa Mayer’s picture: “Are you not going overboard in loading it in favour of some?” I had asked.     

Manage Your Day-To-Day. Edited by Jocelyn K, Glei

All my life, I have been a sucker for books that might effect 'self-improvement'. But there is only so much of even the good stuff you can digest; so during the past few years, I had stopped acquiring this genre and begun to wonder if some of the knowledge had fermented into wisdom. The answer to that question sends me neither into throes of ecstasy, nor slough of despondency. In other words, these books have been useful to a reasonable extent.

Last week I lifted the self imposed moratorium and requested Flipkart for Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, a collection of articles edited by Jocelyn K, Glei. The title appeared tacky and appeared to signal poverty of promise, but if there is one book that can win the case for never judging a book by its cover, this is it!

The authors recognize that we are individuals and to lay down a template would be naive. Instead, we are offered great insights into what might work and are left to create our own recipe and eventually a full meal.There is an opening section on building a rock-solid routine that reinforces the point that great habits can free us from much of the self-sabotaging tyranny of a poorly thought out routine. There is another section on distractions and I found the chapters on dealing with email, social networking and surfing the net extremely relevant and useful.

It is an insightful and inspirational book. If you find the daily routine too overwhelming to allow you to be creative and to do what you would really like to, the book can get you thinking and started on an entirely different path. One that might head towards your personal goals.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

When I picked up this book, I did not have the slightest clue about the nature or depth of Toni Morrison’s writing. During the many hours I have spent browsing in bookshops, I had seen her novels displayed prominently on the shelves. But for some reason that I cannot retrospectively fathom, I was never nudged strongly enough by my subconscious to pick one up long enough to be dazzled by what lay inside.

And completely, unalterably, irreversibly dazzled is what I am after reading The Bluest Eye! Where were you Ms Morrison, during the past five decades of my engagement with the written word? And where was I?

I

f I were to describe this profound work in simplistic phraseology, this is the story of Pecola, an impoverished and ‘extremely ugly’ African American girl who feels, deeply, that her eminently tragic existence could only be redeemed in some measure if her eyes magically acquire the color blue.

Each sentence is a gift wrapping that promises to reveal yet another surprise. The prose is brilliantly evocative, fearlessly direct and starkly honest. The entire star-cast is ‘black’ and yet among the longest shadows cast on the narrative is by the invisible presence of the ‘white’ people. It will be equally accurate to say that this is a book about ‘race’ and that it is a book not about ‘race.

None of the characters is straining to cover herself or himself with even a shred of glory, and yet we are compelled to understand the fabric of their motivations. No apology is made on anyone’s behalf either– not for Cholly Breedlove for sexually assaulting and impregnating his child, nor for his wife Pauline who fought him with matching violence and yet submitted to him, or the misanthropic Dream Reader Soaphead Church who plotted the murder of his landlady’s aging dog, or the ladies of easy virtue, delightfully named as China and Maginot Line; about the last name, I must confess that my acquaintance with military history did provoke me to wonder why a lady in flesh trade would be named after French defenses that were considered resistant to any breach?

The slim book has an extremely insightful Afterword that Toni Morrison wrote in 1993, nearly three decades after she started writing this book in days that were racially among the most surcharged in the US and 14 years after the book was first published in 1979. It gives the work an even more heightened context.  

A brilliant book!   

Lessons to Live By

A few months ago, as I traveled by train, I pondered over some of the major lessons I have ‘learnt’ during my life. I write the word ‘learnt’ with abundant caution because ‘learnt’ should have the same connotation as ‘completely imbibed and translated into practice’. 

Alas, I cannot even remotely claim such an achievement!

All the same, here are the big lessons (both sublime and ridiculous) that have struck a chord in me:

I am not my Ego.

To awaken and be aware is the only purpose of my life. Living life mindfully and in the Now is the way to do it.

Discipline – delaying gratification and accepting pain first – is the key to solving all of life’s problems.

What you do between stimulus and response becomes you.

When confronted with multiple choices of what to do, do what is good for long-term, even when it is clearly not urgent – especially when it is not urgent!

Nine-tenth of the wisdom lies in being wise in time.

Visualisation, intention and believing in what you seek is the ‘secret’ to getting.

When it comes to money, understand the difference between assets and liabilities. Anything that adds to what you have is an asset. Create assets.

The most important issue for a commander (and we are all commanders of our selves!) is having and constantly re-creating ‘reserves’ Without ‘reserves’ one is only a helpless and reactive tool to evolving circumstances. Reserves are critical to influencing the battle of life.

Not surprisingly, the above two lessons apply as much to health, use of time and relationships, as they do to ‘money’.

In contentious issues, try and visualize the ‘end-game’. Are you prepared for the eventuality? Is it worth the strife? Or is there a better way?

Often ‘acceptance’ of what is is the key to peace and happiness. Acceptance is not surrender. Acceptance is a choice and always calls for wisdom, courage and restraint.

Finish what you begin. Do not allow delays (there never will be a ‘perfect moment’ to start; indeed the business of ‘perfect moment’ is the biggest delusion there is!) and if a deviation occurs, get back on rails quickly.

Hard work – not talent – is the king.

Weight loss is almost entirely a matter of calories. Exercise has great uses for promoting health and increasing basal metabolic rate (BMR) (which assists weight loss) but eventually the dice is loaded in favour of imbibing fewer calories. Eating smaller meals frequently – and never giving your body’s intelligence the impression that you plan to go hungry and hence it needs to store all calories for future use – is part of the trick.

If you wish to write, you need to schedule it and then stick to the schedule. Waiting for inspiration is as likely to succeed as waiting on a beach for a message in a bottle.  

A plan without time-lines, resource allocation and reality check is not a plan.


To read a person solely based on his looks or words is to set yourself up for possible failure, even a trap. While looks and words count, always, always, always judge people by their actions.

Good story telling is about brevity, maintaining suspense and punch-line. It is not about stretching the tale to milk it for as long as one can. To do that is to sound death-knell for the story.

For a presenter – a teacher, a speaker, an actor, an impressionist, a comedian or a singer – the most important element is the audience.The fare should be pitched at the level of most of the audience. To ignore this and rely solely on display of one’s ‘knowledge’ or ‘brilliance’ is to fail.

‘Style and substance’ both matter in life (and in presentations) but the sequence implicit in that expression is flawed; it must always be ‘substance and style’. While you risk being underrated if you lack ‘style’, you can never ever succeed without ‘substance’. Cannot sell a bad product for long merely with good advertising!

Love is the willingness to stretch boundaries of one’s ego to accommodate another, solely for his or her long-term good.

A good movie is a credible story told well. (There! And everyone in Bollywood says there is no formula to make a 'good' film!)

The Weight of my Argument

It isn't hard to lose weight.

I don’t think anyone has ever said that seriously. But as fuzzy and convenient self-deluding assurances go, in many heads this one sits at the top of the ladder. Or why would not so many of us burn with anxiety and jolt ourselves out of gluttonous-lethargic stupor and get going? How many failures will it take for us to realize that the only diet that really works is the one that permanently tilts the ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’ equation in the favor of the latter?

But maybe you know all of this and more but would simply like to start tomorrow. It is a delightful thought. Just the hint of putting it off for another day sweeps such a wave of false well-being through each of our cells that the strategy becomes compelling beyond challenge. Over time, it burns into our sub-conscious and every whispered vow to ‘diet’ or ‘lose weight’ awakens the demon that shoves us towards another magically perfect day.

Such bullshit we shovel to our own selves!

I will simply recount some milestones of my life to demonstrate the debilitating cost of dodging the truth that now is the only moment you can count on. And that action, not intention will save the soul.

Be the judge.

