To kill boredom

My school diary had the above words in it, which was written by my English teacher in UKG. My Mom checks the school diary every day and makes sure I complete all my home work before going to school the next day. It is expected that, on a daily basis, every set of homework carries my Mom’s signature. Promptly my Mom does the same and places the school diary in my bag. By the time I completed KG I knew all the alphabets in English…in fact the class started writing English words in the four line hand writing notebook. Subsequently, in First grade we had to construct small sentences. Mrs. Gamble, my ‘First grade‘ teacher wanted us to get into the habit of letter writing and in fact in one of the parents- teachers meeting she wanted the parents to inculcate the habit of diary writing to their kids. She also encouraged kids to write letters to each other or to her…during the winter and summer holidays. Great initiative isn’t it?… My Mom a big fan of “Gamble Miss” and with her ki...

For the past couple of weeks the beautiful Niligri hills experienced rains like never before. Landslides, uprooted trees and floods affected normalcy in all part of the district. Particularly, second week of November saw nature’s fury in a small village near the Kothagiri Township. I happen to hail from the same village and with lot of concern called up my parents, relatives and friends…I heard that my granny missed the fury by quite literally a whisker. My village happens to be in a valley… surrounded by mountains and on that particular night…2 am to be precise, one side of the mountain gave way and smashed a couple of houses and water seeped into half the houses in the village. The landslide spared nothing on the way…trees, rocks, tea gardens. I heard from my friends, that cries of help loud on the air…the whole village panicked…most of them ran around with torches and candles to help each other…and pulled people out of the bog. Apart from the property the land slide took one lif...

My Mom still recalls all the naughty things I did as a kid and laughs over it. It seems, I hated people carrying me or holding my hands. Probably this character in me triggered the “Soapy Innovation”. If I hated being carried…its obvious that I will not let some one bathe me. So the story begins with the soap that we use at home…”Pears”, a sightly transparent soap…I could see my hand through it, and lathers really well. But my innovation had nothing to do with the looks or the quality…it was with the quantity. The problem I faced was…my tiny hands could not hold them. The Grey matter I had never bothered about the cost (probably at that age I did not even bother picking a 100 bucks to a 10 piece “balli muttai”), instead thought about reducing the size of it. How did I do that? I found out that Pears easily dissolves in water…so I started doing that. I dissolved it to make sure the soap was small enough for me to hold. The soap withstood a few more rounds and my Mom replaced it ...