Mumbai Diary: Monday musings

Celestial sight seeing
The rain brings with it yuck and muck, but there are some blessings too. Like three days of heavy rain means that the waterfalls have started.

Sometimes, life is a picture postcard. Pic/Shrikant Khuperkar

As the land glows green like an emerald and raindrops cling on to leaves like lovers in a fervent embrace, the waterfalls thunder down the rocks at Rabale in Navi Mumbai. And we have no option but to twist a verse a little and state: ‘One impulse from a waterfall, may tell you more of man; of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can'.

Don't fall into the app trap
Although smartphone applications, or apps, are immensely convenient, one still has to exercise caution when using them. Like any other facility or device, an app has pros and cons, the main factor against it being the fact that it can access and transmit your data, some or all of it.

And for unscrupulous practitioners, the most attractive target is your financial data. We recently received a message from the Reserve Bank of India warning against an app that is called ‘All Bank Balance Enquiry' or a variation of it. Targets apparently receive WhatsApp messages purporting to check your bank account balance, and asking you to download the app.

It even looks genuine enough, with an RBI ‘logo'. Except that the RBI says it has ever developed any such application. So, while the app may well be genuine, i.e. not created with a nefarious intent, we would still err on the side of caution and stay away from it.

To run is to live
So, of course it was International Yoga Day yesterday and the city was contorting to the global craze. For some at our favourite hunting ground, which is Shivaji Park, it was still another discipline that ruled though.

Branches of trees and runners (above) who had come in from Borivali at Shivaji Park yesterday

Some runners were sticking to their regular early morning runs, and a group had actually run all the way from Borivali and reached Shivaji Park by 9 am. Just a smattering of running die-hards were still circulating around the park at 9.15 am. They said they had just finished a yoga session, and just could not go home without even one round of running.

Some were from the Shivaji Park Marathon Club (SPMC) in the area, while the others, though not SPMC members said, Shivaji Park is for all runners. The running community as a whole. We agree.

Keep running Shivaji Park-ers, but watch out for those fallen branches. Meanwhile, SPMC's Naveen Hegde says that the ultimate aim of every runner is, "health and no doctors' bills." Let's do an asana to that.