1972. As a 14 year old, I confessed to my diary that my main problem of life was my weight.  1972? 41 years ago? And I haven’t waved the white flag of defeat yet?

1974. I qualify for the National Defence Academy and am promptly rejected – temporarily – for excess weight. I return home, give up all food save enough to preserve my mortality, jog many a kilometer in the sun and reach for the medical re-examination famished for the past day and a half. I am declared fit.

1983. My photos before and after marriage reveal a nouveau corpulence of dimensions that should have triggered warnings of imminent calamity. Others ascribed it to happiness thus placing a collective seal of approval on incipient obesity.

1987. During the annual medical examination, confronted by a particularly fastidious doctor who declared every intention of downgrading my medical category on account of obesity, I got to work. I designed a 1200-calorie diet that sucked the lard – and energy – out of me. I walked and walked, and when strength permitted I even jogged. I stayed completely away from oils and sugar. I dropped some 15 kilos, won the unbending medic’s grudging seal of approval and, without delay or fuss, moved back to imbibing fried stuffed parathas and the like.

1990. A mirror-image repeat of 1987. I stuck to the stringent regimen, making no exception to touch even a grain of sugar during celebrations for the birth of our younger son, Siddharth. I lost the 15 or so kilos I had assiduously accumulated. And after Mission Accomplished I reverted to Operation Undo Health with renewed resolve.

2000. I remained overweight through the decade, scaling higher numbers of varying impressiveness. But by 2000 I had completely outdone myself, resolutely staying above 100 kilos and often threatening to cross the 110 landmark. During a visit to Indian Space Research Organisation, on a special weighing scale I checked out how much I might weigh on different planets. I found that I was unfit and obese on all, barring for service on the moon.

2001. My father was operated upon after a cardiac attack. Pacing up and down in a corridor of the hospital I shook a fist at myself and vowed to wake up. After all, he had been in a far better shape than I was and was an inveterate teetotaler. If this did not change my orientation towards health, I asked, what would?

2003. Two more years passed while I waited for that perfect moment. Finally, fed up and cross with myself, I embraced the dangerous Dr Atkins’ Diet. I reinforced the caloric loss with a regular 5 km run, often plodding through the overnight snow. I lost 27 kilos in five months, prompting universal and inebriating adulation. Donning this newly emerged persona, I landed up in Hawaii on a 3-month Study Program. And promptly began to run the short route back to obesity.

2013. In the past decade, I have made many starts, only to flounder in days. A million Excel sheets have been drawn up, charts inserted, formulas set in place only to be deleted and banished even from the Recycle bin even before the downward worm had settled down.

13 August 2013. I am still over 100 kilos and still nursing the dream to scale down to 70!  And now I have begun again on a carefully crafted life-style that will ensure healthy eating, regular feed, controlled calories, dollops of exercise and adequate sleep. I am on my way, this time determinedly on a one-way ticket.

Follow my progress here. I will share menus, tips and numbers.

But, more crucially, if you too intend fighting the Battle of the Bulge, read the above story of my sporadic assaults carefully and know that Mr Bond was right – tomorrow never comes.

This is the weight of my argument.

This Morning

In the calm of early morning, along the path of my walk, is a hem of trees and undergrowth; solid green stillness lying in ambush. 

Not a leaf fluttered in defiance of this discipline, not a branch swayed inadvertently. 

The wind appeared to have been quarantined elsewhere, so the eye could absorb the offering un-distracted by movement. 

Or was I sleepwalking through a giant painting?

The Story Hereafter

I am 55.

This is quite a foundation, built of stones and bricks of a million sizes and every hue on display. It looks formidable but it isn't even of seamless texture, leave alone uniform strength. Indeed many parts of it are flawed and, while setting the next stone, I must ignore them for the sake of the longevity of the edifice that will follow.

