How to stay optimistic in uncertain times

Alittle over a week left for Christmas, and this period’s looking a bit of an anti-climax — the global climate ought to be celebratory, but cautious would better describe it, gauging from the gloomy financial picture, India too, with the rupee in almost free fall against the dollar. B-Town, contrarily, is showing buoyancy this quarter, celebrating hit after hit and hoping for more, next week and in early January, with Don 2 and Players to hit the marquee.

King Khan hasn’t been seen as out and about for his Don offering as he had for Ra.One. There is another star though, a Hollywood one, who is appearing to match the intense energy we witnessed from SRK during those earlier promotions — the magnetic Tom Cruise, continent hopping for MI 4. After India, it was Dubai, then London, in a whirlwind time span. Just when you thought him done, he’s slated to be back here, today, in Pune no less — amazing for a star who’s nearly 50 years old: guess when a global big budgeter is at stake, impossible is nothing. In fact, at the London premiere he told scribes he would dabble in even more action once he turned the big 5-0h in July next year.

On the topic of London, one of my favourite poets Ted Hughes (essayed on screen by a relatively unknown Daniel Craig, pre-Bond days), who was married to the brilliant American poet Sylvia Plath was honoured last week with a memorial at Poet’s Corner (Britain’s most famous resting place for the greats in literature) in Westminster Abbey.

He was Britain’s Poet Laureate from the early 80’s till his death, so for fans its surprising this memorial took so long — but better late than never. It is perhaps unexpected for many, that a poet using animals as metaphor in his works — their beauty and simplicity certainly, but also, more evocatively, their savagery — also wrote children’s books. But he did, and a lot of them too.

And whilst on the topic of children, the latest Brit survey in popular culture has underlined how more and more women are turning to alcohol to cope with the pressure of being ‘supermoms’. It is a fallout of the times we live in perhaps, where pressures are enormous and we also want it all — settling for less is not really an option.

I find my own pressures eased considerably by just being in the company of my five-year-old and her friends, regardless of the ‘supermom’ situation. I got a wondrous opportunity last week too, being a part of the funfair put up by her pre-primary school, aptly tilted ‘A magical land’. Not sure about hitting the bottle, but I would gladly advocate a morning spent in the company of babies, beribboned, ballooned multi-hued surroundings, carnival atmosphere replete with laughter, the unadulterated joy of the very young at the simplest of things —a merry-go-round ride, a cotton candy, winning an egg and spoon balancing prize — as stress buster par excellence in these uncertain times, nothing seems as healing.