A bovine nostalgia

" Buffalo kills woman" A small write-up in an obscure corner of the local news section of our daily caught my attention.It was a shuddering piece of news print about how an impertinate buffalo ran amock in a crowded area killing a 60 year old woman in Hyderabad.
Suddenly I drifted back into memory lane thinking of my princely acquaintance with the bovine creatures.
I was around 12 or 13 years of age when we had just shifted from a crowded city place into the outskirts of the city in our newly constructed bungalow. Our colony boasted of having large pieces of plotted land with freshly laid tar roads. Large water pools could be found abundantly among the plots. This was freshly accumulated rain water with a deep red hue. There were 20 to 30 houses built in our colony with around 100 odd residents. Almost all of them were government servants. My father was working in the State Legislative assembly in a key position and was quite influential with the powers to be. He was the automatic choice of the colony residents as their President of the welfare society. I had many friends in the colony but always nurtured a special affinity with the non studious types. My very special ones were the cowherds and buffalo grazers since they allowed me to ride the huge animals and trained me in the art of producing gruntling noises used to communicate with the four legged variety.
I was always given the privilege of washing the buffalos in the colony pools after which I would plop myself on top of the wading animals and go for long rides till they reached the cattle shed.
On one such occasion which mostly fell on Sundays I was washing the animals with gay abandon in a pool right near the community hall where a General Body meeting was being conducted by the colony President or in other words my father.
I was in the water with only my underwear havingly neatly kept my clothes on a huge boulder.
I saw my father coming out of the community hall and with unbridled excitement started calling Appa ! Appa ! My father took no notice of me thinking me to be an urchin imitating his son, but the other members of the meeting took adequate trouble of convincing him of my true identity.
He slowly came towards me and shot a red angry look. He quizzed me about my clothes and I proudly displayed my common sense of having kept my clothes dry on the boulder. Without even a formal announcement ,he came and took my clothes away to home. My house was a good 1/4 kilometer from the pool. My royal journey back to home in my undies was on a buffalo and I was received fairly decent with just two tight slaps and three beltings.
Since then I always have a reverential attitude towards all cattle and understood as to why the cow is held so sacred in India.

Nagi

Of flights and frowns

The trip was to happen on 18th October to Cochin for some official work
As usual I hated to get up and catch the early morning flight to Cochin. On second thought, it was a not so early morning flight. It was at 8:30 a.m by Air Deccan. As expected and out of my innumerable nightmarish experiences I was sure about an inordinate delay in take-off. It was as though every flight was being announced for take-off but not mine. After literally running behind one of the gaudily dressed employee I got the standard reply that the delay was due to the late incoming flight from Mumbai. I consoled myself of the dire predicament and waited with suppressed anguish about my oncoming ordeal. I actually get premonitions the night earlier every time I am forced to fly Air Deccan. At last the flight took off at 12-30 p.m to Coimbatore. It was a hopping flight to Cochin via Coimbatore. The same gaudily dressed staff came around selling water & eateries. The vendors in the inter state trains do much better. Finally it landed at Coimbatore and I rushed to the loo to have a leak, imagine my plight when the attendant refused to let me into the toilet. I do not know why I was being ordered back to my seat, all my protests about the Captain taking a leak in the loo at the front were brushed aside. With my bladder on the verge of exploding I waited for an eternity for the damned flight to land at Cochin and jumped 3 steps at a time, albeit in extreme discomfort to rush into the Airport loo. The next 5 minutes for me were pure exhilarating bliss. I felt in heaven.

nagi

My first blogging experience

Hi !
Very interesting to hilarious. It was a year ago that I heard from an ex-colleague of mine of this funny sounding word called "blogging". It sounded like someone blurping after eating soap. Well he took an entire four hour session of explaining everything under the sun connected to blogging. He made it sound so horrendously complicated that I thought it was something connected to the tech savvy geeks and nonchalantly looked away !
Just about two days ago another colleague Kichu came to my office and asked me to open his blogsite. It was a mind-blogging er sorry mind-boggling experience for me !
I suddenly became the master of a mighty realm of myriad experiences, words and expressions.
Thank You Kichu !

Nagi