"Are kids gettin smarter or am I getting dumber??"

Challenges come in shapes big and small,something i have come to believe a short while ago...I jus love kids,everything about them: their innocence,cuteness,pranks,constant giggles...So when my youngest cousin,(she s about seven and incredibly cute),wanted to play scrabble with me,I thought I ll play along,not wanting to see her cry.....So here i was,sitting with a tiny kid,a scarbble board in between us...

This kid,as my family recalls is by far the most brainy of the lot(which includes 8 of us)...Anyways, what do I care,she s still a kidddd,and i (whose currently prep for his gre) were gonna play scrabble...She aksed me to start,and i went about makin this word "SHADE",which is not bad considering it would be the last five letter which I would ever make(yea go ahead laugh,scrabble can be a tough game you know...sniff sniff)...

When her turn came up,I reached across to help her out,she jus shooooed me away,pushing away my arms; I was like "yeah,whatever kiddo,good luck"....she,then,quite easily makes the word "DEN"....After which we quickly make a couple of more words,and all of a sudden it jus dawns upon me,that there was a match at hand...

Being her first game ever,she still hadn't comprehended the nuances of scrabble;like when you are about to make a word, it should not end up making non sense when seen with the adjacent words...So when she tried making "AND", I told her "sweetie u cant make that word cos you see the ' D ' clashes witht the letter ' M ' and 'DM' doesnt make sense"... I was like "gotcha", finally I thought I had slowed her down....Totally unperturbed,she tells me 'Okay I ll just remove the 'D' and make the word 'AN', that makes sense right".....Arrrghhhh kids these days...


After 20 minutes she'd gone ahead to make words like goose,tree,tea and a couple of other reallllly nice words...On the other end,I had come up with words such as toe,toy,hen,ant and some really silly words...Finally i said i was feeling sleepy,an excuse to end the pitiful run.....

Next time around I think i ll jus stick to pillow fights,thumb wrestling or stone,paper,scissors(which by the way she s got an uncanny ability to beat me)....Here s a pic of me an Malvika(thats her name,we call her malu at home)....

" Why don't we do things that we don't do ?? "

Somewhere in exotic Kerala....On observing an elephant tied to a tree with nothing more than a mere rope,a traveller asks the mahoot (care-taker of the elephant) with surprise :"How is it that an elephant weighing tons does'nt try to break free from its bondage,especially when its capable of doing so ..."

The mahoot replies "You see,when the elephants were in their infancy,we used to tie them to trees using the very same rope....As the years pass by she would try to break free,but there s a point of time when she realises that all her efforts are in vain,and would eventually give up...And from that moment on,whenever she 's shackled to a tree she would not make the slightest effort to free herself,unaware of her potential strength..."

I truly believe that jumbo here personifies explicitly- the lack of a certain human virtue,that being the ability to place confidence in oneself,or rather to believe in oneself...One cant say that jumbo didnt have perseverance,cos she tried really hard before giving up....But the fact that she believed that she can never do such a thing ever again in her life,well what can i say,thats so human....

It all starts out from our childhood, we start to chalk out in that little head of ours, things we can do,and more deeply etch things we suposedly "cant do"...As we go on, our 'can and cannot list' jus grows bigger...And everytime we stumble across a hurdle or inevitably face failure,we make a 'check' in our list of cannots,assuring ourlselves that it did not lie within "our capabilities " or that we know "our limitations" well....

We constantly curtail ourselves from doing things that we could, should ,or worse still, must have done...Its not the ether that surrounds us,not the people,not circumstances which undermine our capabilities,but that tiny crevice present in some dark corner of our head that behests us from doing things that we could,should, or worse still, must have done....

"To have pre conceived notions in life is bad,but to have pre conceived notions about ourselves,and more precisely about our capabilities is lethal.."

By pre concieved notions here, i mean beliefs that we have come to accept without actually pausing to substantiate them...In short,we deem that a certain thing cant be done,for no reason whatsoever...Now,try reading the elephant story once again,it made more sense to me....

These are purely my thoughts,true to my blog title,and i dont have a clue the way others see life...So,it would be nice if you could drop a comment and lemme know what u think...C ya...

~Kudos to Watterson~

Rolling on the floor and laughing out loud...thats one thing that ll end up happening when you set out to readCalvin and Hobbes...Here are a few strips i had great fun reading...

To the uninitiated, Calvin and Hobbes is a comic strip about a kid (Calvin) and his stuffed tiger(Hobbes)...It was conceived ,as you might have guessed,by Watterson... Calvin is this hyper active kid with an extremely wild and vivid imagination and Hobbes plays a faithful accomplice...Calvin shares an inexplicable bond with Hobbes;the kid misses his stuffed toy more than anything in this world...

What might have caught your eye are the illustrations,none too detailed,but undoubtedly carry a lot of expression... The fact that Hobbes appears different in some comic strips is because to the world he s jus a stuffed toy...Ofcourse,Calvin thinks otherwise,Hobbes to him is huggable wild cat in the flesh...

The reason i feel that C&B has been so successful is because of Watterson's ability to see the world through the eyes of a six year old...Most of his works are based on underlying human behaviour,unlike other contemporary comics; that coupled with the cuteness that's Calvin makes it remarkable...He has made an indelible impact in millions world over,but to everyone's disappointment stopped his creative run in 1996...

Those few seconds that you might have spent laughing on reading the strips above must have been sheer bliss,getting your minds off things that might have been bothering you...Without people like him the world would be a helluva lot more gloomier...Kudos to Watterson...