Evening crawls slowly towards night
Night falls and obscures the light
Each bird gradually ends its flight
My eyes begin to adjust to the dark
But deep at the bottom of my heart
There still lies an unknown spark
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Wander beyond the horizon
Wander beyond what mortals can view
Wander to satisfy the wander lust
Wander like the blazing grains of dust
Wander to discover yourself within
Wander for astounding moments to begin
Wander where loving memories are born
Wander where pain is steadily torn
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Well taking the trend of my 'simple pleasures' series forward where I would write about the books I have been reading or the movies I have been watching or anything that adds to contentment, here is another.
On Tuesdays I usually have sandwiches for lunch because we have the Toastmasters session from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm. So, I get very less time for lunch on Tuesdays and I don't want to waste it standing in a queue for the food in the canteen. Now Toastmasters happens to be an International speech club, which is meant for Leadership and Communications. I never miss those sessions, in fact I look forward to them as they are an escape from my mundane office work. But I am not going to talk about Toastmasters now I will save it for another day. Today I will write about my food trip.
Since I had just sandwiches for lunch I wanted to have something good in the evening snacks. But sometimes you get so held up in your nine hours I.T job that you can not make time for snacks as well. Luckily today was not one such days. I had some free time so I thought of having an early snack. I asked a team member to accompany me and we went on a food spree. It is one such days when you don't care about your strict diet or gaining weight, and you just let yourself loose. We went to try the street food. There are lot of hawkers who put on their stalls outside office and people dawdle around them all the time, right from their morning teas to evening snacks and cigarettes. We too go there when we are bored of the canteen food. Since it was only 3:30 pm we decided to have something light. We started with tea, the roadside tea stall sells very good masala tea in small paper cups and the very smell of it lifts my mood. I took few sips from it, closed my eyes and forgot all worries that were hanging on to my mind for quite sometime. Even in a crowded public place I felt at peace. The next trip was to the sweet corn stall. Now the boy there offers you two ways of having corn, either he boils the bajra for you with spices and you eat it directly or he rips off the corn from the bajra with a knife and hands it to you in a plate with masala and lemon. I prefer the later. So, I took spoons full of sweet corn and relished it, what a break from work! But wait I am not done yet, there is some eternal relationship between a girl and pani puri which we call 'gup chup' in Bhubaneswar. So, how could I miss that. The pani puri stall is a little far on the other side of the road. But you see no street snack is complete for any female without tasting her favourite pani puri. So, we took a small walk and gulped those pani puris one by one till the count reached ten. This is something which I would have called 'the pursuit of happiness' but we decided to end the food spree with some imli candies which I bought from a shop near by.
As I walked back to office I was full of joy. You see a break at times is important and a break from the regular food that you have is a delight. I had seen a board in front of a cafe once which said "We are what we eat". So, I think good food is good mood and we must always start good things when we have had good food. At least I haven't got any good ideas when I was hungry!
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Well taking the trend of my 'simple pleasures' series forward where I would write about the books I have been reading or the movies I have been watching or anything that adds to contentment, here is another.
This December 30th I turned a year older, I am now in my thirties and the years just pass by like days. I have also completed more than ten years at work and I already feel like retiring.
This December 30th I thought of spending only with my family. So, I got up quite early in the morning, got ready and put on my new dress. The dress that I had meticulously chosen from central, one of the malls I always hang out in the weekend. The colour was a bright yellow with golden work on it. I had hesitated to buy it but a friend had insisted that I try bright colour. Putting that on I felt like eighteen again! Now the restaurants in Bhubaneswar keep changing, there was this place called 'Blue Berry' that sold many nice grills and I used to go there with my friends on Wednesdays and Fridays, the days when they had non veg. We relished Mexican grilled chicken sizzler, the seafood sizzler and the exotic prawn sizzler. However one fine day the restaurant completely shut down though it's sister restaurant called 'Wild Berrys' is still open about three kilometers away from it in the other side of our office. The new restaurant that has come up in it's place is called 'Go South'. A pure vegetarian one with all kinds of dosas and South Indian Thalis. I have tried the thalis twice and it is not bad. Since it's vegetarian, people go there on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays because those are the days people usually have veg here. In Bhubaneswar there are days for veg and non veg and there are restaurants to go accordingly!
My mother insists that we have vegetarian on birthdays because that is kind of auspicious. So, I planned to take my family comprising of my parents, my maternal uncle and aunty to the all veg restaurant 'Go South'. Not so sure if they enjoyed but like a typical middle class family they were terribly worried about the bill even if I was paying. So, after a decent meal and decent bill we set out for twin city Cuttack, our ancestral place. My younger cousin brother was more than happy to see me. My aunty had carried a lot of cakes and chocolates with her which he relished. There was no typical candle lighting or cake cutting ceremony but my grandmother and my aunty each gave me a five hundred rupees note. I felt as if I was ten years old again ! Actually I always feel that every time I go to my ancestral place. My granny is about to be eighty years old and growing weaker but she is delightful. I still love talking to her and had an amazing time. After spending the whole afternoon there we went to the Chandi temple in Cuttack, where my mother and aunty were lost offering prayers and then finally we returned back to Bhubaneswar.
