Welcome back Mum

No painter's brush, nor poet's pen, in justice to her fame, has ever reached half high enough, to write a mother's name!

-- Anonymous

After an excruciatingly long eleven month absence, Mum is back home in Ooty!

Suddenly there is life amidst us, after a painfully dull mechanical period which at best can be described as a time of despair and glum numbness! Conversations that were hitherto in monosyllables have resumed to be full and meaningful dialogues. There is laughter once again, like old times. It feels like the family is now complete and together having endured long distraught times due to separation!

Utter silence of the past few months has altogether disappeared and there is a sense of relief and cheer as Mum has considerably improved in health and is nearly back to her previous state.

I cannot say enough to thank all those wonderful souls who have worked ceaselessly to ensure that she reaches a state that is marked in difference, in progress! Without such tremendous and overwhelming support we would surely have been cast away into doom and never regained the strength and the courage to lead our lives in fulfillment and happiness once again!

Iconic it is when I say that the sounds I hear today are apart from those of creaking doors and heavy footfalls.

The Flowing Brook

Time, they say, is nature's way of making sure that events don't happen all at once! But, thinking retrospectively, now I feel that the years of growing up were one big episode of a multitude of related events. Maybe I'm right after all, and I know for certain that I miss those wonderful times of the past and will cherish them for all time to come, all the way up to the very end.

I have recounted to you stories of how I live in the present, but seldom about the way I did in the times before. Now that I feel I'm growing older, I feel a compelling urge to revisit those bygones in the attempt to rekindle a lost sense of warmth and time! Growing up was a journey much like a mission to discover and there was plenty to chance upon, both right and wrong! It was a time when the mind was asking questions about everything that was anew and fresh, that which was unseen and unfelt! Instances of new found love, emotion, desire and comfort were creeping into the mind like passengers on a journey into another world!

I had the world as an outback and it was strangely large and unexplored! There was a lot to do with possibilities being endless under the blue skies of freedom aided with a sense of undying quest. But there was also an urgency to grow up and get away from the routines of study and scores! It was a false belief that age would automatically yield the desired level of control over what one chose to do at one's whim and fancy without a conditional attribute!

Little was I to know that the best parts of life were being played out in the open, only never to be revisited in person once again, for learning soon dawned on me that time and tide waited for no man, or practically anything! Today, the memories last as if they were a movie that has left a lasting impression. But in essence, those times are gone into making me who I now am - with the ability to take full cognizance of the world around me, the people that live in it and the lives that are so distinct yet intricately woven together like well crafted tapestry!

We are all one in the sense of who we were! Maybe we've chosen different paths to fulfill the destiny that awaits us in the course of our journey! But to remember that we have behind us, a time as magnificent as childhood is perhaps among the most blissful of all occurrences one can chance upon in life!

Maybe thats why Pink Floyd sang High Hopes with the aptly famed verses of how "beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young, in a world of magnets and miracles, our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary."

Footnotes:

This post is part 2 of a series of those which remember and pay tribute to the wonderful times of childhood. It was called for by fellow blogger Vimmuuu's tag!

The first part of this series immediately precedes this post and is titled 'Idyll's dream.'

Idyll's Dream

For most of us, dreams come true only after they do not matter! Only in childhood do we ever have the chance of making dreams come true when they mean everything! 

-- Anonymous

Mum would readily agree that Bill Waterson's inspiration to create Calvin and Hobbes was as a result of me! I was so much of a technical nightmare to folks in my formative days as a child! And imaginably, life has been hard on them as a result of my famed antics that come to be recalled amidst laughter even to this day! Sigh!

Such was childhood! Among the best times, undoubtedly when my tender self with an overtly imaginative mind frolicked in the expansive plains of inquisitiveness with surprising thirst and hunger! I'd readily put the phrase curiosity kills the cat to absolute shame owing to the way my mind functioned, an in many respects, still does! I simply needed to know everything, even if were to be how Mum's necklaces would sink down the water in the well, to how later hapless chicken would too! Perhaps, there was some kind of excessive gene in me that ensured that the carrier stayed silent never! But that remains unexplained medically and parentally until now - something which I surely need to be thankful of!

