This, That and Some More

I am a Hindu by birth, a Brahmo by marriage, I feel close to Islam and connected to Christianity yet I have never been religious, I believe in God and that for me is enough. I have lit a candle at a church, offered a chaddar at a mosque, I tied threads in a dargah and I have rung a bell at a temple, most of my experiences have been due circumstances or my curiosity to see the place. My first experience was when I went to Jharkhand with a group of friends; the trip in itself will need another long post which I will write later. We decided to do some trekking and found the hill on which a famous Jain Pareshnath temple was situated to be an ideal location. Right below the hill was a Digambar Jain monastery where we had to stop to attend to nature calls. We turned beetroot red with embarrassment at the sight of near total nudity of the senior male residents. We kept our eyes strictly focused on the way to the wash rooms which were incredibly dirty) and once done marched out with our eye...

India, a country with an ancient heritage and culture which is thousands of years old, a country which has many thousands of languages, in some way or another derived from Sanskrit and yet ironically we don’t have a language to unite our country. Hindi has been announced as the language that will unite India. It is mandatory to learn Hindi in schools but we often come across instances where people from other the eastern or southern parts of India can barely understand it. If the region has a high infiltration of Bollywood films then there may be some hope but down south where the influences of Bollywood have been firmly kept away due to a strong south Indian film industry, chances of people knowing Hindi is almost remote. In most schools down south, children are allowed to carry books and consult each other during the Hindi exam while the person 'on watch' kindly looks the other way, which of course is not the case for other subject exams. If you are a tourist in Tamil Nadu the...

Bidding farewell to tooth fairies in my thirties is probably a little late in the day as I should have done that when I was 10 or eleven as that is the time by when one looses all one's milk teeth. My one particular canine was rather reluctant to part with me so it stayed on refusing to budge as the years went by. In the process the suppressed canine protested and violently pushed up my fourth incisor on the right hand side, leaving me with one crooked tooth, a flawed smile and a general bad feeling about my appearance. The dentist gave me a wire brace in my teens which suppressed the crooked tooth for a while but it reared its ugly head (or is it face?) once my mouth outgrew the brace. The dentist maintained a stoic silence in front of a desperate teen, who had to flash pretty smiles at men but could not. He asked me to accept my crooked smile and said that it adds character to my smile! D'uh. The guys definitely didn't think so - no one said I have a pretty smile so far a...