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It’s Sunday evening again, a weekend is over, a week is over, nay, a year is almost over. Dinner is done, dishes are put away, Knopfler is singing “It’s Just a Place Where We Used to Live”, Hobbes is snoozing on my lap, his tail swishing about contentedly, his retractable claws unretracting themselves every now and then when he feels the world is better than usual. The days are shorter, the nights longer, though the Christmas lights on the shops and houses lend a warmth to an otherwise wholly chilly time. I can never wholly ignore my thoughts on how the homeless and the lonely feel at this time of the year. However studies seem to indicate that suicides tend to be lower in December and especially in the days leading up to Christmas and so it may not be as overwhelming as I imagine it to be.

I’ll be turning 40 soon and I spend a lot of time pondering what I’d like the rest of my life to be like. While my generation was rocking to Pink Floyd’s paean to schooling: “Hey Teacher, Leave The Kids Alone”, one song from their ground-breaking Dark Side of the Moon was what preoccupied me. Growing up in small provincial towns, I always felt the song “Time” spoke directly to me:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

As the years advanced, I have felt more keenly the passage of time and what I was doing with my life. I’ve been working for 16 years now and often wonder if this has made any difference to anybody. Sure, it has helped me build up to a comfortable lifestyle and support my parents when they feel the need, but what else ? Was it love of programming that led me here or was it ambition and greed packaged as love of coding ? As Van Morrison writes in “I’m a Tired Joey Boy”:

And ambition will take you and ride you too far
And conservatism will bring you to boredom once more
Sit down by the river and watch the stream flow
Recall all the dreams that you once used to know
The things you’ve forgotten that took you away
To pastures not greener but meaner

Now I’ve begun to feel the second part of “Time”:

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but youre older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought Id something more to say

Music has been a joy bequeathed to me by my father. It has been an escape, a way to say what words never could and a way to appreciate the beauty of stringing together seven basic notes in such exquisite ways that the heart almost stops. One such artiste that I recently discovered is Astor Piazzola, widely regarded as the most brilliant tango composer of the later part of the 20th century. He’s made a brilliant album called “Tango Zero Hour” in the liner notes of which he writes: “This is the record I can give to my grandchildren and say ‘This is what we did with our lives’”.

I’ve begun to think about what I want to do with my life so that when the time comes, I can look back and say with pride: “This is what I did with my life”. Somehow just continuing my current existence doesn’t cut it for me anymore.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day. Of all the holidays I’ve ever come across, this remains my favorite. Expressing gratitude for the gift of life is such an important act that almost every culture has a day dedicated to it. In ancient times, when a bountiful harvest meant life, the end of harvest season marks such a day. In the modern world, for the urban masses at least, it is easy to forget to be thankful. As Abraham Lincoln, who proclaimed the modern day version of Thanksgiving said: “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come…”

It was Franklin D Roosevelt who set the next-to-last Thursday of November to be the Thanksgiving Day to increase the number of days before Christmas to sell goods. Today in the US, it marks the start of a shopping spree that culminates on Christmas Eve. Shops open as early as 5 am on the day after Thanksgiving with special deals that are available only for the first few hours.

We’ve celebrated Thanksgiving with either our friends at Magic or with Brad and Tanya. This year, our first after our return from India, we celebrated it with Brad and Tanya. It was with them also that we celebrated our last Thanksgiving before our sojourn in India in 2004. Eva, their second born, was just a baby then.

Today, she is over three years old.

One reason to say thanks this year is for the presence of such a joyful child in our lives. Here she is with her equally delightful brother, Noah.

This is our anniversary week. Happy Anniversary beloved. You were my adolescent fantasy and are my adult reality.

Erich Fromm wrote in the Art of Loving: “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one ‘object’ of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”

My years with you have been the development and evolution of this attitude. Dance me to the end of love.

Joan Didion writes in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time… Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.” Maybe that is why, though we’ve revelled in each other’s company for more than half of our lives, I still feel like a high school kid out on his first date when we’re together.

