Meeting Gimbo...

It was a bright summer day. I was 16 years old. We had gone to the new vacation house my father had bought a couple of years ago. People in this part of the country grew all kinds of berries and tomatoes. It was a day designed for picking berries and eating as much as we like. I was playing with the other boys and girls of my age, primarily children of my father’s friends. We were skipping and running around and falling on the green grass and climbing on to the branches of the trees, hiding, sometimes relaxing to a game of cards or boards, etc.

At one point during the day, we were playing hide & seek and I thought of hiding behind a large banyan tree. I ran towards the tree, holding my breath and was looking where my friend ‘seeker’ was. The very next moment I saw a giant serpent looking into my eyes. It was large, rubbery, shiny and throwing out his feet sized tongue. I wanted to shout and cry for help but was not willing to become a seeker the very next moment. So I kept my mouth shut and instead said a ‘hello’ to the serpent. The serpent replied. He said a ‘hello’ back. I hit myself at the back of my head and re-arranged my skirt. It was true and was happening. The serpent was talking.

‘Where do you live?’

‘I live in this large hole inside the tree with my family and friends’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came out to chart out a plan for my hunting trip in the night. Who are you?’

‘My name is Lily. Lily Simpson. I’m here with my family on a picnic. We are playing hide & seek and I don’t want to be caught’

‘How about you come home then?’

‘You mean, your home inside the tree?’

‘Yes and I will introduce you to everyone. They will be pleased to know you’

‘But I’m too big to enter your house’

and the next second, I felt a prick on my right arm. I was so tiny and we were going through the hole. There were hundreds of stairs inside that tiny hole of the tree. As we were walking down the stairs,

‘Can everyone in your family speak?’

‘Yes, all of them can. I will introduce them to you in a short while’

‘Why didn’t you eat me up? Don’t you all eat humans?’

‘We never eat humans. Humans come to hunt us for the skin or to have us as pets. We hate those ones. But we can differentiate the good ones from the bad. Most of the humans run away or faint after seeing us. You did not. You must be a brave one’

‘Yes, I’m brave. I want to protect sea animals when I grow up but now I want to protect land animals like you too’

We were there in front of 20 other serpents who were doing different things. Most of them were sleeping, some of them were taking care of the little ones who looked cute in their own ways, some of them were cleaning the place with their large tongues and some were making things from the tree leaves, flowers and twigs. I hit my cheeks this time to check if I was day-dreaming or something but no, this was happening for real.

‘O I forgot to ask Mr.Serpent, what’s your name?’

‘My name is Gimbo Amazon. My great grandparents belonged to the Amazon forests and that’s why the surname. When we migrated here 500 years ago, a lot of us died because we couldn’t adapt to this climate. But some of us managed to live and now we are fine’

‘I understand Mr.Amazon and it’s a great privilege to meet you and your family’

I realized everyone asleep had gotten up now and was staring at me. I feared for a moment but holding hands with Mr.Amazon made it easier. It wasn’t too long when they were all sitting together and I was offered flower tea, cherries, pineapples with honey syrup. I hadn’t tasted anything like that before. I sang some poems and shared some stories from my memory. I also told them about the snake stories children are taught at the schools which took them by surprise. I played with the little serpents till I realized Mum and Daddy would be waiting for me. I badly missed my camera because I wanted to take a picture with the Amazon family. I promised that I will take care of their species when I grow up and will come to visit them again.

We hugged each other and I started walking up the stairs again, this time though Mr.Amazon was holding me and I loved the touch of his shiny skin. As we were coming out of the hole, I felt a twitch on my skin again and I was back under the large tree. I could hear my friends and Mum shouting my name. Before they found me with Mr.Amazon, I quickly removed the wrist watch Daddy had bought me on my birthday and threw it towards Gimbo. I started to run but once when I turned, I found Gimbo waving at me and crying.

I knew no one was going to believe my story when I united my family. They looked so relieved after seeing me and I gave no explanations whatsoever. Till date, meeting Gimbo has been the most memorable experience of my life. I have never gone back again but I would do someday.

Dear Betty…

Betty is tiny, pale white and shivering to hell as we get home. She is 4 years old and has lived quite a life – separated from her mother and sold to an American couple when she was hardly 2 months old. They left her in a public park a few months ago from where she has been picked up by the ‘Animals without names’ organization. The only good thing her old masters did was to tie her old pictures in her legs. The pictures clearly reveal that once upon a time she used to be a happy person, very comfortable in her surroundings. Now she is here and I haven’t seen her barking even once in the last 7 days.

