Drops of joy!

There's not so much of activity to see or hear around in Brisbane - no maid who comes daily and tells the juicy tales of your neighborhood, no wailing infants being chastised by their mothers in the balconies, no kids running around in the common stairs pressing the door bells just for the funny sound of it. Sounds hear consist of the wildlife(mainly birds) around the apartments and that of the dishwasher/washing machine/dryer/vacuum cleaner and the list continues inside the apartment. I can now identify the different sound waves from the different cleaning machines around me :-)...Yes, it good to be neat and tidy - that's one of the first lessons I think I learned at school.
For instance, the other day when we were generally ambling around in a park, we saw a man cleaning a flight of stairs, I think around 20 of them. It was not an easy job after all, the huge cleaning machine adding to the decibels, eating up all the dry leaves. This took around 10 minutes followed by a thorough cleansing job with water sprayed and sprinkled and forced on the stairs, each and every nook taken care of. I just thought this amount of water could wash 5 households in B'lore or more so fulfill the water needs of a BPL(this is controversial though with the Planning Commission coming up with strange criteria!) family for atleast a week!! Anyway, the task meticulously done was surely appreciable - 45 minutes of loud work by the machine. The stairs looked as good as new and I suddenly felt ashamed of not vacuuming my house for the past 1 week! I promised myself that it would be the first thing I did after reaching home, but to my dismay the grey clouds decided to release their waters at that time and I was stuck there for more time. Down came the rain forcing the cleaning man to rush for shelter leaving the machine near the stairs...The water poured on the stairs with full force for around an hour...I just wondered so much of water for those 20 steps...Just couldn't help remembering a few of the steps that were published back in my apartment in B'lore for conserving water : 1) Don't wash your cars 2) Don't wash your balconies 3) Don't use shower to bathe.....only thing left to say was - don't use water to brush your teeth..etc etc...:-)
A lot of questions and thought then crowded my small brain with full force - wondered if the pressure of population is so much in B'lore that it has reduced the water pressure in our taps? Or is it the pressure of a few selected people governing the country or state or constituency...whatever it is...it will soon be robbing our future generation of the basic human right - to be clean - to wash your hands..your surroundings etc...they will be either left with the industrial waste inflicted or the expensive bottled or tanker water...making it as precious as the yellow metal!! A nuclear power stumbling under water woes!

बहुत सारे लफ्जों से बना एक पल

बहुत सारे यादें लिए वो एक पल

मेरे कई तनहा पलों को संभालता

वो पल

खामोश पलो में बोलता वो एक पल

Outbound to Australia

Really hate the initial 1 or 2 weeks of settling in when one moves(or visits) to a new place...jet lag making you sluggish and you lose sense of time - when actually you don't have time and have loads to set in the new place! While the mind puts you in a deep slumber, the alarm clock goes off and you realize that its not the start of a long night but another hazy day! Really cant understand how people manage travelling jobs - certainly not my cup of tea!(talking about tea - cups of hot steaming cardamom tea has certainly helped in keeping my eye-lids up most of the time! ;-) )
Brisbane is picturesque..in fact it reminded me of Canada (out of whatever little I have traveled - I cant really categorize myself as an avid traveler -specially out of my country)  to a small extent. Till now, nothing can beat Ottawa - though its been very long since I visited that place but its imprint  is fresh and ink still shining bright! This is my first visit to the southern hemisphere - the sun being responsible for this divide..Sometimes think that it will be different to watch Christmas in summers!!! I haven't seen any movie that has showed hot and sunny Christmas day...I have always watched snow flakes flowing in the air while people celebrate Christmas by the fireplace! It will be fun to watch people sweating on the Christmas eve!! :-)
Its a picturesque small city...quiet and clean - these are the first things I noticed - of course coming from Bangalore where noise is just an inseparable part of your back(?)ground. Transit to Bangalore was not less adventurous - the taxi(to the airport) driver absolutely refusing to put any extra luggage in the front seat. Of course it goes without saying that we tried to exploit close to the 40 kgs per head luggage allowance provided by Singapore airlines. Anyway, after that was sorted and we finally reached the Blore airport - wrong to say its in Blore - its an horrible 2 hrs away from the city center! We, like law abiding citizens wanted to declare my newly possessed Galaxy Tab - when to our dismay we noticed that the customs desk was vacant with a sign to call a particular number. So the wait started and good 30 mins later the custom official arrived. So that ate into our time saved for dinner. So finally we departed from Blore without dinner, with good hope that the dinner in the airlines would be palatable and filling - and in fact we were not disappointed. So it was all movies and food in between moments of sleep! Full 11 hrs of movies - which was indeed a treat - don't really remember when I last watched a movie on TV without worrying about the daily chores or for that matter pending office work!! Anyway, the highlight of the plane journey was the butterfly garden in Singapore airport - truly amazing and one of its kind. So while we crossed different time zones and finally entered Australia. The first thing I had to do was give away my home made ghee-smeared besan laddoos as unpacked eatables were not allowed inside the Australian borders! So after an emotional adieu, we finally hailed a taxi(not to mention all the taxis we have hailed here till now had drivers migrated from Punjab - there are 3 lakh surds in Australia!)
One excellent thing about this city is its public transport - Trans-link, the road-rail that runs through the city and also the places around. Perfectly managed and convenient - you couldn't ask for better. It makes the city more welcoming - you just need to take your go-card (that's the ticket) and you could just go anywhere. I think by the time, if and ever, Blore gets such a transport system - I would be in my ninetees :-) But yes there's hope - hope also because of the events(related to Jan Lokpal) happening in India lately - that requires an entirely different blog - so I will leave it at this point. But, yes hope is there - that we will soon catch a speeding train to development - just that we need to build the tracks !!
Early days in Brisbane had been wet - with day long drizzles and winds - a few sunshine hours here and there when we could just sneak out to the beautiful Roma street parkland just opposite our apartment - and see the unique flora and fauna. What with the bottle ridge trees and ponytail palms, ducks flapping their wings and blue headed fairy-wrens(smaller version of sparrows) dancing around in between the rows of herb garden and spring-flower beds! Its surely a treat to the eyes right in the middle of the central business district! More later....