Life is Calling

If I am sitting in my room (say, working on the laptop) in Bangalore, I am actually traveling at a speed of 1015 miles per hour. And this is just around Earth’s axis. I am also actually traveling at a speed of 66,676 miles per hour around the Sun. I am not an expert in astrophysics to go further on speed in which my galaxy is traveling, so I will leave it at that but suffice it to say that its like being in a revolve-rotate roller coaster ride that turns around the axis as well as moves this way and that, giving the general feeling that you have no idea where you are at a given point of time. This gives great joy to majority of the population but the feeling I get is one that of nausea because my insides just can’t take it. Don’t get me wrong. The nausea is when I am in the roller coaster ride, not when I am sitting in my room in Bangalore working on the laptop.

Anyway. Add to this Facebook, LinkedIn and Orkut where I get to see multiple updates on the multitude group of friends in each of these networking sites. One friend is traveling from India to Australia for a job, one friend is traveling from Australia to London for studies, one friend is traveling from London to Switzerland for honeymoon, one friend is traveling from Switzerland to India for settling down in life, one friend is traveling from India to US to join husband and many friends traveling within US during the long weekend. It is as if you are in the midst of a huge inter-networking set of cables that are hovering all over you all the time – the way airline industries advertise their routes on a magazines around the world – and you are just a spectator being bewildered by the increasing dynamics of what is happening as we speak in and around you.

My 6 month old daughter, who spends most of her time on her back, pedaling her legs on an imaginative cycle, flapping her hands in utter joy and squeaking away to glory when she has had her night’s sleep and morning milk suddenly stops all of her activities when I take her for my weekend morning walk. Cradled against my shoulder, she looks here and there at the moving vehicles, she looks at the morning walkers and joggers in the park, she looks at the moving branches of the tree, she looks at the birds and she is all agog. She is literally dumb struck. No voice comes from her. She forgets she has hands and legs to flap about. Her eyes capture everything. It is a new world out there for her. Not just the roof and fan which she is accustomed to. So much so that she doesn’t even respond to her name Paavani or her pet name Tontu. She doesn’t want her parents, doesn’t even want her Mother - who is her constant companion since birth – when she is in the open air. Life, in fact, is beckoning her, and she is bewildered by the enormity of it, and the possibilities it beholds. She, who is the queen of the bed and the room, suddenly feels small looking at the magnitude of World beyond her house. The Smirnoff commercial aptly describes the situation:

Life is Calling.