My Rainy Days....

The more I am away from home, the more I miss it. The rainy days of KGP...It was green and beautiful all around. Of all the good things about rains in kgp, the best is having power at home while it is still drizzling lightly outside. The harmonically soothing sound of water droplets dripping from the rooftop, the infrequent sound of a vehicle breezing through the street, the driver of course trying to get fast to house and have a hot cup of chai while he was still wet and cold, some Rafi or Kishoreda from my Dad’s collection, and to top it all, garma-garam pakode with a hot cup of coffee...” Gar Bar-ru-e-Zamin Ast; Hamin Ast, Hamin Ast Hamin Ast”....

The cricket in rain(ya...we were that cricket crazy)...the cycle races in rain....the running in rain just for the fun of it (did just once...for lifetime)...when u get home drenched after all that was mentioned above...and when ur mother tries to dry ur head fast so that u don’t catch a cold...while cursing the rain “paadu varsham...enta kashtapadtunnado na babu”....instead of feeling guilty...all that was there was a sense of completeness in heart....the sense that this can happen only at home...the right place to be...

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost

The Man In The Arena

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-Theodore Roosevelt (April 23, 1910)

Invictus

One of my favorite poems

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley