crossing 'borders'....

my son can now cross the street across my house....an achievement not just for a child who is all of ten,but also for his mother who was full of anxiety till she could let her mind allow him to do 'it' all by himself.....

"how long will you hold on to him radhika?"...my husband says matter of factly....he understands...he is the 'father'...the more 'adventurous' of the two i guess...but for me it was like letting him out into this 'big bad world' all by himself for the first time...

once he accomplishes this ,there will be no looking back...i felt...

did i have the same feeling when he first drank milk through the bottle and was no longer dependent on me?

did i have the same feeling the day he stopped crying in school and no longer looked for my familiar face outside the class?

did i have the same feeling when he rode the bicycle without my help for the first time?

did i have the same feeling when he could read 'goodnight stories' all by himself before kissing me goodnight?

for me he has crossed borders when he has done each of these seemingly easy and routine growing up tasks...every parent has the same feeling...

soon he will cross borders known-unknown to me...some that he will inform me of...others that he will prefer not to inform...i will still be standing at the side of the footpath waiting to see him arrive at the other end 'safe'...

children across the world take up this crossing borders as a passion and i wonder how their mothers cope up with it...

swimming across the english channel,climbing mount everest,earning and learning in foreign lands,wandering through wilderness to get the perfect photograph...all this and much more...their mothers sleep soundly every night when their offsprings are going through these borders everyday....

and i salute the mothers who let their child stay put on political borders...waiting to cross the border of life eagerly, so that we all can sleep in tranquility...

when i think of this i feel happy and hopeful...my son has 'finally' crossed his first 'border'....

footprints...on lives

'I have not done anyone anything wrong in life...then why lord am i at the receiving end of your wrath'...have we not said that time and again in times of depression...when everything seems to be either in 'pause' mode or too 'turbulent'....but we realise, that unknowingly, we leave our footprints in peoples life...much more bolder prints than we have ever realised...we walk away assuming that with every new wave ,my footprints will wash away...after all it was only sand i walked on...with every new tide newer sand will replace the older...but...we have left footprints which are cemented and no tide washes it away...
i moved on....to a choice of life which i had made....without even looking back at the footprints which walked the sand along with me....these prints faded out at a point where i just flew away to my own paradise....a paradise which offered me so much in return that i forgot the feeling that i had left somebody waiting at the seashore looking at the horizon...somebody for whom my footprints were not mere footprints but they were the way of life....
smart person that i am...i know how to convert these wrong doings of mine into pure 'nostalgia'...i know how to romantisize the vaccum i created in someones life....but the inner of my inner self says...i have sinned....
i have made an irrepairable dent in someones picture,a stroke I made so badly that the entire picture went bad....i am so unjust.. that i call the same picture '...ART"....

IMPACT

I always thought I was one of the 'unaffected' specimens of the human kind ,who very rarely was affected by the shallow emotional 'atyachars' of the television box...very rarely could the idiot box manage to stir any kind of flutter in my mind-heart-brain..sad as i may feel but only serials like 'friends', some episodes of Oprah(only where the American ladies do not wail over stupid problems) and a few reality shows like 'top chef' and 'so you think you can dance',have created a small flutter in my emotional world...until more recently a very very Indian show touched me and shook me from within...balika vadhu...
I started watching the show as a passing activity in the beginning...something that is being viewed by some member of the very joint family types I live in...and even in those brief glimpses the actors of the show somehow managed to grip my attention.I was a show which was on prime time, a commercial, family drama and yet the actors were actually very natural and at ease in their delivery...no 'komolikas' and 'tulsis' in this one...the characters spoke the language, verbal and non verbal of the real India and an almost real life situation was made too come alive...
Anandi,jagdishiya,dadisa,suguna,sumitra,bhairo,bhagmati even the cute phuli are the characters which have come alive because of the lovely performances of all these actors...
Apart from this aspect I think the 'development communication' objective is most certainly fulfilled due to the spoon feeding of thoughts towards the end of the serial which even though might look clique's but are necessary for a large section of the society.This aspect is the one television programme makers are fast forgetting.
I hope the makers keep up the good work and do not let the commercials ruin the quality they have managed to maintain so far...