Three Hindi films...

English Vinglish, Kahaani, and Queen have Sridevi, Vidya Balan, and Kangana Ranaut portray the invincible spirit of the Indian woman. She can take a lot - a great, great deal - but hit at her long and hard, and one day her spirit will shine through...and then............................there's no stopping her.

We've often heard of parents being likened to trees...

The thought here is, whether we are tall enough to provide shade and sustenance and succour to our children should they come to rest under our outspread branches...

Or

Are we stifling them by keeping, 'protecting', them in our shade...

How many times...

we ache for understanding....the real understanding of the emotions behind the words...the real understanding of who we really are behind the masks we too often must needs put on...

I came across this from Wendy MacNaughton

'There is no greater gift we can give each other than the gift of understanding, of looking and really seeing, of peering beyond the persona and into the person with an awareness that however different our struggles and circumstances may be, we are inextricably bonded by the great human longing to be truly seen for who we are.'

It is no secret...

that I totally love the girl child. The boys in school used to get very angry with me because according to them I always favored girls.....which was true. They were not happy that while I was fair to them, the extra mile was always for the girls.

I love it that girls today are strong and independent, without losing any of their femininity, and their never-say-die attitude and courage in the face of all adversity is truly amazing...My DD, for me, stands for all these and is the most special person for me.

I follow Malala as she tackles her new life without compromising on all that she believe in and stands for, in spite of all her suffering. In see her I see the courage and the indomitable, invincible and beautiful spirit of the girl child.

Here's another amazing girl: Mayam Mahmoud, an 18-year-old rapper from Egypt.

Mayam raps for women She has amassed a huge following for challenging how women in Egypt are meant to behave and for how they are traditionally treated. An undergraduate studying politics and social science, Mayam spends a lot of time talking with women who share their stories of daily discrimination with her. She then incorporates those experiences, with their permission, into her music.

Her lyrics highlight the importance of girls' education and denounce sexual harassment of women on the streets of Egypt. "Egyptian women undergo harassment and bullying on a daily basis," she says, stressing that "It was never about going on stage in a scarf. It was about going on stage and sharing a message."

Holly Golightly...

protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany's, has the most evocative way of differentiating between two kinds of feelings that sometimes threaten us...

1. The mean reds - 'Mean reds are horrible. You're afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don't know what you're afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don't know what it is.'

and

2. The blues - 'The blues are because you're getting fat or maybe it's been raining too long.'

We often use 'blues' but there are times when we all experience the 'mean reds'....

Next time, let's say it out loud.....I have a feeling we'll know exactly what to do to get over them....at the very least, saying we have the mean reds or the blues out loud, will help us come face to face with them and then they won't be so scary any more...

If you don't have a choice...

work your way around it.....

Only...


Make sure you keep YOU as the focus....you deserve a chance too...

Everyone, but everyone...

deserves a chance to be looked at again should the first occasion prove to be disastrous, or not be what we had in mind, or not go the way we envisaged, or not come up to our standards, or just be too different from our experience........A second chance definitely needs to be considered, and maybe even a third chance, before we draw conclusions that we can live with.

Wouldn't we like to be given chances too?

People who interest us, are leaders of the time, are our colleagues, are our employers...whoever... change all the time. We cannot and must not go only by our first impression (favorable or otherwise).

We all change all the time.

10 ways we can make life happier for ourselves...

If we are happy, we'll emanate happy energies...

1. Everything (even the worst possible thing) has one humorous thread hidden in it - find it and laugh

2. Don't underestimate daily rituals - doing them even when you don't feel like it, becomes a form of meditation and releases pent up stress. Pep up daily rituals with sharing - a potluck meal, maybe? or something that puts the spring in the step

3. Exercise, maybe gently - but do some physical activity - it releases happiness hormones

4. Make sure there is something beautiful in every room - something beautiful to which your eyes get drawn - they make a glow spread all the way from your tummy to your heart

5. Take up some hobby - some art or craft work - when you see yourself creating something, it will give you a good, 'wow-I-did-that!' feeling

6. Hug - that will make you feel warm raise you on your 'lovable' scale

7. Nap - Indulge yourself and enjoy God's balm for the mind and soul

8. Let it go - Lot of truth in the Beatles song 'Let it be'. Just let it go - whatever it is. And WAIT in silence

9. Keep a Journal and note down 5 happy things you are grateful for. When you search through the day, you'll find more than 5, actually

10. Besides your 'serious' reading, make sure you have something light and frothy too on your bedside or study table

Happiness is in hidden in every moment...find it...

Imagine an India...

without the irreverent, irrepressible, non-conformist, utterly genuine

Khushwant Singh

Impossible.....

Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, journalist, and New York Times op-ed columnist Anna Quindlen...

in her book A Short Guide to a Happy Life says:

'Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. That’s what I have to say. The second is only a part of the first. Don’t ever forget what a friend once wrote to Senator Paul Tsongas when the senator had decided not to run for reelection because he’d been diagnosed with cancer: “No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time at the office.” Don’t ever forget the words on a postcard that my father sent me last year: “If you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”'

She goes on to reinforce something we all know deep in our gut, but somehow forget to apply every moment of every day as we should, that we are the only persons who have sole custody of our lives...she spells out - 'Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.'

We are all prisoners of ourselves...

tied in one way or another by all kinds of unseen threads - some are genetic, some relational, some by habit, some picked up, some created by our minds, some forged by our circumstances....

Some of these are soft and silky, some harsh, some tough, and some gentle....

More and more I am realizing that the meaning of life is to find these threads, check them out and break free from them...

