Pictures to Ponder On

Been a heavy week with several posts, so wanted to give you all a break.  Let you all look at these pics that make you smile and may be time to catch up on reading all the posts from this week. So here goes....

This, believe it or not, is India.  You know the kind that tourists get to see.  But also the kind where rural India lives.  Deep inside, far away from the cities.  

Stole it from twitter.  

See how clear the water is??

Same place.  How unreal does this look?  As if the boat is suspended in space.  But my favourite part is the reflection of the boat underneath itself.  Because the water is clear and because the sun is at an angle, there is a reflection and it makes it seem like the water is land.  Guess, it strange, but no ripples are visible. 

I love the green.  This is the stuff that dreams are made of.  But having travelled as much as I have, I can tell you, there is a romance to pictures that never matches when you are really there.  Fiji is gorgeous, warm and then after spending some time on the beach you deal with crazy heat, sweat that runs down your forehead into your eyes, and within minutes you need to change your shirt, for it is soaked in sweat.  All that I can bear, what was hard was that if you accidentally left a cup of half drunk tea with sugar and milk in it on the table, next morning the entire cup was covered with ants.  

And yet, there is an excitement to being there--in a new place, and feeling the sun, and feeling like you are suspended in time, no home and no direction, and you are not able to breathe, cannot exhale just yet, and yet, it is as if your most unimaginable dreams are coming true.  None of that can ever be captured in a pic. The sad part is that, after that moment, that feeling great, of having travelled and using travel as a conversation starter, or even a commodity---that time, when the initial moment is over, all you have is a memory.  From then on--it is back to memories, staring at and sharing pictures and longing.  

Always.  

There is no place or time when you feel like you are home. I have felt that 

This picture again, I stole from somewhere, but is added here to remind you the joys that you do not even realise you have.  New shoes, smell of a new book, smell of baking bread in your own kitchen, smell of warm kitchen and ah so many more.  But you know where this pic is from?  During or around WWII, world war II, a jewish kid who got a pair of new shoes....look at the joy on his face--as he has the world, and he does.  The greatest gift that he does not realise yet is that he is alive, young and his whole life is ahead of him. 

And that he has the power to do good!!