Walking in the sun with traffic weak in number, the whole city wears a bit deserted look. About late afternoon the sun is not so high either. Most of the roads, just three exit paths, are all closed now. Nowhere to go so I stopped at one of those back entrances of residential infrastructure mammoths. All this while my feet in chappals picking up the dirt from the dust so laiden in the soil of this dry city. Just get of the house and in no time the city is traversed. It sounds like the rattling of wooden hell planked vessels.

Outside the society at walking distance right in front of the schools is a samosa jabebi bread bakery. They have milk too. Fruit juice colas soya bread that I’m fond of is all available there. It’s like an oasis store, when nothing is there just long intersecting roads. The heat and dust of this place is reminiscent of all those dairy stores that are sitting in the middle or no where usually.

It’s a word I’ve coined here in this house for everything abstract yet painful, even dangerous. It keeps me spiritual and devotional even protects me from bad spirits.

I need pencils, regular ones, then A4 size sheets of white paper. Coloured pencils, ruler for drawing straight lines, geometric figures. Start with small shapes primitives to build a bigger picture, just with mosaic maybe. Faces, drawn with hand with detail, such as shading and shadows. Keep drawing until a shape emerges that is benign for me.

A silver ring with diamond. Inexpensive accessory to keep a clean inert metal against my skin. This gives my hands some better grip and protection from negative energy. I wear it for a duration during the day. It gets black and dirty fast so I must keep it clean using a brush with ditergent. It gets its feel and sparkle back in no time.

Nutrition is important. Vegetables, condiments, clean drinking water, meats, pulses, breads, flour, cereals must be home grown or picked up from vendors on the streets never from malls or packaged ones. Lunch should be 4-5 chapatis, dal 2 oz, sabzi 2 oz. One or two bowls of meat with chapati and rice twice a week. Butter jam spread on toasted bread. No junk food ever. Only home or self cooked. Tea or coffee for beverage.

Water must first be drawn from a clean reservoir like the tubed well source, using a powerful electrical water pump motor, all the way up to a large storage tank on the roof of the house. Then a electrical geyser must boil this cold water for 1 to 2 hours so that it’s good for a shower lasting for about 30 minutes.

This city where I live is not a big city. It’s really small. Houses lot of rich people and is connected to the capital region. It has all the modern amenities that one would expect these days. Express way, metro rail connectivity to capital bus, railway stations and airports. International airport is also well connected now. Air is good, traffic is mild but heavy in the morning and evening hours.

Stacks of newspapers just keeps building here. I haven’t read anything in more than two years now. I’ve just lost interest in them, they make me sick. But I liked other useful bits and pieces of information from them like TV movies schedules, puzzles, scrips of comic, hagger ? The business page, sports columns but I never could tell or remember any of the soccer or cricket scores. Front page the shockers, then some respite from the Delhi city page. Some international stuff like who’s going or showing up where. But I never found it comforting or something that made me up to date. Rather it was a tonn of bad news and scurmishes for me. Newspaper should be not more than 4-5 page light digest.

The house historically has a TV set but no computer. The only one ever seen is the one inside my father’s office. It’s an amazing machine an Intel 386 I suppose. It’s color and 8 bit games on it like Kong, Digger and Bricks. All this is similar however to the arcade gaming machine in Nanital. Then BBC micro for programming. Many other processors like Intel x86 upto smartphone embedded devices. It’s something that’s a tool that one must possess and keep getting newer ones. The house now does not have desktop machines with printers/scanners/faxes anymore. Only embedded devices. Even after several desktop computers purchased here, none remains and it’s still with more TVs than computers.