The C - Word

My Friends,
The reason I have been away for so long and shall continue to be after this post, is that a couple of days back my world crashed in. And I was busy picking up the fragments and trying to glue them together. I still am.
You know how life can be. Like a broken piece of glass. Even if you do manage to collect the slivers and plaster them in, the cracks somehow always remain. Insistent. Like a token of disquiet.
My Dad was diagnosed to have a serious ailment in the advanced stage of the disease. And I`m flying back with them to Kolkata so he can get treated at the earliest. In spite of the state-of-the-art technologies and advancements in medical science in this country as well as the super efficiency of the health care system, it continues to remain inaccessible to middle class people like us, due to insane costs. And I have to take my ailing Dad back home, because we cannot afford the treatment here.
I dont know for how long I shall be gone. I dont know whether any of you will continue to wait for my return.
And yet, the ties that bind me to you, my readers, are so staunch, that I could not leave without saying goodbye. And that I hope you all shall put in a word for my Dad, in your prayers. The Gods up there just dont seem to listen to mine.

P.S - Thanks for all the comments on the previous blog. Nope, I wasnt trying to influence anybody with my thoughts or make the 'environment unwelcoming' as someone thought! I was simply stating the obvious. That Money Can buy Me Happiness. I wish I had some more.

And lastly, even though I might not be able to blog, I shall definitely check my email in case anyone wants to write in :) Here`s my email address : piperish@gmail.com

A Lesson Learnt... part 2

Has anyone read 'A Christmas Memory' by Truman Capote? It is a story about a poor little boy Buddy somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. Buddy normally gets nothing for Christmas but hand-me-downs from relatives and a subscription to a religious magazine. He does however receive a prized kite from his special friend one year. And he is thrilled and happy at the thought of going out on a warm windy Alabama morning and flying his kite.
A small part of the story is also about how he was offered money for his Christmas tree but he declined. He believed that theirs was the best and nothing could ever replace it.
But that was then. Times have changed. Stories have changed. Lives have changed.
Today I learnt an important lesson. That Money can buy happiness. It always has. Not completely and at all times. In fact like they say, the best things in life are all free. But Money Can buy happiness. Most of the times.
The relationship between money and happiness, it would appear, is more complicated than the romantic entanglements of any of the Desperate Housewives. Guess what? Not quite. Its a simple math really. A directly proportional equation even a fourth grader can solve.
That`s the lesson I learnt today. And one I`m not likely to forget in a hurry.