ChirpyQuill

  A thousand colours   Dappled sunlight filters through and makes her glow, As you feel her , breathe her in, she urges you to go slow,  She’s a riot of colours and yet, so placid is her charm She’s cold and yet ,her embrace so comforting, so warm, The crispness of her days and the nip in her air, Lambent glow Of the candles and a piano playing somewhere, Ephemeral are moments with her but till eternity will last this affair,  Then she lets go all her colours and finally lay bare, She’s a thousand colours tucked under winter’s veil,  She’s autumn, she’s fall, she’s a never ending tale. 

Last weekend I was in the Hamptons with friends. For the uninitiated, the Hamptons is where the rich people of New York City (both nouveau and old school) live and / or go to spend their weekends, especially during the summers. It is a fountain of privilege, class, rich taste and obnoxious display of wealth. Most New York based senior finance professionals worth their salt either have a second home there or aspire to - it comes with serious bragging rights and it is a powerful statement to start a Monday morning meeting by complaining about the commute from the Hamptons back into the City. OK, so an explanation is in order since none of the sentences after the first sentence in this paragraph apply to me - so what was I doing there? I was attending the wedding celebration of close friends - but this was no ordinary wedding, in fact it is one of the most unique events that I have attended and made me ponder about a number of things primarily related to the subject of this write up. My f

Pakistan broke up into two nations in 1971, owing to their policies of dis-enfranchisement of the East Pakistanis and forcing a language and culture on them thay they did not want or need. Pakistani army inflicted unheard of brutality on their East Pakistani citizens including rapes and murders of 3 million of their own citizens over 8 months. A large majority of the victims happened to be Hindus also. There has been no known incidents of rapes in such massive numbers in modern history.   Indian Army intervened and Pakistani army immediately dropped their weapons and surrendered. Indian army took 93,000 Pakistani soldiers as POW, whom they later released as an act of goodwill. This again has no precedence in modern history. Bangladesh became a free nation. It is now more prosperous than Pakistan, although the disease of oppressing minorities such as Hindus and Christians is just as intact in Bangladesh as it is in Pakistan. (owing to which a 15 percent population of Hindus has dwindled

  A Daughter, A Wife, A Mother…. And the Guilt  by Leena Kundnani   Of the countless roles that I play, some of the most prominent ones are that of a wife, a mother, and a daughter. Not to mention that of a working professional. All these roles get intertwined with each other, each of them vying for time and attention. Often, I feel I am not doing justice to a particular role I am supposed to play, when another needs to be given more priority. This is more so when some of the roles are miles away from each other and physical distance makes it more difficult to maintain a balance. Somehow, I am never content playing whatever role I am playing. I still remember so vividly one day in August 2017 when I got to know my dad had a fall and fractured his back. But questions of should I leave my then 7-year-old alone here in the USA to visit my dad as well as be a support to my mom tormented me. Or few years before that, when my dad had to undergo a pacemaker surgery, my options were to t

Just like that, it happens! It takes just that one moment, one loss to bring you to a watershed moment  when the whole chemistry of your brain changes. The imbalance of the  neurotransmitters, the altered state of your mind, your thought process, your emotions; all of it get a name - Depression! The event which brought you to that state, seizes to matter after a while but you are left with a heart with all its layers, bare open. The brain, starts to loose its rationale thinking and heart starts to rule the mind. The line between what is real and what is your reality starts to blur. The Science :  Brain (which always had my reverential respect - I once wanted to be a neurosurgeon), as we all know, is a complex organ with myriad neural pathways built over a lifetime of experiences, learnings, emotions, actions and some aspects of us which we are born with. Three major neurotransmitters- Serotonin, Dopamine and Oxytocin play a major role in our emotional well-being, how we feel and how ou

  Last evening, was feeling desolate so, decided to go to a star gazing event. And like it does always, space didn't fail to amaze me; it never fails to make my mind go numb trying to fathom the scale of the distances and sizes of the cosmic objects which are so abstruse. I laugh when I think of mankind and how solipsistic are it's beliefs and how desultory it is to the fact that we all are , we all combined along with earth are, not even a tiny speck of dust in the whole scale of universe.  Not that our earth is devoid of things which leave you completely flabbergasted. Monarch butterflies - they migrate every year from Canada to Mexico. They have this path, which otherwise would have taken three of their generations to learn, is hardcoded in their DNA. Salmon - Every year( if it survives the hungry bears on the way), swims thousands of miles to lay eggs on the same spot where it was born. How does she know her path to get to the exact same spot thousands of miles away ? Isn&#

Me and Laundry...... There are invisible people who live in my home People who I’ve never met or seen But I know they exist And that they can’t just be dismissed They don’t drink or eat with me   But all they seem to do is add to my load of laundry I say this because I seem to do way too much for a family of three Sometimes I get so tired Trudging loads of laundry And then what cheers me up Is a cup of my favorite Starbucks coffee And then again my friends I’m ready to tackle the next load of laundry Left by these invisible people who I cannot see                                                      .......................Leena

There is a certain intelligence that pervades the Universe, we all know. Some of it is coded through DNA, and some expresses itself through laws of physics.   That a seed from an Oak tree will not shape up to grow tomatoes is a given. We undertand that the mechanism through which it’s entire future is encoded is in the DNA of each cell of the seed. But we do not know why it is there. Similarly, that the Earth rotates around the Sun and not around Jupiter sometimes and around Mars another time is clearly observed. Underlying the behavior and characterstics are laws and forces such as Gravity. However we do not know why Gravitational pull is what it is and why those laws are as they are.  So this intelligence, which drives the Universe has been called by different names. Some call it God, some Nature and in the context of how it is expressed in living organisms, some call it life-force. A lack of life force causes the organism to die, and it’s constituent components are yielded back into

