From my kitchen window

I sometimes look out of my kitchen window and see a wide variety of scenes. Most of them from the lives of the people living in the tenements behind my apartment complex.
Watching the simple lives being played out is inexplicably soothing.

I'm on the second floor which you can figure out no doubt, from the angle of the picture taken. Right behind the tenements and behind the stone wall you can see one of the properties of an industrialist. I am thankful for the greenery on his vast property and less than thankful for the loud blare of party music they sometimes play late into the night. Also it serves as a constant reminder of the mix of riches and poverty in India which exists side by side.

The crux of this post though is not economic disparity but that I saw a little girl imparting to a few little ones their first lessons in literacy. A medium sized tree sheltered them from the sun. She helped them write the alphabet on their slates, playing teacher to the little ones who followed her commands in innocent dedication. A dozen or more little people are happily growing up there in extremely simple conditions and yet living their childhoods to the fullest, their joys unmarred by anything mundane.

Fragile

Fragile- this was the title of a painting on the back cover of the Readers Digest that I sketched a likeness of, one day long long ago. I was doing my Masters degree in English literature at the time, in the green and rainy belt of Karnataka, Malnad.

Stuck at home with blocked sinuses for company I dug up an old file and unearthed the sketch. It brought along with it a predictable whoosh of nostalgia, for the times when I was much more free of heart and mind, unburdened by Samsara, so to say. Besides that slight envy of my own free student self I also felt I had to write a related post and this after almost one month of writing my last post. It just had to be.

Fragile, the word itself conjures up everything soft, tender, breakable- worth protecting and cherishing.

Our lives, our world and its ecology, our children and their all absorbent psych
e, our relationships, our egos- all so fragile, all  in need of our utmost love, care and compassion.