My Chennai

I came across a link online, something that was about a 100 Things to Do in Chennai, of the hundred things one can do to stake their claim as a true Chennaivaasi I had only done a measly 15, half of which I would never had done had there not been the corporate culture of "Team Outing". I had never considered myself to be a part of this city, I had scoffed at those images that went online, something that went "Chennai is a city, Madras is an emotion". I found it to be a statement too shallow to my liking.

I was quite proud of my unfamiliarity with Chennai, as I felt it asserted my image of being a social outcast. When I told my friend that I had not even crossed twenty things one could do in Chennai, she chided me saying that I wasn't a true Son of the City, I rather found it to be a compliment.

While people who lived in Chennai or had migrated to from a different place, swear by the sights and sounds that she had to offer, I only cringed every time I had a reason to get out of my home. I would fret and fume whenever I boarded the buses and trains ranting to myself about the population and traffic, bemused at how people find the city to be liveable what with the extorting policemen and hassling autodrivers. Chennai is not a perfect city, why should it be?

Maybe I was irate because I lived two hours away from the city in a once quaint little town that now is slowly being inhabited owing to rising real estate value or maybe because the city is so overpopulated that the masses are looking for new places to occupy, and they've decided to occupy my once quaint little town. That's what they do, occupy, not live.

I had spent a good part of my two decades in this little town, I grew along with my friends in a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, where I could get a store credit just because my grandmother used to share the town gossip with the local annachi.  Now, when I go for a walk in the evenings I feel like I have entered a different place. My neighborhood has changed, my little town is inhabited by strangers, those who had been here for decades have either been buried to the ground or have moved to a different place. It's hard to find a familiar face that I used to see as a child. My friends have gone away, my childhood crush lives here no more. The only place I could connect with, my little town, has transformed. From a ghost town it has now changed into a place that's bursting off the seams. Heck, even my playground now has apartments being built on it.

People associate their love for their city with the places nestled within it, I never could find any place in Chennai that I could connect with emotionally, not its beaches, not its joints, neither its temples nor its malls. I may not reminisce about Chennai thinking of the times I'd spent in the city, I have no emotional investment in any of the monoliths it houses. Even when Landmark in Nungambakkam was being closed down, I mumbled "Look at these people overreacting over a stupid bookstore closing down". 

For me, Chennai is beyond the places that define it,  for me Chennai is about the people it has gifted in my life. The few places that I would look back on fondly are so because of the people who had made it special for me. From the family I've grown up with to the casual acquaintances I have befriended, to the close friends who are dear to me, to the many loves I had fallen for, they are My Chennai, not the buildings or the beach or the bar. My people have been that piece of puzzle when put together completed my life, that have shaped my principles, that have made me the person, good or bad, that I am today. Chennai was just the large canvas where I was piecing it all together.

And as I spend my last week here, I've realised that my Chennai is about the strangers I have met with whom I have built a strong friendship, the first brick for which was laid with an awkward "hello". My Chennai has to be about the friends I once had who have now drifted away into being strangers, for no fault of theirs, of course. My Chennai has to be about the half-a-dozen times I had my heart broken, my Chennai has to be about those countless times I had fallen for someone on a first glance. My Chennai has to be about unrequited loves, the broken promises, the forgotten dreams, the false hopes. My Chennai has to be about the people who taught me and tormented me, who have forgiven me and who have forgotten me, who have accepted me and who have discarded me.

And if you're reading this and you know it's about you, then you my friend, are my Chennai.

...And the Buck Stoppeth Here

I have been an avid armchair cricket buff for long, the fascinating duel between a fast bowler running at 100 miles an hour, hurling a ball at a man standing twenty-two yards away with a bat in his hand who is trying to hold his own is one of the most testosterone-charged sights that any sports could offer. But what I find more captivating than the sights and sounds of this wonderful game is the way it has been captured into words by the ones who write about it. Cricinfo is a premier website on cricket that not just boasts of great content but is also blessed with a wonderful team of insightful writers from all over the cricketing world. When I read about the passing away of Peter Roebuck­–one of Cricinfo’s most hard-hitting and widely read writers, it left me saddened for I had lost someone who with his incisive and to-the-point articles educated me and millions of other readers about the rights and wrongs that were happening on and off the field.

