It has been a busy weekend, of much coming and going. I taught at Amma's school at Ettimadai, outside Coimbatore. I gave away awards and spoke at a global conference of the Nagarathar community. I attended the inaugural pitch of an angel group that is starting off in Coimbatore.
All of that between two consecutive nights that I spent on a train in all of thirty six hours. And I almost missed my train back to Bangalore as sleep overpowered me in the last twenty minutes of my four hour wait for the train at Coimbatore railway station.
Amma's campus is something else. Quite apart from its frugal functionality, where everything worked exactly as it was supposed to, the whole place looked like it was out of a children's picture story book, with trees and flowers and birds and even a railway track passing through the middle of a large expanse of verdant dream come true nestling in the foothills of the Western ghats.
I refer to it as Amma's campus because ownership is a more powerful metaphor than we may all realize. We often associate ownership with the mere rights and benefits that it confers. But ownership is just as much a matter of what you give to what you "own."
Amma's campus is a perfect example of the complete ideal of ownership. It is an outstanding example of how much Amma cares for the various activities or initiatives that she takes up. If it was not for her infinite love for the people who are part of her world, Amma would pass for a hard driving, slave driver of a boss.
It was thus a very different weekend in many ways. A weekend that left me with lots to reflect on, to write about. It felt like what people must mean when they talk about living life to its fullest.
Yet my mind feels very barren. My pen seems to have run dry.
All that I can seem to recall is the dull pain that I felt as the rain poured heavily on the green lawns of Amma's campus, reminding me of Anita Nair's piece Where the Rain Begins, as the peacocks heralded the rains with their raucous, loud calls that cut through the heavy stillness of the hills, reminding me of the vivid and painful imagery in Kalidasa's Mayurasandesam, vast bits of which I learned in school as part of my Sanskrit lessons.
Unable to bear the sheer pain of that captivating beauty outside I shut myself up in the Spartan but clean room inside Amma's guest house, preparing to speak on one of the most dreary and uninspiring topics perhaps: risk financing.
At the end of that whistle-stop sojourn, as I sat on platform no 3 of Coimbatore railway station, downing endless cups of hopeless coffee and watching Thattathin Marayathu for yet one more time, possibly the nineteenth, my mind was a strange jumble of scenes from the previous eighteen hours or so and visuals from the movie.
And that is all that I seem to be able to say about what may well have been one of the more fulfilling Saturdays of my long life.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
All of that between two consecutive nights that I spent on a train in all of thirty six hours. And I almost missed my train back to Bangalore as sleep overpowered me in the last twenty minutes of my four hour wait for the train at Coimbatore railway station.
Amma's campus is something else. Quite apart from its frugal functionality, where everything worked exactly as it was supposed to, the whole place looked like it was out of a children's picture story book, with trees and flowers and birds and even a railway track passing through the middle of a large expanse of verdant dream come true nestling in the foothills of the Western ghats.
I refer to it as Amma's campus because ownership is a more powerful metaphor than we may all realize. We often associate ownership with the mere rights and benefits that it confers. But ownership is just as much a matter of what you give to what you "own."
Amma's campus is a perfect example of the complete ideal of ownership. It is an outstanding example of how much Amma cares for the various activities or initiatives that she takes up. If it was not for her infinite love for the people who are part of her world, Amma would pass for a hard driving, slave driver of a boss.
It was thus a very different weekend in many ways. A weekend that left me with lots to reflect on, to write about. It felt like what people must mean when they talk about living life to its fullest.
Yet my mind feels very barren. My pen seems to have run dry.
All that I can seem to recall is the dull pain that I felt as the rain poured heavily on the green lawns of Amma's campus, reminding me of Anita Nair's piece Where the Rain Begins, as the peacocks heralded the rains with their raucous, loud calls that cut through the heavy stillness of the hills, reminding me of the vivid and painful imagery in Kalidasa's Mayurasandesam, vast bits of which I learned in school as part of my Sanskrit lessons.
Unable to bear the sheer pain of that captivating beauty outside I shut myself up in the Spartan but clean room inside Amma's guest house, preparing to speak on one of the most dreary and uninspiring topics perhaps: risk financing.
At the end of that whistle-stop sojourn, as I sat on platform no 3 of Coimbatore railway station, downing endless cups of hopeless coffee and watching Thattathin Marayathu for yet one more time, possibly the nineteenth, my mind was a strange jumble of scenes from the previous eighteen hours or so and visuals from the movie.
And that is all that I seem to be able to say about what may well have been one of the more fulfilling Saturdays of my long life.
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
