At the Crossroads of life.

Say you are at the prime of your life, and all is well with the world....
Your children are doing brilliantly, as is your husband, and you have made a nice way of life and living for yourself...


Then one day you feel an inexplicable, nagging pain in your chest and it gets worse by the hour. Until you can't even breathe...eating, in any case seems to be out of the question.


All the while the doctors suspect one minor illness or the other, (including acidity) and you are made to go through a range of medications..But nothing helps....


Then on one bright morning, you go for a chest X Ray, and the world will never be the same again.For when the report comes out, it's as if one lung just isn't there any more, filled instead with 5 and a half litres of fluid.Which needs to be removed over three painful procedures..


And once that is done, tests are conducted, only to find a malignant tumour in that lung...


I tried, just for a moment to step into my friend's shoes today...but failed...Miserably..

Yet knowing that that she really is at the crossroads of her life, tried my level best to give her the sustenance and encouragement that she needs...

By telling her that in addition to the prescribed treatment,faith and prayer will keep her going, as will the love and care of friends and family.

Some memorable Vignettes from Hindi films

Though there are lots of scenes one can recall from Hindi movies, particularly if one sits down to think, I challenged myself just now, and this is what I've come up with...in fact, as I write...

Choti, Choti Baatein-a very old Hindi film starring Motilal.

The family sits down for dinner, there are three grown up children, a husband and the wife. The table is groaning with food, and it all looks good. The dishes are passed from person to person as the family dives into the food...The father, ie. in this case, the main bread earner, gets each dish last. In most cases, the food has been cleaned out, or something very close to it..

He just goes ahead and eats whats left.
Then at the end of the movie, he simply walks out..
Out of his own home and their lives.....

Vijeyta- Produced by Shashi Kapoor.Rekha and Shshi Kapoor, playing husband and wife in the movie, share a strained relationship, the reasons for which are never really clearly defined.

One day, she simply breaks down dissolving into tears, sobbing and sobbing endlessly.All the while on her husband's chest, while he holds her and tries his level best to comfort her.

Then she simply says, "why is it that sometimes one just feels like crying? Even when there is no explicable reason.?

And in the nexrt scene, she is dead, of a sudden heart attack..while the father and son mourn her death.

Junoon.Again produced by Shashi Kapoor.

Shashi Kapoor, playing a Pathan, loves Nafisa Ali, a British girl at the height of the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
But the real question is, does she love him too?

Well we get to know this at the end of the movie..when he finds her after having galloped on his horse, like a mad man, just to catch a glimpse of her. He finally does reach her home, where she looks up and sees him, and they exchange a look...

One which says it all..

Ad then he turns his horse away and gallops away, fighting those same Britishers in war. He's killed and she remains unmarried till she dies.... at a ripe old age.

I'm sure we can all think of many such scenes in movies, scenes which have impacted us in many ways, but these came to me right away.

More another time

Do I/Don't I ? The mind and it's inherant contradictions

And so here it is again...

Time to leave Delhi and go back home to Muscat..

And there begins the eternal question yet again, quite simply this...Do I /Dont I?

Yet, common sense creeps up, right behind that very thought.
Too much of a good thing perhaps?

Followed immediately by, when is enough ever enough?

Never ending circles, with no clear answer,perhaps?

And I find re-assurance in the fact that we now live in such a global age, and the world now looks so very flat.
Where everything is just a mere 'click' away.

Finally telling myself that this is what being a grown up is all about.
When one has learnt to move on, adapt and then re-adapt..

Whatever be the place or the occassion
Or then, the rhyme or the reason