Author: nourishncherish

Whimsical Writer – Articles, Novellas Voracious Reader – Fiction, Non-Fiction, Children’s Books – anything really! Childrens’ Stories – Live in a World of Pure Imagination Writing Classes – Novel Writing & Science Writing for Children

Slay the Dragon (NOT the Parrot)

My dear father loves the stock market and anything to do with it almost as much as his children. I know we rank higher in the love chart, because he doesn’t forget facts about stocks, but he does forget facts about us. Lock him away without a physical copy of Economic Times therefore, and he gets forlorn. So, imagine his glee when the husband got an opp. to visit India on Business.

“Please get me a copy of Dalal Street and Economic times, pa. Not the Sunday ET mind you.” he told him as soon as he heard the news. The husband nodded glad to be able to buy something that would make the dear man happy.
A hectic packing schedule later (another blog waiting to happen), we went to drop him off at the airport.

The father gong sounded, “Remember to get the Economic Times pa. Remember not the Sunday ET. I will send you an email also to that effect. Not Sunday. Any other day is okay.”

He gave him a final wave before leaving the airport with the loving words, “Not Sunday!” (Once a teacher always a teacher – repeat after me, “Not Sunday”)


Now, my father knows that life can be intense and people tend to forget. So, he typed out an email mid-visit thus: (I shall, in another blog, touch up on the typing)
Dear XXX
We are all finehere.My new boss(the Baby ) and hisstser are doing well.Pl. buy Dalal Street and Economic Times.
Love
Appa
PS: I do NOT want Sunday Economic Times.

Now, the husband glanced at this email on Monday morning. He was supposed to leave India that night. So, his head swimming with ‘Sunday’, he tried his level best to procure a copy of the Sunday Economic Times. Failing to do so, he weaseled up to the peon in the office and asked him to see if they had a copy of the Sunday Economic Times anyway. He was in luck as the peon had stored away the Sunday copy. It isn’t everyday that working-in-America saabs thank the peon for old newspapers. The heart felt thanks made the man’s heart swell and he felt morally obliged to give him Monday’s copy as well.

One can imagine the triumphant scene whence the prince was told to slay the dragon (not the parrot) to obtain the approval of the king. Slay the dragon but not the parrot. Remember not the parrot. And the prince crosses 7 seas, dons bitter pills, fights gory creatures and slays the parrot.

The king and prince have since made up, since the dragon was also slain by mistake, but there it is – not the parrot!

It turns out that the Sunday Economic Times costs 3 times the amount and has 1/3rd the content of a week day ET, hence the “Not Sunday”

Too Much Happiness

Many persons who have not studied Mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, this science requires great fantasy.
– Sophia Kovalevsky

I read about Sophia Kovalevsky recently and the lady’s life was pure inspiration. (The short story: Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro) Here was a person who was not only a mathematician, but also a novelist. She was the first lady to ever become a Professor of Maths in Europe and this was in the 18th century. There are a number of awards in her name to encourage girls to pursue Maths.

It is therefore with a heavy heart that I see a century and a half later, we are still limping along on this path, especially in the USA. Our minds perform best when challenged and when we shut off challenges, where are we? Fighting against preconceived notions has been a bane for many generations. This study looks at the effect Elementary School Teachers have on the children. Not surprisingly, if lady teachers were less confident in Mathematics, the girls tended to start thinking this to be the norm. The study touched a nerve because I have heard so many teachers confess that they are not great in Maths in Elementary Schools, when they shouldn’t be.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125172940.htm

What Maths needs is patience, practice and understanding. It is as much an art as a science. When equipped with the right sort of discipline, this subject is music for the soul. I was blessed in school to have teachers who brought out the joy of Mathematics in me. I can only wish the same for all generations to come.

How low is too low?

Clothes are a personal choice. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering about how some clothes defy the laws of Physics.

Many a time I sit on my train wondering what to wonder about, when teenage boys walk in and fill the void. When I say walk in, I use the term loosely. They waddle in like ducks with athritis. Their knees are bent in an awkward manner and their feet land as apart from each other as possible – you know making an obstuse angle like this.

\ /

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Why do they walk thus you ask. To keep on a gravity defying bit of clothing, that is why: Their pants hanging on for dear life to the waist. I suspect it must be pretty rotten being the pants in question. I mean imagine living every moment wondering whether one is going to fall down. I suspect they use belts to keep them where they are, but I haven’t really looked. It seems indecent to look at people’s pants especially if it means catching sight of their underwear instead. Coming to which, what do these boys call their underwear? It is clearly not “under” any other piece of clothing. Most of the time the pants are more than midway down the thigh. Sigh!

http://www.mercurynews.com/san-mateo-county/ci_18468273?source=most_viewed – pants below bottom

Rebellion takes many forms – the pants in this case. Nobody says anything of course, but merely look away discreetly. Which is why this news item intrigued me – the crew asked this man to deplane since his pants were below his bottom. The man did not comply and created a fuss before being whisked away.


