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Why cannot 'Pateti' be 'Happy', for crying out loud?!!

This 'Pateti' (the last day of the Parsi calendric year), like every year, I sent out messages to my friends, family and relatives, wishing them a ‘Happy Pateti’ and ‘Pateti mubarak’. But this year, the greetings have garnered some backlashes. A couple of my Parsi friends responded to my well-meaning ‘Pateti’ greetings with pedantic messages aiming at informing me about the inappropriateness of my greetings. According to them the impropriety of my greetings stems from the fact that ‘Pateti’ is not a day of celebration, but a day of repentance. It is to cleanse yourself of your sins, ask your maker for redemption and resolve to be a better person in the coming year.  This act of redeeming oneself of past sins is performing the ‘Patet’ as it were... a fact not unknown to most Parsis (including me). However to one of these friends it seemed highly inappropriate that I should affix such a day of ‘Patet’ (Repentance) with words such as ‘Happy’ or ‘Mubarak’, and she let me kno
English Haiku Oh little bird don't sing today I've lost a friend in my memory. Every month someone borrows the moon then pays off the debt piece by piece. The Cherry blossom tree gives shade overhead and a carpet below. Stars twinkle on the autumn branches at the onset of every spring. The brown boat that the ant rows in the pond has fallen from the tree above. These stories the spider weaves are retold every year after the rains.

The Sunbird

It was fifteen days since I had locked my little ground floor apartment, which was in the lightly wooded campus of a University, and had gone on vacation. On my return I found that the small balcony at the back of my apartment had been encroached upon by a most unsuspecting visitor. A small-time architect had decided to build himself a house and had most indiscreetly taken possession of my balcony. To my great surprise, not only had he completed the construction in so short a period of time, but had also started living in it along with his family. Despite the fact that he was an intruder, I could not help but enjoy his rather elusive company. He seemed to me a rather handsome and smart fellow, dressed in his shiny black coat which frequently caught the rays of the sun and broke into shades of purple, green and blue; almost every time he popped in and out of his house. I started leaving my balcony door open so I could have the pleasure of watching him come and go. After all, it i
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  To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour . ~ William Blake

The 'Bhakarwadi', Me and Philosophy!

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Having brought a packet of 'bhakarwadi' from my hometown in Gujarat back to where I work down south of the country, I thought I'd give my South Indian colleagues a taste of the true blue Gujarati 'farsan' (dry snack). In order to ensure that everyone in the office got at least a sufficient portion of it, I had selected the mini 'bhakarwadi'  which were smaller in size, compared to the normal ones, but which came in a larger quantity. After the packet had done its rounds from table to table, with the contents diminishing to a few leftover crumbs in a matter of minutes, one of my colleagues who'd been out of the cabin, walked in, to discover that he had missed out on the munchies. Reluctantly I opened up my palm and offered the last few roundels of the snack that I had saved up for my later consumption. Scooping up the little roundels from my hand and leaving just one for me, he went back to his seat and merrily popped them into his mouth.