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In Peter's Leningrad

Having waited impatiently for the evening to arrive, I am kind of relieved to be on my way to the railway station from where we have to catch our train to Leningrad. After arriving at the station, we find out that we are early and have to wait for the train to come to the platform. While waiting for the train, I strike a conversation with some students from Vietnam. Some of them can speak a little bit of English.... and one of them mentions Mahatma Gandhi when he finds out that I am from India. I am very pleased by the fact that he is aware of Gandhiji and just when we start the discussion about him we are told that the train has come and we have to board it quickly. We all rush to the coach which we have to board when suddenly I realize that I have forgotten one of my bags in the waiting area!!! I tell the Russian gentleman, who had been given the responsibility of ensuring that we board the train to Leningrad and with whom we had come from the hotel to the station, about it. He is s...
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To Russia, Without Love

It has been about 20 yrs since I came back from Russia and every time I discuss my experiences there with any of my friends, they tell me to write about it. The same thing happened today too. So here I am using this blog as a medium to share my experiences in Russia and the erstwhile Soviet Union with all of you. I hope you guys find the time to not only read these posts but also enjoy doing so. The year is 1989, the city Visakhapatnam and I have just been informed that I have got a scholarship to go and study engineering in the Soviet Union. I am elated... excited... happy beyond words. Like millions of Indians, I also want to get out of India and go see the world and hopefully settle down in a 'phoren' country. My family seems to be happy too....after all, a family member is going to a foreign land....... The preparation for my departure to the Soviet Union starts. We shop for warm clothes, shoes, food stuff that I can carry there with me and seek ad...
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Love - A piece of cake??

The other day I heard a song which had the sentence "Love is a piece of cake and making love is all there is to it......" as part of its lyrics. That set me thinking and here I am putting my thoughts down for you to comment on. In one of my posts on my blog here, I have tried to explain how fear makes people do the things that they do ,i.e, I have tried to convince the readers of my blog that it is fear that makes the world go around. A lot of people probably would not agree with that. Especially those who believe that it is love and/or money that makes the world go around. A  lot has been said about the word love.... there are thousands of books written with the love as their theme and numerous movies, songs, poems , etc. written on this subject. People seem to become mad on falling in love (ever heard the phrase - madly in love?) and even wage wars for the sake of love. I really don't think it is love that makes the world go round but sti...
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Object and Suffer?

Recently I had a discussion with one of my friends about bringing about change in and around us. He is of the opinion that we should accept things as they are whether at our workplace or in the society around us and not get bothered if something is not the way it should be or if something can be improved. According to him, if a person tries to change anything, he or she is bound to be castigated. Most of us tend to get into a "comfort zone" where we are very happy with the way things are and very strongly resist any change that will force us out of that comfort zone. This is applicable to every environment, whether it is the workplace or home or any other environment that you can think of. My mother sometimes used to remind me of the famous saying - "Santoshi nar sada sukhi!", which translates into English as "Be contented with what you have got!". I am one of those who refuses to subscribe to this idea and would rather be propagating the idea - "Neve...
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Of God,Religion,Sin and Virtue

A lot of people would have heard the joke below but I would like to start this post with the joke and here it is: One day a young boy got up in the middle of his biology class at school and said to the teacher - "My father says that we have descended from the monkeys." On hearing this, his teacher replied - "After this class, we will discuss your family's problems!" There has been a lot of research and talk about the origin of mankind and about how we seem to have evolved from the apes. I, for one, am very sceptical about this theory of the evolution of man from monkeys. If we really have evolved from them, why are so many monkeys still around? Why haven't all the monkeys evolved into human beings? This brings us to a very simplistic way of looking at the existence of life on out planet - it was created by the entity - God, call him by any name - Eshwar or Allah or whatever name you want to give to him. It is my firm belief that all these different names re...
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You are SPECIAL, VERY SPECIAL.

A lot of times, in our lives, we encounter situations when a question arises in our minds - why me? This question arises, in most of the cases, when we are in a 'difficult' situation and we feel that GOD (or the creator or life itself) is or has been very unkind to us and that we do not deserve to be so shabbily treated by HIM (or HER - depending on what kind of GOD you believe in). And, by a 'difficult' situation, I MEAN a really difficult situation, like, for eg. , take the case of a friend of mine whose child has been diagnosed with a particular kind of illness of the mind. The fact that the child is very young and also suffering from this illness makes it a huge challenge for her parents to teach her some of the basic things. On a lot of occasions, the parents of this child become very frustrated and upset and I think, probably, the questions like 'why our child?' and 'why us?' could be arising in their minds too. I have myself faced innumerable such...
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FEAR is the KEY

I had a discussion with somebody recently and told her that an average human being does most of the things that he/she does in fear of something or the other. And this behaviour is apparent at every age of the average human. As a school going child, he studies because he is afraid of, either, not passing in the exam or of not getting good grades. An athlete might be training very hard because he is afraid of, either, losing or not performing well enough in a race. As a young man, who is going out to meet his girlfriend, he wants to appear well groomed because he might be afraid that if his appearance is shabby, the girl he is wooing might reject him. Similarly, a girl, who has got a date with a guy she likes, might not want to meet him that day because she is afraid that he might find her ugly (just because she has developed a very prominent pimple on her face that very morning!). At the work place, a person might be working very hard and, as they say, "toe the line" of his s...
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