These words reminded me of our grandson when he was three years. He loved to watch the ripples on the lake. He called them rickkles 🙂
“Wind touched the waters
To make ripples on the lake
Nature’s fine circles. ”
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Everyday Moments – ( #SOL- 2019)
I first came across the Slice of life some time in 2017 and it has become a very nice part of my life. I like reading slices by bloggers from different parts of the world. Our everyday moments everywhere are not very different. These moments make our life what it is. I started writing to my Doddamma, my father’s elder brother’s wife in October 2017. She is 88 and is not able to hear properly if I telephone her. So I write to her. I post my letter to her every week. I edit the letters and post them as Slice of Life every Tuesday.
16-07-19
We are reading in the newspapers about water scarcity in some places and excess rain in other parts of the country. Both are causing so much misery to people. We need the rains and the water, what can life be like if there is no water? We cannot even imagine such a life. We had rains from 9th to 12th, and it has been raining every day though with not the same intensity. On the 14th it was drizzling the whole day. That way more water will seep into earth. Many a time I feel I should not talk about rains at all, just take life as it comes.
On the 10th afternoon my husband went to our village to be with his father. He returned on the 12th morning. My father-in-law is fine. That afternoon I went to Asare. A teacher told me that people have started paddy cultivation in her place. On the way back I had some shopping and it was raining. I had an umbrella but it was good to feel the rain. We buy our grocery in the Cooperative society where we have been buying since 1982 😊.
I made raw jackfruit dosa. We have to grind the arils with rice to make the batter. It is tasty. That Dosas are made from the ripe ones too. We make many dishes with jackfruit. Every jackfruit season, exhibition (mela) of jackfruit and its various products are held in different parts of the state.
( finger chips made from jackfruit, I have made them by baking too.)
We like going to EndPoint for our evening walk. Our town is on a hill and one end of this place is called EndPoint. From there we can see river Swarna flowing towards Arabian Sea. It is very peaceful there. The rain water harvesting pond is full and it was a pleasure looking at it.
On the 14th we watched more of Wimbledon and less of cricket World cup final. We wanted Federer to win but by the end of the game both deserved to win. It was a wonderful match. We did feel sad for the New Zealand team. Moreover both games we could watch without getting too involved 😊.
Today is our grandson’s sixth birthday. We sent videos wishing him, in the morning. Our daughter and family live in Germany, they are 3 ½ hours behind us. They are coming for a vacation and will come here on August 10th. I made mango jam for our grandchildren today and have kept mango and ‘chikku’ pulp to make icecream. It is nearing ten at night, we just talked to him by WhatsApp video call. Technology has changed our life in so many ways.
Grandchildren are the dots that connect the lines from generation to generation. ~Lois Wyse
Manilkara zapota – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manilkara_zapota
Asare | Manipal Academy of Higher Education (formerly, Manipal …
https://manipal.edu/mu/important-links/social-impact/asare.html
Jackfruit mela a hit in Udupi | Deccan Herald
https://www.deccanherald.com/state/mangaluru/jackfruit-mela-a-hit-in-udupi-746960.html
#SoCS July 13/19
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “instructions.” Write instructions for anything you know how to do. As detailed or as rambling as you’d like. Enjoy!
‘Instructions’ immediately brought to mind recipes. I enjoy reading recipes and reading the instructions. I follow the instructions but not very rigidly. If I do not have an ingredient and if I feel it is not really necessary, I try the recipe without it. And usually the taste is good and as we do not really know what the exact taste should be, it does not really matter. And I like to experiment 😊.
When our son gifted us a DSLR camera I followed the instructions exactly as was given in the manual. I have yet to learn a lot but it is fun to take photos. My father was a very good photographer. I have fond memories of him taking photos, he would ask us to stand in the correct place, he would then measure the distance required and then take the photo. Those were the days of photo reels and negatives and one could not afford to make mistakes. In his later years he enjoyed the digital camera. He could delete what he did not want 😊 but he used to say he had more fun in the earlier days.
Talking about instructions I think people usually do not like being given instructions 😊. Maybe it depends on the way they are given. My husband grew up in a joint family. He says that all family members followed the instructions given by the head of the family. No one even thought of not following them. But everything has changed now. There are very few joint families, at least in my part of the country. I don’t know how it is in other parts. Changes happen and life goes on.
RonovanWrites #Weekly #Haiku #Poetry Prompt #Challenge #261 Zen&Chaos
Zen way of thinking
Helps to understand chaos
Troubling world today.