Looked at individually, each stone is a fascination of indescribable wonder: look closely and you would spot many variations of the themes of success, failure, serendipity, grace, anxieties, fears, love, rage, drift, empathy, apathy, inebriation, solidity, flexibility, sobriety, affection, patriotism, cowardice, and you will have identified but a microcosm, a tiny bit visible easily to the naked eye.

No matter what the station of our lives, we still have an edifice to build. And as we engage in it, with or without the tools of mindfulness, we draw on what has gone before.

I have done my share of sleepwalking. I have perennially deluded myself that there is a perfect moment to begin living mindfully and that that moment arrives at a well-defined hour or date that has one distinguishing feature – it isn't now. I have ignored the passage of time and fuzzily pretended that it wasn't passing or could be bent at any moment and even recalled at will. I read the signposting that confirmed the directions I already knew and I often ignored the ones that warned me of errors, even grievous ones. In celebration of my ‘heroic youth’ I often wore lack of mindfulness as body armour, proofing myself against assault by reason and awareness. And I survived because grace cuts us huge slack.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; plenty of good too has been my tailwind. Like everyone else, I too have benefited from millions of brief shining moments that, stitched together, make me who I am. Yes, in balance I am in the black.

This blog is a very personal story of the structure that will rise; of that elusive mirage called future that, upon arrival after some trudge, always appears, like a passing ship, and as a place called now; of my life that will follow.

A life that must be crafted, brick by brick.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I admire Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I consider Purple Hibiscus a great book and Half of a Yellow Sun not too far behind. The Purple Hibiscus revealed what a great story teller she is - observant and empathetic with a felicity for lyrical prose. I took up Americanah with the eagerness of a child revisiting a favorite place and discarded my critical shield.

Do you already suspect what is coming next?

Disappointment might be too strong a word, but, to say the least, I was not bowled over. Americanah, a 480-page tome, is about 'race', particularly about its 'controversial' ism in America. It is more of an informal essay that relies on a flood of anecdotal props, stitched together to outline a story and thus couched as a work of fiction.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of a Nigerian woman - with a charming name Ifemelu - who travels from Nigeria to the US and, after a stay that ends in many loves, daily brushes with 'race', a blog and the acquisition of a Green Card, back to her native country. In the meanwhile, lest we not get the full picture, her first love Obinze also makes a sojourn to London before being deported for being an illegal immigrant.

The story line is thin and the entire purpose of the book is to squeeze every possible shade of racial differences as possible. The narrative does its best to paint a balanced picture - it is not merely a whites versus blacks story, but a sweeping account of the innate differences among people of different ethnic moorings. And it is built around the story of loss of love.

To be sure the book is an achievement in observation and retelling. It held my interest, if only because I felt that something more might be revealed. In the end though I found it mildly satisfying, it was a meal that held more promise than the cook could actually deliver.      

Manoj and Babli - A Hate Story. By Chander Suta Dogra

A decade ago when I was attending a study program at the Asia Pacific Centre for Security Studies at Hawaii, I chose ‘Identity Politics and Ethnicity’ as an elective subject. It was taught by the venerable scholar Robert Wirsing who, on more than one occasion informed us in a voice that could have stopped a cavalry charge, “Culture matters!”

Culture matters to people. It gives them a sense of identity, even stability, and fuses unwritten laws into collective DNA with that blowtorch called ‘emotion’. It often holds rationality with disdain of the ill-informed and embraces past with dangerous naivety.  

In her first book, Chander Suta Dogra has traced the tale of a young couple, Manoj and Babli, who were brutally killed for having married against the dictates of their culture. This dastardly practice goes by the sobriquet of ‘honour killing’ and never has the word honour been put to a more severe test of irony.