My main house is small but I have a large backyard. I hope Betty likes spending time in the backyard as much as I do. For now, I have made a cute house for Betty and placed one of my sofa cushions there.  The fostering house has told me that I need not train her for bathroom habits or walking & running habits as she knows them very well. It’s lunch time here and we are planning to have some rice with a lot of vegetables. I plan to take Betty out tomorrow to the nearby supermarket and will buy her her own food. She shivered again right now but I cuddled her and I felt that she took less time to recover than before.

It’s 4pm and I’m planning to show Betty a few clothes that I have designed for her from my wardrobe. She looks at me with anticipation. We have tried all 4 pairs of clothes I made for her. Blue and Pink would suit her I feel. I hope as she regains her original colour in a few weeks from now, they would suit her even more.

We are going out to the garden now. Betty has her name in the collar with my house address. I talk to Betty about all the flowers that I have planted and the lawn moving job that I do once every 2 weeks. I hope we can give each other good company when we do these jobs because some of them are pretty boring and having a friend around will make them seem less so. We have wandered around for a while and are resting to observe the sun going down. I’m having my favorite cup of tea while Betty is enjoying her biscuits.

We come inside and I put on some music. Betty is slowly starting to move around and she is staring at the loudspeakers. Maybe she has a good or a sad memory about them or could be something related to a dream. I start to make dinner for the both of us. While things are in the making, I show her some of my old pictures. She sits very close to me and is observing me flip the pages. This time when I lift the sheet, I give it a pause and ask Betty to do it if she wants to. She flips it on her own and I hug her dearly.

Yotsuba reminds me…

… of the old times. It is National Day holidays here in China. The city was supposed to be quiet but it is not so. I went to some of the museums & parks during the holidays & found people everywhere. Seems we also get visitors to the city who then go out with their relatives and crowd all the city’s attractions.

So, I’m reading YOTSUBATO. Yes, the name of the manga has to be in CAPS. Because there is only few other ways I can describe it’s amazing-ness (if that’s a word). Yotsuba is a girl (from who knows where) and she is 5 years old at the moment. Her life is beautiful! She is beautiful! Her acts & ways bring tears and joys to my eyes! Not always does the world feel paradise to you. As I’m reading it, I feel so.

It also brings back my old memories. When I was about the same age as Yotsuba (or even a little younger than her), I used to look forward to traveling with Daddy to small shops in Kolkata (Calcutta then). Daddy used to sing poems of all kinds of astronomical things to me in the night so that I could fall asleep. He used to promise me that he would wake me up early so that I could go with him to the usual Bread purchase routine. We had vendors coming with small trolleys to sell breads at home-step but Ma always felt they were too sweet for our taste and hence Daddy used to buy salted ones from several shops around the corner.

Often when we came out of the house, Daddy used to tell me ‘Sorry, but I don’t know the way to the Bread shop. Could you guide me?’. I used to act too brave (also a little bossy if you may call so) when I was a child. And my reply always was ‘Daddy, you don’t know anything, I will take you there’. I still remember a good loaf of packaged bread was Rs. 2 in the early 90’s. At every corner, he used to ask me ‘Right or left, where should I turn?’. I didn’t like holding hands (I don’t like it even now) but I sometimes had to while crossing the roads. I used to walk in the front and Daddy used to walk behind me.

Well… Yotsuba and her Daddy have a bicycle, so they walk less than we did. And today I walked in the streets of Guangzhou with my beautiful friend Leslie. It’s nice to walk, also nice to lift hands and feet while walking to feel the breeze. I forget all the above when I’m working Monday-Friday in an air-conditioned office. I also want to thank the person who introduced me to this Manga but I won’t

If you want to read the manga, go here.

Brands & Advertisements

It was last week when I heard that about a fourth of the world’s population is fasting this month. Even children as little as 3 years are taught how to fast. Many international companies are supporting colleagues who are coming to office early and going home early to break their fast. For those of you who don’t know, Ramadaan is a holy festival which runs for about 40 days. People who take part in the festival have meals before sunrise and after sunset and during the day time they even refrain from having water and they do this all the 40 days.

I watched this lovely advertisement of Surf Excel today and  it teaches about helping people. If all the children of this world learnt this, the future will be an amazing place to live.

Under an Umbrella…

Strong forces were shattering the glass walls as I came downstairs from my work floor. A bunch of people were just staring at the dark sky and the heavy downpour with their unopened umbrellas. I think they were deciding whether or not to take the risk of walking in that kind of a rain. It was a strange one for sure. The sky had turned pitch dark at 5 in the evening and it started pouring heavily by 5:30. I’m quite bad with opening umbrellas while I’m taking care of the doors. I don’t know what to do first and what to do next or most importantly, how to do both the things together? Most of the times, I open the door first and then try to open the umbrella and by that time, I’m a little wet already. That’s what happened yesterday too.

