Thursday 14 June 2012

The Other Aspect of Rain


“Lighting every face, healing every pain;
To felicitate every heart, here comes rain!”
The above lines define the beauty of rains with immeasurable ease. The rainy season, or Monsoon, as it’s called in India, is hardly disliked by anyone. The word ‘rain’ is enough to light any face up with a smile. We associate rains with fun, frolic, love and a lot of other sugar-coated, cream-topped stuff. But is this assumption the same for everyone? Like every coin has two sides, rains too have another face- another, not-so pleasurable face. While rains bring indefinable joy to people like us, there are people for whom, rains are more of Satanic. The people who live in makeshift houses or roadside tents may not have the same opinion towards the rains as us. For them, the rains are only a season of botheration and suffering. Rains destroy their houses (if they can be called so), and leave them unsheltered. They have nowhere to go, nothing to feed on, and their life is turned into more of the hell that it already is. They are left helpless and destitute, and thus, possess hatred for the very same rain, that we are so deeply in love with. There are many other people, for whom rains spell misery. The rag pickers, who earn their daily bread by picking up useful, recyclable trash from the streets, fail in doing so, as this trash has been soiled and has turned useless due to the rains. The potter, who moulds clay into fine specimens of art, does his molding everyday and waits for the sun to shine and dry his creations. But, can the sun shine on a rainy day? Does the rain leave any scope for these people to thrive? People say, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.” But do they realise that It takes both sunshine and rain to form a rainbow?!

The End of Harry Potter


What was born on 30th June, 1997 wasn’t just a book; it was a phenomenon that would later go on to change the world FOREVER! This phenomenon is the HP madness, as fans call it. The day marked the release of ‘Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone’, the first book in the legendary series of seven. These books were penned down by Joanne K. Rowling and revolved around Harry Potter, an 11-year old orphan and his journey from being a boy nobody knew existed, to becoming the greatest wizard who ever walked the face of Earth. These books later triggered off a series of eight typical Hollywood movies, with ghosts, sound effects, brawls, the works. Everyone, be it children or oldies, went berserk over Harry Potter, the conscientious wizard, who was ‘Oh- so-brave’!  But 15th July, 2011 witnessed the so-called end of this series. It was when the last movie of this series, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- part 2’ released. But, it’s hard to tell where the "official" Harry Potter universe will end and the unofficial world of Potter mania fandom will begin. Harry Potter's story has become part of our everyday cultural references, an allegory we use to describe everything from politics to the financial crises that have swept across the world. The HP madness is here to stay!