Greetings from Mysore, a most splendorous town in South India! 

A Zen Quibble. There is no point in this Zen story. That is the point.

– Ananth Madhavan.

When I came to America decades ago and saw my first Dunkin Donut, I was relieved. It was my first day in the land of plenty. I was jetlagged and hungry, and I couldn’t wait to sink my teeth into those ring-shaped delicacies. I imagined they’d be piping hot and savory, just like the ‘vada’, a popular breakfast food back home. Wrong! The damn thing was sweet. And you dipped it not in spicy chutney and sambar but in coffee.  I didn’t waste a moment reporting (via a handwritten aerogramme) this hilarious discovery to my near and dear ones back in India. Everyone had a good laugh, as I found out when I got their handwritten reply a month later. Episodes like this played out time and again, and each time my writing skills were put to good use. Then, a little at a time, other communications devices replaced the aerogramme, that thin lightweight piece of foldable/gummed paper for writing a letter for transit via airmail. R.I.P Aerogramme! I miss you. Decades later I established a home in India, where I spend most of my time now. Friends in America are forever curious about life in this land far way. But information is ubiquitous now, and the internet has strangulated the joy of reading a handwritten letter that has had to travel a long way in time and distance just to tell us fascinatingly personal factoids about lands we may never see.

So I was delighted when a dear friend of mine, an American Michiganite named Tom (an excellent writer to boot), having recently (sort of) wrapped up life in America and now living (with his wife who is Japanese) in the land of the rising sun, decided to blog his ‘life in Japan’. His Tokyo experiences are no less wondrous than when I first bit into a slice of NY pizza in the ’70s. Aptly called ‘The Cranky Old Man’, it chronicles the experiences of an American living in Japan. Most of the material he writes about you can’t easily find on the internet – a very personal perspective. Bite size posts, quick reads, easy to read more than once, like those handwritten letters I was once able to write. Give it a try. You’ll love it.

CLICK HERE FOR THE CRANKY OLD MAN.

I’ll be back in June, maybe earlier. We’ll talk about the rains and mangoes.   And more.

Till then, this is Storyteller Vish saying,

Go get vaccinated. Stay safe. And do come back here from time to time.

Thanks for reading.