I saw the giant Black cars with red eyes making their way towards nowhere. I was happy that I didn’t have to be careful about the water splashing from the car tires today. It’s quite dark first of all and my legs are wet already, so I don’t have to worry. The rain was falling at an angle of 30 degrees and no matter how much hard I tried to balance the umbrella and move it around, the rain water would brush my feet. I was enjoying the forces. I was enjoying that my brain reacting so fast for a change and dripping with emotions.

Nature definitely is much more powerful than humans. If the winds were a bit more stronger, they would have flew me away. I enjoyed walking on the footpaths. Footpaths which are generally full of people, some people walking so slow to annoy the hell out of me seemed empty today. The cars gave me company. The ones with red eyes. I wonder what people inside them felt. Perhaps happy of their accomplishments in life. Perhaps pitying the fate of people like us walking on the footpath. I remembered my teenage driver days. Driving a car felt a lot of liberation and independence. I felt that I could move places faster than my own speed and can even take people around. Perhaps the ones inside the cars just felt happy that they were protected and were aiming to reach their destinations soon. I hope they did.

The yellow lines for the blind, the white lines and the blue lines on the footpaths looked more brighter and clearer than ever before.  I have always wondered how did that colour yellow helped the blind anyway. That doesn’t seem to be addressing the basic fact that they cannot see. While I was trying to walk straight on a dark stormy night, I thought of Vivekananda. His beautiful poems and quotes have always inspired me. He did go to Kanyakumari. I guess the depth of the oceans made his thinking clearer and easier. Maybe he heard nature’s voices and penned them down. An average person could not have written such facts.

As I walked forward I came to the signal and there was still a minute for me to cross the road. While I waited for the signal to turn green, I looked at the tall buildings of Guangzhou. I wondered what people must be doing in them at the moment. It was dinner time, so most of them must be having dinner while some would be playing or sleeping or trying to write or sketch. That noon I had seen a family next to my lunch table. While the elders of the family were busy deciding what to order, the little girl was painting on her notebook. She wasn’t bothered about the food, she wasn’t affected by the senseless talks that elders indulge in. She carried her good work on her Sketchbook till the food arrived. Her mom served a few things on the plate and that’s when she showed her sketch to them. I tried to take a sneak-peek of the sketch too. She had drawn a fairy and had worked extensively hard on the gown the fairy was wearing. I think the painting looked quite beautiful. I don’t have too artistic eyes but I hope an artist would have loved it too.

I crossed the signal and started walking towards the last stretch of the road to reach my apartment building. The forces of nature became even more severe and people under the shops were looking at me strangely as if it was wrong walking in the rain. I thought of India and how it had an open drainage system in many places, how they would get jammed in such heavy rains and how water would enter homes sometimes. There was no such problem here. Water seemed to be flowing smoothly, entering through some passageways somewhere and there was no clogging. I didn’t have to watch my steps carefully here because there were no open drains and I would not step my foot on one such like I would worry there.

As I entered my apartment building, the security officer opened the gate for me before I took out my keys and entry card. As I took the lift and entered home, I knew I wouldn’t find my mom standing at the gate to touch my forehead and check if I had fever. Nor would someone comfortingly say ‘The food is ready and I have made your favorite rice, let me quickly warm it up while you change your dress’. I checked my trousers, they were wet till the knee. I tip toed into my tiny apartment thinking ‘It is Mother’s Day this Sunday’.  There was a pin-drop silence.

Why I like contrasts?

Imagine a tree. Not just any tree but a tree that has a green trunk, green branches, of course green leaves (that’s not too hard to imagine), green flowers with green stamens, green petals, green everything and when you dig it out from the ground shows up green roots.

My question is would you like such a tree? I dont know about you but I would not and glad nature is not like that. That’s precisely my reason why I like contrast. Matching everything up doesn’t fit into my sense of vision and creativity. It’s just boring.

Why I like Simulations?

First of all, what are Simulations? They are just some hypothetical scenarios where we would like to test a particular thing. So, this is the bottom-line and also the top-line about Simulations – it is the one same thing or the same question that we want to answer, which means that the question remains the same. But the answers are very many because we change the situation (change the parameters) in which the question is being asked.

I had heard about them when I was in high school but got to do some when I went to do my Engineering in Pilani. It was part of the Optimizations course. I remember we did some Monte-Carlo simulations on Excel and that felt very good. It was as-if, all possible solutions were available and if there existed something like a safe bet, I would be prepared of doing that.

I have been working on Simulations recently – constructing 2 and 3 dimensional metrices and looking at the numbers to finally decide cuts on the basis of what I think is the most reasonable thing to do from an implementation point of view.