We’ve had good times, bad times and “in between” times. I still cannot listen to Leonard Cohen say “Dance me to the children who are asking to be born” without feeling grief at our dreams that may never come to pass. But then we’ve had so much happiness together, I’d be a fool to be not grateful and feel blessed.

So, wishing us love and happiness, happy anniversary again.

The gilding of the Indian summer mellowed the pastures far and wide. The russet woods stood ripe to be stript, but were yet full of leaf. The purple of heath-bloom, faded but not withered, tinged the hills. The beck wandered down to the Hollow, through a silent district; no wind followed its course, or haunted its woody borders. Fieldhead gardens bore the seal of gentle decay. On the walks, swept that morning, yellow leaves had fluttered down again. Its time of flowers, and even of fruits, was over; but a scantling of apples enriched the trees; only a blossom here and there expanded pale and delicate amidst a knot of faded leaves. – Charlotte Bronte

Indian Summer is a period of mild, unusually warm (for the season) weather in autumn. Autumn, the time when I miss India the keenest and Indian Summer, when the warm weather brings back even keener memories of home. I left India for the west always during fall, usually September or October. My memories of home, still raw, would be waiting for me after I returned from the day’s explorations of the new country. Memories of my Mom’s cooking, of returning home late at night after an exhausting day’s work, but alive, of evenings with friends, of weekend movies and most of all, of Shanthala. I came across the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, a late 19th century German poet on autumn that captured my sense of desolation during those times, especially in Paris. Here is an extract from the poem “Autumn Day” (from http://www.poemhunter.com):

Who now has no house, will not build one (anymore).
Who now is alone, will remain so for long,
will wake, and read, and write long letters
and back and forth on the boulevards
will restlessly wander, while the leaves blow.

After a few days of unusually cold weather – I believe a few records were equaled or broken – and the beginning of rain, we had beautiful weather over the weekend. I returned from my trip to Pittsburgh, sleep deprived by the schedule of the conference and the time lag between the East and West coasts. Pittsburgh was mild the night we landed, but became overcast and alternately thundered and drizzled over the rest of our stay there until the evening we were leaving. The foliage had begun to change colors, displaying the brilliant hues and shades that turns ordinary mortals into leaf-peepers. But the wet weather and overcast skies (and my own inability) prevented me from getting very good pictures. Here are two soggy examples of what might have been.


Saturday and Sunday were spent relaxing at home and running errands. We had a fabulous lunch at Pizza Antica in Santana Row. The pizza with potatoes, rosemary and truffle oil was worth dying for. As we wandered down the street, a combination of paint and door captured the shirts that Shanthala and Ashish were wearing. I thought that I had a Kodachrome moment, but it was hard with these two blithe, flighty spirits.

We ended the evening watching Christopher Nolan’s “Following”. For those of you that have not yet heard of Nolan, you’re missing something big. I can’t recall a director in recent times that has so captured my imagination. There is sophisticated story telling that includes brilliant non-linear story lines and fascinating, on-the-border characters. I first ran into Nolan with that mind-blowing movie from a few years back, “Memento”. Following, shot in black and white, follows the adventures of an unemployed young man who follows random people to kill time. Things take a turn for the worse when the following becomes less random and he follows the same people day after day. It’s like nothing you have seen. Watch it.

As Shanthala and I had a brisk walk along Sylvan Park, my mind was preparing for the coming week. A year has gone by since we began our return from India. Watching a jet streak in the sky, I thought that was how time has been for the last few months. Streaking by.

Finally, the week belonged to Eva who reminded me, that she had turned, three. May life always catch you smiling, little one.

Finally ! I uploaded a lot of the pictures and using the templates from OSWD, created a website after having purchased web hosting services from Startlogic. The site is hobbesdutt.com. Captioning and cataloging the pictures still remains as does making the webpage a bit more spiffier. But for now this should suffice.