It was a day well spent with my family and worthy to be remembered because sometimes in the hassle of the job life and the outings with friends we often forget our aged relatives who won't be around always and do need our time.
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Well taking the trend of my 'simple pleasures' series forward where I would write about the books I have been reading or the movies I have been watching or anything that adds to contentment, here is another.
I was browsing the internet to find more about writing when it occurred to me that instead of reading articles about writing, or books on writing why not watch movies on it. Well then I came across this link below, it lists out 15 greatest movies about writing.
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The first movie is 'Julie and Julia' which I watched last weekend. Both characters Julia Child played by Meryl Streep and Julie Powell played by Amy Adams are fascinating. In this movie Julie tries to challenge herself by cooking from the book “Mastering The Art of French Cooking,” she decides to complete 524 recipes in 365 days and starts blogging about it. Now Julia is the author of the same book and in doing so Julie becomes a fan of Julia, she is literally obsessed with what Julia would have done and how Julia would have cooked.
The movie runs both Julie's and Julia's stories in parallel, Julia trying to cook in Paris and publish her first book on French cooking in the 1940s and Julie learning to cook from the book authored by Julia, in the Queens in the 2000s. The movie appears to be a conversion between two women separated by time. They are on a mission, both love food, love to cook and have this idea to write about it, the movie is about how they work on this writing or food blogging which drives them to success. Julia Child publishes her book and Julie Powell makes her blog famous before writing a book called 'Julie and Julia'. Both have their ups and downs, both work against heavy odds, both meet with self doubt at some point of their life but finally both drive themselves to success.
I loved the movie, it's inspiring. First of all it helps you to never give up hope and secondly it teaches you interesting things about writing. You see writing is not just about literature or following Hemingway or publishing books, it's beyond that, a)You may not write a novel but you can write a cook book b)You may not write a book but you can blog. As long as you are passionate about writing there will always be a way to express yourself and put your thoughts, feelings and ideas into words. You need not have a great plot to write nor do you need a very eventful life to be a writer, I believe writing can come from the simple pleasures of life, something that keeps you going or makes you happy when nothing else does.
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I am writing after a long time I had been reading books and I am going to write about some of the books I read in my upcoming blogs, and if not books I will write about movies, food or anything that adds to contentment. I would call them the 'Simple Pleasure' series. You can find more of it on my facebook page (link added at the end of the blog). Please don't go too deep into my grammar, punctuation and style of writing, because this is just happy writing :)
The recent book that I completed reading was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. Murakami was nominated for noble prize this year. I like the way he writes, I love his philosophy. He describes the characters and the conversation between them in such a beautiful way that it touches the right cords of your heart and you get to know the answers of most of the questions that pop up in your mind in your day to day life. You can relate to the confusion of the characters in his books, their miseries, their moments of happiness and their moments of pain. The stories are based in Japan a place miles away from my country, the life style is different, the food described is different even the music that Murakami describes in his books is not that known to me but I wonder how the characters and the story which he has woven around them are so easy for me to relate. They suffer from the same dilemma, the same constant worries and the same challenges that life throws at us every day.
Well this is the second book of Murakami that I read, the first one was South of the Border, West of the Sun another very intriguing story. Murakami did leave a deep impact only with few pages of that Novella so I decided to go for a bigger and thicker novel, and I am glad to say that am not disappointed. Rather the book Norwegian Wood was very soulful. It's about a college guy called Toru who has a past and a girl associated to his past, her name is Reiko. When Reiko comes back to his life he can't let her go any more but she is not in a position to accept him because of the past they both share. It's a story of one year where Reiko comes and goes out of Toru's life and how Toru is desperate to follow her with all his hope. Reiko's world is dark and tormented and only hurts Toru unless one fine day he realizes that he has to move on, that a bright life awaits him and beckons him where healthy and happy people live, people who truly care about him. Toru then makes a pledge that he will forget the past as the dead remain dead forever and life must go on for the rest. Murakami writes it in the most appreciable way.
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
What I could conclude that you can not run away from death or people who are dead may haunt you in your dreams but it's all about living before you die. Toru's acceptance of his world and his gill to embrace life after all that had happened gives you hope while you close the last pages of the book. You can't say that the book had a happy ending, because it didn't but in a way it helps you believe in life because Toru, the protagonist chooses to live to his fullest even after all what he had undergone and that decision itself was a silver lining because it was the acceptance of life.
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