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BluD

BluDada is what I've always known him as, from a blue bus he used to drive when we lived in Nagpur. My dad's younger brother, who from whenever I can remember has been in Germany. He is a priest there, tho now retired.

This photograph is a from our visit to Goa when he took me back in time to show n tell me all about their childhood. I was trying to get to know a lil about my dad through him. He limped up  a steep hill and down to the Chapora river to show me where they learnt swimming and caught fish with lines made out of coconut leaf stems.

But that's not what I started writing this for. I go tomorrow to Germany to see him. He's getting older n slower now and says he won't come to India again. I'm sad about that. I am taking a Samsung Galaxy Tab for him - a tablet phone so he can call and use the net from his room itself, without needing to climb down to his office. The excitement I feel for him is just like I had felt when he got me a really cool pair of roller skates or the first portable radio he got us. I cannot wait to see his face...

As a kid, we'd go up to Nagpur to spend Christmas with my dad's family. Bundled up for the cold, I'd wait impatiently for him to set up his slide projector. My first glimpses of Europe! I packed all those slides I found many years later when the ancestral house was sold...and the projector too :) I have his photography diary too where'd he made meticulous notes about his exposures. And the delightful little behind the lens filters.

I guess I'm just going to say thanks!

Everybody's Meenaka

he couldn't live without her (or was it the other way round?)...with him gone, what reason did she have to hang on?...how quietly she went and so suddenly... without even saying bye...

...while I wait for the phone to ring at 8.30 in the morning. May you live happily ever after...

From Ovid...there was a god who wandered disguised on earth with the intention of learning about his creation. One cool spring by the sea, he comes to a farm on the edge of the village, occupied by an elderly farmer and his wife. They invite him to supper and a night's lodging. The next morning the god continues on his journey after the couple has been allowed to make one wish: they do not want death to separate them. The god responds to their wish and turns them into a huge tree to shade the farm.

In their cool shade, if I can be even 1% of the person she was, I'll be a better human being :) 

my appa

1921-2011

may his soul rest in peace

one cold january morning...

...it must've been around 4am, i'd have been woken off the red dhurries that lined the arched corridors outside the hall at xavier's. janfest - the indian music group's annual celebration of indian classical music was always neatly timed around my birthday :)
i'd have slept off through the more rigorous daagar brothers...but the moment pt bhimsen inhaled his first lungful to launch whatever the raag it was...that first intonation seemed to travel straight to me in that hallowed quadrangle. gently lifting me from my slumber and into complete entrallment. miyan ki todi, bhimpalasi, puriya dhanashri, multani... didn't make much sense to me then but it simply didn't matter. i was hooked! it was only much later that i learnt that kirana was also a gharana!
he'd sing well past the magical sunrise and we'd applaud and applaud and he'd simply join his palms and bow and shuffle off the stage. i'd turn around to birthday wishes and hugs...and go home beaming ear to ear. the goencho had been corrupted...and happily so :)
as sadanand menon says in the beginning of his obit "may his voice continue to wake us up and keep us alive for generations".