2018, ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO TRAVEL IN THE JOURNEY CALL LIFE

I am not sure why everyone celebrate the beginning of a New Year. Is it because the previous year brought them great Joy that they want to have another year of greater Joy, or is it because that year was full of misery that they hope the New Year would bring them out of it, or is because celebrating the New Year has been a norm year after year that everyone just follows it like herd.

If it is about hope, then every waking day should be an impetus for a new beginning. One does not have to wait for one whole year to end before making resolutions for a new beginning. 

The Human rush seems to overwhelm life itself. Everyone is preoccupied with chasing something, to a point that many have forgotten how freshly cut grass smells, or even what colours that a Rajah Brooke butterfly have, and the list may go on. 

Life passes day by  day in a self centred cocoon, neither giving a chance for wrinkle to come due to mirth and laughter  nor having any empathy that something is actually wrong with the state of Denmark.

Sad it may seem but when that one day comes, when reflection is forced upon, alas it may be too late to realize that the path taken was a one way ticket and no backtracking is allowed, but the journey continues. Any changes has to come in the forthcoming travel, any changes has to be for the future and not about the past. Mind and body are wonderful things, both matures with different outcomes. Hence as one ages the equanimity between them goes of tangent, which makes change even more perilous.

Just thinking of the poem by Rabindranath Tagore,

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

This poem though was written in Bengali in 1910 (an English translation ensued in 1912) , it was one of the many that inspired the independence movement in India, nevertheless it still pulses meaningfully today. 

So what am I doing now, well its 12.16am, right after this I am going to make fruit jelly for New  Year, and then going to catch some sleep, before waking up in the morning to make  onion sambol (condiment) which accompanies kiribath (milk rice) which Greeja will be preparing. The fragrance of coconut milk, pandan leaves (screwpine) and rice, boiling on the cooker is something that reminds me of how wonderful life is. 

For now I am toasting to an old Irish proverb that goes like this, "What Whiskey Will Not Cure, There is No Cure," Cheers To Jameson and CHEERS To ALL.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE.

ravivarmmankanniappan
@123001012018 

caption courtesy:anonymous.