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"Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel."
.........Oliver Wendell Holmes
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OWH is quite right...
At the T-Junction of the AgE road and the road in front of Gate # 5 at IIT KGP, there is this huge tree which is hardly noticed by anyone. But, come Sri Raam Navami in late spring (April), this tree blossoms; and I knew it had done so by the faint perfume that it sprinkles all over its environs. Then I would look up and watch its nascent milk-white flowers shaped like a nadaswaram:
http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/nadaswaram.html
The flowers drop within a couple of days and the ground is littered with paling whiteness. Pick up any flower and blow through its stem and you can generate the 'peee-peee' sound of the nadaswaram. And the flowers were aptly called by my wife, "Raam Baanam", meaning:
"Sri Raam's Arrows"
And every April when this happens at KGP, I used to be transported to the Village of my school-life, Muthukur, where there were dozens of these trees and their perfume pervaded the Village for a couple of weeks...and memories of my school life and play returned loaded with that perfume.
And, by the side of the street where we lived near Banjara Hills for about 3 years here, there was a lone Saptaparni tree, so-called because every twig of it had about seven leaves and every bunch seven white flowers and every flower seven petals:
http://www.holistic-herbalist.com/dita.html
http://marathepa.wordpress.com/category/saptaparni/
And come Durga Puja, this tree would blossom and I would be transported to the KGP Campus where there were dozens of this tree which suddenly blossomed in October spreading a strong aroma all over the Campus. The bunches of its flowers were a sight to behold, but not everyone, including my wife, liked its strong scent. But I did. And enjoyed it. The flip side was, as I wrote earlier, this sweet smell was associated with the upcoming Reco-Season...not so sweet for the reco-er and the reco-ed.
My good friend, NP, who did his B. E. at Anantapur, told me their charming association with flowers. Apparently, outside their hostel there, was a sugandh tree which used to blossom every February. And that was like their aazaan...call to stop horsing around and start reading, for it heralded the uneasy Exam Season.
There are also untidy smells that can be equally evocative...
My youngest niece, who is the heroine of the blog, Gul:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/04/gul.html
was born in Gudur and was a frequent visitor to my mom's home there during her infancy. Unfortunately, the road outside our house at Gudur by which you enter and exit our gate was never cleaned by the celebrated Gudur Municipality and so was filled with perfumes of drying urea. And this girl, when she grew up a bit and was passing through an equally spicy town in Maharashtra, woke up and asked her mom:
"Have we returned to Gudur?"
I had always a 'nose' for English words. And after my retirement I must have blogged close to a million words.
There was this Professor at IIT KGP (not in Physics, thank you) at whose sight I used to develop itchy rashes all over my body...a unique case...the allergy must have been surely mutual. And this gentleman was in a position to write essays and notices and musings in Campus Periodicals, often officially sponsored. And he used to fancy he was an eminent writer of this foreign tongue for which he had no ear, eye, nose, skin or even tongue for that matter...strong words these, excuse me..but he took an extremely negative view of our Phy Dept; and patriotism excuses my rant.
And he used to sprinkle his write-ups with needless words like:
1. banal
2. ethos
3. milieu
4. genre
...just a sample.
Now, no word in English or any other language is bad or good in itself. Each has its nuance and most of the time is irreplaceable. But this gent used to so overdose his prose with such 'evocative' words that I developed an allergy for them too, by association. And whenever I have an urge to write 'ethos', his not very handsome face with its toothy leer appears to my inner eye like an old-fashioned negative that was 'developing' in the dark room, and I bypass the good word almost always...one good word lost to me forever...
Ethos, pathos, bathos, chaos....
========================================================================
"Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel."
.........Oliver Wendell Holmes
********************************************************************************************************
OWH is quite right...
At the T-Junction of the AgE road and the road in front of Gate # 5 at IIT KGP, there is this huge tree which is hardly noticed by anyone. But, come Sri Raam Navami in late spring (April), this tree blossoms; and I knew it had done so by the faint perfume that it sprinkles all over its environs. Then I would look up and watch its nascent milk-white flowers shaped like a nadaswaram:
http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/nadaswaram.html
The flowers drop within a couple of days and the ground is littered with paling whiteness. Pick up any flower and blow through its stem and you can generate the 'peee-peee' sound of the nadaswaram. And the flowers were aptly called by my wife, "Raam Baanam", meaning:
"Sri Raam's Arrows"
And every April when this happens at KGP, I used to be transported to the Village of my school-life, Muthukur, where there were dozens of these trees and their perfume pervaded the Village for a couple of weeks...and memories of my school life and play returned loaded with that perfume.
And, by the side of the street where we lived near Banjara Hills for about 3 years here, there was a lone Saptaparni tree, so-called because every twig of it had about seven leaves and every bunch seven white flowers and every flower seven petals:
http://www.holistic-herbalist.com/dita.html
http://marathepa.wordpress.com/category/saptaparni/
And come Durga Puja, this tree would blossom and I would be transported to the KGP Campus where there were dozens of this tree which suddenly blossomed in October spreading a strong aroma all over the Campus. The bunches of its flowers were a sight to behold, but not everyone, including my wife, liked its strong scent. But I did. And enjoyed it. The flip side was, as I wrote earlier, this sweet smell was associated with the upcoming Reco-Season...not so sweet for the reco-er and the reco-ed.
My good friend, NP, who did his B. E. at Anantapur, told me their charming association with flowers. Apparently, outside their hostel there, was a sugandh tree which used to blossom every February. And that was like their aazaan...call to stop horsing around and start reading, for it heralded the uneasy Exam Season.
There are also untidy smells that can be equally evocative...
My youngest niece, who is the heroine of the blog, Gul:
http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010/04/gul.html
was born in Gudur and was a frequent visitor to my mom's home there during her infancy. Unfortunately, the road outside our house at Gudur by which you enter and exit our gate was never cleaned by the celebrated Gudur Municipality and so was filled with perfumes of drying urea. And this girl, when she grew up a bit and was passing through an equally spicy town in Maharashtra, woke up and asked her mom:
"Have we returned to Gudur?"
I had always a 'nose' for English words. And after my retirement I must have blogged close to a million words.
There was this Professor at IIT KGP (not in Physics, thank you) at whose sight I used to develop itchy rashes all over my body...a unique case...the allergy must have been surely mutual. And this gentleman was in a position to write essays and notices and musings in Campus Periodicals, often officially sponsored. And he used to fancy he was an eminent writer of this foreign tongue for which he had no ear, eye, nose, skin or even tongue for that matter...strong words these, excuse me..but he took an extremely negative view of our Phy Dept; and patriotism excuses my rant.
And he used to sprinkle his write-ups with needless words like:
1. banal
2. ethos
3. milieu
4. genre
...just a sample.
Now, no word in English or any other language is bad or good in itself. Each has its nuance and most of the time is irreplaceable. But this gent used to so overdose his prose with such 'evocative' words that I developed an allergy for them too, by association. And whenever I have an urge to write 'ethos', his not very handsome face with its toothy leer appears to my inner eye like an old-fashioned negative that was 'developing' in the dark room, and I bypass the good word almost always...one good word lost to me forever...
Ethos, pathos, bathos, chaos....
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