PEREGRINATIONS

I take my car out A couple of late walkers  striding with determination to nowhere The ubiquitous phone in one hand blaring a monotone the path to spiritual salvation A stick in the other, that gives an air of purpose Is useful for hitting out at the strays that inhabit the same roads they walk on   I turn into the main street, and merge with the traffic The road is two lanes but cars decree four, the cars, the scooters, the bikes, the buses The footpath is decorated  Stacks of pottery for sale,  a barber, a sprinkling of urine  The car and the bus honk in unison at those who inhabit  the world outside their windows the school-kids trying to cross the road the men and women rushing to work   I arrive at the intersection The garbage dump is strategically placed As if an exhibit  of the innards of our life Sifting and sorting reclaiming to life, the condemned to rot the ragpicker is elbow-deep He shoves at the cow that inhabits the same space  ...

The woman sat in the stuffed chair The stuffed chair sat in the cold corner of the room A prime spot when the day is young and the sun is pouring from the east But as the day ages, the shadows lengthen, the air cools It still sits there, in that cold corner The dog positioned himself on the floor  In that patch of sunlight  That gained entry through the open door And with every stretch and shake of his body He moved a few centimetres, with the sun The story began without much ado Setting the pace to slow and predictable The woman read aloud and the dog listened with eyes shut Perhaps to better picture the scene set by the author The story took a turn The dog sat up The tale heated up, the plot thickened The dog gravitated towards the heat Alert and captivated he sat with his eyes glued to the woman’s moving lips That is when tragedy struck and all was lost The book came down slowly The dog found his head resting on her thighs Her hands tired from holding the book up Too rested...

India Gate lit up in Red to spread awareness for Dyslexia in October Yet another October has gone by. Until a few years ago, October was for me the month when winter knocks at your door, early mornings have that pleasant chill and air pollution starts to hurt. But now, as the mother of a neurodiverse child, October is the month of walks and talks and posters and pamphlets to spread awareness of dyslexia. Dyslexia is a very specific learning disability that makes reading and understanding written words difficult. It is easier to spot it in children before they learn to mask and hide the problem. Dyslexic children struggle to connect letters to sounds, they have trouble spotting rhyming words, and they flip words around. Some of them cannot easily comprehend what they are reading, they have a poor vocabulary, and they jumble the beginning, end and middle during storytelling. Dyslexic kids may freeze with multiple instructions or actions with multiple steps because it is tough to keep tra...

Let’s talk about love. Nothing new. It’s all around, in the air. In a scientific institute, which is as near a bio-bubble in everyday life as can be, we all see the tentative overtures of love, the distracted state of early love, love in full bloom and then sometimes the broken hearts mourning their loss, all through the lens of the frustrated guide or joyful friends or annoyed lab mates, depending on where we may be placed at that particular phase of life. So, one wonders why love stories are not written about love amidst the test tubes. I was pleasantly surprised to recently discover two separate books on this topic. Both set in biology labs, both poles apart from each other in their treatment of the topic. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. Hazelwood is a cognitive neuroscientist (with all my googling I was unable to figure out where her lab is!) who, near the end of her PhD, got frustrated and decided to write romance novels in a science setting. Love Hypothesis, her first bo...

April is Autism Awareness Month Priyam was the life of the party at the day care centre. A bright-eyed boy who captured the heart of the caretakers and played with abandon. Sometime after his second birthday, all this started changing. He stopped playing with his toys, he seemed more interested in organizing them now. He stopped talking, not even responding even when called by name. He stopped smiling at people and making eye contact. Then the rhythmic movements started; rocking his body, banging his head or repeatedly tapping on the table. One day he banged his head so much that when his father came hurriedly summoned by the caretaker, there was a trickle of blood running down his face. That was his last day at the centre; they refused to keep him after that.  Nancy was different. Growing up in a family with siblings and grandparents, she was used to people. But outsiders were studiously ignored. She heard all the questions and comments, but never acknowledged them. Loud noises, r...

I still remember walking down the as-usual deserted Inman Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts and suddenly pulling up short and looking around as the smell of my mother’s sambhar surrounds me! At that moment I would have given anything to get a taste of that sambhar! But I knew there were no Indian households in the area. I knew none of the sealed double-glazed windows in the vicinity could be the source of the smell. I was, in fact, having an olfactory hallucination. Oliver Sacks, one of the most prolific neurologist-writers who through his writings let us look inside human brains through the eyes of his patients, said, while talking about his book Hallucinations, ‘We see with our eyes, but we see with our brains as well. Seeing with the brain is called imagination’. When I sit and stare into space daydreaming, I call that imagination. Michelangelo hanging upside down under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and visualising the hand of god reaching out to man; I call that imagination....