MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THESE

Our life continues to be busy in Chennai. Of course, Apr-May was less hectic than the previous two months. We visited only about 20 temples, 2 concerts, 2 films, Madurai, Palghat, Pollachi and Tirunelveli and I spent 4 days in Mumbai. Now the details.

Aarthi
Aarthi has been having a hectic time both in college and in vacation. She is in Mumbai from 26th May attending a couple of workshops and will go from there to Ahmedabad to spend a few days at National Institute of Design.

Amritha
Amritha continues to be busy with various activities in Women's Organisation. In the house, she spends a lot of time in the garden which has resulted in a good crop of mangoes, jack-fruit and coconut. Of course she also travels a lot with me.

Birthday Party
There was a party in Hotel Sangeetha, Adyar to celebrate my sister-in-law, Vijaya's 60th birthday. Any party in our family circles is now incomplete without Housie (which was conducted by me and Raman). Any Housie is incomplete without Amritha winning a prize, which she duly did by sharing a full house with Chooda.

Carnatic Music
As most of you know, I am busy writing a book on appreciating Carnatic music. The book is based on my research in the net and will be aimed at laymen (like me).The Synopsis of the book and an appeal from my publisher for advance orders is in this Newsletter. The book and our outings leave me with little time and so we enjoyed only 2 concerts in this period.

Divya Desams
We are quite far ahead in the Divya Desam race. I'm keeping a tally only from 2003 after I made the web site and by 15th June 2004 we've covered 85 (out of the 95 which are in the area served by Southern Railway.). April/June saw us visiting the temples near Palghat, Madurai and Tirunelveli.

Films
We saw 2 films in these two months. (I count only the films that we see in theatres). Perazhagan in which Surya acts as a hunch-back and Mani Ratnam's Aydha Ezhuthu were the two films. Both were good.

Harish
Harish is busy with his work and could not visit us. This is the first time in the last two years that he has not come here in six months. He and Aarthi will join us in Kerala on two days' holidays from where we'll all come to Chennai.

Mother's masyam
We continued to perform our mother's monthly rites regularly. Upto December, we did it in Triplicane while the last few have been performed in Besant Nagar, which is a nice, clean and well-maintained place.


Other Temples
Apart from Divya Desam, we have been visiting a number of temples. Tirunelveli Nellaiappar/Kanthimathi temple is easily the most impressive we saw in this period. We were visiting it a second time.

Other travels
Amritha and I visited Palghat and Pollachi. Jagan has a sprawling house with a lot of trees and other plants. We went in the afternoon to Top-slip which is a minor hill-station. The road as well as the places in Kerala that we visited from Top-Slip were better than Tamil Nadu. Earlier, we were in Palghat and visited Malampuzha dam and a few temples. We also went to Madurai. I went to Mumbai for 4 days. Aarthi was already there and Harish came there for the week-end. Amritha was in Chennai. Mumbai is always a nice place to visit. The two special things I like about Mumbai are Miday/ Afternoon, the two afternoon papers and the fact that we could comfortably travel everywhere by public transport till late night. In fact on Friday (11th June) we came back to Rest house only at 11.45 PM.

Weather
Nature was kind to Chennai this summer. On the day Agni Natchtram was to start, there were heavy rains. There were also intermittent rains and we really did not experience bad summer. Monsoon had not hit Mumbai till I left it on 13th June.

Bye till 15th August,


16th June 2004