My Cup of Tea

Set the ball rolling...

Finally I decide to write something voluntarily...and that's after a long gap of 5 years.

Last time I did this was in my second year in engineering, when I had written an article for our college magazine. It didn't make for a very enjoyable or leisure-time reading (a little justified, though, as it was meant for the science section of the magazine) and basically just contained a compilation of some facts and hypotheses put forth by some scientists regarding a theory , saying, in a nutshell, that the Earth is a like a living organism. Personally, I had really liked the idea when I first read about it in an old issue of the Geographical. (Interested folks can just google for "gaia hypothesis" and get a little too much of information - better read my article on it instead - it's short, concise and simple enough to be compiled by a rookie 19-year old. There's a tiny problem though - the magazine issue is no more in circulation).

So this is the first time after that effort, where people would get something to read from me which they might find a little interesting. Proof of this statement: the only things I wrote in these 5 years meant for other people to read were examination answer books or documentation on software that I've worked on.

So why the title "Manache Shloak"? For the uninitiated, Manache Shloak are a fantastic collection of short verses in Marathi (the language spoken in the state of Maharashtra, India), written by Samartha Ramdas, a patriotic 17th century saint. The speciality of the Manache Shloak is the simplicity in which they are written. They bring about the truths in life and guidelines for people to follow in their lives in such a simple straight form that they are hard to forget or erase from your mind. We used to have regular recitals of the Shloaks (verses) in primary school, and we students used to know literally hundreds of them by heart. So the title will keep me reminding of the bare truths they taught us, and also as a side effect, those glorious innocent childhood days, which remain to be "the best days of my life" until now.

posted by Sandeep Limaye @ 1/11/2006 06:47:00 pm