Leading the gang, or rather a crude bunch of thug children, I'd wander to seize upon the next victim - that could be anything from Aunt's cow being horrendously multi-coloured to lighting up a fire enough to consume a house in its blaze! Childhood was surely unrestricted and largely unsupervised! Being subject to discipline was not a deterrent in any way, but only served to up the ante in vengeful multi folds!

But there absolutely was something magical of those bygone times. They were blissfully sweet, with promises of strong bonds and unbreakable companionships. Even the sunlight seemed kindly mild in its disposition. There weren't deadlines to meet or people to satisfy! There was just us, a bunch of wily hooligans who were almost always given a long rope! And we did tie up the world in it!

Prized possessions ranged from those pocketfuls of Poppins, peppermints, phantom sweet cigarette sticks and so on, often traded for another one's best kept trophy, which was shamelessly called for and made one's own! Might certainly was right! One could endlessly argue over a board of strewn marbles or a pack of footballer cards that were a child's lifeline!

Where have those wonderful days gone to? Why do I never feel the wind bring me those scents now?

Footnotes:

This is the first of a multi-part series inspired and called for by fellow blogger Vimmuuu's tag on the same subject - Childhood and the nostalgia associated with those heavenly times!

Introspective glances

Standing perpendicularly beneath the sky, one feels neatly aligned to every celestial body in a straight line, but the end points of such a connection are countless. Similarly, engaging in an introspective exercise, based on the process of life, is also an endless pursuit with unlimited outcome! Such is the world of possibilities in the realm of the absolute!

It doesn’t help to go to sleep and toss aimlessly from one corner to the other in the pursuit of that easy exercise which you are deemed to engage in, supposedly with near-perfect ease! The mind, it is said, needs to attain a certain equilibrium before slipping into a state of clean surrender at the close of day, allowing the subconscious to perform that routine exercise which is meant to calm the system. But, aren't systems supposed to become dysfunctional at equilibrium? Or so, I read some place!

Introspection, thus, as I have learnt, needs to be limited only to that aspect of what can be done in the context of what was not done better on a previous occasion. If you give the process a degree of liberty more than what is deserved, then facing the peril will also be a responsibility you’ll automatically have to shoulder.

Mean minds like mine can play power games with itself and it's owner, without either of them realizing that they are being tricked in the process. So how do you rein in the brat?

Now, is that my mind speaking to me or otherwise?

Jackrabbit woes!

Footnotes:

Not to worry! This one is a product as a result of my inability to fall a sleep on a rare occasion. Having faced with the situation, I tossed myself up, following the advice of a spin-doctor, and pronto - the product is a grey configuration with shades of black and white! Abstract at best, presumably!

International Womens Day

Today is a significant date, which was etched in history to commemorate the establishment of the International Womens Day!

Eons have come to pass since then and changes although welcoming have not yet been indicative of the state that is desired.

Countless women across geographies continue to suffer the ravages of war and social injustice. Sexual violence against women is rampant in Congo, Senegal, Colombia and Pakistan, to name a few, that is. Elsewhere in places such as Darfur, living conditions, as a result of civil war and strife, are painfully abysmal!

Here in India, an ominously archaic social structure continues to prevail in many underdeveloped states where women folk continue to bear the brunt of a shamefully oppressive system!

Empowerment, self-help, education, etc are among the many buzzwords in print, which have not yet made significant in roads into dusty lands to effect the action that they have been supposed to evoke!

Simply put - how long before we learn better to take care of our women?

Seeking Albedo

A flight of fancy on a windswept field
Standing alone my senses reeled
A fatal attraction holding me fast, how
Can I escape this irresistible grasp?

