Wow, April has come!

There is a certain something about April: its mornings are different from the rest of the seasons. They are wholesome and serene. The sky looks clear and pure blue, the earth smiles, and all nature rejoices as that eternal rider of the day emerges from the bowl of darkness on the eastern horizon. Welcoming him are the chirping birds and the peepul’s giggling leaves. April mornings are surreal beauty: breeze blowing from the south laden with the mist through the fluttering and dancing young lush green mango leaves, 'incensed' by the wandering kuhoo kuhoo songs of koyel sways the mankind, clears the cobwebs of yesterdays, and makes one’s mind so sharp and clear that snatches of poetry memorized in childhood come flooding.

Blowing through the unkempt hair of the young, it juggles mischievous new ideas in their minds. Indeed, April is the month of youth: being freed from the grind of classes, lessons, teachers, homework, examinations, and having thrown the books onto the attic, children are at their boisterous best in their restless search for fun and frolicking. They crave for outings to dance in wild glee—to run amok in gay abandon. They even pester parents to take them out on a ride across the country.

Hi! Executives. Heed them. Get out of your whirl and muddle of business, at least, for a while. Take them out, let them ramble around free of parental pressure, all in the fresh air of the countryside, for ‘they have their own thoughts’. Let them experience the warmth of vasant. Assist them in knowing their country, to relate with it and shape their ideas in sync with it, for that is where they have to live for the rest of their lives.

Even otherwise, you too need a break! Get off from your daily chores and what better way could you think of than taking the family on a ride across the country. Despite being grown-ups, don’t most of us want to do crazy things; want to be on our own fancy rides; to take a bet at our disillusionment, the hope, and the dream to live a life of our choice, at least for a while, even if it means being a ‘catcher in the rye’?

Why not join the young and run ecstatically in the wilderness, enjoying the multitude of colors of nature at the best of times. Who knows, amidst it, you may reinvent your own youthfully innocent ‘self’ that is hidden all along under the burden of whatever you are doing, and just like that poet who, encountering a glimpse of rangeen nazara of a college lass went around humming in the April breeze—Doondtha huo tujhe har raah, har mehifil mein/Mere mehboob tujhe, meri mohabat ki kasam/Phir mujhe nargisi aankhon ka sahara de de...  —you may, flipping into that old life, also muse. Who knows, you may reinvent yourself—all those hidden beauties of your imagined life may sprout jinglingly, an unknown Raag may entwine you as a tender creeper taking you “on the viewless wings of poesy” to Elysium. And don’t you think that it breathes fresh breeze into your whole family?

What are you then, waiting for? Incredible India is inviting you! Go out of the garish and obtuse cities/towns, deep into the country, out of the high rising buildings that are blocking the stars in the quiet sky from you, and watch moonlight in the night when it sleeps upon the motionless trees, listen to the music of night’s stillness and ‘become the touches of harmony’ with the country folk by donning the robe of ‘invisible hand’, which is sure to help those standing at the periphery earn their living. It’s, after all, in spending that one realizes the meaning of earning. And, as long as this money-cycle keeps wheeling across the length and breadth of the country, the whole of India can rejoice dancing ‘all inclusively’.

- GRK Murty