Wish I could fly

I am so glad Mumbai decided to observe 'No Honking Day' two days ago on World Health Day. People usually associate pollution with air pollution or water pollution, bcoz they fall sick due to that. What most dont realise is noise pollution and how honking contributes so much to it. Honking on empty roads: In Baroda, I've found honking, even when the whole road is empty. They keep honking - God knows for what reason. Sometimes, I've felt these must be ppl from the neighbouring villages, but its just a guess. Honking at traffic signals: In Bangalore, ppl start honking at traffic signals, even before the light turns green. I often wonder why. What are the vehicles in front supposed to do? Rush the signal and risk getting rammed, so that our friend who is honking his way to glory, can save 1 or 2 minutes of his time. Honking in the midst of heavy traffic: And there there is also the category of people, who honk, when they are caught up in heavy traffic - like on Airport road...

Its surprising how sometimes friends turn out to be your best support system. And when they do so, it just reinforces something positive within us and makes us feel that 'Life is beautiful'. Suddenly you get a fresh perspective to look at the same problem and you feel differently about it. The intensity of the problem seems to decrease, our anger subsides and we start thinking rationally, about how best to resolve it. Close friends even pitch in with suggestions on what could be the possible solutions. I've got a lot of stick from family, right from school days, bcoz I used to spend a lot of time with my friends - playing, roaming around, etc - even studying, sometimes :-) And thank god I had these friends - I've got out of some very impossible situations, simply bcoz they were all there for me. And I believe that I have also been there for some of my friends, in their hour of need. This blog is just to say a big thank you to all my friends, for being the friends they a...

Sometimes it happens that we get to know someone and form a mental picture of them, based on the first few interactions - something like 'first impressions being last impressions'. And if the picture we have built up is not up our alley (some call it 'my kinda person'), we tend to drift apart. But I just realised lately that the picture that we carry in our minds for years on end might not reflect the person that the person is now. People can change ! And how !!! I just rediscovered a friend all over again. And I am so glad I did. I am revisiting a lot of my friends, dusting up the phone book for old friends who I have lost touch with. Like I recently got the number of a friend when I met his uncle and called him up after 15 years. He was so moved that I took the effort to trace him after so many years, that by the end of the call (which lasted more than half an hour), he was close to tears. And yes, in this case also, I had discoverd that he too had changed a lot. He...