Indu Muralidharan

Everything has a reason, though it cannot always be deduced for we cannot see the full picture of a life at any point in time.

I have often thought that Walter Mitty had it in him to be more than a hen-pecked loser. Instead of living it up as a flamboyant daredevil in his dreams, he could have chosen to be a responsible man in real life, goingabout his work with dignity, and people may just have treated him with respect. Did his failures in life lead him to seek solace in daydreams or did his wandering mind stand in the way of his potential success? One must have triggered the other, and then it would have been both working together. An empty life drives you to fantasies of fulfilment, which then form a deadly, vicious circle which can turn you into a cartoon, as it did poor Mitty. Or lead you to ruin like Madame Bovary.

Become aware of yourself. Everything will come to you, Chinmay, when you are in that most wonderful place on earth, the centre of your being. If you learn just one thing from this book, let it be that once you are aware of yourself, depression cannot hold you back any more than a tiger can be trapped in a spider__ web.

Someday, Chinmay, perhaps when you are as old as I am, you will realize that we calibrate time as per our own convenience. The dates on the calendar do not matter by themselves, nor do the numbers on the clock. Only this moment counts, this moment alone, and that is because of the awareness that we bring to it.

O for those days when these tired metaphors were teenagers too, when it was still possible to recite __affodils_ and feel thrilled as you gazed at the golden laburnum in bloom. Recognising clichés is a sign of aging. Sweet as the past may be, it best remains pressed within the pages of memory, savoured for a moment ortwo on quiet Sunday afternoons.

Voices have a language of their own and communicate much more than the words that they say.