 We were a small family: Amma, Appa and I. However, we were surrounded by uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents within fifteen minutes of us. My parents weren’t religious folks but we still celebrated all the festivals with zeal, every year. Some were celebrated in an elaborate way and others in an intimate setting. Amma was always the driver of all things related to the celebrations and Appa was mostly interested in those mouth-watering dishes that accompanied the festivities.   Out of all those myriad Hindu festivals, the one that stands out in my mind is Gowri and Ganesha festival. Particularly Gowri festival which we refer to as Gowri Habba in Kannada. As I would learn later, this is celebrated by mostly people from Karnataka and is not as well known as its accompanying festival, Ganapathi Habba. On a typical day of the festival, Amma and I woke up early in the morning and got dressed in bright-colored Indian clothes. While I reluctantly woke up at the crack of dawn, Amma wo

शिकवा बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तेरे एक बाल से,  जो तेरे कानों के पीछे से हो के तेरे गालों को चूमता है,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तेरे उस झुमके से,  जो मदहोश हो के तेरे कानों में लटका झूमता है,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तेरे काजल से,  मेरी तो कोई जगह नहीं पर तेरी आँखों में वह जो रहता है,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तेरे कंगन से,  कलाई तो मैंने ही पकड़ी हुई है ना, मुझसे हमेशा कहता है,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तेरे गले के हार से,  तेरे सीने से लगा हुए मुझे कहता है के तुझे तेरे खाली बाजूओं का एहसास तो है ना,  बहुत शिकवा है तेरी उस एक पाजेब से,  तेरे पाऊँ में पड़ी हुई है पर तेरे पास तो है ना,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे हर उस शै से ,  जो तेरे नज़दीक हो के मुझे मेरी दूरियों का एहसास दिलाती है,  बहुत शिकवा है मुझे तो उस हवा से भी,  जो तेरे खुली हुई ज़ुल्फ़ों को छु के महक सी जाती है,  हाँ, बहुत शिकवा है मुझे। 

There is value in challenging some basic precepts handed out to us in the name of common knowledge. There are innumerable examples of those with questionable credentials. The reason they survive is likely lazy thinking on our part. Often we make no effort of opening the nice-sounding package of words we have received, examining its contents, poking, prodding, and testing the substance of it. We hand them to the next person in the same pristine shape we received, and so the myths continue.    Granted that, at first blush, many of them seem to be accurate, just as much as the Earth is flat looks true. Only when one checks their veracity do cracks emerge and, in many cases, just with some simple hammer taps of sound logic, the precepts break down. "Women are more complicated than men" falls in the same category, in my opinion.  Now, if you have already revolted at the notion of me challenging this obvious truth or perhaps have even bolted by now, we don't have much to say to

Yesterday, I was a on a long drive and as always, it was Warris Shah's "Heer" keeping me company. And like always, listening to it, mind drifted to my birthplace; Punjab! A land that has been the forefront of the modern wars, ancient invasions, witnessed one of the worst massacres in its history and one of the largest exodus.So much blood spilled and yet, the most passionate of the love stories born in its soil. Heer-Ranjah, Shiri-Farhad, Sassi-Punnu , Mirza-Sahiba and Sohni-Mahiwal to name a few. The sufi renditions of these stories by sufi poets like Warris Shah, Bulle Shah, Farid take them to a plane which transcends from the romance in the heart to the love for the divine.  My mind, flooded with the memories of my growing up years and some scenes came alive vividly. A milkman taking big cauldrons of milk on a cycle on a cold winter morning and finally disappearing in the fog. You only hear his fading voice chanting Gurbani and ting-ting of the cycle bell. Winter eveni

                                                             “Nayana, I see an airplane flying really low, it is coming close to the towers, where are you? This doesn’t look normal!” My husband, screaming in utter disbelief, was on the phone with me from across the river in Jersey City; I had just stepped off the train at the World Trade Center. Two years before that terrible day, I had flown into New York City from Mumbai, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, a blushing new bride. The first thing I saw as our airplane gradually descended to what was to be my new home were those gleaming towers. I remember staring at them in wide-eyed wonder, at their sheer size, at the vertical space they occupied as they rose majestically into the New York skyline on a beautiful, brilliant blue August afternoon! As luck would have it, my first job in my adoptive country was a few blocks from the Twin Towers. I was twenty-five years old, living my best life in New York. The best part of each day was when the tr

We experience the world through our five senses and the sensations within us. A mish-mash of “all that jazz” and accompanying feelings is what we call experience.  My experience of Chatora started several weeks before I ever got there, when I decided to visit London to celebrate my niece’s graduation. While there, I figured I will visit my classmate from school, at his Michelin Star rated restaurant called Chatora. Aside from being aware of the awards and accolades his restaurant had earned, I had seen the pictures of some of the sumptuous dishes he had shared with us in the past. They had always left me mesmerized at the quality of the presentation and attention to detail. It was a double edged sword though since it set my expectations really high.  The one hour ride from from central London to the restaurant, increased the anticipation of enjoying the delicacies as well as meeting my friend and team-mate from my school basketball team after close to 35 years. So we snaked our way thr