Heart to Heart

                                                 An ode to my dad “Shashtriji”                                                        Today, on monsoon-oppressed August’s 31 st morn brightened by balmy sunshine, our kitchen downstairs is unusually abuzz. My better-half, despite her back-injury mandating bedrest, is busy making the choice Pahari dishes for my dad’s ‘shraadh’. The clang and bang as also the mouth-watering aromas trigger nostalgia and send me down the memory lane. The first wave of thought is guilt-laden and soul-singeing: how crass negligence by the slumbering night-duty doctor and apathetic paramedics at the civil hospital caused his avoidable death. Following that mixed, overlapping memories flood the mind. “What was the defining trait of his persona?” I ask myself. Of the many that whelm the mind, two stand out: his irrepressible love for books and immense sense of humour. Thus the tear-and-trauma inflicted by more than a fair share of “slings and arrows of outrageo

    On a morning walk in monsoon                                                                         I t was a little dark outside when I stole a look from the window. The dawn still languid with sleep and conspiring with the rain-impregnated clouds lording over the sky had cast a hush of sensuous magic. The wet, winding road looked lonely and desolate. I was soon at my choice spot by the bend. There I stood to cast a reverential gaze at the distant ‘Dhauladhar’ peak with a couple of stately deodars standing in front like dutiful sentinels. Birds were busy singing their ‘Raag Bhairavi’ while a brook gurgled by behind me. I paid my obeisance as if to a deity, muttered my favourite hymn “Sarve bhavantu sukhinah…”, and strode ahead. Suddenly, a vehicle hurtled by breaking my spell of bliss, leaving me with a ghastly noise and a cloud of obnoxious fumes. Minutes later, having passed by the houses still cradling their inmates, with the misty quiet of the outdoors fondling their dreams,

  “Lightness of being” is all I am a self-confessed hedonist fond of all good things that I can mine out of this ephemeral life for my insatiable platter. Besides gorging on the magnificent delights that mother Nature presents   – golden-hued dawn and bird song, changing moods of the Dhauladhar,   meditative silence of the deodars, crimson-cheeked sun’s shy descent heading west for the rendezvous, and so on – I adore   exalting company of friends (though the truly cherished kind is harder to come by!). Above all, I love the sunshine of books that open new worlds of thought and bestow revealing insights into life and world; dispel the cobwebs of hatred and bigotry from the mind; infuse love, compassion and poetry in our souls and sculpt us into better humans; stimulate, excite, tickle and titillate and make us cry or laugh. And in addition, if yours truly is able to pen-push a few lines off and on, I have no need for any kind of heavenly bliss. That said, it is however the little sto