The Mango blooms

Spring is in the air! We have a mango tree in the courtyard of this house we're renting and it is in full bloom these days. I'd almost forgotten that the mango also blooms. So much in life we tend to overlook or just pass by. At my primary school, we had over a dozen mango trees, and when they burst out with flowers, we knew winters were finally behind us and we could throw away the pullovers and blazers and look forward to playing outside a bit longer. The mango blossoms give out a faint sweetish odour, another thing I'd almost forgotten. It's said that the sense of smell is the most primitive and therefore the most evocative. Think about it. How often you smell something and remember some days long gone by. Coffee and cigarettes might remind you of those lazy sundays in the hostel, frying pakoras might remind you of monsoon and your mom's kitchen, so many wonderful memories often come flooding back with just a smell, a whiff of old times!

For me, the mango blooms bring back happy childhood memories. Rushing to school, playing with friends, the warm-cool weather, the soft, velvetty moss on the school wall that we loved to touch and run our cheeks against, the lantana clusters with their own sharp, almost minty odour, the huge peepal giving out new leaves, all this from just a plain old tree in the backyard that has come into bloom!

Why does he do it?

Why does he indeed? Why does Saurav continue to play cricket? After all the indignities heaped upon him and unfairly, I might add, why does he not leave in disgust? This last humiliation should have been the proverbial final straw. Four captains in one team? There was never a bigger farce in the game. Why stop at four? Why not make every player his own captain and let it go at that? Mind you this is the guy who brought up Indian Cricket to the level it currently enjoys. He brought courage, determination, self-belief and a certain brashness in our men. And we repayed him by kicking him out when there were 3 more deserving players to be removed from the team. He proved his worth with a century in his last series, cocking a snook at the powers that be in the BCCI. But to be co-captain with three other players for a 20-20 series? Please Saurav, for your fans' sake, just tear that KKR jersey apart!

The IPL is being moved out of India. I think it's a shameful thing to do. The Indian elections are the biggest excercize of its type in the world. Not to talk about how important they are both as elections and as a symbol of our freedom and democracy. And given the security environment in which we live today, it is only fitting that the elections get the highest priority. I am as big a fan of cricket as the next guy, but our sense of nationhood ought to take precedence over the game. Cribbing about the Govts. inability to provide adequate security for some matches is totally unworthy of any patriot. But I guess, when millions of rupees are at stake, all else goes out the window. I know a lot of people would have lost a lot of money if the IPL was cancelled, but I don't think it would have made a dent in the pockets of people like SRK or Mallya. I mean the whole country is being mobilised for a momentous occasion and all Lalit Modi can think about is how he can salvage his competition. Now they're looking at other venues and studying how they can maximize their profits. Money is very important I know, but there has to be a limit! Would he be happier if his matches were provided enough security in Delhi or Chennai and people lost lives at bomb blasts at polling booths. What is the greater necessity? I haven't discussed this with anyone, but I feel I might be a minority in feeling thus, though I hope I'm not!

It was brought to my notice that people might be confused by the title for my blog, so I thought I'd clarify that. mlcw stand for 'My Little Corner of the World', which is what I intend this blog to be. As does everyone else I suppose. In this world that is ' too much with us, late and soon', I've found the most difficult commodity to come by is a little space to call your own. How often I think to myself,"Oh for a few days away from it all!" But that's not happening anytime soon. Hence this little nook. Too much of my life has been spent in crowds. In younger times, I would withdraw into my room/shell every so often, just to unload my mind, recharge my batteries, but as I got older, I found less and less time for that. Now I find myself with a stranger when I'm alone. So in a way, this is an effort to reacquaint  myself with myself, with my thoughts, my dreams.

I wonder what dreams, which wishes are actually mine now. All I seem to want from life today, is that what I really, truly want? Or is it something I've learnt to wish for, not even considering the why of it all? Difficult to say. In this close pressing world of ours, little of us remains truly ours. And rediscovering that bit is one way to happiness, I'm sure.

I am a little late to this bandwagon, I think. Something I was idly thinking about for ages but never got around to doing.... like setting up my outloook account, which I did after owning a PC for over a decade. Not too surprising I guess, except for the fact that I could assemble a PC at home but found myself unable (unwilling?) to configure Outlook.

But finally the utter ennui of this conference I'm attending got the better of me and here I am, writing. And realising how used I am to MS Word's auto correct options. Christ, I never thought I was this bad at typing! 

It's a weird feeling, writing like this online. I've written a diary in my childhood, but this is publishing it for the whole world, or whoever bothers to check it out, to read.

Attending this conference gave me my first firsthand experience with how bad the economy is getting these days. It surely is a bad sign if the trade counters don't even have free pens to give out! Last year, there was everything from CDs to books to what have you. NOw all you had was toffees. Gifts are down from ipods to 2GB pen drives. Being in the field that I am, the economic downturn hasn't really affected me, nor did the upturn of the last decade or so either. So it's an eye opener to see how bad it is for the rest of the guys. I wonder how things came to this. I mean I know how it happened, but I wonder how it was allowed to fester till it reached such huge proportions. Did these guys think no one would ever find out? What were they thinking? And the biggest irony is that while the rest of the world is feeling the pinch, these "geniuses" are still getting big bonuses! It's a screwed-up world.