Thank you for stepping in.
And thank you for being one of my inspirations to maintain
and update my pages. Here's a friendly Hi!!

I'm Suresh and I hail from Kerala, a small beautiful southern
state of India where nature puts on some of her best attires.
It's a long strip of land between the mountains and the blue sea
with beautiful hill stations, backwaters and seashore,

Well. I'm a software engineer by profession.
Working with IBM India.
At Bangalore, the 'Garden City'.
I wonder what a home page should be like
and what people look for in it!
It should be interesting, I guess.
I've tried my best to make it so. Take a look at everything!

If you have time, there r some interesting thinx in the table below.!
Hope you enjoy staying at my home!!
Please don't forget to sign my guestbook before you leave.
Have a nice time!
gosuresh@go.com

A Quick Note: A movie director is what I want to be. in the future. its kind of a looking ahead. It's not a thwarted ambition as Simon Goodley described in London's Daily Telegraph . But his article made my site more famous in the cyber world. Thank you Simon, for including me in that. The same article appeared in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald . Another one written by someone else came in HongKong's South China Morning Post . I've not read that though.
 

“Memory … is the diary that we all carry about with us”, once exclaimed Oscar Wild.

It must be that kind of a diary where you add pages in the front and start reading with the page of today.  As you go on, they become older and the pages start crumbling at your touch!

Sometimes, I try to go through those old pages, travelling down the great lane of memory.  Around childhood I see lot of blank or near blank pages!  Then a few torn pages! pages soaked in an afternoon rain or an occasional burst of tears!  And also pages that I no longer understand!

The most vivid of those pages are when I was 8 to 9 years old.  That was when I was entering the ‘senior level’ in our primary school.  If no ‘top of the world’ feeling, it was at least kind of a ‘top of the roof’ feeling!

That was when my grandfather died.  The only grand parent I ever saw, my first Guru, our playmate, but in the big family gathering I was enjoying the unexpected vacation with an army of kids leaving the elders to grieve.

And that was when I wrote my first love letter and was severely punished by my class teacher (my mother only!) in front of the whole class!  Believe me, I had little idea about either love or letter at that time.  Well, I think I can tell that story some other time!

It was my 5th year in school then.

I was the in-charge of 'law and order' in the class when the teachers were away.  Kind of a police minister with a decent title of 'Class Leader' with the main law enforcing equipment being a 1 metre long wooden ruler.  It came under my control whenever the teacher decided to take a break!  I must say that no one was afraid of me.  But no one shared that attitude with the long ruler!  With that in my hand I was a big success and the law and order always remained 'under control'…! 

The unwritten penal code gave me just two choices to handle situations.  Either note down the name of the offender so that he/she gets duly punished by the class teacher or use the ‘weapon’!  The former was not very effective when too many of them were making noise together.  And most of the time this was exactly the case with more trouble generally coming from the ladies section!  I'm sure most of the guys out there will agree with me when I tell how difficult it is to keep a group of girls silent!  No matter what you say, no matter what you do, they always have their own ways to be noisy.  Maybe its my biased view, maybe not, but at least this is what I thought.  Moreover, it was generally believed by the boys that the class teacher being a 'she' was slightly biased towards the girls.

That day also I was on 'duty' and I found it extremely difficult to keep the girls silent.  The reason behind the increased agitation was this girl who came with her right hand full of twinkling colorful little bangles!  She was easily the center of attraction and there were frequent busters of laughter followed by jingle and twinkle of bangles!

I realized the worsening law and order situation and was desperate to do something.
The policeman in me figured out an idea in no time.  That was to keep the li'l bangle lady quiet!

It was executed without any delay.
Stretching my hands and the ruler to the maximum length I reached the 'culprit' and hit her a couple of times!  The little girl, still full of smiles, playfully tried to block the ruler and ............gosh!!!

There went all the bangles piece by piece, broken by the ruler!  A thousand pieces of different colors on the desk, on the books, on the floor, on her skirt,...... everywhere!!

Everyone was stunned.

She could not believe what happened.  And once she did, she hid her face in the hands and started crying.  I stood like an idiot.  Embarrassed, bewildered and feeling extremely guilty.
It was something very big for the young audience.  There was total silence for quite some time as everyone took time to digest the situation.  I took even longer!

The class slowly came back to its senses and the girls started singing in a choir, something that meant "Let the teacher come and we will see"!

A few of my friends tried to comfort me.  Someone showed me to my place!  Someone even challenged the girls choir.  But all with little enthusiasm.  They were all sure of the heavy punishment that awaited poor me!  I was but more worried about the broken bangles than any punishment that awaited me.

She was still lying with her hands on the desk and her face in the hands!  There was a feeling of 'something big has happened', in the air.  There was nothing I could do but just wait.

