Precious Pearls

Finally it’s over. The Festival of Lights began with a bang and ended on a high sounding note! (Cracker-less Diwali is still a distant dream).  It would take a couple of days for our folks to come out of the festive mood and get back to routine. While most of the people were engrossed in preparing for and celebrating the festival, I was a silent observer. Despite hailing from a family following rituals to the T, I somehow have found it tough to be into them. Diwali means lots of fun to kids and even for housewives and devout minds, it’s such a big occasion! After entering the newspaper world, I handle festive features when the Festival of Light comes calling. It’s a nice opportunity to see what happens when you prepare a little too much in advance! As we have tight printing schedules, we have to close our supplements a bit too ahead of the fest. It’s no different from housewives taking up cleansing work too early. One of my aunts told me she had started clearing the clutter a good...

Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future! The wise words of Oscar Wilde apply to each of us at some point. Don’t be surprised if one of your classmates, a ‘flirt’, turns out to be a doting husband or father. A backbencher may surge ahead in the professional race and a vagabond may convert oneself into an extremely committed and sincere individual! Someone who appears a person of substance today might not be that way in the past. On the contrary, someone we may label as being ‘shallow and insincere’ could evolve into a mature human being. If you stand out today, what you were yesterday doesn’t matter much. Exhibit the grit to leave baggage behind and a positive transition isn’t far away. The makeover is just a matter of time. And why talk about major transformations? Even small but smart moves we make will bring about a transformation. It has happened to me. Of course not the sinner-to-saint kind, it’s in terms of the thought process. It all began with clearing the mind’s a...

In a magazine, I read a series of interviews of couples happily married for more than two decades. It featured ordinary as well as celebrity couples. What struck me was none of them looked made-for-each-other. Many husbands and wives were poles apart by their nature; one introvert, other outgoing, husband unassuming, wife flamboyant, the man loved computers and machines while the woman, books and films. In some cases, wives were extremely career-minded while their partners were more homebound. Divergence of attitudes and likes was evident but perhaps what kept them going was respect for others’ opinions. Come on, I am not talking about ‘secretes of happy marriages’ or ‘relationships’. I was wondering many of us can accommodate diverse interests but what happens when someone holds viewpoint exactly opposite to our own? Why can’t we exhibit similar levels tolerance here? For example, many of those who love classic English literature believe that Shakespeare is ‘the’ best writer. Can the...

Scars on an innocent mind may cause irreparable and irreversible damage for lifetime.  That’s the reason we need to be extra sensitive and sensible with kids. As society and country, are we doing the needful? Problems of child labour and beggars have always been of importance since times immemorial. Unfortunately, they are only growing... These sound like high-sounding phrases straight out of social research papers or intellectual debates, which hardly yield anything. I swear they are not lifted from anywhere. I’m absolutely not into plagiarism.  I have paraphrased these words and needless to say, they’re clichéd. Even I could feel futility of the sentences while writing them. It doesn’t mean we don’t recognise enormity of the situation but perhaps, we have learnt to live with the fact. Yet some incidents underline the clichéd sentences again and again. What happened to a 12-year-old boy, a ragpicker named Firoz in Indore , is immensely shocking, to say the least. A constab...