Relishing INDIA!

I have been fortunate enough to be living in the suburbs of a beautiful town Dehradun, though the realization gripped me in my late teens when I was further away from this place. A place where you wake up caressed by the fresh cold wind from the Shivaliks, welcomed by the vast blue expanse of the sky, where you sleep under the limitless sheet of the night studded with stars and moon, where the hush and crowd of the city seem to have taken a backside. The most rejoicing piece however being the exotic aroma that fills your senses as soon as you are out of bed and already you are craving for more. An aroma that gives you the sense of being alive by suffusing you with life!

This aroma made up of various spices and masalas that make up the delicious Indian cuisine, a blend of various traditions, be it Punjabi, Garhwali, Rajasthani, Kashmiri, Marathi, a blend of mouth watering ingredients like curry leaves, coriander, cardamom, cloves and an endless list. In any part of the country, any city, any town, any village of India, cuisine is always sought for. I, being much of a foodie myself have never been able to escape these wholesome packages of food that besides serving your appetite, the various chatnis and pickles serves your taste and nose buds as well! Besides an Indian touch to Chinese, Thai and other such cuisines are more of a treat to have. Be it a chicken curry or rajma pulao or a dosa, pakora or a simple aloo parantha and a lassi or thandai alongwith, a stomach is all you need and you are already lurking for an additional one, what seems to be a never ending bliss. It’s said that way to a man’s heart is through his stomach but as far as I believe a good food is a way to everyone’s heart and we being Indians are already privileged and blessed to have to our advantage the relishing  food or rather a relishing India!

A Fortuitous Reflection

Some feelings are so grave yet so an infant that their innate nature deceives one into reception, that the revelation dawns upon us the twilight of the truth whose burden we bore since centuries, even before we came into this world, even before we were born. The burden that not only surmounted on our very soul but clutched in its claws the people that surrounded us maybe because our soul joined with theirs though concocted different by this imminent universe.

These truths that had long been our companion when the universe had so much to offer through its grievances and deceptions, that clicked the hysterical fraction in contrast with the witty one and created a squabble within the same. I am not here to defy my own emotions and neither will I be contemplating someone else’s but an incident, though like many others, coerced me to muse over  and suddenly there were countless questions ,that to which answers were never denied us but it is just realization some are bereft of. That how my pragmatic self was suddenly aroused by an act of indignation against a person who rather deserved a sweet lullaby after a day’s hard work, of how a wife just seeking a peaceful night sleep which was poisoned by her husband’s harsh words only to wake up again the next day, serving the same, as bright as she could be! I felt bad, yes I did, for the person could had been my mother or father and I truly adored them. But what would one say if they were merely some slum dwellers whom I never knew, in fact the sense of melancholy that prevailed therein was of a much greater extent, which left me in shame witnessing the agony, yet welcoming a day with sunshine smiles on their faces!

These were perhaps the episodes that echoed in everyone’s life or to put it more precisely in my everyday life yet there was an unstruck chord that somehow escaped me; firstly, why did I ever suffer for the ones whom I barely knew, why somehow that guilt occupied me when I saw an anguished heart, that unexplainable demeanour that I put on and not really wanting to let go of it. Being as it is I was guided into thinking that ultimately we are one and our soul is one that is the soul of the universe save for how some people had the heart to disrupt it, discard it with perfect agility like some flog and were these very people devoid from the eternal truth? Secondly, the acceptance that came from these despondent hearts, these troubled souls, was hope denied to them, that hope which forms the very basis of life, that which illuminated the light of existence, were these people sceptical of their own being or were they such iota in this magnificent world that even nature despised its own creation that flickered this light in them! These strange quotients, though having experienced every bit of it, were impregnable yet elucidation will always be seeked for, despite the redemption that we so long for!