Myself and Jackie....my boss...were talking about the old days...no I am not as old as Jackie....but things back then....were really different.
It got me in a nostalgic mood. Today when I think about those days it gives me a warm feeling and I feel so bad for Ananya that she will never be able to live that kind of a life. One can call it the old fashioned life ...but as compared to today's modern monstrosities taht we call life it really was bliss. We used to live in this old british styled bungalow houses in Pune. Actually, our compound had a 1 main house and 1 outhouse which was the servant's quarter during the British Raj.

The compound was full of fruit trees like red guavas, white guavas, papaya, jamoon, alphonso mangoes, coconuts and custard apples. All fruits used to ripen at different times of the year and so through the year we used to have a supply of fruits directly from the trees. You cannot get it fresher than that can you.

In summer I remember I used to spend half my time on trees, plucking mangoes...making a mixture of chilli and salt .....taking the first bite of the raw mango and spitting it out and then dipping the white flesh in the chilli salt mixture and in to my mouth.......just writing about it has got me salivating.

That was bliss......my dream is to have a house with a lot of fruit trees so that we don't have to satisfy ourselves with the awful crap that comes to the supermarkets.....tasteless fruits full of chemicals.

Those days we did not have a luxurious lifestyle.....but now when i think about it...I miss it. I remember coming back from school, eating some thing and then running out to play. Everyone knew everyone and if one child was missing on a day, all of us used to go to his house to check up whether he was ill. We did not have our parents monitoring us then.....today we cannot even think of allowing our kids to play unsupervised looking at all the horror stories that we hear and see in the media. Is it a wonder that children are growing up too quickly nowadays.....children hardly have a childhood....they are toddlers and then in a couple of years they start behaving like young adults....its a shame that innocence has to be traded for modernisation.

I look at my body and see so many scars and touching the scars gets back memories. I wonder whether Ananya will ever have a scar to touch since today children are not allowed to take risks and play due to the danger of getting hurt. Isn't getting hurt a part of growing up?