But that leads us to the question – how far is too far and how low too low?

A Cryonics Question

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/28730691/detail.html

The Cryonics Movement Founder, Robert Ettinger died. He had his own body stored. When his first wife died, he stored her body. Then, the poor man lost his second wife as well and of course stored her body too. He must have loved them both dearly.

In the future(possibly hundreds of years from now), when technology does develop enough to resusciate a man’s life from his remains, imagine the shock the man will get on springing to life in an unrecognizable world. As if this was not enough trouble to be getting along with, what would happen when he finds his wives’ spring on him er … spring back to life. Which wife is his legal and binding partner? Is it the one who comes back to life first?

I am not sure as to their ages when they died, but what happens to to seniority in the family? Love will triumph – maybe the women will continue to love their man, but will they love each other? Maybe, they should have stored Osama Bin Laden’s body to find out how he managed with three wives under one roof without so much as an opp. to step out for groceries….

The World may change, but it’s worries not much…..

Physical Google – Where are you?

With great advances in technology, the size of things produced has become smaller and smaller, while we seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Consequently searching for something in the house means ransacking the house more thoroughly than a bunch of bandits would. Why not keep things where they belong you ask? A fair question to anyone who doesn’t know the pride and joy the father and husband take in leaving the house a messy place. “That is what makes it a home, otherwise, it would be a hotel!” they proclaim loudly and admire each other’s sentiments and pat themselves on the back. I would pat them too, albeit a bit too hard for their liking.


I don’t know which animal it is that does this – I think it is a badger.(It is not an ostrich contary to popular opinion – the only pic I could find was of an ostrich though) Namely bury its head in the ground till the danger passes and then surface. I tried the badger technique the last time around and was quite unsuccessful. You see midway through burying myself in the hole and ignoring the whole search act, the corner of my eye caught a sofa being upturned. I don’t think badgers have sofa sets in their homes to be overturned while searching for something, but if it did, I think badgers would revise their opinion of ignoring events such as these.

I had merely uttered the threat idly because of I was tired of finding things that I was not searching for just then and not finding the things that I was searching for then. Little did I know that the threat would result in the house being turned upside down in the literal sense of the word.

All because the latest thing being searched for was a memory card. The size of my thumb.

Also, I wonder if you’ve noticed that the size of our belongings seem inversely proportional to our size. For instance, the youngest offender in our household, Tucky, is but a few months old, and he too cries when he loses sight of his possessions. But unlike our possessions, he does not need sofas upturned. He just has to look around the room – his possessions are there – loud, clear, big and bright. Whereas ours are dull grey, or better yet dirt colored memory sticks!

Just because we learn the art of camouflage doesn’t mean we impose this learning on our belongings – but alas, humans apply their learning everywhere. If Google could come up with a search engine for the wild, wild web, why not come up with something for physical objects?

Leave the old flush alone

“Can you imagine plumbers charge $50 for something as simple as replacing this lever? It takes five minutes to do!” proclaimed the husband holding up a black-ish looking object. I looked impressed. He was holding up a contraption that looked technical in a very plumbery fashion, not to mention that triumphant glow on his face. Having repaired the toilet flush when it acted up once before, I felt he was entirely justified in feeling competent in the general area of plumbing.

He started off at the end of a long, hot day after a refreshing shower. The flush in one of the bathrooms was having a minor hiccup. Once the water filled up, the water continued to leak without shutting off the water supply. This was because a lever that was supposed to tell the water knob to “Cheese it!” when the water filled up, wasn’t doing it’s job. I hovered around for a minute or two, and then loitered about the house doing the intangible, unnecessary things that I do. Then, I put the children to sleep; all the while listening to the water go on and off. By now, it was evident that it was no 5 minute affair the c.plumber was dealing with. I mean two children don’t go to bed in that span of time in our household. So, I went in to the bathroom – just to get a general status, you know – mutter the encouraging word and pat the tired back sort of thing.

What met my eyes shook me to the core. On the floor was the erstwhile dry, clean man that I love. He looked like the flush had whipped him a couple of times, while rapping his knuckles and making him kneel down in a pond of water. My heart bled for him, and I enquired. I must have sounded like a rattle to a baby, because I was given the situation in so many words. Pretty soon, I was kneeling down in the wet bathroom and oggling at a petulant knob with my neck corked at 22 degrees in the NW direction, with a cutting plier in my hands.

