If this blog could talk, it would have welcomed me with “Hello Stranger!” – I have been away for that long. :-(

I think I should seriously check out how blogging is done through a mobile. Because as I continue working throughout the day there are hundreds of things that I want to write about but then sheer laziness prevents me from logging in to post them here after coming home. Also, I must say that spending the better part of the day in front of office desktop doesn’t exactly fill me with much enthusiasm at the sight of my personal laptop. :-(

First things first, I have been reading a lot – as usual. This time I read a lot of Marathi (my mother tongue) books. 2-3 of them were novels set against a historical backdrop. I love that genre. At the back of your mind you know that this might not be necessarily how the events turned out or how the people behaved in those times. But still it fills you up with anger, frustration and many times a kind of helplessness. You can’t help wonder how history would have turned out to be if choices made by the people involved were different. And the life of the Hindu women 4-5 centuries ago shocked me to the core – so totally dependent on their menfolk that after the death of their husbands their choice was either a death on his funeral pyre or a lifetime of neglected, miserable existence in dark dank rooms. It’s worse than being caught between the devil and the deep sea. Not that the lot of the women has improved drastically these days but it still is a notch better – at least in the cities.

Then there was a book by a female author who has traveled the length and breadth of India – from the hot deserts of Rajasthan to the cold foothills of the Himalayas. I read on in fascination - unable to mask my envy as she talked about some remote village in the Himalayas where the Indian Laws scarcely apply, about a long-forgotten cave where their group stayed for the night, about the glittering Golden Temple at Amritsar, about the magnificent Valley Of Flowers, about forests lovely, dark and deep……