Refractive Thoughts

Walking is considered good for health and is a low-cost activity.   One has to wear comfortable clothes and step into a good pair of shoes.   A cap fits in right if the sun is shining bright.   For someone like me who walks on roads in Bangalore, even though in the quiet neighbourhood, a small hand-held baton helps to ward off any street dogs that typically move around in packs. A conscious effort to walk is the need of the hour given our modern-day sedentary lifestyle.   Hours and hours at the desk on the computer, or in front of the television set watching the favorite channels are the triggers for obesity, diabetes, heart conditions, and other lifestyle diseases.   An intervention in the form of conscious decision making with a high degree of commitment to staying physically active by an individual is the best way forward. Somnambulism – not a desired state of walking.   In continued impaired consciousness, an individual when woken up from sleep may ...

Dosa or Upma are both 4-letter popular dishes and there ends their similarities!   Innumerable theories can be put forth to gain one upmanship of one over the other.   Starting point for a Dosa is a thought!   Various ingredients in stated proportions that are soaked in water throughout the day offers quick beginning of ensuing process steps.   These ingredients when subjected to few runs in a mixer-grinder yield a batter of optimal consistency.   Soaked overnight, fermentation kicks in to cause raised levels.   The owner earns a good night’s sleep to dream a dish that caters to the entire family. Starting point for an Upma is action!   Rava is roasted in a pan and boiling water is added with continuous stirring to prevent knots.   Garnished with chillies and a few other seasonings – bingo, the steaming dish is ready in a jiffy.   Variations do exist with the starting ingredients to cater to a variety of taste buds.   An old proverb ...

Honk…honk!  This is my road, and your presence shouldn’t impede my movement.  I use banned horns because I like their shrill sound!  Maybe I love it that I can annoy you! Pyepaar….pyepaar!   We believe in recycling, and you can trust us…we pay cash for your newspaper and other old items of scrap value. Tarakari, hannu, hoova!   We are better than Swiggy’s and Zomato’s…we bring everything fresh to your doorstep.   Trust us…we’re there from time immemorial, before aggregators had a business model, before our own children developed those Apps for the big companies. Jhadoo….jhadoo!   We help to keep your house clean and rid them off cobwebs.   Remember, cleanliness is next to Godliness. Bow…bow…grrr…grrr!   We bark and we howl, and we move around with gay abandon.   Darkness motivates us to chase each other to play and to announce trespass of our own self-marked territory.   We howl but then we don’t know why this disturbs your ...

RACE – Rapid-access to ACe Education Abracadabra, the rarest of rare sights!   Education should have been spared but that was not to be.   Enter the rat race and one is bound to see unhealthy competition.   It appears an offshoot of the peer pressure that has transcended borders, families, gender, and what not! ‘Rat race’ is today the omnipresent truth.   Look at the loving parents shepherding their ‘generation-of-tomorrow’ young ones into coaching classes at unearthly hours.   This is for a ‘make-believe’ short-cut to success which catapults their wards into the career-path of choice – mind you mostly the parents’ choice!   One is left to wonder where this is leading us! Does the student choose the stream of choice, or blindly follow what is chosen by parents?   Student is at the crossroads when he reaches first the 10 th grade and then the 12 th grade and is misled by “Opportunity never knocks twice,” “Make hay while the sun shines.” The pr...

Bangalore – I hail from this city.   The city with nicknames such as ‘Pensioner’s Paradise,’ ‘IT Capital,’ ‘Garden City,’ ‘Pub city,’ and many more has lost its charm.   This is true of most Indian cities, unfortunately.   Do we thank globalization, commercialization, growing pains, our politicians apathy, whatever?   This is the new norm that we accept with our heads down.   This write-up is from a couple of years ago but holds good even today! A study then stated that Bangalore’s traffic-related accidents had reduced considerably.   The traffic department made a claim that it helped being pro-active and efficient.   A tricky proposition that raised doubts in my mind; my postulation goes thus… A report stated that Bangalore residents have better DQ – Digestion Quotient!   Report highlighted the city residents are gastronomically initiated to a variety of cuisine and digest them compared to people in other Indian cities.   Be it the weste...

  ‘No time to die.’   No not the title of the recent Bond movie. Time now for us to put up a united front.   Let’s discuss in a video conference to strategize our next move.   A Zoom meeting will help collaborate to decide our next course of action!   Participants with a dress code for Zoom praised each other for the variations in their appearance, nevertheless the same end result! “Remember we have travelled all over the world into some 150+ countries, and this is no time to accept defeat and lose our battle.” “Even WHO believes that if we come together, we can mate and mutate while there is every effort from authorities to mitigate the risks that we pose them.” “Listen Omicron, you’ve brought our might down…you are a weakling?!   Why did you lose your potency after you invaded the human body to make them sick? They are calling us a flu virus!” “Why do you have to be jealous about my potency?   I doubled much faster than you and I am the h...

  Innovation is the panacea for risk-taking individuals to tackle any challenges. The idiom “Down the Drain” is in usage for a long time and implies to waste something or the means to a futile end.   A water faucet gone kaput which has made it impossible to arrest its wastage or harvest its flow is a good rationale for usage of this adage. Scientists tread the path of research with gusto, though at times their research results in dead ends or delayed results.   Both these situations throw them out-of-balance and make them feel desolate, since they may have to start all-over.   Often their research produce detrimental results too for reasons beyond comprehension and they get branded in the society as anti-social.   Nevertheless, it’s their resilience to take adversity head-on which is an essential element of their success, sometimes a late-stage gain.   They endure and evaluate methods when faced with challenges to prove their hypothesis.   Innovati...

  Earlier this week, specifically on 11-January two years lapsed since I started my blog.   Doesn’t time fly at super-sonic speeds? 2 years – 46 posts – 10,000+ views and some invaluable comments from most of you.   A testament exists in the form of digital footprint of cherished comments that will last a lifetime.   Whose lifetime is a discussion for another day! Each of you have motivated me – your unannounced approval for me to forward the links to my new blogs, the time you took from your busy schedule to read that, and then the time you invested to leave behind a few comments on the blog or sometimes in other social media platforms like FB, WA, LI, that was indeed feedback in real-time. Some of the ones that I enjoyed writing and I received some cool comments include: https://prasharihar.blogspot.com/2020/01/creative-juices-11-jan-2020.html - I started with a great degree of trepidation but then creative juices flowed.  So glad that my procrastinatio...