Idle Reflections

With the total urbanisation, the residential areas are filled with houses and shops and other buildings. All have electricity and are well lit. Additionally, even the streets are well lit. So, there is nothing special when you go home or visit someone else. But times were not always like this. (In many places on rural landscape, thankfully they are still not like this). When you came back home in the evening, you had to traverse a lot in darkness with lights visible only from dwellings spread far apart and separated by darkness in between. Finally when you were  at a distance from your home with its welcoming light visible, the sense of eagerness and thought of the warmth (in winters even physically) would be very pleasing. I remember one evening when I visited my grandpa’s house at Mysore. He was at the outskirts of the city, about half a kilometer off KRS road, in Metagalli. I landed up at Mysore at an unearthly hour of 9 PM! The city would practically go to sleep at this ho...

Many of the changes which occur are irreversible. When I sit and reflect about my experiences as a child in my own village Kanamanapalli in Kuppam, I know that my experiences could never be gone through once again and the only way to convey is by narration. In those days, my village was not electrified. It was a sleepy village, but provided with enough bounty of nature. There was a lake and its waters relesed by controlling the sluice gates. A lot of pleasant green of mainly Paddy and Ragi fields surrounded the dwellings. Behind my grand mother’s house there was a coconut grove and in it a pond with lotus flowers. The approach and exit road to my village was a dirt track and the only vehicles which traversed them were bullock carts and a few bicycles. The same road branched and one branch led to Kuppam railway station which was three miles and another branch which led to Yamanur, also was the way for the cattle to go to jungle for daily grazing. Every morning, the village cowherd ...