Spread the Light, Spread the Warmth....

Diwali has just gone by, the New Year has started. 

I pray that the afterglow of the brightness of Diwali, the warmth of the festive season remains with us for the rest of the year, guiding us to be good human beings.

May be the positivity of this festive Diwali season spread its light, spread its warmth, all year round, till the next festival season!

"Roll With The Punches! Tomorrow Is Another Day!"

After a long sleepless night, which is rather unusual for me as I do sleep like a log, I mustered the courage to sneak out of bed and literally smell the coffee.

Here I am sitting in front of my computer. The windows are open - a cool breeze is blowing in. The sounds of the night, those of crickets and other insects are as melodious as can be. And I stumbled upon a webpage, on one of my favourite movies of all times, on IMDB - Jerry Maguire.

The protagonist, Jerry Maguire, played by Tom Cruise, is a successful sports agent. During one sleepless night, Jerry gets an epiphany, a serious crisis of conscience. That makes him pen down a mission statement, which implores his firm to think long term - think of the ultimate interest of the clients rather than milking clients today! 

What follows isn't any surprise - Jerry is fired! And he walks away with Flipper, a goldfish and Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger), an accountant, who also happens to be Jerry's secret admirer and at that moment is deeply moved by Jerry's "memo".

What follows is a struggle that Jerry has in getting his first client, as a solo agent - that client happens to be  Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding Jr.), a football player whose pride and arrogance hindered his path to success. Tidwell's character is a stereotypical Hollywood depiction of an Afro-Americans, but his and Jerry's frequent encounters on "showing him the money" pepper the film with appropriately spaced comic sequences.

Jerry has a hard time convincing Rod to play from his heart, and not to play for the money. Jerry believes that greatness (and money) would follow from playing with the heart. (There's message for us here!)

Rod does achieve his moment from glory after doing just what Jerry had always said - play from the heart! And he does see the money.
Paul McCartney's instrumental piece, Momma Miss America, somehow defines the sense of purpose that Jerry Maguire chases through the movie.

But without doubt, the most enjoyable comic sequences in the films are between Ray, Dorothy's  precocious six-year old kid, played by Jonathan Lipnicki. Ray is an quintessential epitome of cuteness with his spiked blonde hair and round spectacles. (Neeti thinks that as a kid I would have been a lot like Ray!!!!)
Some of Ray's quips are particularly heartwarming and endearing, like the ones here from YouTube.

And then there are those memorable gems by Dicky Fox:

Look I don't have all the answers. To be honest, in life, I failed as often as I succeeded. But I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success. 

Roll with the punches. Tomorrow is another day.

Jerry Maguire is a good mix of entertainment and inspiration and certainly a must-watch for all those who are pursuing corporate careers. I must confess, I have seen this movie at least 20 times over, thoroughly enjoying it end to end. Each time I feel somewhere, somehow, parts of the movie resonate with my life. And I always end up inspired.

Smell The Coffee!

Even though I have largely been a tea-drinker for the last 15-odd years, I do occasionally enjoy a cup of very strong coffee with a hint of cream and just about a pinch of demerara sugar.

Coffee for me has this amazing ability to "wake me up", to heighten my sensory faculties, to leave behind that amazing bitter after-taste in my mouth that keeps me "high" for a few hours. And the aroma of coffee is  nothing but simply magical.

Coorg was the place where I discovered the best coffee. I cannot forget that day in January 2011, sitting in the veranda of that 100-year old colonial plantation bungalow and sipping on an amazingly aromatic thick black coffee liquor. It was a lazy day, bright and sunny with a rather cool breeze blowing. All around were sounds of silence, green plantations and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee wafting in the air.

That was sheer bliss for me!

More recently, Bru introduced premium world coffees in the market, Bru Exotica - coffees from the Killimanjaro, Brazil and Colombia. I could not resist picking up a bottle of Killimanjaro coffee despite its steep price of Rs. 300 a bottle, simply because this coffee supposedly came very close from my motherland, Uganda.

Talking of Ugandan coffee, which has been very prized for long, during Idi Amin's reign of terror, the economy had collapsed and the Shilling crashed alongwith the onset of spiraling inflation. In those trying times, coffee was the unofficial currency for Ugandans in the countryside. The resilient Ugandans used to risk their lives carrying coffee in their canoes all across Lake Victoria to Tanzania or Kenya for some money that was worth more than wads of Ugandan Shillings. (My Dad has lucidly described the resilience of Ugandans in his blogs). That's how they survived. Today, however, Uganda has regained its prestige in the world of coffee, but climate change does threaten it.

One coffee that I would really love to try is the one from ancient land of Ethiopia. The Ethiopian civilization is quite old. It predates Christ and goes way back to age of Solomon the Great, who supposedly was madly in love with an Ethiopian queen, the Queen of Sheba. (Indeed, Ethiopian women are really pretty - ask me, I recently saw the flight crew of Ethiopian Airlines in Mumbai - they were all lissome and sharp featured!)

Legend has it that Ethiopia has been the cradle of coffee. A sheep herder once saw his flock chewing on some berries and getting high. Those berries, with time, came to be known as coffee berries!

