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Greetings to my long suffering regular readers and all you fresh faces who might have stumbled upon this blog during this extended silence. I’m on a holiday in Mumbai. Sort of.

A break has been in the offing for months now, but it was postponed many times for various reasons. Now it has finally come to be but for more practical reasons than relaxation. A few years ago my Father had a fall for which he needed some serious hardware surgically added to a bone in his leg. Recently this old implant had started causing some problems and it was time to have it removed. So, this trip came about more as a medical mission than a vacation.

All the metal is now out, and it was the mining of it that kept me busy and this blog silent for the past few weeks. The Father is now doing fine and has given birth to a bouncing baby hardware store. It truly is astonishing how much metal it takes to shore up just a small section of the femur. It makes me marvel at the strength and design of human bones with renewed fervour.

That’s my story for the day. I hope to be less delinquent in my writing and my replying to your comments over the coming days, but then I am supposed to be on a holiday and you know how unpredictable those can be.

Samir

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Compassion is a deep awareness of, and a sympathy with, someone else’s suffering. That is the traditional definition, but really compassion is much broader than that. Compassion is an innate sense of empathy with things and people outside of ourselves — not just their suffering but their feelings, their thinking, and their situation. To be compassionate is to see, feel, and sense beyond yourself. It is this broader sense of compassion that truly makes us human. What would such a thing have to do with the ballet of Swan Lake and musical fountains? I thought you’d never ask.

On New Year’s eve, I was at the Festival City mall in Dubai. There was revelry in the cold winter air and good cheer amongst the hundreds who had chosen to bring in the New Year in the outdoor areas of that complex, on the banks of the creek. After staring into the distant glimmer of fireworks that exploded over the city at the stroke of midnight, we walked along the little canal that is woven into the promenade, by the many busy restaurants there. We found a new sight to greet us at the central area outside the main atrium. There, next to the water of the canal, was a beautiful fountain bathed in light and colour. Its million spinnerets wove a fleeting web of water that clung longingly to the night air before falling to the Earth, and all of them danced to the tune of music that filled the air. A hundred dazzled pairs of eyes looked on in amazement. I was one of them. Then the fountain went quiet and as it sprang back into colour, the Swan’s Theme from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake swelled through the gathering.

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