I came across this just now, and simply had to share...

Oprah Winfrey's words on failure.

There is no such thing as failure - failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.

And so, we need to 'approach it with the right mindset.'

I've made a change in one of my blogs...

I've changed Cal Kaleidoscope to Weft and Warp to broaden the canvas. I'd love to have you share your comments with me. You'll find it at the bottom of the page, so you can click and go there directly, or the URL is: http://newskaleidoscope.blogspot.in/

Check this out...

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140316/jsp/opinion/story_18084444.jsp#.UyWVSPmSwX8

It's a wonderful analysis on a recent release - 'Queen' - by Ruchir Joshi, an incisive columnist.

A meditation from...

Streams in the Desert...

'There is a yet harder and higher heroism—to live well in the quiet routine of life; to fill a little space because God wills it; to go on cheerfully with a petty round of little duties, little vocations; to accept unmurmuringly a low position; to smile for the joys of others when the heart is aching; to banish all ambition, all pride, and all restlessness. To do this for a lifetime is a greater effort, and he who does this for a lifetime is a greater hero than he who for one hour stems a breach.....'

In acceptance...

lies peace....lies power....

We read this so often in different concepts. And it is true. The problem is the 'acceptance' part. This is what is so difficult thing to attain....acceptance...

It is suggestive of having given up, or being defeated, of being put down...

and yet, there is nothing more powerful than acceptance of who we are, of where Life has placed us, of what has been destined for us, of all the things that happen to us (for I do believe that nothing happens to us that is not already in the blueprint that has been created for us)...

So if we know that we are where we were meant to be, and are doing what we were supposed to do and are living the Life that was written for us, then why is acceptance of it so difficult?

Sure, we have to try and better things for us, but if we can't, then failure would be to stay down, whereas acceptance would be to look again at where we are and see what we can do to better that place/situation.

It is the same with our relationships.....

It is the journey that matters...

is something we read every so often as we trek along on this journey of Life...

We mark out important days and dates on our calendar, either month-wise or week-wise, so there's something to look forward to or work towards. But, what of the DAY - the day which is made up of moments. Often I forget that these moments too are part of the journey. Now, I'm trying to be conscious of each moment - conscious of the coffee cup I have in my hand and then of every sip, conscious of every word that I am reading, conscious of the task I am doing - be it putting clothes in the washing machine, or cooking, or cleaning, whatever.... Sometimes I have to drag my mind back, as it's taken off somewhere else.....and I'm learning that it is only important to know that we are in that moment - we don't have to do anything earth-shattering or world-changing. How we are in that moment is changing our world.....and that is enough....

I believe this would help us to become alive to the potentials that are in us, the possibilities around us, the talents and various gifts we have, and to all our emotions.

Feeling very puzzled...

Two situations that have cropped up over the last couple of days have left me totally flummoxed:

1. A friend swore up and down the line that she was breaking off her relationship with close relatives. They had hurt her very badly and she did not want to have anything more to do with them. So you sympathize and hurt along with your friend, for you cannot tolerate anything hurtful happening to her. And then there's a volte-face and everything is hunky dory. All hurts forgotten and everything is back to as it was, and you are left having damned those people, who you don't even know, to hell...

Does this mean that we should take all we hear with a bag of salt. Sympathize with the lips but keep your heart away?

and

2. The father of two children you have taught has been accused of corruption charges. Other children whose fathers work in the same company have also been your students, and like all children, a relationship develops over the years. Children are children. The person concerned has always been cordial with you, on the few occasions you have met. You don't really know what happened, but you do know that corruption is a major State offense. One child asks you to write some lines on a website where support for this person is being expressed. What do you do?

As a teacher, I've always taught my kids that one should not do wrong things. And that if you do, the consequences are likely to be severe, and you have to face them. Here I find myself in a situation between children I love and a person who has never been anything but affable to me, but who is now in custody on a major charge. Everyone is suffering - kids, the person concerned, other employees and all those whose lives have been, in some way or the other, been touched by this person. What words to use, for which child will accept that her Dad has done something wrong? And, how to show support, based on your personal interaction, for a person who has been charged by the State?

Provoked by these words...

to think about our country...

Xinran, in The Good Women of China, a book she published in 2002, said this about China:

'When China started to open up, it was like a starving child devouring everything within reach indiscriminately. Afterwards, while the world saw a flushed, happy China in new clothes, no longer crying out with hunger, the journalistic community saw a body racked by the pain of indigestion. But it was a body whose brain they could not use, for China's brain had not yet grown the cells to absorb truth and freedom.'

India too has opened up, but it is only for the top 1%, if at all. For the middle classes, many goodies are still out of reach, and for the last rung, which is the majority, the pain of starvation is still their reality...

Though the politicians become louder and louder and use all the rhetoric at their command, the question my mind asks is whether India has 'grown the cells to absorb truth and freedom.'

I've just mentioned this phrase..

in Gleanings (another blog of mine)...

and want to share the thoughts that came into my mind.

From: The Good Women of China by Xinran

'.......the inertia of tradition made it hard for any one of us to fix on an independent course in life.'

We hear this word' tradition' so often. We use it to stress a point, or as a compass to live by as Tevye did in Fiddler on the Roof, or we hide behind it...it is a very convenient word, especially if we are afraid...afraid of questioning, afraid of new things, afraid of stepping into the unknown, afraid of being ostracized, afraid of our reputation...just afraid...

And thus we allow tradition to paralyze us, and make our minds sluggish as we passively accept whatever comes our way...the inertia of tradition....