My rear view mirror

Memories came flooding back as I sat at the main gate, watching kids going to the nearby  school.

I was transported back in time,  finding myself a three year old  in the hill town of Nainital. I saw myself sitting in a room where grown up people were busy getting ready for the group photograph.

I was feeling a bit ignored. My maternal uncle had come back with his bride and we were  going to have a group photo with the married couple.. Everyone was dressing up fabulously, particularly the two young  girls -  my youngest aunt and the eldest cousin sister who were dressed up in fabulous maroon silk sarees.They were both fifteen years old.

I just sat waiting impatiently . And then someone attended to me. She also made a pony tail of my hair and took me down the huge steps into the open ground for that family  photograph . I don't remember anything else. . . .

Thus I sat at the main gate, having time travel and watching tiny tots  marching to the nearby school.

I  tried to recall more of my  childhood and  I found myself in the carpeted office room of the good old Headmaster of our school, a six foot tall stern Rai Bahadur. He was punishing my school mates one by one and and I was the last one in the row. we had been caught with our dresses full of wild colours on the school day preceding Holi festival. We had been warned not to play colours in the school.

I was the smallest of the offenders brought to him.

He raised his cane over my head as he stood towering over me and I braced myself for the pain. He stopped and lowered the cane and stared at me.

"No , he is certainly not one of them. Somebody seems to have smeared this boy with colours " he mumbled. . . .

I was spared. . . .But after the school's last long bell as I  raced out  of the premises I was caught again by those bullies and this time they did the real job, smearing plenty of black oily paint on my whole face. It made me look like a man fresh from Africa and my mother got terrified when I entered our house.

I forced myself to go back to the hills again in this memory rewind. There came a clip of crossing a shallow rivulet on our way to grandfather's village house in Mala in the hills of Almora. Someone was Carrying me in his arms. I have memories of a fine three storey house and a large drawing room with wide windows, of the smiling face of my grand father and of coming across a dog much bigger than me on my way up that hilly footpath that led to the house. I must have been four year old then.  A little later I came back to the village again to attend a marriage. I remember sitting in the courtyard under a walnut tree eating a sumptuous lunch.

Next I see myself on the Mall road in the hill town of Almora, walking towards the Brighten Corner to visit someone  in the Cantonment area.  There were plenty of huge deodar trees all around and the breeze whistled through them all the time. Almora was such an uncongested and green hill town in those days !

And then I am back  to our childhood house with a sprawling compound in the planes of U.P. We were playing cricket in the winter vacation. I was batting. I  recall Ramdev, a school friend,  bowling to me. As he prepared to send the next delivery, out of nowhere his father popped up, slapped him hard and led him back home, muttering "playing, playing, playing  all the time.  Never study". I can still see that hurt in his eyes.

I am suddenly brought back from the reverie by the blast of the horn of the enmpty yellow school bus moving out of the school. There are no kids on the road now. Classes seem to  have started. . . . .

The ultimate riddle

The ultimate riddle.

In another fifty years science is likely to discover that all living beings on this planet have an electro magnetic   relationship with the other planets of this solar system and the constellations beyond.

The real scientific age is barely a hundred year old  but is progressing at an awesome  rate.. From the first aeroplane to first landing on moon took  just six decades or so ! The time for a quantum jump in scientific discoveries is just round the corner.

The ultimate riddle to solve for science is the limits to which electro magnetic fields from each object affect and alter other body masses. The whole universe is nothing but a fierce interplay of matter and energy known to the ancient religion as Shiva's. Tandav.

Yogi Ram Charak (He was interestingly an American) was ridiculed and insulted by scientists when he maintained in his timeless 1904  book that the human body has an electronic magnetic field. It was only in 1954 that scientist discovered that the human body has indeed an electro magnetic field..

( This 1904 book of yogi Ram Charak,:"FOURTEEN LESSONS in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism " , can be downloaded free from internet.)

Science is correcting itself fast as new facts are unravelled. The creation is unique. No two persons have the same finger prints as each one is an inimitable unique piece of creation in TIME and SPACE  syndrome as  each one is spaced out from others by TIME and PLACE of his/ her birth in the rapid  kaleidescopic shifting of planets and constellations.

The ancient civilisations seemingly solved the riddle of the universe but were obliterated in a deluge (known as a PRALAY in Hindu philosophy in unending cycles of creation and destruction).

Random Reflections

Random Reflections
- the child's world

How far back in time did you leisurely spend some time lying on your back in your backyard or a park bench, looking at birds as they flit from a plant to another, or butterflies as they sit on a green leaf, ever so busy? How far back in time did you gaze at the deep blue sky, with those tiny white clouds scudding across, continuously making new patterns and shapes, with  kites flying 'up above the world so high',  gliding leisurely at that great height, their wings spread wide apart? How far back in time did you last  closely watch  an army of ants at work on the ground, carrying bits of  grains of sugar or cereal far too big for them, always in a neat unbroken line, always disciplined? When did you last watch that tiny cut in your skin caused by a thorn as you worked in the rose garden , and  how it bled for a few seconds and then, automatically,  a transparent film formed over the cut as the healing process began?

Most of us have no time for all these matters. If we are not busy with professional work we are busy with our cell phones or that idiot box. But we  have done all this in our childhood days, the time when we were growing up and constantly educating ourselves, constantly learning new things.

The way a child learns new thing is amazing!
 

Nayyars Restaurant

"Nayyar's Restaurant"

I ordered an #upma. It was served steaming hot. The service was excellent and the place was crowded.

I had to share a table. The man on the other side of the table was hurriedly eating a thick onion tomato uttappam.

He appeared to be very hungry. He had already ordered a masala dosa too and the boy brought it just as he was finishing his uttappam so he continued eating non- stop.

I finished the deliciousupma and looked at the boy with that gesture of 'what else'. He suggested that I could try an idli. I said 'yes'.

Coconut chutney that was served with upma and idli was very tasty and fresh. Tea was an excellent Nilgiri variety.

I thoroughly enjoyed this evening tiffin on my very first day in #Nagpur. The place was very close to my office in New Secretariat Building.

The proprietor was silver haired Mr. Nayyar, a fine old gentleman of an infectious smile. I instantly liked him as I went to his counter at the entrance to pay my bill. He observed that I was a new customer'.

Of all my favourite restaurants of my younger days Nayyar's restaurant was by far the best and also the cheapest in tarrif. It was located next to the Liberty cinema building.

Some well known nearby places were the Indian Coffee House and the Bishop Cotton School.
That was a very long time back, in the late sixties. I wonder if Nayyar's restaurant is still there !