Her riveting account has a chilling opening. The contemporariness of the bloody incident – it happened in 2007 – is shocking and depressing even to someone who is aware that the practice exists in pockets of this region. But it is also a tale of amazing courage of a handful of women - the mother and sister of the deceased boy, an intrepid judge who sentenced the culprit to death and a NGO-worker – all of who refused to bow to the powerful khap panchayats (caste based local bodies) and risked their lives to secure convictions for the murderers. They climbed a steep curve and surmounted isolation, penury, hostility of a trenchantly patriarchal society, indifference and even criminal culpability of police and convenience of politicians. They provide the light that makes the prospects of traversing a long and gloomy tunnel tolerable.

There is more to cheer about. It is evident that there is an evolving awareness that is beginning to germinate in dry sands of ‘tradition’. It is incipient and it is against all odds. But watered by the occasional drizzle of contact with modernity, it gives every indication of flowering someday.   

The writing style is easy and effective. It is an extremely well-researched work that rings true all the way. The sheer grip of the events makes it hard to put down; I read it in gulps. And the narrative has been garnished with dialogue to add life to the story.

Both for inspiration and jolting middle-class indifference out of its stupor, I recommend this book.

Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Experience is about everything that the title promises – the secret of enjoying the optimal experience – that period when immersed in an activity you experience near-seamless joy. All of us experience it in snatches while being engaged in activities that interest and challenge us adequately, for example, reading a wonderful book, writing to our satisfaction, painting, preparing a presentation, making a draft, building a structure, learning to play an instrument…. If only we could be in that trance like flow forever!

You would notice I did not include mindless surfing of the Net or pushing buttons on remote among those activities. Flow, we learn, is only produced by activities that add to our inner growth and complexity. The rest – like lolling in the bed, gazing at a screen, chatting, drinking or even sex – might give us a spot of happiness but once the activity is over, the experience is rarely carried forward into other areas of life to experience joy.

Flow occurs when you lose the sense of time and appear to have quieted that incessant chatter that fills up our heads all the time. That optimal experience is called Flow. And this book by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – if you can pronounce his name you are a person with infinitely greater supernatural powers than anyone I know – dissects the phenomenon and gives you all the ingredients for you to cook your own meal from your own recipe. In that sense, it is not a ‘how-to’ book, though, with careful contemplation one can elicit a great deal of self-help wisdom.

The basic premise of the book is that mastery over or bringing order to consciousness is the key to living in the flow. Attention is the critical tool for that mastery. But given the fact that most of the human race simply cannot live in the now and finds it hard to embrace mindfulness, how are we to get there?

The author makes several points and some of them bear repeating in full. I quote:

Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It does not depend on outside events but how we interpret them. People who can learn to control their inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

It is by being involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. It must be pointed out that such experiences are necessarily not pleasant when they occur – remember the long march in an exercise or the cross country run or the long preparation before an exam or presentation? But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

Because optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual effort and creativity.

The optimal state of inner experience is one which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder – that is information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy.

Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experience can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.

The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. Doing this over and over again is how the self grows.

A person who is never bored, seldom anxious, involved with what goes on, and in flow most of the time may be said to have an autotelic self. His goals mostly originate from within himself.

Rules for developing such a self are simple:

Setting Goals. To be able to experience flow, one must have clear goals to strive for – from lifelong commitments to trivial decisions. Selecting a goal is related to recognition of challenge. As soon as the goals and challenges define a system of action, they in turn suggest the skills necessary to operate within it.

Becoming Immersed in Activity. Involvement is greatly facilitated by the ability to concentrate. People who suffer from attention disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.

Paying Attention to what is Happening. Concentration leads to involvement, which can only be maintained by constant inputs of attention. Having an autotelic self implies the ability to sustain involvement. The elements of autotelic personality are linked to one another by links of mutual causation. It does not matter where one starts – whether one chooses goals first, develops skills, cultivates the ability to concentrate, or gets rid of self-consciousness. One can start anywhere, because once the flow experience is in motion the other elements will be much easier to attain. The autotelic individual grows beyond the limits of individuality by investing psychic energy into a system in which she is included.