-- Learning to Fly, Momentary Lapse of Reason, Pink Floyd, 15-09-1987

Have you had an uncanny sense of having been in a place before? Something like having known it even before having visited there? Or maybe, the striking similarity in the manner in which two events have occurred? Say, for instance, stark similarities, more than once? Or perhaps, a very vivid dream that pictured extensive detail as if time had enacted a scene of utterly unquestionable reality before your very eyes, when the mind was in absolute consciousness?

Of late, such instances have been on the rise for me, with the saddened part of them lasting only in tiny fractions, their sketchy remembrances almost always lost in the same instantaneous moment and manner that they appeared in the first place! I'm wondering what it is behind a Déjà vu, that makes it so real, yet painfully unexplained!

Must it be nothing more than a minor chemical imbalance triggered by an electrostatic activity in the brain? Or is there much more than meets the eye, of something that is larger and certainly incomprehensible? Either way, there is a certain degree of frustration as a result of the inability to understand the 'signal' that may hold the key to what the mind has known, even before the present individual (read: physical) realm attained consciousness!

Pure logic would suggest a rapid discount of such trickles, necessitating them to be dismissed as non-figurative occurrences without any significance what so ever! But the other hemisphere - is it the right? - would ponder over such happenings for sometime in a quest for reason! Balance is never found, though articulated at length by various internal agencies. Arriving at a conclusively amicable agreement is a mythical state, yet something, which is cleverly urged by one over the other in an endless scheme of outwitting the opposition - power-plays and artful dodging engaged at best!

There are a thousand fractals within, like black holes lurking in the boundless black universe, unknown, unseen, yet powerful light-bending time-stoppers! Maybe they are aimlessly chance creations, for now, but in time and with experience, a lot more will be understood of them as perhaps holding the key to time warps!

Sorry, not quite what you may call the adventures of Tom Sawyer!

Footnotes:

Albedo, by the way, is the measure of how strongly an object reflects light from light sources!

The Skinnew Effect

The Sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older!

-- Time, Pink Floyd, 1973

Operation Keeknow (spelt Key-No) has come to an end, after a marathon two day exercise which saw a much needed change in the way Redefining Oblivion presented itself, resulting in what I now call The Skinnew Effect!

Among the first things that you'd notice is how quickly the blog loads itself. This was among my primary objectives, considering the number of emails I've received asking to do something about the delay. For those of you accessing this space via low bandwith internet, this surely will make a lot of difference, I hope! I've also factored those of you who access my site via handheld devices, and thus made the new template wireless-access friendly, with very little links loading upfront. The trick is to access the page in a landscape form over your handheld device browser!

Over time, the previous template had gathered a great deal of knick-knacks making it appear very cluttered and distracting, besides the number of tweaky XML codes in the back-end ensured that page loading was delayed - this has been addressed! The comments section has been relocated to the bottom of each post, as was before. Common sense necessitated that it made no meaning to place it after the title, inconveniencing readers who would have to read the post and then scroll back upwards to leave a comment!

Working my way through the maze of XML codes, thanks to a host of invaluable information available on the internet, I trimmed parts of the new template, adding a brand new triple footer section, that now displays fellow bloggers and their spaces according to their respective genres! Reminds me of triple Sundays, the desert! ;)

The template itself, you will notice, is minimally simple, keeping in mind the objective of the blog - to portray relevant content, combined with quality, in a very simple yet appealing manner, which I hope you find so!

Obviously, all of this would not have been possible, but for your suggestions and recommendations, which go a long way in the endeavour to make this a better and meaningful space with a truly enriching web 2.0 visit experience!

However, one person needs a very special mention, for his Godlike patience and determination, and for his thoroughly professional meticulousness in listing down a number of very well-pointed recommendations that I have adhered to, word to word! I cannot say enough to thank Parv kaushik, from Indiblogger, for his invaluable help in effecting Operation Keeknow and The Skinnew Effect, as a result thereof!

And, as for you, my fellow bloggers, readers and enthusiasts, I say with a great deal of conviction that it is your words of encouragement, support and critique that drive me ahead, in pursuit of the best!