Journalists are superheroes in their own rights, for with the might of their keyboards and with the gift of their intellect they have the power to change the way the world thinks. There are those who shy away from calling a spade a spade, fearing the powerful enemies they might make, and then there are those like Peter Roebuck. Honest, with a no-nonsense approach and with a genuine affection for the game that was his bread and butter, Mr. Roebuck breathed life into words going on to be one of the most celebrated sports writers. He pooh-poohed cricket's governing body and never feared in chastising those who brought disrepute to the game. After the controversial Sydney test in 2008, Peter Roebuck in a scathing article for the Sydney Morning Herald had called for the head of Ricky Ponting. For a man who always believed that nationalism should not come into play while writing about sports for it corroded your views, Mr. Roebuck wrote blunt and unbiased columns that earned him bouquets and brickbats, admirers and detesters.

Be it the ugly hood of match-fixing that when struck had poisoned the game, or the advent of the hit-and-miss format of T20 that threatened to take the life out of cricket’s ultimate Battle Royale- Test Match Cricket, or even the Zimbabwe cricket crisis, Roebuck with his articulate and a school-headmaster like tone of writing shook the souls of players, and the foundations of behemoth cricketing boards. A David who took on the might of the Goliaths of cricket with a laptop and his arsenal of words as his only weapon, Roebuck carved an image of a prophet for himself amidst cricket enthusiasts of all kind. Every time I browsed through Cricinfo or “The Hindu”–where he was often published, any article that carried Roebuck’s name beside it indulged me into opening the doors to a whole new world of insights and opinions on matters that were hotly debated in the cricketing circles. Be it the emergence of a new cricketer or the prelude to an exciting series, or an article criticizing the functioning of ICC, Roebuck’s piercing analysis served me often as a lens with which I viewed the finer details of the game.

With his untimely death under the most heartbreaking of ways – a suicide, the reasons for which are unknown, the lovers of the game have been robbed off of a brilliant and respected writer. Cricket has lost one of its sanest and stoic voices that raised issues with no fear of being diminished. He may now have retired to the pavilions of Heaven, but we shall all be thankful for Mr. Roebuck as he leaves behind his voice in those rich literatures that with every written word brings us closer to cricket.

Image Source: http://www.topnews.in/sports/bollinger-beerandsawdust-man-far-removed-sipping-sherry-roebuck-27959

Honey, he shrunk the world!

There have been very few brands worldwide that command a loyal fan base like Apple, for Apple a fruit that was considered to be forbidden, as a brand is today synonymous with innovation, and is regarded as a pioneer in its market, we all have rested under the shade of the Brand Apple tree and have been enamored by its global fan following. It’s been ages since the world had witnessed an innovator with the caliber of Steve Jobs–ours is a generation that never lived during the times of the invention of T.V or the telephone or the computer and we have only read about the brilliance of Graham Bell and Edison, and I doubt if there are were videos of them speaking in business/school/college conventions. So when we witnessed a gadget that redefined the way in which we listened to music, and communicated with people it left us wide-eyed and envious of those who possessed it. In Steve Jobs we had the digital era’s Messiah, a man who invented and reinvented as he rose the bar challenging his competitors to come up with anything that could match the gadgets that Apple manufactured chip for chip. From accessing music  in a gadget that boasts of a hard drive of more than a hundred GB to watching videos and getting in touch with your loved ones on a portable tablet, Steve Jobs’ Apple had brought the world closer. In the corporate world he was the boss everyone wanted to be, a man who was looked up to by everyone from a college student to a company CEO, he was the mentor everyone dreamt of having a tete`-a-tete´with.

I by no means am a techno geek, I have no idea how many GB RAM my system has nor do I know the name of the graphic card that supports the games I play. And when it comes to discussing the nitty gritties of a gadget, I am as clueless as a deer caught in the headlights. But I am a consumer of the modern day inventions who is thankful for the way life simplifies with the push of a button. I am thankful for the internet that had reduced everything from stalking my high school crush on Facebook to gathering information on the Renaissance period to just the click of a button. I am thankful for the electric trimmer that with the push of a button shaves off the hair from my head with a calculated precision, I am thankful for the mobile phone that has brought us closer to our loved ones and to those who owe money to us. But of all my few prized gadgets the Ipod tops the list­–having lived in a time when storing 3000 songs in a music player was unheard of, the Ipod captured our imagination, it dared us to dream, it not just changed what we listened to but also how we listened to it.