Learning to Enjoy Immediate Experience. The outcome of having an autotelic self is that one can enjoy life even when the objective circumstances are brutish and nasty. To achieve this control, however, requires determination and discipline. One must develop skills that stretch capacities.

Unquote.

I have reproduced excerpts at length because it is difficult to make a case for Flow without going over many contours. It is an excellent treatise and written in the easy style of great teachers. Highly recommended!

I am now reading the author’s next offering Creativity – Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Watch this space. 

Half of a Yellow Sun

War is tragic and pointless. It is a monstrous game invented by the human race in the mistaken belief that it leads to something glorious and meaningful. It is a cauldron that cooks a toxic brew of hate, insular ‘patriotism’, negativity, violence and every other base instinct that lies buried in our collective psyche. It is a self-inflicted injury that is mistaken for a cure.

The story and characters of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun ride piggy-back on the contours of the Nigeria-Biafra war of late Sixties. Their fortunes mostly plunge downwards as the South-Eastern region of Biafra makes a misplaced attempt to secede from the remainder Nigeria.

Adichie is a consummate story teller. Comparison with her previous work The Purple Hibiscus is, perhaps unfair, but inevitable. Half of a Yellow Sun is a far larger canvas. Character after character is developed and pushed into the well-told story. The pain and destruction – both physical and psychological – of people caught in the crossfire of conflict are etched with understanding and empathy.

But very largely, there are few twists in the tale and an air of predictably hangs over it. It is not hard to predict the gradual depletion of the spirits of Odenigbo – the Professor and the master of the house. His occasional indiscretion can be seen before it happens. The life of his wife, the beautiful and sagacious Olamna also runs a predictable course. Ugwu, the somewhat precocious servant-boy does depart from the script by a display of heroics but soon returns to the original trajectory. Richard the expatriate who considers himself a Biafrian, also sticks to his expected ‘brief’. This is merely to report on the book as I saw it and not meant to be a criticism of the master story-teller.

In fact, the story closely mirrors life – even in the midst of great upheavals, most lives rarely experience game-changing cataclysm.           

A Post Walk Break....

An evening walk and then a break to enjoy the view!

Outside on the tarmac, Jacarandas lay out a special welcome, especially for the morning walker.

Daddy and I Visited Simla

Daddy and I visited Simla - his first in 50 years to this hill station. Mummy and he had spent a few years here and I had attended the Portmore school as a nursery student. I did walk through the school (in uniform, if you please!) and only when a curious teacher asked me if i wanted to meet someone I revealed that I was an alumni. She appeared quite thrilled!

Amritsar - the Golden Temple

A visit to the Golden temple is always uplifting. This was my third. We went at dawn and already huge crowds were thronging for darshan. The queues were dauntingly long and it was great relief that we were quickly taken to the sanctum as so-called VIPs. It was a day of fairly long walks for Mummy and Daddy and they took it very well indeed. A few pictures:

The pligrims' progress.

Amritsar

We made a trip to Amritsar where I had an official engagement.Mummy, Daddy, Neeti and I used this opportunity to see the theatrical display of militarism at the Wagah-Atari Joint Checkpost, pay obeisance at the Golden Temple at dawn and see the historic - though poorly maintained - Jallianwala Bagh where so many innocents shed blood when Gen Dyer ordered indiscriminate firing on 13th of April 1919.

At the end of the day, Mummy too shed some blood when she fell outside the Guest Room and her spectacles caused a gash above the eyebrow. She is recovering and the staple will be removed tomorrow. Here is the first lot of pictures:

 Mummy and Neeti shortly after Mummy's wound had been stapled at the hospital.

 We are standing in front of the wall that bears the bullet marks (highlighted with white rectangles) of that day in April 1919.

 Awaiting the start of the ceremony, Mummy and Daddy posed for us.

 Neeti in front of the Indo-Pak gate.

At the 'Zero Point'. The onlookers in the backdrop (and the soldier with a high turban) are all Pakistanis.

PS - Photos at the Golden Temple follow.