I have this snap as the background on my desktop and delude myself from time to time that here I am, under a gulmohur tree in full bloom, in the heat of a fading summer with a book on a lazy afternoon hoping that I could stay here forever

I am sharing it with all of you in the hope that on a particularly stressful day, it helps you take a few minutes off to lie down under a gulmohur tree

There is this cliché that what goes round comes around - you know be nice to someone and you get it back ten-fold. I've actually got to think of this after the last posts of Deepa and Sudeep ('Wise Donkey').

Some 5-6 years ago, I traveled between Bombay and Bangalore by bus and had this woman for company. So as usual, you do the small talk, crib about the bad movies shown in the bus, etc While stopping at one of these road-side dhabas for dinner, when we want to wash our hands, this lady who had finished and was turning back, saw me coming and actually turned back to keep the tap open for me. Very small gesture, but something I remember even today. Don't remember her name but very clearly recall her face.

From what I see, anger and rage seem to be increasing. Road rage is up. I hear about all these people working at call centers suffering from stress due to abusive customers.

What does it take us to be nice ' I don't mean superficially smiling like an idiot at strangers but to take that extra effort to NOT be rude! I have decided to politely decline the n number of calls offering loans, credit cards, insurance, investment, etc. rather than bite the poor soul's head off. Will I be called a nice person? I don't know ' but atleast not a rude boor.

It's surprising how quickly unconnected people form a community ' the 'me vs. you' or the 'we vs. them' syndrome! People working together in an office with no particular fondness or bond if suddenly faced by a new comer or an outsider suddenly become a close knit group ' we against you! People with no obvious patriotism suddenly yelling their lungs out 'Go India, Go!' at cricket matches The same thing taken to the next level ' how Asian are discriminated against by the ICC and unnecessarily fined or their bowling doubted on! Or developed vs. the developing countries! So while we are competing with China on one hand, on the other, work together gmail vs. the other email providers. Airtel vs. hutch. Nokia vs the rest. No great bonding with the brand but when meeting someone with a competing brand, the tendency is to immediately play up what I think is my brand's strengths. We sit in our respective cities, incessantly cursing the local administration for bad roads, inadequate power, etc but the moment an outsider comes and does the same thing, we get on the back-foot and get into arguments of how our city is still better then theirs. Like us, for example on rediff iLand, currently a group of lone rangers doing their own thing, wonder what will cause us to suddenly become a ‘US’?

I miss the feeling of pure bliss from the simplest of things. Of buying a big yellow balloon and then letting it free in the air…of putting my head out of the window to feel the first rains of the season of eating a hot samosa in the rains of bunking classes and just sitting down with friends talking of nothing and everything under the sun . of making faces at a child and hearing her laugh of throwing my first water balloon at Holi and finding my mark of hugging my grandmother and sleeping on her lap and hearing, for the thousandth time, my mom's adventures as a child of hearing snatches of a long forgotten song with the breeze Dil dhoondta hai, phir wahi, phursat ke raat din