Quirky Glasses

Lens And Piston( @lensandpiston ) One of the early memories Fayaz recalls from his childhood is of him crawling under a Maruti Gypsy. He viewed the underbody of the Gypsy with as much fascination as someone seeing the stars in Milky Way for the first time. “It runs in the family,” Fayaz said “the love for automobiles.” With time the toddler’s fascination grew. He identified cars by its bumpers before he could count numbers. Fast forward a few years, the teenage Fayaz pined after bikes his father couldn’t afford. Undeterred, he saved up for his first bike, doing odd jobs. He bought his first bike, a Yamaha YBX 125 in his second year of Engineering. The depth of love and pride he felt for his hard-earned bike knew no bounds. If he could cuddle it in his sleep, he would have. But in his final year of college, the trend of owning a Royal Enfield Classic gripped Fayaz, just like everyone else. Everywhere he turned the exhaustive sound of the Bullet bikes followed him like a gh...

Millions of people throng the Delhi metro. Everyday glum faces commute between work and home. Their eyes glued to their mobile phones, the blue light of the screens casting an enchanting aura around them, drowning out from the mundanity that surrounds them. Commuting in the metro, I came to realise, is a grim affair. You rarely get to see anything bright. Rarer is finding someone with a book. But today as I was people watching around the not so crowded Magenta Line Metro, a well dressed smart young man came and sat opposite me. His handsome face with combed hair, faded jeans and a yellow kurta caught my inquisitive eye. He sat down and scanned around him catching my eye. A perplexed though seemed to have crossed his mind for it foreshadowed his pleasant demeanour. He then scanned the rest of the coach and with a visible sigh opened the book he was carrying. I have the unusual habit of craning my neck like an owl to see what others might be reading. I vaguely made out the title....

For quite sometime now I have been at sea at writing my next post. What can I write about? I don't have bundles of wisdom to share or exotic travelogues to put across(lately). But when I glanced across my room, I saw the copy of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that I had just completed. Why not a book review then? The Little Prince at first glance might seem like a children’s book. But as the saying goes never judge a book by its cover. The story is narrated by the unknown narrator who meets a prince in the Sahara desert where he had crashed his plane. The prince explains to him about his little planet with three volcanoes and his beloved rose. He leaves his planet to explore the nearby ones. The story then moves forward with the characters he meets upon each of the other tiny planets and finally on earth. The book made me realise the importance of preserving the perspectives we held as a child, the innocent creative ways our minds would wander. As we grow up...