A Mother in India

Wintry days and Vanilla Cake

It's an unusually cold February. With temperatures hovering below five degrees I am finding it uncomfortably cold. I find that the days tend to look bleak if I watch television for too long. The combined effect of the cold weather and being a passive audience to the tedium of television trivia tends to make me melancholic.

These days the television channels in India are on air for twenty four hours and most news channels indulge in reporting of news in a sensational and dramatic manner. The reporters speak in high decibels and in a frenzy of excitement compensating for the lack of news- worthiness. Even weather conditions are reported from towns and cities which are comfortably accessible. I scout for news in vain to know about the weather conditions in a place where I have stayed - a small, intoxicatingly beautiful town nestling close to the snow capped Himalayas. There is no way of knowing how the people living there are coping in this cold weather.

So one does not know about what is really happening in the small towns and villages of India. The chasm between the cities and the villages of India seem to be only widening with the benefits of the current economic boom touching only the lives of the people living in cities. The villages are neglected. So more and more people are leaving their villages and becoming migrants not out of choice but for survival.

Not as it used to be …. When people left their villages then - it was to seek adventure, to assuage their curiosity, to quench their thirst for learning ....

Today my daughter baked a butter sponge cake for family friends who visited our home. The cake was delicious soft and fragrant with vanilla .....dispelling the chill, warming our hearts with love.

Posted by survivor at February 5, 2008 12:52 AM