center of attraction

Yes, what you see there is dew.

Not rain.

It feels like a year since we have seen a good sunny day around here.. Days upon days of blinding curtain rain and steady-as-Dravid rain and looking as if it is certainly going to rain and a faint misty rain and - you get the drift. You name the type of rain and we have had it, and have had it again for a second, third and fourth helping. In a country which is reeling under drought, I bet there are a lot of exasperated people out there saying "Its not fair! Why, of all places, only in that little industrial town in the middle of nowhere ?"

I certainly echo the same sentiment.

So it feels really nice when little Johnny can go out and play, even if its for only one little morning.

on the japanese bridge

Do you know why the path was left untrodden ?

Well, so do I.

look - Arundhati !

This is in reference to a scene from Devdutt Pattnaik's book - "The Pregnant King"

A big part of the book was about the king trying to conceive a heir; and there were comparisons about "ownership" of women in a marriage which would frankly be outrageous in today's context. However, looking beyond these, the dialogues on "duty"- to everyone around - parents, ancestors, subjects, children, could set one thinking, as also the sections on the difference between right and wrong, given the context. How easy it is to imagine that there could be absolute rights and wrongs - that it would be easy to take decisions in life that could be viewed as either black or white, and not "depends" !

This scene was from the earlier pages of the book - when the difficult decisions had not come into picture yet. There were no promises to pluck the stars either, just the heady phase of strutting off, of exploration, of getting to know.

One way to look at it is Charlie's way: the fewer promises you make, the fewer you would need to break.