Full circle
Every morning I open the kitchen windows to be greeted by familiar sights. I have been seeing them almost every day for years. Bulbuls, babblers and sunbirds fly from branch to branch, from flower to flower and call out to each other. They look so busy and I watch them for a while before returning to my work. The scene is so unchanging but full of life. And I wonder whether there are changes in life. Of course there are changes, but some changes make me very anxious about the future.
Our monsoon season begins in the first week of June and we get very good rains. However, my father-in-law used to say that the time and duration of the seasons have changed from what they were more than fifty years ago. This year, in June we hardly got any rain. We all hoped it would rain in July but things have improved just a little. We see dark clouds gathering but very little rain falls. I hear it is the same in the southern part of India’s west coast. But it is raining well in other parts of the state and the country.
I am reading a fascinating book called The Incredible History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal and Sowmya Rajendran. The Indus valley civilization existed between 3300 BCE and 1300 BCE. Sanyal and Rajendran write that these cities were built gradually and disintegrated slowly over a long period of time. Between 2600 BCE and 2000 BCE the climate started changing. Around 2200 BCE, the monsoon became weaker and there were prolonged droughts. This must have precipitated a massive crisis. However, the Harappans were faced with a much greater problem. The river system upon which their civilization was based, was drying up. It has now been proved that this river was the Ghaggar, known back then as the great Saraswathi and not the Indus as was believed earlier. Interestingly, the Saraswathi is eulogised in the Rigveda. At some point of time the Ghaggar lost its tributaries and also its sources of glacial melt from the Himalayas. Around 2000 BCE the lack of water began to affect the Harappans. They migrated to other parts of the country in search of a better future.
My imagination must be working overtime 😊 We are facing conditions that have never been seen before. Different thoughts came to mind as I connected those times with our own. Maybe life is taking a different course and we have to go along with it.
I wrote this post a few days ago. Our monsoon season for this year started on the 9th, one month late. It has been raining almost continuously since then, some time pouring and at other times drizzling. We now feel that in June we got pre-monsoon rain which we usually get in April and May. So changes are happening.
“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” – Mary Shelly
Rigveda – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigveda
Indus Valley Civilisation – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization
Sarasvati River – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasvati_River
Everyday Moments – ( #SOL 2019)
9-07-19
Today it has been raining since morning. It seems as if our monsoon season has started. We are keeping our fingers crossed. It is now four in the evening. It is cloudy, dark and raining. Yesterday it had rained only in the morning. 6th and 7th were such dry and sunny days. We were feeling so terrible. It should have been raining but we are having such sunny days. Lack of rains is worrying everyone but we all say we can do nothing about it now. We have to just wait and hope. On the 7th evening we went for a walk to the lake in our place. Every year by July the lake is almost full. During the monsoon season water flows into the lake from all sides. But this time we can still see the lake bed!! We just hope it will become full before the monsoon season ends. It is very worrying.
On the 4th our son went to Hyderabad for four days. He had some work in the university where he studied. We went to the airport. The ground staff will assist him while going and returning. We came back home by 1.45. His friend came to receive him at the airport and he is staying in a hotel not far from his university. That evening we went to our temple park for a walk. We had not been there for a long time.
Last week I was able to go to Asare three times a week. My husband and I leave home together. He goes to the medical library to read the latest dental journals. He was professor in the Dental college of our University. He retired in January 2017. We return together.
We had read about a Sanskrit daily newspaper. We have subscribed for it. I studied Sanskrit in school. I am happy that I can understand a lot of what I am reading. And we have got a very good Sanskrit Dictionary by Monier Williams. My father had gifted it to us. I read in the morning at about 11o’clock once I finish my work.
There are a lot of jackfruits in our tree. On Saturday we took three to my husband’s cousin. He and his wife use raw and ripe jackfruit in different ways. I crushed the ripe arils, added sugar and cooked. It is tasty with dosas and we make a tasty dessert with it called payasa. These days jackfruit ice creams have become very popular. I liked it 😊 .
Our son returned yesterday afternoon. He came in a prepaid taxi from the airport. In the evening we did not go for a walk. My friend and neighbour was taking a brisk walk in her front yard. She and her husband go for walk every evening. But he had to visit a relative. I joined her and enjoyed the walking with the talking.
Days are going on. I remember the water scarcity in April and May. The days passed and these days will pass too. That is life.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane
Sudharmasanskritdaily Sanskrit Daily Newspaper
sudharmasanskritdaily.in
Monier Monier-Williams – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monier_Monier-Williams
jackfruit payasam recipe | chakka payasam recipe | palapazham …
https://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/jackfruit-payasam-recipe-chakka-payasam
