Colonel's Random Thoughts

Before the Sun Rises Without Us One morning, you will wake up for the last time.  You will not know it is the last. You will make your coffee, reach for your phone, get dressed and begin another ordinary day. You may drive to work, answer calls, sit at your usual place at the dining table, laugh with your family, kiss your children, watch a movie and make plans for next week.  Nothing will announce that this is a moment you should remember forever. That is the strange condition of being human: we are given no calendar for the moments that matter most.  We do not know the date we will arrive in this world, nor the hour we will leave it. Between those two unknown points lies an astonishing interval called a lifetime. It may be twenty years. Forty. Sixty. Eighty. Perhaps a hundred.  We simply do not know.  Yet we live as though tomorrow has signed a contract with us.  We make plans. We postpone things. We tell ourselves there will be time later. La...

Kollavarsham 1202: A Journey Through Time, Memory and Resistance There are some people you meet in life who seem to inhabit a world slightly different from the rest of us. Jinson Abraham is one such person. I have known Jinson for nearly 17 years, and through all these years I have watched him remain what he has always been at heart: a deeply creative soul, endlessly curious, restless with ideas, and possessed of that rare ability to see things that most of us simply pass by. His ongoing exhibition at Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Kochi, is yet another window into that remarkable imagination. Kollavarsham 1202: Munne : Ippozh : Ini [Before, Now, Hereafter], conceived and photographed by Jinson, is not merely a photographic exhibition. It is an encounter with memory, history, identity and resistance. Inspired by Kerala's complex history of the female body, clothing, caste and social power, the project brings together twelve women, twelve portraits and twelve months of the Mal...

Maybe I Am Meant to Be Unfinished When I was young, I thought life was a question that needed a single answer. At different points, I wanted to be a poet, a filmmaker, a librarian, a café owner, a therapist, an architect, a musician playing on sidewalks. I imagined selling books in a quiet little town, growing my own vegetables, healing people, wearing suits in glass buildings, dancing on rooftops in cities that never slept. Sometimes I even wanted to disappear. Looking back, these were not confused dreams. They were different windows through which I wanted to experience life. Perhaps that is what growing older teaches us. Our goals do not remain still because we do not remain still. What seemed desperately important at twenty may feel strangely irrelevant at forty. What we once called success may later seem like an elaborate distraction. A failure that broke us at one age may become the very experience that gave us wisdom at another. Life keeps editing us. ...

The Extraordinary Hidden Within An Ordinary Life There is something quietly beautiful about the way we live our everyday lives. We stop for sunsets. We play the same song again and again because somehow, in those few minutes, it says something about us that words cannot. We take photographs of meals, journeys, faces, streets and skies, not because every moment is extraordinary, but because we instinctively know that moments disappear. We dance while getting ready, make wishes at 11:11, revisit old songs, keep souvenirs, return to favourite restaurants, call someone just to hear their voice, and celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and small victories. We often call these things ordinary. But perhaps nothing about them is ordinary. The morning cup of tea or coffee, the particular chair we always choose, the music we play while driving, the route we take home, the food we crave when we are happy, the photograph we take from the same window, the familiar conversation with som...

The Things We Don't Notice There is something almost unbearably beautiful about the ordinary ways in which our mothers love us. Not always through grand gestures. Not through carefully chosen words or dramatic declarations. But through the little things we barely notice. A phone call asking if we've eaten. A packet of something we once loved. Food packed carefully before we leave. A reminder to carry an umbrella. A favourite tea picked up from the store. A simple, “I saw this and thought of you.” We grow up believing these things will always be there. We become busy. We postpone conversations. We say, “I'll call you later.” We sometimes find their questions repetitive, their concern excessive, their fussing unnecessary. And then, one day, there is no later. That is when the smallest things suddenly become enormous. A grocery bag sitting quietly in the back seat of a car can become a lifetime of love. A voice we once hurried through a conversation to e...

Coming Home for Onam Every year, as Onam approaches, something almost magical happens across Kerala. Airports become crowded, railway stations overflow, highways carry a steady stream of cars heading south, and homes that have stood quietly for months suddenly begin to stir. Malayalis return from Dubai, London, Singapore and the Gulf, from Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi, carrying suitcases filled with gifts, unfamiliar chocolates and clothes. But what they are really bringing home is something that cannot be packed into luggage: themselves. For Onam is not merely a festival of flowers, food and new clothes. It is Kerala’s great season of homecoming. It is when distances that have accumulated over months and sometimes years suddenly disappear. Families scattered across cities and countries find themselves gathered under the same roof. Cousins who once spent every holiday together may now meet after five, ten or even twenty years. They may initially excha...