Happy Friendship day!

Apologies for my long absence from this space. Ill heath, house guests, the Collective Studio management, and travel, along with long hours in my studio put my blog on the back burner for a while. But hopefully I shall be back to my writing with less ruptures from this week onwards.

Happy Friendship day!

I feel really blessed with the friends that fill my life. Each of them add so much to who I am as a person. Their long phone calls, their daily concern, their attention  for details that bring delight to my life and their constant vigilance to see that my life is always full of the energies that best nurture my spirit becomes a cyclic gift that is seamless in time. Thank you my friends for all the love.

Mithun and Samera drove down for a days visit yesterday with the agenda to take Surendran, Aditi and me out for dinner! Next weekend will see my favourite "couple" back at home for a longer weekend that holds the promise of a picnic (!!) which needs me to muster my enthusiasm for  flies and the lack of  clean toilets(!!), but soldier on I will because it will be loads of fun with the jing bang lot of us doing masti and regressing in age, with sandwiches and cakes as comfort food !

I am aghast each time I put the news on these days. Land grabbing and custodial deaths, ministers with triple murders as their achievements and over played cricketers hounded by the media for loosing a game which causes  more furore than urgent national problems like illegal poaching of tigers or mining or the suicides of farmers.

I caught a strange debate on TV, hosted by Arnab Goswami that seemed truly bizarre and quite farcical with Mahesh Jetmalani and Anumpam Kher extremely being personal and rude to Teesta Setalvad, who despite the hostility held her own and was the only voice that was informed and rational. Arnab is a rabble rouser who held such potential when he was with NDTV. What a slide down to become this pontificator who does little else except wind people up, interrupt them and use air time in such a pedestrian way. Nidhi Razdan and Bharka Dutt remain anchors who have kept the quality of interviewing very high. They bring out points of view and positions that allow for issues to be examined and for debates to hold relevance. Maybe it is time for Tarun Tejpal and the Tehelka gang to start a TV channel. I would certainly be a subscriber.