What gives

Mangan is getting ready to celebrate the 15th of August. My cousin an ex-beaurocrat observes rather sardonically-why does this place celebrate the occasion with such pomp?It's bigger than any festival.There are series of school putting up their annual performances ,there is the football tournament which starts a fortnight ahead.This year the stars of the tournament are couple of black players from clubs in Kolkotta who are representing some of the teams. Every year we observe with increasing sense of amusement and wonder the workers ask for allowance to stitch new clothes for the occasion as well as ask for leave to attend the programmes. Everyone is involved.There are the local gentries pushing each other beyond the rules of the game putting their best foot forward in the football and the basketball matches .We remember with a lot of fondness our dad and mom playing these matches when we were kids.Dad's nearing eighty but he doesn't miss the matches even now. There is my ...

It’s good to be home.The familiar sounds of the morning and my mother’s voice excitedly waking us up with a warm cup of tea to be a part of the moment,the solar eclipse.My brother’s been all over the compound looking for the best view of the thing to come.Dad’s busy with his chicken even this early in the morning.Sherry,the tibetain apso looking like my puppy Bead in the foopets ,after a much needed hair-cut ,tilts his head ,whines and cuddles up to me.Monu,my mom’s girl Friday’s daughter is cooing in her crib.’Here it is’- my mom declares,beyond the over-cast skies suddenly it is night again.There is silence ,absolute silence , the nature is itself paying homage to this once in a life-time affair. This is my mom ,always involved with wonder in every occasion in our lives.She was describing the two cobras who had been walking the grounds.They have been apparently flourishing and have become so sure of themselves that they walk around the garden...

Mangan,-'Mon'-'gaon' -,which means a place where people meet or a place where you should not be when a war strikes,is a quaint little town in Sikkim and yet so dear to many of our hearts.It's placed strategically in a valley between mountain and hills.This town ,where most people know each other and yet now when I go home I am a stranger amidst the kids who have grown up and the migrants who have settled in. Just as you enter Mangan ,down below in the valley there is a red-roofed elephantine house that has always made many of our hearts beat faster,it was the place where I was born,it was the country homestead where all our town cousins used to congregate during the holidays-oh what memories I have of it!It was this place where all of us siblings wove our fantasies around the large antique mirror that hung on the wall-told each other fancy stories to dozen,hero-worshipped our elder sister,wrote soppy but innocent letters to our mother who was away for a short-while...

Saw MJ's funeral on TV.Felt sad,sad,sad.Especially the final moment when they picked up the casket to exit-it felt like the show was over and the final curtains were down. The funeral itself was touching made more so by so many christian songs sung.MJ on the retrospect, comes across as an extremely vulnerable and a fragile personality inspite of the heights of success he attained .When he was around-he seemed to be wacko-jacko,making news but barely registering in the recent past although he seemed to be everywhere during the 'thriller' days.His music was something else though.In his death he seems to be larger than life-farewell MJ-you packed quite a punch in life as in death!

I can see Jodie Foster mouth the words-You never recover!!you just become someone else- this is a line from a hollywood flick-it is not the bible. Do we actually recover from the incidents and accidents in our lives I wonder? Life with all our tragedies and pain, Life with all the sun-shine and rain. How can something that has been only so real in our lives suddenly go back to being never was? Does time heal?Is healing getting back to the absolute whole or is it just getting back a sense of balance? Healing, assessed physically(def), is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair to reduce the size of a damaged or nechrotic area. This does not sound absolute does it? Healing incorporates both the removal of necrotic tissue (demolition)-this might be easy, and the replacement of this tissue. The replacement can happen in two ways: by regeneration: the necrotic cells are replaced by the same tissue as was originally there-Do tissues ever remain the same??sounds impos...