Mumbai local trains - alongwith lakhs of people they carry lakhs of emotions everyday. 

The other day, whie traveling from Chruchgate to Khar, in an almost empty second class ladies coach, I came across a woman, her daughter and her son. The woman must be not more than 25 years of age, her daughter was around 5 and son less than a year old. 

With her son in one hand and with the help of her little daughter she was selling clips on the train. By the look of it, you could easily make out that she was definitely not leading a good life. She looked tiered and was malnourished. But it was not all this that caught my attention. What caught my attention was, her love for her children. Her son was constantly crying for milk. She didn't look like the one who had loads of it. Actually she didn't look like she had any at all. But inspite of that, she kept shifting her son from her one breast to another in the vain attempt of feeding him. 

On sale of every clip she first kissed her daughter and then made her son play with the money for sometime before keeping it in the purse. I still remember the smile on her rather tiny face everytime she kissed her daughter and saw her son smile.

That's the heart of a mother. She ensures that her children are happy inspite of whatever physical, mental and emotional state she is in.

Also, its only the Mumbai local trains, where you have such close encounter with such beautiful emotions. 

You see, I'd been busy

Its been over ten months since I last updated my blog. You see, I'd been busy. Busy at work - the commuting itself kills me, Thane to Nariman Point, and on top of that the ever increasing stack of files; busy at home - on weekdays, eating and sleeping and on weekends, eating more and sleeping more.

Now that I look back at these ten months, I can't quite figure out what exactly kept me so busy that I couldn't spare an hour a month to update my own blog. Something that I'd created for myself, for my love for writing. Talking about being busy, let me tell you that it took me two months from the day my tooth actually started aching to see the dentist. I didn't have time to attend my friend's wedding at Ulhasnagar, which is barely 45 minutes from my place and I don't have time to teach my mother how to use the computer.

I think there's some profound and underlying connection between growing old and getting busy. Back in school and even in college, we had time for everything we wanted to do and for people we loved. And now all we have is excuses. The best one being, "time is flying by".

The family doesn't have time to have dinner together, some members come in early and some come too late and the ones who come early don't care much to wait for the ones who come late. It takes a wedding or a death in the family to go and meet your relatives, provided your boss grants you leave for the same.

And friends, it takes reunions and weddings, to meet our very close friends from school and college, where we exchange numbers and email ids and promise to keep in touch henceforth. All that number and email id does is occupy a little more space in our phone memory and the day we need to save a new contact and we don't have enough phone memory, we browse through our contact list, find that useless name and delete it without batting an eye lid. You see, we are too busy to think at that time. Yes, when a friend dies, that is when it hits us hard, "the not-keepin-in-touch-with-a-friend thing", but even that realisation doesn't have a long lasting effect on us.

Chuck others, we don't even have time for our own selves. Time to do things we always loved to do, to read the book we have always been wanting to or to go on those long walks or to listen to our favourite song.

Before we realised, life took control of us.

Today I got the time to update my blog only because I'm on my study leave and was getting tiered of my books and just ended up visiting my friends' blogs. On seeing those blogs and the regularity with which items were posted on them, I resolved to update mine today and from now on, regularly. I'm not to sure for how long this resolution will stay. May be till my study leave is on and may be, if I just realise and decide to do something about my life, then forever.