Saturday, May 15, 2010

Summer memories

the summer is at it's peak (Hyderabad's sweating it out at 44.!), blistering it's path unheeded and a remarkable wry thought occured to me the other day while eating cut chilled mango (the ONLY pleasure of this dreaded heat) Summer was a time of leisure, of fooling around and of holidays...where has all of it gone? In ten years, a young generation has grown and how!! It holds true for most of us, the past decade is a completely new entity to us now, what we have grown up with is no longer existent and its new because you can rightly claim so only after much later in life... cricket is not played in the grounds but online and friends are not made in the neighborhood park but on social networking sites!!I yearn for that time when summer meant

- a proper vacation at grandma's place with cousins,endless and mindless movies, ice-cream, scrambles, chess, great food and minor tiffs.

- a pair of strong and comforting arms, I still rue the memory of

- a time when as children we ambled with no summer camps or restrictions and more importantly behaved like children. My cousins, a decade younger feel immensely grown up to me!!

- Reading the Enid Blytons and Agatha Christies over and over again and still feeling smugly satisfied each time

- listening to that one cassette of Lata Mangeshkar Live at Calcutta and a Kishore kumar album...no wonder that I still remember the lyrics of each of them!!

All of this and more seem so alien now, vacation is a weekend and fun means multiplex. The joy of a thing, I believe is less in the thing itself and more in the process of the entire experience. With that amiss, it's like chemically enhanced Alphonso, looks the same but leaves you strangely unsatisfied even after eating a bushel!!