There are many a cheap doppelgangers that are available in the chor bazaars, yet the product with the half-bitten apple as its emblem is the real deal. There were other top players in the market who competed with Apple from PCs to mobile phones, to music players to tablets–yet brandishing an Apple product in public grabbed eyeballs and was the owner’s pride. Never has an innovator/industry captain’s loss evoked such pathos from the different stratum of society, from two-page eulogies read out by nation heads to a tribute of a hundred and forty characters tweeted by tech geeks and Apple owners, news channels and social networks alike paid their respects to one of the i-Cons of the Digital Age. Steve Jobs was to brand Apple, what a quarterback is to his football team, he was its face, its heart and all that he stood for. All those humane factors that Steve Jobs personified, be it his simplicity, his large-heartedness, or his creativity was replicated in his brainchild. In one of his most poignant speeches made at Stanford, Jobs shared his rags-to-riches stories as he philosophized about life, love and death. He highlighted his code for living life - to stay hungry and to stay foolish. Hungry enough to strive to achieve what we want, and foolish enough to make mistakes, for how could we improve if we made no mistakes?

Be it the iTunes installed in our system, or the iPads and iPhones which are the playmates of the techno-savvy, we all have had a bite of the Apple and owe a bit of gratitude to the gardener who planted a seed and watched it grow into a tree, he shared his garden of dreams with us inviting us to have a larger bite of what he had so fondly grown.  He amazed us with all that he offered, he teased our imagination, and he brought the world closer. For if it weren’t for this gardener the world would never have known to dream bigger.

Image Courtesy: http://fernexpress.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/

Thank You Uncle

"When zealous kids greet me by adorning the path with flowers and waving copies of the Tinkle, there is nothing more that I can ask for. Such instances may have been few, but forever etched in my memory"  - Anant Pai

Traveling by train has always provided many of us with fond memories as a child. We may not actually like the destination, but the journey would be made memorable thanks to the sights and sounds it offered. I, as a kid was always averse to traveling, the whole practice of searching for clothes, packing them, dressing up in clean clothes, and traveling all the way to Central Station was a ritual I abhorred. A reason for which was because I hated to get out of my comfort zone and take the trouble of getting out of my home to a relative’s place where I would not have the complete freedom to be myself and do as I please. But my whole outlook on travel was changed by one man, his creation – that was exclusively for kids had completely converted my hatred for travel and had ignited within me an eagerness to look forward to that crowded Central station and the whole ordeal of traveling in packed trains with vendors and other passengers alike hustling by. 

 

He had transported me to a different land, a land where Shikari Shambu - a bumbling hunter by a comedy of errors managed to catch his prey, Kalia - a smart crow who always outwitted Chamataka the cunning fox and Doob Doob the crocodile, his ever-faithful yet dimwitted friend, Tantri - a scheming minister who always ended up at the wrong end of his own plans while trying to steal the royal throne from the good natured and trusting king Hooja, Uncle Anu - a bearded and bespectacled man of science who educated his young friends with simple and practical science experiments and Suppandi - a simple-minded servant who tickled my funny bone with his lack of common sense. This man was the father of all these characters, a man who brought all these colorful characters to life and with their antics brought a smile to our faces. He may be no Walt Disney, but then in a time where there were no playstations or I-Pod or no multiplexes and twenty-four hour cartoon channels he had managed to capture the imagination of every boy and girl who had at some point of time flipped through the pages of his creation. And for that, he shall not be deemed lesser than a Walt Disney, he was Anant Pai– the founder of Amar Chitra Katha, the publishing house for Tinkle Comics and widely regarded as the Father of Indian Comics.

Uncle Pai, as he is famously known to every child, not only entertained us with his comics but also managed to teach us history and mythology in his own inimitable style. Amar Chitra Katha which was found as a reason to reignite a dying knowledge of our history among the young audience not just achieved that, but in the process it was also able to preserve our culture and our folklore. With beautiful illustrations and a very simple narrative and language Uncle Pai had blessed me with those memories of childhood which I shall never forget. Before Enid Blyton he was the catalyst who was able to inject in me with a fetish for reading the printed material, which before graduating to reading novels actually began by reading Tinkle comics. Summer vacations was always about spending a lazy afternoon curled up in the bed reading through the troubles that Shikari Shambu had fallen into, those were also the days when there were lending libraries more than video-game parlors. 

