The Trip
Ooty, short for Udhagamandalam, is a good little town. I went there at the beginning of April with my parents. It is a serene place to relax in and let yourself get soaked up in beauty.
After resting up the entire day, we started with the Botanical Garden, it’s a lovely place to walk, there was a map of India carved out on grass, a cactus garden of the sorts and lots of plants. It was quite similar to Lal Bagh in Bangalore but more vast. On our way while coming back, we ate dragon fruit and my parents bought me a rubber duckie. I always wanted to have one for me for debugging.
Next day we hired a taxi to cover all the places, we went to Rose Garden, Ooty Lake, Chocolate factory, Tea factory and Wax museum. I saw this anime in second year of my college called Honey and Clover where one of the characters Yuuta Takemoto goes on a solo cycle trip to Hokkaido, I always wanted to pull something off like that, to understand what it all means, to go on that journey when life gets too much. I think maybe the car journey was too easy and the trek too less, so I didn’t feel much or was rather underwhelmed that this is highest place of Tamil Nadu – Doddabeta Peak. Maybe it was the commercialisation or maybe it would have been an entirely different journey if I had bicycled it till the top. Maybe for another time. Overall it was a good trip. On the third and final day, I decided to finally give Tamil a try and learnt the basics. The Tamil lasted only for a few days in my brain. I can do only one sentence now-
Tee la sakkara kammi poduinga. (Add less sugar to the tea)
This one stuck coz that’s how I demonstrated to my Tamil speaking friends that I did learn Tamil : )
The Books
I had finished the last two hours of Unfinished by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, she talks about getting married to Nick and their family coming to India and getting married twice as per both customs, it was heart swooning and emotional.
The next I had picked up was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl, the author shares his experience of the life in concentration camps. How humans develop can bear so many hardships, the attitude people had. How people would run towards the barbed wire, how it could be seen on the faces of those who had given up. The author quotes Nietzsche on multiple accounts – “He who has a why to live can bear any how“. He also talks about the emptiness and hollowness we feel, of how that’s a common theme among people committing suicides. There is a mention about his patients and logotherapy – a therapeutic personally catered approach to find meaning in hardships.
Next up is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, I am so glad to have found her and listen to her work. I can’t really articulate my thoughts or feel I will do any justice to her. There is only one way to do it – One must read her work. The opening premise is – she is trying to write a paper on Women and Fiction. She tries to look for books written by women. Accounts of women, of how they lived their life, what they did on a day to day basis. There is not much in 17th, 18th and until much later of 19th century. One can read men’s accounts of their lives, where women pass and go or are in the background as shadows. She talks about Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Shakespeare and her fictitious sister. The book is like a train, say Woolf’s Thought Express and we, as passengers, are riding it. It is leading to “somewhere important” and we make stops at these multiple stations – “women in history”, her trip to the British museum to research more about them – how everyone either treats them as the inferior sex or superiorises them to god like, but never as equals. Her analysis of maybe it’s not the inferiority rather the superiority they wanna maintain. And how when the contemporary writers of Woolf’s era are writing, theirs is not pure work of art because it is influenced by the hostilities and anguish suffered by these women, that they go into these personal ramblings. How other women authors, who were more ingenious, could have easily surpassed Jane Austen, but couldn’t as they collided their own hardships with the character. And why women never wrote poetry and mostly prose, because prose doesn’t require that long concentration hours. Prose can be easily written with the disturbances of the household, which were often the case. And her agreement to the Pope’s remark that No woman could write as good as Shakespeare, that is true for another 100 years until women have money for themselves for the basic necessities and a room of their own.
And last week, I ordered and read tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom and gifted it to a good friend.
It talks about all life-like things, it sums it up all, it’s from a perspective of a person whose bodily functions are being demolished one at a time and the end is near. An old student reconnects with the professor and asks him about life. The regrets, the love, the envy. I think there is a slow gentle lesson each Tuesday. I feel I read the book a little too fast to absorb and apply everything it says. I think it’s like an instruction manual, the one Larry gets at the Night at the Museum. The book was so good I had to gift it, I think I will order a copy for myself.
Thanks for reading 🙂
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