In 1981, our family did pass by Addis Ababa for a few days. I was 5 then - too young to have coffee. But today, I am a big boy(!) and I would love to go back to Ethiopia, smell and drink Ethiopian coffee and also visit the great heritage of this ancient civilisation - rock carved churches at Lalibela, monasteries at Axum that are believed to house the legendary Ark of the Covenant and tablets of the Ten Commandments, the Blue Nile monasteries of Bahir Dar, castles of Gondar and the grand Rift Valley! Ethiopia also has a rich culinary heritage - injera (much like our Indian dosa), fit-fit, wat and many other delights!

It isn't hard to understand why they say "Smell the Coffee". But for me, smelling the coffee right in the morning is a big NO. I would rather wake up saying to myself something I adapted from a dialogue from one of favourite films, Jerry Macguire - "I have rolled with the punches, but today is another day!"

That does keep me going, till about afternoon, when I sometimes indulge in literally smelling the coffee!

Deja Vu in Orissa

Earlier this week, I was in Orissa for a couple of days. After landing in Bhubaneshwar, we traveled northwards towards the coast at Paradeep, back to Bhubaneshwar and then to Angul and Dhenkanal and then back to base.

Orissa has a reputation for being a very warm and humid region, the weather this time around was amazing. Despite the golden warmth of the Sun, the temperature barely touched 30 degrees Celsius. In fact, we were happier putting off the air conditioning in the car.

The route to Paradeep is very beautiful. Green paddy fields on either side of the road made the drive an intensely pleasurable experience, a treat for weary urban eyes gone sore by the sight of concrete all around.

Paradeep is lovely port town. Life in the town centers mainly around the port and a few mineral processing industries. The town itself is well managed by the port trust - wide neat roads and a lot of greenery. A self-contained town, Paradeep has all facilities, including schools, hospitals, markets, hotels and yes, a golf course!

We stopped by at a local hotel to grab some food before our return back - Empires Hotel, which belongs to a local Oriyan business group. The hotel caters to the shipping crew who stop by at Paradeep, and that shows in the tariffs. The hotel itself is very well located, has an inviting decor and is quite compact. The lunch buffet had an amazing variety of Oriyan delicacies. There were a number of local Oriyan delicacies on offer. There were a few vegetable preparations - greens etc., which were delectable. I attacked the Oriya style baingan bhartha, which was more like babaghanoush, aloo bhartha (spicy mashed potatoes) and tomato bhartha (to me that was a lot like Mexican salsa).

And then my Oriya friend pushed me to take bowls full of crab curry, mutton curry and fish curry. The crab was the best - extremely spicy with a generous helping of garlic. The crab was so fresh and succulent - the only hitch was the mess I was afraid of creating, cracking open the shells! Dessert followed - all typical Oriya delights!

On the way back, my friend (and colleague) got me a box of local pedas from Cuttack. Mildly sweet and fragrant, the pedas were too soft to dig into, alongwith a warm cup of Assam tea.

The next day, early in the morning, we set out for Angul in the interior of Orissa, passing through Dhenkanal. Unlike the route to Paradeep, this area is not cultivated. Instead, there are quite dense forests on the way, alongwith rolling hills, grasslands - a varied landscape. And the bright blue sky above, with a few clouds floating around in gay abandon. This reminded me of Zambia! It was almost like deja vu, as though I was back in Zambia!

Adding to the sense of deja vu, I came across a number of anthills and mud huts with thatched roofs! This was it! And as I was seeing all this, Miriam Makeba's song "Africa is Where My Heart Lies..." was ringing in my head!

There's A Price To Be Paid...

It is over 9 PM right now. I am on my way back from office. I have been stuck in traffic for over one and a half hours now. Luckily for me, the agony of my commute back home has been partly ameliorated by some cool hits being belted out on 94.3 Radio One, truly "soundtracking" my way back home!

But as I sit on the wheel, my foot on the accelerator ready to zoom the moment the car ahead of me moves even an inch, I wonder what causes all this.

Eureka!

Didn't I learn about an interesting concept in physics, way back in school, called Brownian Motion? I bet - if you were you were to fly high above this crazy megapolis, the sight of the roads would be something like this - the big vehicles stuck and the smaller ones like autorickshaws, bikes and small cars moving around, haphazardly crisscrossing lanes much like Brownian Motion!

But just then, I thought a little more. I thought a bit harder.

Aren't roads also like cholesterol clogged arteries? 

Now think of this - a truck breaks down on the Western Express Highway. This truck has no business to enter the city during peak hours. Somehow the trucker greases palms and enters in. Given the poor state of maintenance of truck fleets, they are susceptible to breakdowns, especially on the kinds of roads you have in the megapolis of Mumbai! So, invariably, during the peak traffic hours there would be some idiot trucker, whose vehicle would have broken down in the middle lane.

That's a lot like a clot of cholesterol in the artery!

Now when you have vehicles moving around in fashion similar to Brownian Motion and a "clot right in the middle of an artery", you are bound to spend over 2 hours to traverse 13 kilometers!

Now comes the best part - the traffic cops who are rather "proactive" in non-peak hours simply vanish when you have this disastrous cocktail! They should be out there booking drivers for violating traffic norms during peak hours. So much for the efficiency of this city!

I cringe at the thought of an ambulance carrying a patient stuck in this kind of a helpless situation.

My folks who are just back from Beijing are raving about the orderliness they have experienced on Chinese roads - both urban and rural. If you ask me why we don't have that kind of order here in India - perhaps, there is a heavy price to be paid for a democracy of consensual indiscipline, which cannot hold anyone accountable for any damn thing!