Back then in the publishing industry in the early 90’s there were probably not many publishing houses around which catered to a child audience in the way Amar Chitra Katha did. While there were others desi superheroes like Nagaraj, Doga and Chacha Chaudhury and Sabu who used an over-the-top storyline, Uncle Pai had always maintained to entertain children with clean humor and humane characters and a simple story, a reason why it was a big hit. Tinkle may not have had the flair, the richness or the packaging of a DC Comics or Archie’s digest, but then it was a comic book which we could all relate with, a comic book with a lot of heart and sincerity. It was simple and honest, it portrayed the simplicity and the honesty of the Great Indian Middle Class. If Doordarshan with its teleserials like Buniyaad, Vyomkesh Bakshi, Hum Log epitomized the Indian Middle Class Adult of the 90s, Tinkle Comics with its simplicity and down-to-earth characters symbolized the Indian Middle Class Child of an era that has gone by. In this age of digital revolution where entertainment actually means playstation and I-pods and flashing high-end mobile phones to the new generation brats, it is worrisome to see the death of simplicity that an Indian comic book house possesses.

Uncle Pai in his lifetime was sadly not conferred with any notable national award for his contribution towards having revolutionized the publishing industry, except for the recently received Lifetime Achievement Award at India's first Comic Convention. He may get an imaginary yet a fitting farewell from the characters he had etched in his comic book. He departs as an unsung hero, a visionary, a dream weaver, and a story-teller, but to millions of children across the country he would always be regarded as a man who gifted them with the simple pleasure of reading. And for me he will always be the man who made my train journeys special.

Image credit : http://www.ack-media.com/new/characters.php

A Field of Dreams

As a kid we all had lived dual lives. There were lives lived inside the classroom, where the importance of academic excellence was drilled down into our heads - how solving math problems, memorizing multiplication tables, mugging up dates taught in history classes, racking our brains on trigonometry and Pythagoras theorems would help us secure a future with a prestigious degree (as in B.E) and would lay a foundation for a "golden" career (as in Software programming). Then there was the other life, the one outside the classroom inside a playing field, where for that two hours in a day we chose to forget and not care about math equations, the history of India, the state capital of Nagaland, and countries that lay near the equator. For that brief moment we became what we wanted to be, the Superstars of the game we adored - Cricket.

Everyday as I walk past the playground that once existed nearby my home, there seeps in a feeling of nostalgia. I never was an "outdoor sports" kind of person. I was always the last guy to be picked in any team, I never owned a cricket bat, I was too scared of fast bowling, I could not remember more than two instances where I could have held on to a ball without dropping it. To sum it up, I was picked only because my mother was a teacher at the school where most of the kids studied. My only attempt to stop a ball would be to awkwardly cover my face in a flash when it was hit toward me. It would be hard to even fathom how a boy who could not hold the bat, nor throw a ball be picked in a team. When the boys around me would be playing the game with a seriousness that involved making strategies in a huddle for the 12-year old Master Blaster of the neighborhood who played with a picture-perfect cover drive that even Sachin would be proud of, I on the other hand played the game with a callousness. Imagine the Joker playing the game of cricket, he would cackle away heinously with every attempted wild swing of the bat that would miss the ball by almost a yard, well that was me. The captain of my team, which always ended up losing would often be chastised for having picked me in the team, but the poor lad had no other option but to fend for me, for he had a Social Sciences assignment to be submitted the next morning... to my mother.

And come summer vacations we all would turn into cricketers with a seriousness as if we are having plans of participating in the world cup. With the sun beating down our backs and the worry of summer projects to be submitted postponed to the last days of the vacation, we would enter the playing field as Men on a Mission, ignoring our mothers' call to come home on time for lunch. The seriousness of the other lads at times would turn out to be infectious as I would whole-heartedly make efforts to catch the ball, but the results would be the same nevertheless. We played till the Sun got tired of witnessing our play and would decide to go to bed, the rest of the evening would be spent with the boys in the dimly lit field strategizing for the next day's play. And as I went to bed, I would make a note of the scores I made for the day in a log book - 1, 3, 4, 12, 5.

There was something about that field which made us young boys act like men and grown men act like boys once we stepped on it. The field had something mystical about it, for a brief moment of time in a day we boys stopped worrying about homeworks and assignments and exams, for a brief moment of time the men would stop worrying about their job and responsibilities, for a brief moment they would have regained their lost childhood. It was the thrill of playing the game we loved along with the people we knew that made us vibrant. It was the glorious sun, it was the thrill of playing in front of the neighborhood, to be applauded by the people we knew that made us play those expansive strokes we saw on T.V. It was an era when we hadn't heard of the Internet, let alone Youtube as we tried to match each shot, each delivery and each jump to what we had seen on the television the last night.

