My Blah Mind

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I don’t know if its just me but my mind is always chattering. Ceaselessly. Even as I type this post, I can hear my mind chiding me for the spelling mistakes I made : “It is not ceaselessly it is ceaselessly. Go back and correct it” and so on and so forth. I don’t think I have ever experienced complete silence. Even if there is no noise around me my mind is talking. I close my ears sometimes just to see if it stops. But it only increases as if cutting even the remotest of outside noise is like adding fuel to fire.

We had a teacher in my ninth standard who tried to teach us unruly bunch of kids the art of meditation. Mrs. Vasundhara Reddy. God bless her wherever she is. She was one of the best teacher-guides I have ever had. Her method was to light a candle in the fore front of the room. We had to look at the flame for 2 minutes and then close our eyes and concentrate and see the flame in our mind’s eye for ten minutes. What happened in my mind was completely different.

“Why dint I wear a sweater and come today? Am so dumb. Hey! Concentrate on that flame”

Or

“I wonder if it will rain today. Concentrate on the flame dearie. Yeah see that flame flickering. Concentrate. Concentrate” and so on and on.

Finally I learned to focus my mind on saying “Flame, flame, flame” so that I don’t feel exhausted after a meditation session :)

Seeing me sitting on my bed and looking out of the window for hours sometimes drove my mom nuts. She used to wonder whether I was normal. But for my mind it was the perfect thing to do. Sit for hours and chatter away with all those folds and nerve endings and gooey stuff.

Even now its telling me what to type next! I don’t like following instructions so am going to end it here. GRRRR

My first quotable quote

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"You only have to start cribbing about or apprecitaing the weather in Bangalore and it changes!"

This is what I like about my dearest city :)

During lunch time me and a few colleagues were talking (crib crib crib) about how hot Bangalore had become these days. And how in the good old days there was always a rain or two lurking around the corner just to quench our thirst for coolness.
Voila two hours later I hear reports from T about rain lashing down in some parts of the city. I love nanna bengalooru :) yippie
....and the rain always brings out the best in me..somehow charges me with those extra positives that would've been slipping!

In which I saw a devotional movie

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It was a holiday with no prior plans. It started off quite harmlessly with me getting up only by 9 and then making myself so busy that the family couldn’t catch up with me to complain. The power of visual aggressiveness is huge…really *smiles*

By 10 T finally cornered me while I was pretending to be busy folding clothes and gave out a terrific idea. He wanted to make it a Parents’ day out. With us chaperoning them ofcourse *winks*. And so he went out on an errand to secure six movie tickets for the grand plan. He searched high (PVR Cinemas) and he searched low (Pallavi theater) and finally managed to find a guy in the latter who was willing to earn a few rupees more for doing a neat job of procuring tickets for us in absentia. Pallavi theater is one of the old world movie theaters where only one ticket is issued against one person.

We promptly reached the theater before the show began, collected our tickets and readied ourselves to watch the movie “Sri Ramadasu”. I readied myself to get bored. I have this thing about seeing movies which are about mythology or historical stories (kings and princes in skirts kinda movies) etc. My mind block tells me they are “uncool”. As I sat squirming in my seat for the first ten minutes refusing to accept that the movie was anything but boring T leaned over and whispered “Relax, just try and get to that mind set and watch, you will have fun”.

One thing that both of us observed was that mythological and devotional movies are best made in Telugu. It must partly be because of the lyrical quality of the language. Even a scolding sounds funny , for examples “gadadi” (donkey) or “donga na koduka” (thief) in Telugu sounds much better than say “nimmajji” (your grandmother) or “loafer nanna magane” (quite self explanatory) in Kannada. This is purely my opinion.

It’s basically the legend of Bhadrachalam -Lord Rama’s Temple in Andhra Pradesh. How it got built and who built it and why.

As the story evolved I got so involved in it that I did not notice the passage of time. At the end of the movie, I had the craving to go the Temple and experience the whole story again. Such is the power of a story well told or a movie well made.

This movie has become a box office golden goose across Andhra and Karnataka. I would recommend it to everyone. It not only brings forth a legendary tale but also unleashes in front of you the devotion and the madness of a people who no longer exist among us. When I can become a devotional movie watcher so can you!