The ‘choir’ eventually stopped and just as the class teacher was coming back, she lifted her face.  I don't remember how I faced her.  I don't remember the look on her face.  I don't remember how fast my heart was beating!

But I do remember that no one talked about it.  And nothing happened.  The teacher never knew!

I still carried that guilty feeling with me for a long time.  That was probably the first time in my life when I really really felt sorry for something I did.  And boy, that was a very haunting feeling!  I don't think I ever apologized to her even though I always wanted to.  Somehow I decided not to talk about it.

After all that why did she decide not to tell the teacher?  Looking back, I now see that she had had acquired the great trait of being forgiving at such a young age!  I’ve always been thankful.  But I think she deserves more of admiration and respect!

I don’t know where she is now.  In fact I've never met her after my primary school days!
A happy wife n mom somewhere with a li’l girl who wears lots of shining li'l bangles, I guess...
 

How far can you look back?  "Up to the horizon"?  "As much as I can see"?  Right! and wrong!  By looking back I mean looking back at your own life.  Looking back to the long trail of footsteps that goes back in time from where you are now!  How far can you see?  And how clear is what you see?  Trying to answer this question could be a very interesting time-pass; I do that once in a while when I'm free to wander in my own world.  Trying to remember!  Trying to recollect small small incidents that I thought I forgot long ago! something that made me laugh my heart out! something that made me cry! someone I met somewhere!...

So far the earliest days in my childhood that I could remember have got me running away in terror from a big truck that was speeding towards me at an alarming pace.  The truck was but a toy that my father presented me!!  But it was big enough for me and I was no 'adventurous' kid.  I just have a very vague memory of something moving fast in the living room towards me with a lot of noise and me running away afraid!  The truck was at home for many years -and I might've got used to it somewhere down the line- and all the time that served the purpose of being an object for others to tease me by describing how I used to run away!  And afterwards the green coloured beast was lying abandoned somewhere among the mango trees living the not so colourful second part of his life.

Occasionally I used to go to school with my mother when I was around 4 years old.  There was a maid at home to look after me, but the school being very near to the house, I was free to go there whenever I felt inclined!  I was allowed to go anywhere and no one seemed to mind if I go to a class and watch what's going on.  For students I think anything happening other than the class itself is a welcome change!  Maybe because of that or maybe because I'm a teacher's son, they always treated me with affection.  The teachers were also nice to me and I liked them all except the Hindi teacher!  She was in fact a very nice lady.  My hostility towards her resulted from a small incident that infuriated me a lot!  I was on one of my casual visits and she was teaching Hindi in the 5th standard .   I was near the door.  She might've been making sentences to the students when all on a sudden she pointed me to the class and told "chotta ladka " meaning little boy!!  The class repeated 'chotta ladka' and most of them laughed!  I didn't like it.  I didn't like them laughing at me.  I didn't like her calling me 'chotta'.  For sure, I didn't know the meaning of 'chotta' but I might've took it for some bad word or something.  I shouted to my mother who was in the next class that she's calling me 'chotta'.  That triggered another chain of laughter in both the classes.  I was disappointed to see that my mother also had joined the group.  I don't remember what I did next.  I think I might've just retreated from the scene!  But I carried some grudge against her for sometime until I forgot the incident.

The last time I met the old Hindi teacher was a couple of years back.  Even though she looked up to talk to the bada ladka' (big boy), I realized that I'm still no bigger than that 'chotta ladka' in front of her!!

Another thing that I remember is going up the staircase to the second floor to be with the small library we had at home.  It belonged to my grandfather and was probably related to the school he founded.  I might've started exploring it right from the time I learned to read.  (It was there for quite a long time until it was transported to the school library.  I have no recollection of when that happened; probably after my grandfather's death when I was 8 years old.)  I remember reading a popular malayalam novel, the title of which directly translates to 'An umbrella and the li'l sister'.  It was a touching story of a brother and sister who had a tough time with their stepfather.  The boy runs away and the girl was adopted by a rich man.  The brother works in many a place to make enough money to buy his sister an umbrella and later goes in search of her.  After a long and weary search he manages to locate the girl but realizes that she's too high for him to even get a chance to speak to her.  I don't think I remember the story right.  And I don't know what happened after this.  The book had a number of its last pages missing and I remember many a sleepless night trying to imagine what might've happened to them.  There was no way I could tell anyone at home to get a new copy for me.  No one encouraged my 'wasting time by reading novels' when there was 'lot to study'!  I never asked.  And I never ever read those missing pages.  I never knew what happened to the boy and his little sister.  The story probably had many different endings in many of my dreams.

You might wonder why I didn't go in search of that book when I grew up.  I don't know.  I had the story in mind for quite some time but it gradually faded and I never bothered to go around looking for it.  On the other side, it never came my way too.