With the girls in the neighborhood keeping an eye on the proceedings, that was as good a reason as any for a few of us to jump around and act like we were captaining our national team. We would do a few lunges and a few stretches nonchalantly as if the fate of the team depended on the strengths of our shoulders, the claps and the encouragement from the neighborhood uncles and aunts and their daughters would only make us act more like the cricketers we saw on T.V, as we chewed our gum even more stylishly with the mouths doing a complete circle, and a huddle held after every delivery bowled to discuss the field placement, add to that a "C'mon boys!" with an Aussie accent shouted every minute any outsider would feel like they were watching a match going on between future international stars.

But as years grew along so did we, and with that changed our responsibilities and priorities. The field that once lay beside my home is now encroached with apartments and a lot of houses. The Playstations and the X-boxes have now become our virtual playground. No more do I hear young boys crying in anguish over a dropped catch, no more do I hear grown men shouting instructions on how to bowl, no more do I hear kids embrace each other over a match won shouting in joy, basking in their moment of glory. Yet, if I prick my ears up as I walk past the field, I could still hear that roar of joy, those claps of the neighborhood and the shout of an enthusiastic kid yelling "C'mon boys!" egging up his other mates.

The End of an Affair

In every relationship that speeds towards its end there comes a moment where we wish "Let this minute last forever". We try to celebrate that relationship in different ways, we try to involve ourselves in those moments for these are those last moments after which we may never get that feeling again. We leave a stamp, an imprint of sorts with what we do. When a dear friend parts ways we give him/her a warm embrace, an embrace so tight that we wish that our hands never come apart for we know that we shall never meet him/her again. When we part ways with the one we love we involve ourselves in a night of passion, we spend every minute holding their hands, remembering every moment we spend with them, registering her laughter, her wink, her smile, her touch, her feel in our minds. We wish for the moment to remain still, we wish the hands of time never move. When I gave my last Sodexo coupon to the lady at KFC in return for a tub of chicken breasts, I wished to commemorate that event by prolonging every bite, every chew of the breast... of that chicken.

There was a part of me that said "Do it fast, get it done with already will ya!? People are giving you disgusting looks when you eat that chicken breast... look at that woman over there... Oh My God she knows you are a bit loose in the head!"

And there was the other half of me that said "That Sodexo deserves a proper goodbye, you pay your tribute to that coupon for this sumptuous meal by relishing each bite, every bone, every wing, every breast that falls between your teeth!"

And relish every bite I did.

To you it may not seem like a post worth reading, it may not seem to connect to you in any way. You may be wondering what a Sodexo coupon is, "What is this fuss all about and why does it mean so much to him?" you may wonder. You can find your answer to these questions by asking any nerd walking on the streets of OMR , for most of these nerds work in those numerous software companies which lie on both sides of OMR which actually is not an Optical Mark Recognition, but Old Mahabalipuram Road. Chennai's very own Siliconpettai. 

And he will describe you of its beauty with the same fervor with which a hormone raging (read horny) teenager describes Megan Fox.

A Sodexo coupon was the symbol of freedom and hope. It gave us the freedom from carrying our Tupperware and it gave us a hope of dining in KFC to McDonald's to Subway relishing their junk food paying no attention to the extra weight it was adding on our asses and hips. There were times when we dared to forget our employee ID cards, but never did we dare to forget our Sodexos.

A Sodexo coupon was more like a second mother to me, a mother who never raised an eyebrow when I splurge my coupons on an ass-fattening cheese crust pizza at Pizza Hut, a mother who urged me to sink my teeth in those overpriced yet orgasm inducing ice-creams at Baskin and Robbins that also allowed me to experiment with any combo, a mother who never twisted my ear and said "Abishtu! Abishtu" (which in simple English means "Dumb Ass ! Dumb Ass !"). when I looked at a KFC joint with lust.

If a software techie is confronted with a "Mere paas maa hai" line he could now unashamedly reply "Mere paas Sodexo hai!". And there ends the argument- Game Set and Match for the software techie!

There are only two days in every month that a techie working in a software firm waits for fondly - payday and the day when Sodexos are distributed. When in the former cash would already be credited to our accounts automatically, its the latter that injects a heartbeat amongst the otherwise dead as dildo programmers (read copy pasters). It is much like little Charlie Bucket eagerly awaiting his ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, we have the excitement in our eyes, the same excitement which one can see in the eyes of an impoverished Somalian kid when he hears the news of being adopted by a busty Angelina Jolie.

