Gerald D'Cunha

  “To win the people, always cook   them some savoury that pleases them.” Aristophanes, The  Knights   S ome months ago, when I first came across a YouTube video by the name ‘Village Cooking Channel’, I instantly fell in love with it. Village-cooking videos on YouTube are not a novelty… There are thousands of them. But, this one was distinct and special in many ways. It was brisk, it was authentic… and, it filled the viewers with energy and joy. So much so, one felt like not only visiting such villages, but settling down there, permanently.       I remember watching a couple of videos from this YouTube channel some days ago… It was late night, and I was feeling extremely low. These guys brought a smile back on my face, and fired energy back into my heart! The very night, I wanted to blog about them. Somehow, the night passed and days, too, without a blog on them. And, just a while ago, I watched this one, their latest… S o many of us ...

  “The greatest single achievement of Nature to date   was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.” Lewis Thomas H ow big is really big? And how much is really much? The ‘bigness’ and ‘muchness’, somehow, don’t lure me anymore. But, it wasn’t so, many years ago, when success meant ‘how big’ the numbers were… How many students I had (How many branches), how much I earned, how popular and widely known I was… What I began to realize, over time, was this: If I let ‘size’ and ‘popularity’ to decide the state of my happiness, then, that very need could become a constant source of my anxiety and worry. Because, deep in in my heart, I knew, that ‘size’ and ‘popularity’ would slide… When they did, would I be prepared to ‘accept’ the reality? “What goes up comes down!” It’s not just a Law in Physics, it’s a Law in Life, too. The most beautiful pageants - ‘Miss Universe’ and ‘Miss World’ - and ‘The Strongest Man on Earth’ – haven’t they all shrunken? What about ‘The Fas...