Let The Life Flow

The house where I stayed in South London is a beautiful building located in a beautiful locality. I was welcomed with warmth by Caroline, the wonderful human being and owner of the house. My room was at the upper floor and carrying the suitcase through the stairs proved to be quite an exercise! I realised that entire staircase is thickly carpeted – in London a common feature perhaps, coz I saw the same even in my friend Ravi’s house – probably a measure to cope with the extreme cold in the winter. The stairs creaked below my feet – it was a wooden staircase. But that was the beginning. The amount of wood use I saw in the house was amazing from what I have seen back home. Through the carpet not only stairs but also the floors were creaking. Yeah the floors were wooden in that three floor house. There were wooden doors, wooden chairs in the rooms and corridor, wooden tables, wooden cupboards, wooden racks, wooden almirah, wooden show cases, wooden photo frames and many other things pla...

Clarendon Drive in Putney, London (where my London colleagues had organised my home away home) seemed to be a posh locality. Beautiful houses stood in neat rows, on both sides of the almost empty roads. After reaching there suddenly I realised why the ‘videshis’ and our very ‘phoren returned’ talk about dirt and filth in India. The roads were absolutely clean, stretching from end to end between two houses on both sides. One does not get to see any cracked road, ‘broken at the edge’ road or ‘with pot holes’ road. The mostly brick colour houses at the first glance look perfectly uniform; creating a synchronised rhythm of visuals. But two days after my stay, a visit to central London and exposure to lot more beautiful structures, a closer look at each building revealed to me that almost all houses were different in their design. But the designs are so ‘in sync’ with the others in material, colour, design and size that they create an illusion of uniformity though they are quite diverse in...

Today – oh sorry it is already yesterday – being the Romance Day, let me come back to the feelings and emotions again. Think of it, if you LIKE somebody or something what is your instinct? You would have an inclination to know more about the subject/object, to spend more time on/with that. In opposite when you do not like some subject/object, then you feel like going away and not to deal with it. Try spending time with subject/object for which you do not feel positive emotion. You feel bored and burdened! A denser form of this emotion would what I will call as LOVE. You no longer only feel positive for this subject/object; you try actually devoting and spending more time and feeling happy in doing so. If this is for a person we also want reciprocation and try to do things to get the same. You take effort in becoming more aware about the other person and letting know about yourself. You feel attracted and drawn to this person and feel inclined to attract him/her. If the feeling is mutu...

Those who are in the field of disability rights, they will understand when I am mentioning about accessibility. But for other’s benefit let me give you a brief on accessibility. Have you seen a particular insurance company’s ad on TV where a young man sitting on a usual chair gets transformed into a wheel chair with one leg gone? Today you are going to a cinema and you never think of the stairs. God forbid, tomorrow if you meet with an accident and to save your life doctors ampute one of your leg and then you want to go to the cinema – would you ignore those stairs? Certainly not- your access to that building is gone if they do not have a lift. So suddenly with loss of your leg you become a lesser mortal and you do not have access to many places including the roads of our country. If you are on wheel chair, can you go on our pavements? Its a joke. Is not it? With almost a foot high our pavements do not give access to the wheel chair users at any place where they can get into the pav...