Sodexo coupons are much like our ticket to Disneyland, and in Chennai it was Ascendas, the tech park that holds the sobriquet of "The Disneyland of Junk Food". We are handed our coupons by the friendly ever-smiling Parvathi Akka, there may be a few who may not know who the founder of our company was - a multi-billion dollar American who probably owns a dozen yachts and also owns our asses. But there could be no one within the company who can say that they have never heard of Parvathi Akka, the bearer of Sodexo coupons. She knew everyone by name and by location of their seat, she was someone whom we saw once a month as she handed out our Sodexos to us with a never-fading smile and a harsh word or two said with love to behave in a civilized fashion as educated men and women (which we were not) while collecting them. At that moment she was no less than a Mother Teresa who handed out packets of food to the hungry and unruly children.

We never treated Sodexo as money, maybe because it resembled those fake money which one uses while playing Monopoly. Where do you find a 25 Rupee note which does not have a Mahatma Gandhi chuckling away as if he had caught you butt naked? We failed to realize that these were as important as money hence we would go on a splurging spree when we entered food courts. Food courts beware! Hungry copy-pasters with Sodexo coupons on the prowl! There were a few of us who had a lot of unspent coupons, there were some booklets which remained untouched, as untouched as the virgins of Virginia. And as the month was about to end with another visit from Parvathi Akka round the corner we would unleash ourselves to all that was on offer, from ice creams to pizzas to burgers to all that in the menu which Ol' McDonald, The Colonel, and good Ol' Wang had to offer.

As my tenure at my workplace had ended, I had now moved on to a different place where no Sodexos were offered. I was now forced to sweet talk my mother into packing my lunch, my wings were clipped. From being a hero at home whose Sodexos were used at the groceries to pay for commodities, I was now reduced to "Just another Average Joe with Tupperware" as I was looked at with pity. As I munched down the last few remains of the chicken wings thanks to those last leaflets of my coupon I realized that my affair had ended, I said a silent prayer, not for the chicken but for the Sodexo for having filled my stomach with every single item on the menu that I had dreamt of devouring, and for having made my every day a better day. The affair came to an end, but it was an affair worth remembering.

The Rearview Mirror

The final week of a year always changes us into a philosopher, just like doing a countdown of all the hit movies or songs that had released over the year, we do a recollection of all the moments that are imprinted on our minds. I was asked by a friend of mine how the year had gone by. As I look at the rearview mirror to see the things that have gone by, I realize that it has been a year of total transformation with me no longer walking the streets with the tag of a "student". The student that was within me last year has grown on to be a working man who is plagued by fears of meeting weekly targets and preparing reports instead of semester exams and campus interviews. I no more miss my college life, nor do I wish to spend a day amidst my friends in the college canteen, all that is in the past. I now yearn to grow in the path that I have chosen to tread upon. I yearn to meet new people, write more posts, make new friends, and live more experiences, and grow on to meet my ambitions.

The year 2010 has taught me to deal with change, it has taught me to be more responsible in the job that I do, be it blogging or carrying out my office chores. It has taught me to let go, and it has taught me to welcome new people in my life with open arms. It has taught me that there are good days at work, and then there are the bad days. All that matters is to learn from our mistakes, be it in personal lives or in our professional lives. I have learnt to share, I now share my fetish for blogging with friends whom I urge to blog. My blog, of which I feel like a CEO who invests time and energy in it has paid me back for all my efforts by gifting me with more readers who drop by to read it from all corners of the world. The internet is proof enough that if you got talent, then it could play a perfect portal for you to share your works with the world.

Much like a bus driver who rides along to his destination with passengers of various kinds, I too have been blessed with passengers (read friends/influences) of various kinds who have accompanied me in this year-long journey. The journey was filled with fun, fear and a bit of philosophy to overcome the fear. They taught me to dance, they taught me to laugh, they taught me to sing, but most important of all they taught me to live. There were a few who had gotten down when their stop had come, and there are a few who have stayed on. But their presence and support has always been overwhelming whenever the bus had broken down or when I encountered speed breakers en route to my destination. The bus keeps rolling, and there are many more passengers to pick up on the road and many more places to see.

Wish you all a wonderful year ahead.