“Flames burn bright and fast
Like many relationships.
True love, like ember
Glows steadily and truly
Both have their own inner light.”
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #155 Ember&Flame
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Childhood (Slice of Life)
Every other day we read horrifying stories of child abuse in some form or the other. It hurts and angers. How can people be so evil? I wonder at the minds of such people who love to torture children. It is not really surprising, because humans are the only animals who inflict pain for the sake of pleasure. My friend remarked that God does not have eyes to see such actions. And there are no answers to many such questions. I remember reading in a book by Paul Theroux about child prostitutes. He writes about a little girl in a brothel. He could never forget her with a soft toy in her hand and her frightened look. What is really tragic is that these children have no childhood at all.
Memories of our childhood come to mind. We used to spend every summer vacation in our grandparents’ place. Two whole months of fun. Long ago days, but those memories are fresh. Coming to the present, our daughter was telling us about our grandson’s activities. He will be four next month. He has learnt the art of manipulation. He knows when to ask for something he desires: he is aware of the times when his parents cannot refuse him. Of course, we as grandparents think he is very clever. How do children learn this art? I remember what my father had written about getting money from his father to buy a magazine.
During his childhood (in the 1940s) my father loved a Kannada magazine called Koravanji. He writes:
“It was a humorous magazine, full of stories, jokes and cartoons. Each made you laugh and smile. We were eagerly waiting for Koravanji to appear in the bookstalls. It was priced at four annas. The present generation cannot understand this. Four annas means one-fourth of a rupee or the present day twenty-five paise. Now, the twenty-five paise coin itself is not there. But, at that time, for us children, the problem was how to get this money to buy the magazine. We did not have the courage to ask our parents for this money. But I discovered a method. My father was good at playing tennis, and an expert at playing bridge, a game of cards. There was a club, not far from our house. It was called Cosmopolitan Club. It had a tennis court and a small building with a large verandah, where the members played cards.
“My father went to the Club every evening after returning from the school. First, he played tennis. Then he climbed the steps of the Club verandah, where three of his friends waited to play bridge. They played for small stakes, one anna for 100 points. My father used to say that playing bridge without money on the table was no joy. When Koravanji appeared in the bookshop, I went to the club to watch them play tennis. I was allowed inside the Club, as the Club attendant, Mr Singh, knew me. After my father and his friends started playing cards, I did not leave. Perhaps, this disturbed my father. He called and asked me, “What is the matter?” I uttered the word, Koravanji. And he quickly gave me four annas. I left the Club and went to the newspaper shop, not very far away, and purchased Koravanji. Then, for a long time, one could see a large smile on my face. Koravanji has disappeared now. What a loss!”
Childhood, a time when children have no worries, they live in the present. They do not think about the past or worry about the future. But, for so many children all over the world there is no childhood. They become adults long before they reach adulthood. A real tragedy and so unfair.
“One of the luckiest that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood.” – Agatha Christie
My father passed away last September, our grandson was born in July 2013. My father enjoyed the company of his great grandson for two years. 🙂
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #154 Darkness&Deep
“Spreading violence,
Deep in the hearts of people
Darkness descended.”
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #154 Darkness&Deep
Human Nature (Slice of Life)
Our monsoon season started in the first week of this month. We had been waiting eagerly for the rains. The weather had become very hot and there was rationing of water. The rains started and the weather became cooler. Human nature is very strange. We yearn for something and when we get it we change our way of thinking. It rained almost continuously for days and we were thinking will it never stop. We were even thinking the clouds must be tired. Then, for two days there was no rain. Everyone was talking about it and were worried about what would happen if it did not rain. Today it rained heavily, there was such a feeling of relief. Human nature is strange indeed and many a time there is no satisfying us.
The Daily Prompt : Create
I am reading ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’ by Sogyal Rinpoche. It is very good and I can relate to so much that the author writes. When I read the prompt ‘Create’, the words that he had written about waves came to mind.
Sogyal Rinpoche writes, “Think of a wave in the sea. Seen in one way, it seems to have a distinct identity, an end and a beginning, a birth and a death. Seen in another way, the wave itself doesn’t really exist but is just the behaviour of water, “empty” of any separate identity but “full” of water. So when you really think about the wave, you come to realize that it is something made temporarily possible (created) by wind and water, and that it is dependent on a set of constantly changing circumstances. You also realize that every wave is related to every other wave.”
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #153 Star&Bloom
Blooming every night
The Parijatha, like stars
Make magic for us.
Blooming and spreading fragrance
Nights become special moments.
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #153 Star&Bloom
Fleeter than Wind (Slice of Life)
“The mind is fleeter than the wind” answered Yudhishtra when questioned by the Yaksha in the Mahabharata. (The Yaksha’s questions and Yudhishtra’s answers form a major episode in the epic.) And this is true. It happens all the time. In one fleeting moment we travel forward or backward in time.
In the last week of May we went to Madikeri. It is a hill station about four hours from our place. But the place is something more than a hill station. It is the place where my father born in 1931. The house where he was born still stands and his relatives still reside in that house. A few years after his birth, his grandparents moved to the adjacent house. My father’s maternal uncle’s family still lives there. The house is just as beautiful as it was then, and our relatives warm and welcoming. We had a wonderful time, sitting up late into the night, talking about the days gone by. We went back in time and lived those days again. My father had very fond memories of the vacations spent in this house.
The mind is fleeter than the wind and it jumps from one topic to another. Some time ago we were driving back home from somewhere. We were behind an army truck in which were sitting many jawans (soldiers). Seeing them I remembered what my father had said about the second world war. Samyukta Karnataka was a very popular Kannada Daily in the 1940s.A correspondent writing under the pen name Sanjaya reported daily on the ongoing war. This pen name is very significant because in our Mahabharata it is Sanjaya who narrates the great war to the blind king Dhritharashtra. My father was only eight years old then. My grandmother was blind, and he used to read to his mother Sanjaya’s articles from Samyukta Karnataka. She used to ask a lot of questions, especially about those foreign lands. This helped him to acquire his love of general knowledge and appreciation of atlases. It so happened that my parents went on to visit and travel through many lands on various continents.
It is good when our memories are good ones. But so often it is so difficult to forget the painful moments of life. The other day someone was telling us that people who forget are lucky and those who cannot are cursed. All our memories are present somewhere in our mind. They come back to us at unexpected moments and take us on a journey, into the past or future.
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Story Girl
(My father and his mother)
My father’s maternal uncle in the centre 🙂 More than forty years ago.
In May this year 🙂
Fleeter than Wind (Slice of Life)
