Flux of Time

Happiness. Often used as a substitute for success. Both highly intangible words. Both can't be contained in a single definition. And yet, we are conditioned all our lives to believe that it is something we 'achieve' if we do certain things. As kids, we make our parents happy and ourselves happy if we do things that are supposed to be 'right'. So, we complete our engineering or medical degrees (what else can poor South Indian children dream of? shudder shudder if they think of something like the arts, especially boys!) and we will be happy? We go off to the US, do our MSes, and think we and our parents and our families have been wrapped in one big happy bubble! Then we marry. If that partner fits the standards set by our closest set of relatives and friends, we are doubly lucky. Soon enough, we start a family. And the cycle continues. A car, an apartment, then two, our quest for material symbols of success is one long relentless one. We parade our achievements on so...

The end of 2014 must go down as one of the worst months ever, at least for me, personally. How do you come to terms with the freakish manner in which a young cricketer who was just about starting his international career had to say goodbye to the world? How do you even begin to internalise the death of a couple of hostages at Sydney? A mother of three children, what wrong did she do? Or the death of the manager of Lindt Cafe - how does that make sense? December 2014, what have you done to us? What made you take the lives of over hundred innocent schoolchildren in Peshawar, all mercilessly gunned down? What about their families? What do the parents have to look forward to? December is indeed the cruellest month. You took away a former colleague of mine, an honest man who worked hard, who was also a very good friend to me ten years ago. I think of his wife, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. What will life be like for them from now on? How do they deal with their loved one's abse...

That's my travel piece in today's City Express, New Indian Express. The link here: http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/bengaluru/Rolling-Back-the-Clock-in-the-Land-of-the-Hoysalas/2014/12/11/article2564981.ece