Do Something Exciting Today

What are we doing with our lives ?

No, don’t tell me, I will tell you. Nothing. The same, boring routine day after day, month after month, year after year. Drag yourself out of bed in the morning, plunge right into the bustle and rush and stress, work, dinner, perhaps a little TV and then stumble to bed in exhaustion.

Nothing new, nothing different.

Nothing exciting.

Life passes in a long, gray fog until one day you find yourself older, grayer, fatter, and bored out of your mind. Is that how you want to live ?

Do something exciting. It doesn’t take much to make life exciting again. Here are a few things to try.

Do your daily routine in a different way. Take a new route, change something. Make it interesting for yourself.

Try something new. Learn a new subject, whether it is cooking or photography, learning the computer or martial arts. Learning something keeps your brain young and alive.

Take up a creative project you always wanted to do but never had the time. Make the time. You can always fit in ten or fifteen minutes or a half hour a day. Paint a picture, sing a song, bake a pot, use the camera, write a poem, anything, anyone of the millions of creative things out there.

Instead of getting your excitement from other people’s stories – reading a book or watching a movie – instead of that, discover your own story. Your life story, the most exciting of all. Keep a diary. A simple tiny daily dairy will do. You don’t even have to write realms in it, a few words will do. Make a note of each day and what happened in it. Short entries which you will enjoy reading earlier. ‘Unpleasant neighbour and singing lessons.’  ‘Day of shopping and a promotion.’ Whatever. Nothing is quite as exciting as your own story.

While browsing the web I came across this interesting website –
http://makesomething365.blogspot.com/
Take up a project and do it every day for 365 days. Take a photo every day, make a drawing every day, craft or embroider, write or explore. Every day.
Its wonderful the focus this can give you. Check it out and chose your own.

Do something exciting  and creative today and every day. Beginning now.

Now They are Coming Back

I met her at the fruit stand on the corner of the street. She was arguing over a papaya. I had not seen her for fifteen years or more. She was one of those who left India in the 80s and early 90s, in considerable haste, and with dire warnings.

Someone in those days had made dire predictions. “Its going to sink you know,” she told me earnestly back in the 80s. “Bombay will end up at the bottom of the sea. Please save your life and go to a safe country.”

She had spent quite some time earnestly trying to save my life and left with a hug and tears. She knew we would never meet again, destined as I was for an underwater grave while she prospered greatly in a white country.

Now here she was, a little fatter and definitely older, haggling over the weight of the fruit. Yes, it was really her, standing in the Mumbai sunshine. I waited until the fruit seller was popping the papaya and two apples into a bag for her.

“How unexpected to meet you here at the bottom of the ocean,” I said.

She smiled weakly and said she was back.

“How long will you be here ? Can we catch up?”

She squirmed a bit, fiddling with the fruit bag, before she admitted, “I am back for good.”

What, leave paradise for our messy little section of the sea floor? This story I had to hear. I took her for coffee and she told me why she was back. At first it was the winters, the severe cold and the terrible feeling of being totally cut off. Then it was the racist remarks, snide, but clear. And finally the glass ceiling which is there for all who are not white.

Then we ordered samosas and she warmed up and told me the real reason. Loneliness.

“I had a couple of friends but they moved away and I lost touch with them. People there smile and say hello, but it goes no further. I took a job here, I have been back two months and now I have invites every day, and so many people to call that I don’t have the time to call everyone. It’s the loneliness which kills you in the end.”

At first she had not liked it here. She had endless complaints and the word ‘clean’ and ‘corruption’ and ‘poverty’ figured prominently. Then the words slipped from her vocabulary and she settled down.

So she was back with a good job, house help and lots of friends. For the first time in twenty years she was happy in a country where the weather is warm and the people are warmer.

“Life is not so bad at the bottom of the ocean,” she said laughing, making plans for next week, next month and next year.

Lonely on Valentines Day

Yesterday was Valentine’s day, a day of great hype, mostly observed by college kids and newly weds. and as I found out, by pariah kites.

She was there for two days. I kept hearing the keening call of the pariah kite  echoing above the buildings and finally I went to look. There she was sitting on the top of the cell phone tower, head tilted up, calling.

I waited, hoping to get her in flight. Instead I got something far better. Another kite had been hovering around – here he is close to the tower.

As I watched he swooped down upon her.

At first she seemed willing, her head low, allowing him to approach, then she moved sideways, clearly dissenting.

He was gone without even landing.  She continued to sit there, calling her long piercing cry, for a long time after.

Perhaps he was not the one she waited for. Perhaps she did not like his rough approach.
What, no chocolates and flowers ? What, no compliments ?

The next day, Valentine’s day, she was back. She sat there, on top of the world, her feathers ruffling in the wind. She called and called. Waited. Called again. I could see other kites circling far away but they did not come close.

Finally she took off and did not come back. Today, no signs of her at all.

Perhaps she has just given up on men.

They really did it

They did it, they really did it.

Yesterday I watched something I never thought I would get to see. I watched the non violent power of the Egyptian people overthrow a tyrant.

It took 18 days of hardship and determination. They left their homes and jobs to camp in the Tahrir Square in Cairo. So many called for them to go home. Their own weaker minded colleagues asked them to stop ruining the economy, accept the meager handouts and return home. They did not listen, knowing that if they did, the battle was lost. They were willing to die but not to give up.

Their perseverance won the day. Mubarak left without even a live appearance. I watched the explosion of sound when the people in the square heard that he was gone. When the scenes of jubilation filled the screen I knew what it must have felt like for my parents, back in 1947, when, at the stroke of midnight, India awoke to freedom.

Egypt awoke yesterday. Their courage and their perseverance took  the day. They won their freedom and we watched it happen – participating in it by means of all the media.

They reminded us of something so easy to forget – how precious freedom is and how beautiful. No cost is too great, no price too high. My generation is post Independence – so all I know of the satyagraha was the stories I heard from my parents, how they attended the rallies and secretly distributed the newsletters. My mother was there at the Azad maidan when Mahatma Gandhi declared Quit India. She narrowly escaped a British bullet.

She knew what it was like, but I did not – but yesterday I got a taste of it.

The courage of Egypt has been a light in the darkness. Perhaps others will follow where they have led and also break their shackles and come out into the sunlight.

Birds, bathers and not an ET

More pictures from my bird watching holiday in December 2010.

Put a waterbowl in the garden, scatter bread crumbs and you get a variety of visitors.

Last time I put up Bulbul and Babbler pictures. Here are  others with a few surprises.

I think this lovely blue bird is a Bank Myna, a shy and quiet visitor who takes delicate sips and spends a long time perched on the waterbowl edge while quicker birds flutter in and out.

This little bird is a White Throated Fantail Flycatcher, a dynamic bird who arrives with loud chik-chik calls.  It is aggressive and direct, fanning its tail and threatening other bigger birds to claim the waterbowl for itself.

Here it threatens the Bank Myna, who prudently took off and gave up the territory.

There is more to a waterbowl than drink.

That blur is a bathing Bulbul. It must have made a sudden splash from the reaction of the other two who seem to be leaning back to avoid the spray.

What is this ? No, its not a visitor from Mars. This demented looking extraterrestrial is a bathing Jungle Babbler, with its feathers all fluffed, just out of the water. Two others are about to leap in. Dinner lies to the right of the bowl, a scattering of bread crusts.

The waterbowl gets other visitors as well.  Stray dogs stop to lap,  a passing cat or squirrel, and then there is always this one :