I’ve been meaning to talk to these architects about this. Why place these toilet flushes in a corner – why not in the center with a full view of all the knobs? While I struggled with the cutting plier and tried to angle the grip, I banged my head a couple of times against an inconveniently placed closet. The husband had replaced the lever just fine and while tightening the knob found that it was an obstinate one and refused to tighten all the way and stopped one turn short. Anywhere else, that would mean a creak, but with water it means an incessant drip, and could not be ignored. So, I tried my hand at it. “All I need is a small mirror to get a good view of the knob”, I said.

So, the husband handed me one. While calculating the length of the mirror and estimating the length of my hand, there was a difference of a couple of centimeters and the dratted thing fell with a resounding crash.

The children asleep in bed, the husband and I in the bathroom, the sound of a mirror breaking and the steady sound of ‘Drip Drip Drip’. All you had to do was turn off the lights, and I would have screamed. The experience had set us both on edge. I wonder how tightening corks and screws and things under the flush can frazzle one’s hair, but it did. We both looked like a ghost chased us down a scary lane in the middle of a cold wintry night.

Cleaning up broken glass in a pool of water has problems writ large all over it. To cut a long story short, we took out the new lever and put the old one back on to stop the drip. Then I cleaned up (without cutting myself on the shards of glass I might add), had a shower and came out to the welcoming cries of an infant demanding his midnight snack.

“I wonder why plumbers only charge $50 for this!” said the husband, and I agreed whole heartedly. The solution to the flush problem was a simple enough one – we just pulled the lever manually and made it do its duty forcefully.

“Leave the old flush alone”, is the new watchword in the house.

If Dear were dear

You know how you start to write a letter and automatically start to address the recipient as ‘Dear’? I’ve always pondered about that. Sometimes, I’ve written ‘Dear’ to folks I could not whole heartedly call as dears. In fact there have been a few where my imagination drew a blank at even trying to imagine anybody else doing so.

A case in point: There was once this man to whom I had to address a letter. He was a Deputy Sub Registrar of something in a government office in India. As is the practice, I had to use the opening “Dear Mr So and So”. But believe me, never have I found a man less dear to me in all my life. It may have been the fact that I witnessed the man at his bossy best. He was man-handling a sorry looking sallow faced peon without actually touching him. How is that possible you ask? Well, the man’s legs were squeaking under him and his knees were positively quivering with emotion, not to mention the stuttering and the silent unshed tears. He had a patchy pendulum like motion going. His body seemed to oscillate with the frequency of the deputy to the sub assistant head registrar’s tone of voice. If those aren’t symptoms of being manhandled, I don’t know what are. I asked somebody nearby what the row was about and he answered that “Saar” being an important person was entitled to get angry at peons like this. Apparently, the great power and responsibilities of being a sub deputy assistant registrar or whatever he was, was too much for the man to handle, and he was therefore entitled to behave in this appalling manner.

What I would have liked to do was address the fellow as an “Egotistic procrastinating shirker” (I had requested for something five times already, and had nothing to show for it other than carbon copies of my own letters.) The peon in question told me it is not a good idea to draw his attention to that fact – I had written a loving letter enclosing copies of all my previous letters and rounded off with polite sarcasm by asking him when he would be able to consider my repeated requests. Which was why my heart went out to the peon. He knew the man and his habits, and he had evidently saved my letter from being ripped apart in anger and the shredded peices joining the breeze on a hot day.

Dear Sub Assistant – my foot was my general feeling then.

So, it isn’t with too much regret that the practice when it comes to emails has shifted to the more informal ‘Hi’ – I don’t mind saying hi. with ‘Dear’, one had to use the superlative for folks one really considers dear. So one uses ‘Dearest’ for dear folks and ‘My dear dearest’ for dearest and it was all most confusing.

I would like to see the reaction of the s.a.d.registrar when the peon hollers a ‘Hi’ at him and asks for something to be done.

Our Achievement

Indians are good at patting themselves in the back.  If you have any doubts all you have to do is type out a mail listing all our achievements from the beginning of time and send it to your friends. (The number zero, Ayurveda, Yoga – you get the gist) Before you know it, not only will twenty different people have forwarded the list to you, but there will also be fervent appeals asking you to prove your patriotism by setting it as your Facebook status for an hour.

