Today has been all cold and rainy, like any other cold day here.Just that it’s been sunshine for too long, long enough for me to believe it might just stay. I drove to work today listening to “Tejonidhi loh gol”, bliss!! Stopped at a red light, can’t avoid looking at the person in the car next to me, can I? Anywhoo, there was this old lady in that car looking straight at the red light, and suddenly she dozed off. Yeah that’s right, at the steering wheel, she just slept. Woke up in a second, looked in the mirror to check her lipstick, acted just normal. The light turned green and I wondered if she was headed to the freeway. Hopefully not!
Two potted plants (my pets) which survived the bitter winter, one of them seems to be happy and is sprouting flowers. As I was looking at them yesterday, I remembered our balcony plants back in India. Mum would put potted plants in every spot possible so that we don’t enter the balcony or for that matter any balcony in the house. Her own little garden she calls it. I could never understand the pleasure she achieves in attracting mosquitoes, some other little insects which hover around green and a grasshopper at one time. While these thoughts circled my brain,a big fat honeybee started hovering on a little yellow bud. Bliss again! Ok Ma, know how it feels now, yeah and also know how many times I have said this. Yeah yeah I would know when I grew up and stuff.
Today I spoke to a best friend from India. The one whom I send senseless, annoying emails. Ranting, frustrations and more. She however, religiously replies to them with some completely unrelated topics and thoughts. Isn’t it wonderful to just have such friends? In one of her such emails is a little story, probably we all were read such stories as kids, but doesn’t harm to revisit them once in a while, does it? So here’s a conversation between two characters in the story:
The story itself is set in the pre-independence period.
A British forest Officer is talking to one of the local Indian Tribal man assisting and supervising the Khedda operations. He notices that the elephants, which have been domesticated earlier, are used to pull out the newly captured elephants from the Khedda pit. He also notices that the huge / heavy tusker is tied to a tree with a relatively thin iron chain. So he asks, “That elephant is huge, don’t you think you should chain it properly? Those chains are very thin. That tusker can break those chains by yanking and pulling really hard repeatedly".
The Khedda man replies, “When we capture baby elephants, we chain them. Initially they tug at the chains and pull hard and try to free themselves. Gradually, the frequency and intensity of the 'pull' decreases. One fine day they simply stop trying. Once they stop trying we don’t change the chains. The elephant is now growing up. It can break those chains with a couple of good pulls. You know it and I know it. But the elephant himself doesn’t know that".
This week’s thought: Keep trying. You will never realize how strong you are unless you try to break the chains. The day you stop trying is the day you are actually chained.
P.S: Thanks Sowjanya for listening always!
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