There are moments in a day when some present activity reminds you of a minutely related similar event from your past, particularly from your childhood. And the childhood we all have seen was quite more relaxed than the ones of our kids I feel, and hence was weirdly eventful. I remember me, my cousin, and my neighbour making fake paan of litchi leaves by keeping sugar in the leaves and eating them and would eat almost 4-5 leaves in a day. Anyway, the point is that very often there are few activities today that remind me of some extremely random event from the past.
Our campus of IIT Jodhpur is blessed with a diverse flora and fauna. Yet it is the deers that have a dominance. The Chinkara deers are spread like wildfire and make the most visible part of our wildlife here. The deers are beautiful, agile, very alert, and primarily always eating yet very slim. Talk about metabolism! Watching these deers is exciting initially but then they become a part of your everyday life. Yet everytime I watch these deers I get reminded of the Age of Empires game, my eldermost sister, Kavita aka Kamdi, introduced us with after she joined college. In the game the villagers hunt for food, and they would attack some deers, feeding on the grass. The deers would initially run and eventually succumb to the wounds.
Another absolutely random event that I so often get reminded of, particularly when my phone rings during a meeting, or when my son is asleep, and I within a cinch of a second make it silent, is a scene of the movie Ghajni! Yes the Aamir Khan starrer on the subject of amnesia. The scene that plays in my mind is when the group of people who wish to kill Asim’s character rush to her house of which she is aware, intelligently hides herself in a storeroom or a closet and grabs her phone too. No one is able to find her and just when they think of leaving from her house, her phone rings. And in this do or die situation her agility, alertness and IQ all go for a toss and she lets it ring for few moments and receives the call, only to not put her phone on silent instead in the first place. You are being searched to be killed girl, the basic rule should be that you do not get found, particularly from a phone call and being heard talking on it then! Eventually she is found hiding in the closet by the bad people and unfortunately meets her end. I now wish had she seen our deers, she could have learnt a lesson on quick reactions by the gurus of agility!
I should call this memory flashback, or recall or something else, but these are part of my everyday, as no day passes when I do not hurriedly put my phone on silent, nor does a day pass when I cannot see one of the 450 deers chilling in the hot summers of Jodhpur. Unfortunately I have no pictures of the deers so sharing some beautiful sights of our campus of IIT Jodhpur across seasons.
Aali Pant 