Raise a toast to your humble tea!

 Sometimes just having a cup of cardamom infused tea is all that is needed to let the stress off steam. (There's many other tea spices and masalas that enhance tea's flavour but cardamom is a subtle and lovely mood lifter for me:) ) Tea with few biscuits is like self acceptance on a plate - it's in those moments of smelling the tea and sipping the warmth that envelops you for just a few moments to stay in your zone that is actually the comfort that we seek to rest into. So, tea and that too the non watery ones and the ones with the right amount of milk and thickness and water to bring to boil the tea leaves/powder which is all there is to tea making, to give us a cupful of fresh perspective from a relaxed sense of taking our minds off what is consuming us and to just be there for ourselves just as we are, in whichever situation we are, is the highpoint of the humble tea.

Tea consumes our stress for those few moments you can say and not the other way round!! To just give in to these small moments of times from our mind numbing everyday schedule is one's own quality (tea) time and what better way to be with oneself than by having a cupful of aromatic tea to just blend with our senses and make sense of it in our own mindful ways.

Ta drinking for the sake of tea drinking is one thing and tea with oily, fried snacks is another. Tea undoubtedly adds taste to the samosas, pakoras, bajjis and more, but as a standalone treat when consumed just for tea's sake! 

We need our times of solitude to take our attention away from our problems which again keeps brewing in our minds similar to a bitter tea that has lost all taste and life, and it's my takeaway that don't keep thinking through problems - talk to your friends, parents, or anyone trustworthy (let out your steam) and get yourself off your ruminations(it's like stirring through broken milk that won't hold anything under heat) and don't make them a blending habit with your everyday life and plans. It's the aftertaste of bitterness on one's tongue or in one's life that makes it so not worth it.

Here's raising a toast to the universal tea that ties people together through tiredness and refreshment, through solitude and tea parties with friends, through worries and deadlines, and project victories, tea stays with you to make sense of all the highs and lows of your life. 

To F.R.I.E.N.D.S with love😊

 Phoebe Buffay from F.R.I.E.N.D.S is such a wonderful human who is weird and honest and so beautiful to look at and has some of the best costumes and hairstyles that are so becoming of her - just free spirited and true to her whole personality. I can't imagine Lisa Kudrow to be any less than the Phoebe she plays on FRIENDS. 

I have always wanted to be like Phoebe or have a friend who is like her, but in reality in my life there's no such character.

FRIENDS, to me, back in the late '90s and early 2000's was like a rite of passage to help me transition from teenage into early adulthood and growing up in a closed minded environment did not make it any easier to want to understand my sexuality without just the female biology that stood staring back at me in the mirror. 

My cousin and I managed to sneak into a storage room that had an old portable TV and switched on star world channel promptly at 8 PM and laughed our heads out. She(Meena) and I had healthy discussions over why she thinks Rachel goes way over line and Joey is just a plain naïve guy who just got lured by her charms, and that Joey was just too vulnerable without Chandler by his side. We agreed to disagree but came to some kind of concurrence that this was just a serial while eating our dinner, and just went about our college stuff and again came back to blacklisting Rachel for another of her drama queen sagas the next day☺

FRIENDS became so much a part of our consciousness and our patterns of thinking that if we inadvertently do something dumb and funny we would call ourselves "Duh.. I am being a Joey!," or shoot sarcastic wise cracks at others at home slyly and feel like a Chandler all the way!

They became a part of us and especially for Meena and me as we were the same age almost and giggled a lot when we got together at the stupid jokes we played on each other and spoke in hushed tones while joking about others at home. I had the assurance that if not finding a Phoebe in the outside world, I have a "Chandler like" Meena at home😊

I guess it's over 2 decades since Meena and I sat down together to watch FRIENDS and relive our silly giggly moments, but I am glad that I still have her as one of my close sisters and friends. Binge watching FRIENDS on Netflix is not the same without Meena but I am glad that despite the awkwardness, hardships, ups and downs that my growing up was full of but FRIENDS just let me be and made my problems feel smaller.

There are many other fun, heartwarming stories, serials that we have all grown up with and each has a place of their own in our hearts, in our lives. The joy of growing up as I may dare say now is that FRIENDS continues to feel the same and that I have not lost my humor no matter how unexpected the blows in my life. Here's to more such fun reliving down memory lane💗

To God, with Love

Realizing your inner divinity is an expression of gratitude for the life creator as a whole. Subtle and pulsing with energy, the quiet stillness and the deepening of breaths to such a meditative state that you become just an instrument that breathes while fully coming to life the realization that it's something or someone who is beyond you and within you who creates this magic of life flow to happen across the spectrum of creations as if by a pre determined choice. The human will comes into light as we grasp the invincible with a spirit of surrender and yet staying empowered in our willingness to live and grow through the uncertainties being laid out in our life path ahead. The acceptance here makes all the difference, no matter what the consequences of the directions taken in our life path. 

Coming into power through one's realizations is a beautiful and unique process of becoming one with yourself and also acknowledging the beauty behind God's ways of communicating with you and His love for being you. It's a mutual sense of love give and take actually, and loving God unconditionally no matter what expectations get met or how many successes you experience is the open hearted response and an expression of love from you to God. 

Sunday Marketainment

Sundays become marketainment when one shops for groceries, veggies, snacks and so on. Be it supermarkets or the local vegetable market, the crowd of families and specially with kids is quite a scene. Insistent on pushing the shopping carts, nagging parents for another stationery item, crying until the chocolate is not bought, and tugging at parents’ hands to lift them up in the middle of a crowded queue are familiar sights from the little ones.

