PON ONAM..

It’s onam again. Being in the college hostel for the past five years, Onam was all about giving our mundu nariyaddum to the laundry guy a month in advance, make reservations for lunch in restaurants, take a zillion snaps, getting them developed and putting them up in our respective hostel rooms ( either framed or with the walls of the room serving as the frame by messily sticking them there) under the caption ‘Me and the gang on Onam’ or something on similar lines. It was also about going to bed on Onam eve with hardly containable excitement, and thinking for the 100th time why God had not gifted you with longer hair just so that you will fit the image of the perfect Malayali girl!!

It was about going shopping in advance for D day to T Nagar (a prominent shopping area in Chennai) in groups, all the while on the lookout for matching bangles, bindis, and earrings. When ordinarily we would brush the mere thought of wearing something Indian on a daily basis as ‘inconvenient’ and ‘ uncool’, we girls were on the lookout for fresh jasmine flowers and chandanam to adorn our foreheads. A blessed handful of girls who knew how to tie a sari with minimal supervision and equally minimal safety pins were all of a sudden much in demand and on Onam morning it was a hilarious sight to see these girls, looking terribly harassed, hopping from one room to another. When normally we would not even spare a thought to anything other than our assignments, project work or the latest movie to hit the theatres, we suddenly find ourselves thinking about Indian mythology and explaining to our friends from other states about the story behind Onam and Mahabali. And most of all, it was about sashaying down the streets of Chennai, revelling in the numerous stares of people who were nice enough to stop and stare with open jaws reaching the ground and their tongues rolled out like a red carpet!!

That was five years back and a lot has changed since then; which does not mean that life has become lacklustre. For what it’s worth, I still have those photographs, whose white flipside once bore the faint yet elegantly written ‘Konica’ across it. But now it is replaced by big ugly patchworks of paint, which stands testimony to the fact that these pictures were once put up in a hostel elsewhere and marvelled at by a group of giggly girls. Now though that hostel seems to have disappeared, the room number 32s, 42s, 56s have gone, and the group of giggly girls have been replaced, these pictures, which are now buried deep under the layers of my attested certificates and resumes, are still taken out lovingly, but this time only to reflect the image of a lone face, blissfully lost in another world.. another time.

So everybody, A VERY HAPPY ONAM TO U ALL!! Lets pray for a world where violence is something of the past. ‘ Treat the earth well; it was not given to you by your parents;it was handed to you by your children. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.’