“The blazing hot sun reminds us that we are still in the middle of yet another summer. It is also the time for relaxation as I get my annual vacation. As the mind relaxes into a vacuum, old memories rush in to fill it: for nature abhors a vacuum!
The passage of many decades has blurred the contours of time, so unlike in the case of tree rings, we cannot neatly dissect our brains and see how many memories were stored during each year.
The folds in my brain have convoluted the memories, but they are still clear and apparently near. The memories which are now gushing out paint a picture of a very different world. A world which is distinctly non-electronic. A world in which there were no mobile phones and computers. Even cars and televisions were rare.
There were no electronic gadgets to distract and entertain us, but we were surrounded by lots of cousins and friends. During the summers, we would by turn visit our cousins or they would visit us. With so many of us around, forming a complete cricket team was a trivial task and playing all day in May was our mid-summer day’s dream! Every activity we took up was somehow enjoyable to our innocent minds: whether it was walking aimlessly through lanes and bylanes and exploring new areas in Chennai or Bangalore or rolling in the surf on the Marina beach. Our age and the time in which we were living probably contributed to enhancing our enjoyment. I see now that walking through the lanes of any city (Chennai or Bengaluru), choked with traffic and smoke is no longer an enjoyable experience and looking at the dark waters and dirty sand of the Marina beach, I wonder, why anybody on Earth would love to go there even if it is touted as the second longest beach in the world. Yes the world has changed, and probably for the worse. The children of today have many gadgets to play with, but are denied the simple pleasures of the wind, sand and the sea.
They are also mostly denied the company of their cousins.
The second law of thermodynamics, dictates that the entropy of the Universe has to keep increasing. This has meant that cousins have ended up in different cities if not in different continents. So get togethers of the extended family are too infrequent to generate lasting relationships. The distances which separate the members of a family, mean that some of the things which I managed, (even if you, gentle reader, consider them to be silly) are no longer possible. One of the enduring memories of my childhood summers was an early brunch which I had at my house, followed a few hours later by another brunch at my grandparents’ house which was a few streets away!
Simple living and simple thinking under a blazing hot sun, have baked indelible memories on to my brain! I will relive these memories for the rest of my life.”
(Ramya, as I mentioned, we did not have many gadgets (no cameras either). So, I do not have a single picture from my childhood days.. These are the photos from my twenties. Think they count as my summer memories too. )
Prof. PK Thiruvikraman was my Physics professor at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus and now is also the HOD of the Physics department. He is a great teacher and a down to earth person. I have always seen him pleasant and optimistic. 🙂
Clouds of the Dusk 