What is appealing to me about us as a race is our resilience. We wash down scams with gusto and reach for higher and higher levels with each subsequent scam. When the Bofors scandal came about, drawing room conversations erupted in fury about how this amount is unheard of and doomsday prophecies were made about how difficult it is for a country to bounce back from a financial blow like that.  Rs. 400 million is no joke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors_scandal

Hardly less than 5 years later, we found that Harshad Mehta had swindled banks to the tune of Rs. 4000 crore. Crippling to the economy was the verdict.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harshad_Mehta

Now, we are dealing with a staggering 2G scam that leaves me fumbling for the number of zeroes. (176K crore i.e. approximately $33 billion )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G_scam

We even hold the honor of having a wiki page listing the scams by year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scandals_in_India_by_year

For all the brainpower exerted in pulling off the scams and the bribes on a grand scale or as a matter of life, it is indeed sad that these same people do not even think of applying their mental faculties towards anything constructive.

I tried searching for “Scams in <Country name> “ and not one of the countries I searched for had an organized listing by year. There. Our achievement.

I sleep like a baby …

I don’t remember being an infant. I suppose most people don’t. But given my preferences now, I am not sure I would have enjoyed being the infant me. Well obviously, my parents tell me I was a happy baby, but I am just wondering. Let me tell you my reasoning…

Some people do it for economic reasons – it is their job, they get paid for it. Nothing else could make it worthwhile, especially if one has to do it everyday – day after day. So, they torture themselves and do it anyway. The night watchman waiting for something to happen in the still of the night while his eyelids are stretching themselves to see how much further it has to travel to close completely. It is a tense moment, another second for the eye to close completely when the sub-conscious, with that quirky permanence, reminds him of his duty and his neck jerks in that ungraceful manner and pulls the eyelids open again. There is little chance of conversation to help things along unless he chooses for his conversation the very person he is looking out for; a thief. I feel strongly for thieves too. It must be pretty rotten waiting with sleep gathering around them for the right moment to strike and then find a pesky night watchman jerk awake in the nick of time. I digress.

Anyway …. I have professed my love for the nightly snooze a good many times on this blog. I’ve sacrificed the restoring quite a few times – but I cannot pretend to love those long hours that stretch mercilessly through the night with a Production issue. I am not fond of interrupting my slumber by jerking awake. Yet, the call of duty is a tough one and I rise and shine … well rise dully and shine rather desultorily.

But infants have none of this. There is nobody paying them to keep awake. Not to be harsh or anything, but the world around them will function a lot better if they do sleep. Yet, you find these night warriors the most willing of folks to keep awake. They think nothing of going to that state of near sleep and plucking their eyes open. When sleep seems inevitable, they do what night watchmen cannot do. They cry themselves hoarse and awaken not only their senses but everybody else’s too.

Maybe the psychology of the thing to not do things asked of us starts early. When folks ask us to sleep, we don’t. When they ask us to remain awake, we’d like more than anything in the world to sleep. As for the adult me, I can do a straight 12 hour stretch anytime you ask me to – quite the obedient one what?

Well….till little Tucky learns to sleep like an adult, I get to sleep like a baby every night.

Sundaes: Sorry – what flavor?

My mother is an accomplished cook (A well documented fact in these chronicles). She came during the precious last weeks of my pregnancy and let her culinary talents flourish. Meals I prefer to classify as feasts were produced at the slightest drop of a hat. Then, I went into labour and had a baby. About the same time a terrible metamorphosis seems to have happened to her as well. There is a distinct degenerative trend in her cooking.  She spurns the occasional chilli, recoils from spices, and classifies half the vegetable kingdom as unfit for consumption. As if this weren’t enough, she upped the frequency of feeding me this cuisine. I only have to remain half awake to have some bland soup, or drink thrust at me with loving hands. The theory being that the extra nutrition is needed to feed the baby. She tells me of post partum mothers of the post Indian Independence era making ghee their best friend and drinking cups of it, while subtly deploring that I don’t accord it the same treatment. The general rule of thumb being that bland is the formula that is safest for mother and baby.

In spite of all this, there is the occasional discomfort that the newborn exhibits. Guess what this loving mother of mine does? After the immediate task of alleviating the discomfort of the infant, she then spends her considerable mental faculties evaluating and tabulating everything she fed yours truly in the past 24 hours. Then she proceeds to rank them by taste, and she boots the tastiest of the lot from the already shrinking list as the potential offender. Once, the tastiest thing I had eaten was an orange and they were on the potential list to be banned. They only survived because of my vehement opposition.

Why am I telling you all this? To prove that breast milk is one of the most thought about items on the post partum agenda. Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, great aunts are all full of tips on breast milk. So imagine my surprise when this rare commodity was featured in a news item alongside commercially sold icecreams?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/02/25/134056923/breast-milk-ice-cream-a-hit-at-london-store


To be teased as the cow in the house is one thing; to make a career of it quite another.

To follow up on this news item, UK banned breast milk sundaes soon after.
http://allweirdnews.com/breast-milk-sundaes-not-allowed/

One thing still nags me : who is the target audience for this icecream? It can’t be the infants surely ….