By wish or by fluke you have just entered the online home of someone who just left a well paying job and cozy flat in Mumbai and have taken up something which makes me work for 16+hours a day,pays me nothing and keeps me away from my family for months on together. (Incidentally I'm in IIM Ahmedabad) I was having interests ranging from nature to heavy metal,Coelho to Puzo,spirituality to finance !!Right now trying to get interested in obtuse intellectual masturbations which goes by the name Accounts,Operations Management,Mathematical Decision Modelling etc.
But as for anybody who have gone through this rather agonising process of defining oneself, I too doubt the justice I shall render to the job. Still the trial persists..............
My childhood,frankly, belonged to the ;Gods Own Country, a place which even now I love a lot, the State of Kerala which does justice to its Sobriquet......a land of beautiful hills, dense tropical forests,streams and rivers. A state which has given the world the much touted Kerala Model of Social Development, making the UN and other international agencies sit up and take notice. National Geographic has cited the state with having one of the best breakfasts of the world and a must see along with such tourist havens like Venice & Zurich.
But some argue the excessive insistence on green Kerala has resulted in lack of Industrial Development not helped by years of communist rule for whom private industrial ownership was an anathema. The lofty medical and public sanitation standards have increased life expectancy but it has also given Kerala one of the oldest society!
My childhood memories are entwined in the myriad pictures of this beautiful place...the swaying coconut trees dancing to unwritten tunes, dark clouds bringing in the romanticism of monsoon, green carpets of paddy fields, the smell of festivals and the sound of silence.
A city etched in my memory is Eranakulam,(Also called Kochi) a landscape dotted with the signature Chinese nets and the backwaters.Another place Ive stayed and enjoyed to my hearts content was Ottapalam in Palakkad district. An even more rustic little town proudly preserving her virginity against the marauding modernisation albeit having all the amenities. My memories of childhood in Ottapalam has the face of "Poothan and Thira";,wandering out of Hindu mythology,their countenance masked by rather grotesque make-ups. While the former represented the demons, the later stood for gods. They came with the sound of festivals the smell of spring ; a smell as arousing as the smell of dancing girls in the discos of Bombay, bodies smeared with different colors of Elle-18.Im suprised how fast those memories seem to be running away from me! I wish i were a kid again..
in Mikumi National Park-
Tanzania
