First Bite

   The bus was chugging along lazily one fine winter morning as I sat at the window seat, staring without focus at the dusty panorama of the north Indian state of Haryana-the six-lane expressway, till recently a mule path, that still served manual vehicles drawn by bullocks simultaneously with motorized vehicles like the one I was in, malls that sprung like weed among fields  of endless greenery, liquor stores, toll booths, dirty bazaars with sleazy eateries, village hovels and their barely-clad inhabitants, BMWs, private engineering colleges, lecherous motels, overloaded trucks, herds of traffic-congesting cattle, industrial chimneys emitting smoke purposefully, offensive hoardings as well as well-meaning ones serving public interests, tractors and steamrollers and strange-looking construction machinery, family of five on a scooter, tiny islands of soon-to-be-felled trees, hustling and bustling concrete jungles with massive webs of entangled overhead wires, filthy  urchins and one-legged dogs, more fields of green crops to sooth the eye from the onslaught of vicious change, unfinished fly-overs and dug-up earth...the image seems incoherent to the point of being bizarre, but it is precisely what one sees and indeed feels when travelling through 'emerging India'...bizarre.
   I looked on at the familiarly unfolding scenery with disinterest when my wandering mind suddenly recalled the image of a delicious chocolate cake. The idea of creating a blog to share my rambling thoughts and observations had been at the back of mind that entire morning, but the image of this cake convinced me that I should set about doing it as soon as possible. I know it sounds strange, but sometimes there are moments when strange, wandering thoughts and incoherent images focus on interesting things. I remembered that as a child, I preferred the cream that coated the cake and wondered why do they bother making the other, less delicious parts. As a result of this seemingly idiosyncratic preference, I always savored the cream and grudgingly ate the remainder out of want for nothing better to eat. But with time, I figured that the cream, when eaten with the cake, doesn't taste bad at all, if not better than having the cream seperately. I don't really remember when this change took place, but I think it was when I actually ventured into taking a bite of both simultaneously and let my taste buds experience something different. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Like the progress from a tiny nibble at the cream to a wholesome bite of a cake that reveals its true taste, we understand things piece by piece, layer by layer, as time goes on. We learn when we venture a little further than we previously dared to. My reason for creating this blog is somewhat similar. A space to share what I sometimes think is worth sharing; when I feel that my fellow people can identify with some of the things I have felt or observed, and find it to be of some value.