Eco Challenge

Our organisation has initiated an Eco Challenge encouraging people to adopt a healthy life style and hence contributing to the environment.

And we have started participating as a team, we have selected certain daily chores which we have resolved to accomplish.

The challenges are in all categories from healthy living to mindful eating, less screen time and more time outdoors.

We are all following it to the core and enjoying it. And what we last Friday brought everyone a happy smile.

We decided to dine on fruits and salads and the whole team was game for it. We chose an outdoor location and had our lunch in much peace! For the coming week we plan to do something similar, we are all excited!

And though this challenge is for 10 days only, some of us would have developed a habit by the end of it!

Let's do our bit.

Every thing that lies here and there

Every thing that lies here and there has got her touch and feel in it, and this is in our Delhi home. We have not been to our Shillong home yet and that will be a task!

The book shelf that she had arranged remains the same, I am still not getting the courage to dust it leave aside doing anything different to the existing arrangement.

Today I threw a mouth gel with so much pain, some of her clothes I had already given away! Some of her face creams and her nail polishes stay...these are mine, very much mine.

But the stuff that has to stay will stay, her Sarees and her Shawls, her Sandals. I have started wearing them not that I didn't wear when she was there.

Some questions come to mind, never to be answered...the circle of birth and death will never be understood. All her possessions stay here and hits the mind in a way that is not easy to be explained.

I want to speak to her, feel her, and let her know how much more I would have loved to give her what she loved.

And the memories

This Navratri we are not doing anything, a year we will not be participating in any auspicious occasion. But long before we heard about Navratri, we celebrated Basanti Puja in our very home.

And this time of the year Baba misses it for the most, last few years it was an annual trip to Kamakhya temple. And long before that the annual festivities at home.

And the four days meant a lot to the entire family. Ma Basanti is the keeper of our home, giver of our lives and protector in all seasons.

My mind is filled with memories of our home where the preparations would start to deck the Puja room, to get arrangements done for the Pujas and the aunties pouring in for helping Ma.

Arranging flowers and fruits, deciding the menu for the Bhog and attending to everyone who came home. We even had times when people who we did not invite turned up for the Puja.

And add to that our cousins, our games, having lunch together or saving some special Prasad for ourselves are all what will never come back. It's so so fresh in the memory.

Ma's role was wonderful, she did everything that was needed to. The quiet person that she was, she demonstrated such patience that only she and only she could handle these proceedings almost single handed. I sometimes would be angry at her for may be paying me a little less attention those days but now when I think about it, here was this lady who held on to family, culture without questioning.

I don't know how much of what she did we could give her back, surely never enough....but wherever she is today, and as they say the soul knows it all, may she know that she is missed.