The cows seem to occupy a lot of the road space when shopping for vegetables from local markets. The smell of fresh cow dung keeps the flies away from the vegetables while the roads ‘go green’ besides the water sprayed by the sellers on the greens, leafy greens actually to keep them fresh under the blazing hot sun.

One cannot miss the roasted groundnuts on a wheeling cart, corn cooked in portable cookers and raw corn toasted on pieces of coal on simmered fire, tea stalls with whiffs of cigarette to add to the mass market feel, and colorful balloons and toys that attract kids and their cries to this Sunday market scenario.

Be it churches, temples, mosques, or any other place of worship, the religious commitment to reserve quiet on an otherwise plan it all and do it all on Sundays is quite an achievement. Here too the crowd to connect to their Gods and give Him/Her weekly offs is a unique public phenomena. 

The sun seems to set sooner on Sundays as another week gets ready to rise. With a heavy heart to let the curtains go down to wrap up this weekly marketainment, the next 6 days feel longer than the queue in the supermarkets.

Whatsapp Forwards

Whatsapp forwards are like the uninvited guests who we can do without. They give opinions, free advice, and even preach on what are the do’s and don’ts as if they have voices of their own. These mindless voices spoken through whatsapp is an undeleted space that many of us have dedicated in our minds for such forwards.

Forwards may not take our minds ahead as in changing our thoughts and changing our lives kind of way, but would rather preach this through so many group members who are mobile addicts disguised as ‘proactive’ content providers. As a result, you flip through the pages of your mind as if they are random forwards going back and forth between groups, sending forwards or short messages back as acts of mobile diplomacy, and like folded pages in a book to serve as reminders to get back to doing what one left behind get back to try to stay on the same page with home or office work, or work from home as per convenience.

If our mobile trash folders with deleted items were to be retrieved to be assumingly valued in currency, (which even the waste or scrap, or old newspapers of our households won’t be worth as much put together), then we would have gotten a lump sum legacy to leave behind for our future - left, right, and forward, er…centre.

Since our demand for entertainment, infotainment, and all other bytes of focus distractions are fed through such apps, besides tons of channels on TV, Radio, web series, and other virtually streamed content, these forwards supply us with interactive things which we normally can’t come up with to say, to make people smile, or ponder about.

But somewhere between one forward after another in our ‘mobile’ lives, the effort to pick up the phone to say hi to one’s friends, to loosen up the comfort of lethargy that a forward wraps oneself into, and to keep the flow of verbal conversation going is keeping the human voice alive in us. After all, interaction is a two way street, and forwards can just fill in mechanical voids in the groups to say one is active and can just be our echoes, not our true voices.  

Spirituality through Siddhas

Siddhas embody spirituality as a mother embodies her embryo. The Siddhas nurture the essence of truth through their relentless probe into the cosmic play similar to a curious child who has gotten hold of a toy and deconstructs it part by part.

The Siddhas quintessential nature to hide what they see, and to seek those who want to understand the truth in their reality and their life is the breaking open of the shell of the individual.

The Siddhas do not travel through ‘right’ values and ‘wrong’ methodologies, or to a mirage of knowledge dominant and ego centric minds, but to the pure innocence and simplicity in the faith guided and truth thirsty minds.

Hence, what the individual wants even if prayed through ardent rituals does not hold ground, but the ability to love and to surrender no matter what the urgency of the wants will be answered with the right people, right things, and right kind of help happening at the right time to meet our needs.

Siddhas like Yogi Ram SuratKumar are the butterflies that help us emerge from our cocoons. His contagious laughter, penetrating vision into one’s mind, an endearing humility, and a spirit full of innocence and joy are jewels that adorn him, in addition to the green turban crowning his head.

When he raises his hands to shower us with “My father will bless you,” he seems to channel the cosmic universe to shower her grace on the blessed.

He is like an infant crawling his way into the hearts of his followers and is like one’s child that you wish to hold close to your bosom.

Sometimes the guardian, sometimes the child leading the path, Yogi Ram Suratkumar’s heart is like the wings of a colorful butterfly which takes you into its fold and also liberates you from your bondages.

Awakenings from Vipassana

I am not sure what is better liberating, the truth of one's own limitations, or the growing light on one's enormous ignorance over such self limiting habits and attitudes?

Liberation is real, is true in its every fiber. The sensations of discomfort and pleasure that a purely breath centric channeling that the nostrils open one's awareness to dies a quick death as the breath gets deviated to impermanent transcendence of this existential living. Pleasure and pain arising and passing away as waves through Vipassana's art of living is as real as one's breath and as true as one's idea of how to swim through life every day and through every situation but without being overwhelmed by its depth.

We each have died a million deaths not just with crushed egos and wounded spirits, but without knowing how to stay in the now and to be hopeful for tomorrow.

Egos as we meditative souls are aware is an exaggerated version of what we expect of others and what we think we are supremely full of. The more we have gotten protective over guarding our egos to facilitate our habits, our selective attitudes towards learning new things from anyone irrespective of age, hierarchy, or life experience, besides the environments that we grow from, beliefs, faiths, likes, prejudice and so on which shape our personalities to accommodate ego from the outer mind. This feeling of being 'I am ...' is a reassurance to a transient life, a ripple in the constant waves. 

The waves will ebb and rise as they are supposed to, undeterred by the outside disturbances, and the image of one's ego centric world. This passing away of an 'I' from one shore to another, angry, weary and hurt and feeling small all over again at the depths of this subconscious ocean could happen to the destined few who wish to swim the waters of liberation unafraid and totally surrendered to the lifeguard called Vipassana.