Facing the unfamiliar is not something we love, especially being children of routine, but it could turn out fun, as mine did, a few years ago, when there was no lunch laid out for me that day:

It’s a habit of mine to leave my front door open, while I write in my study. The cook comes in everyday as she has been coming for the last fifteen years and she cooks a meal for me. When the children were at home, she cooked for all of us, but now it’s just for me, as my wife has her lunch between surgical cases at the hospital.

Even a small gesture impacts us, doesn't it?

African-American poet Countee Cullen spent the summer when he was eight in Baltimore, Maryland. Shortly after he arrived he noticed a little white boy staring at him. Countee smiled, but the little boy did not smile back. Instead, he stuck out his tongue and called him a “nigger.”

As years wore on, the little white child most likely forgot the gesture. He was never aware of the pain he inflicted on a little black eight-year-old boy. But the truth is---everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

There’s not a day going by when we are not bombarded with jokes through Facebook, WhatsApp or other social media outlets. Billions of such gags, funny yarns and wise cracks travel cyber space tirelessly round the clock hoping that at their journey's end they will evoke laughter to the recipient! And since most are undoubtedly funny, the world should I dare say be rollicking, rolling and rebounding with chuckles and titters all the time!

But I hear no such laughter!

“Our greatest ability as humans is not to change the world, but change ourselves,” …… Mahatma Gandhi.

And as the nation went on a cleaning spree yesterday, with most everyone taking a broom and sweeping beaches, grounds, and everywhere where the lens of the camera could reach, I imagined I saw a small man with horn rimmed glasses, covered with just a khadi cloth, watching everybody, “Looks like a cleanliness drive on my birthday,” he said.

A reader of mine has asked me to write about love! Ah love: What a beautiful feeling isn’t it? Suddenly the world changes, dark clouds become bright sky, gloomy days become joyful, and quiet men and women get swept away in a form of ecstatic madness! I have seen shy men or women with no confidence in themselves suddenly strutting around like kings and princesses! All, because someone has returned the love they’ve given.