TRIVIAL TRAVAILS
Recovered from all the celebrations of the longish weekend? Wishing all of you a Very Happy New Year – the Islamic New Year also known as the Hijri New Year was celebrated here on the September 22nd, and marked the beginning of the new Islamic calendar year, the day on which the year count is incremented. To paraphrase the Sanskrit mantra chanted at the recently concluded UN General Assembly, by the Minister for External Affairs of India: “May all be happy;
May all be healthy;
May all see what is good;
May all be free from suffering.”
May the New Year bring in peace, good health and happiness to our region in particular and to the world at large.
While some celebrated the Islamic New Year, some of us got a double bonus as we also celebrated the beginning of the Navratri or the Durga Puja, which is an annual Hindu festival in the Indian subcontinent that reveres the goddess Durga and is particularly observed in eastern and northeastern states of India, in Bangladesh and in
Nepal.
As someone from the land of the Bhodrolok (theoh- so propah upper crust in Calcutta/Kolkata) commented…. “For us it is a celebration of culture, ethnicity and togetherness. The festivities are all about human qualities, their love, tenderness, affection. We celebrate what makes us human, not just being of a particular religion. That is the reason why literature, music and food are part and parcel of these celebrations.”
And as the well-known journalist Vir Sanghvi has written “Puja captures the essence of everything we adore. If you want magic, there is nothing to beat Puja in Calcutta.” However, the celebrations in Muscat by the Bengali community are no less and seeing the lovely ladies wrapped in their finery and their significant halves in their starched traditional attire, one is reminded of those good ole days in Calcutta some 37 odd years ago, when one had just begun my banking career.
While today is Maha Saptami or the seventh day – the day when the war began to obliterate the evil; the tenth day of the festival is celebrated to commemorate the victory of truth over evil, the vanquishing of our inner demons. This year Vijayadashmi or Dussehra will thus be celebrated on September 30th and to all those who celebrate this festival: Shubho Bijoya, Dussehra Mubarak, and Happy Vijayadashmi!
While some got one, few got a double; one particularly good and kind soul got a triple bonus yesterday! This pretty, petite, patient, placid, pleasant,
perfect (in the hope of gathering Brownie points!) person with her elegant touch of grey, officially climbed over to my side of the hill surprising the grey, the greyer and the not-so-greyer lot.
But the surprise of surprises – the coup de foudre – was pulled on the 15th of this month, by the two lovely understudies and yours faithfully. Mea culpa but in cahoots were our friends who had arrived on time and were quietly ensconced in this gorgeous beach-front villa in Jebel Sifah, belonging to this gorgeous couple.
And to throw the birthday girl off the scent, we took a detour to arrive at the villa, where as she admired the orange sun dipping into the aquamarine sea, the “Surpriiiiiise” and “Happy Birthdayyyyyy” clamour shocked and overwhelmed the soon-tobe-over-the-hill-girl! After that nothing could rein in the fun and frolic, the song and dance, the happiness and love, the red and the white, the salt and lime…and of course one could then hear the “milk of human kindness sloshing inside” the buoyant and effervescent lot!
Thank you all for being so tight-lipped and playing along the “mum’s the word” game. Thank you all for taking the time and making the effort to be in Sifah to make it a really special evening. Thank you Anil & Deepa, Sivaji & Bridget, Rajive & Sabina for adding to the out-station glamour quotient!
Thank you my partner of 36 years for having endured what you have endured - and as you enter a new decade, one wishes you the very best. As you climb over to my side of the hill, one can only echo what Wodehouse once said: “At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.” You, my dear, are one of those women. Happy Birthday!
And before I sign off, a few random thoughts: ▶Do you know that Rene Descartes had said “Corgito ergo sum” meaning “I think therefore I am?’ I know some people who could say “I think therefore I am…. confused!”
▶Do you know that the trick to really enjoying someone’s company is to not spend a lot of time with them?
▶Do you know that there are people out there who want you to be on the same page with them, not realising that they are in a totally different book altogether?
Till next fortnight... . I now have a sneaky suspicion that Jeremy plans his Muscat trips to coincide with the TT. Welcome back Mr Barnes!