Author: nourishncherish

Archana made me think. Now when you get an email stating your head will blow up in a thousand pieces if it is not forwarded to all your friends, I belong to the class of people who test the limits of the email, and co-erces my friends into collecting the shards of my fractured skull if that email were true, and promptly deletes it.

That said, I will say some things about myself only because it made me think. But please respect my opinion that I do not want to tag other folks.

! I admire creativity. Any job done with a flair of creativity gets a mental pat on the back from me. For the same reason, I love to read, dance and sing. I am…well was…..a Bharatnatyam dancer in my “hey-days” as I like to call it (Said with a jaunty look and a look of the glazed one looking fondly upon their past with a nostalgic tinge.) As for the singing, I am very creative with lyrics, and have found on several occasions that the latest Tamil movie songs have my lyrics in them. I should be a little more guarded while singing in public I guess. Too many copyright violations of late (Kunju kutty – dam-pu-chik, pattu kutty dam-pu-chik. Amma kutty – thanga laalee! My daughter loves these songs of mine, and looks like Kollywood is lapping it up too!)

@ My folks tell me I am very determined (Well… their words are not exactly these, but I am an optimistic soul, and so “determined” I am!)

# I reminisce about pleasant memories, and thank my stars for the wonderful life I have (family and friends) I adore to spend time with my family and friends.

$ I am passionate about anything I take up, and from there stems point (@) I guess.

% Travelling is great fun, and I have my father to thank for making me love people and places. Every school holiday, off we went gallivanting around the country. I see now that he really did think it an important aspect of education, and therefore, did not hesitate to spend for vacations. I can think back about every vacation we had (well almost all – if you discount those we went when I was too young to remember)

^ I was brought up in the beautiful Nilgiris with bountiful nature for company. My parents were both teachers, and we grew up inside the school campus. The most beautiful place I have ever seen. It is a tiny place (the School nestles in 800 acres of its own land), and every vacation was spent in adventure trips exploring the hillsides! College in Coimbatore, and thereafter the software industry it is for me. I now work as an analyst in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

& I love to learn new things, and believe that the more you learn, the more exciting life becomes.

* I detest hypocrisy. So when I look at hypocrites, I play the fun game of guessing their actual thoughts, and then process their thoughts through a very defective prism, and imagine how distorted the image must be in order for them to say what they did. So, if I were to hear about the great beauty of a garbage can, I spend precious moments trying to figure out the various adverbs they might have used…and well…you get the drift!

( I was hoping that use of the special symbols would make it easier to say 9 things about me. Seriously, it is not helping! It really is too much to say 9 things about yourself!

Now that I have shed the burden of responding to the tag behind me, I shall continue on with my posts without procrastinating!

The author lives in California with her husband and 2-year old, both of whom she loves way beyond words can say.

It is Navarathri, and I can imagine the festive frenzy in India now. Lakshmi Puja and Saraswathi Puja will be performed in every single home. Come to think of it, even now, I always put a coin in a purse (even if empty and stowed).

I was musing on these very thoughts on my way back from lunch, and stopped in my tracks at a seemingly normal gesture. Two men, dressed in business casuals and evidently working in the city, threw their one-cent coins on the street, like people sometimes throw trash, and moved on with not even a second glance. I was somehow disturbed. Why could he not have given to the numerous homeless? Or simpler still, dropped the cash in the donation jar kept almost at every counter?

I hesitate to throw out usable clothes, and try my best to donate them whenever possible. I guess our thinking is just ….well “different”!

I was reading DilbertBlog on the stifling airport procedures and couldn’t help this post! A fortnight ago, we had been to Alaska with friends. Apart from losing a small perfume bottle to airport security, I emerged unscathed.

Beyond the security gates lies a hungry explorer’s haven. Pretty soon, we were tucking into a dish from every restaurant. I’ll spare you the details of our mastication, but suffice it to say that we were stuffed beyond belief. That was the time I got pondering on pants with extendible button loops. (I shall save this for another post)

To settle the turbulence in our stomachs before our red-eye flight, we bought a large bottle of water. We neared the gate, and guess what? No bottled water aboard. The whole thing ticked my friend off in no small manner, and he insisted we finish the water before boarding the flight. Don’t ask me why we humoured him, but we did! We drank, and drank till we had to force a bathroom break to make more room for more water. We boarded throwing out the empty bottle, and taking in the full bladder.

At this point in the narration, I would like the reader to take note that airline seats don’t function well with squirming passengers. Pretty soon, we had frowning passengers with all the creaking of the seats. The seat belt sign was still on, and the bladder was sending urgent signals to relieve the built-up tension in the there. Barely had the seat belt sign turned off, when we made a beeline for the loos. Once inside, the slow and steady release of tension was sheer bliss (to be experienced to comprehend the full extent of relief!)

Sometimes, security measures don’t consider the irrationality of folks drinking up a gallon of water before boarding, and that’s why it is so inconvenient!

She felt sleepy: She stared into her boring face as she narrated the incident. It was impossible to not think of how lifeless her good story sounded just because she was looking into her eyes. There was nothing there, and she found her thoughts wandering to how her life partner must feel.

A few days later, she showed her a photograph of her lover, and she saw her partner’s boring eyes looking up at her. She felt sleepy.

The missiles were landing continuously. One even hit the window hard. Everyone looked up startled – we thought these were times of peace – where were these coming from? The shopkeepers stepped out, and spent a silent moment pondering who will muster the courage to stop this attack.

All eyes were fixated on a six year old boy with mischief writ large on his black eyes, and a large pebble in each hand. As he aimed and threw a larger stone this time, he gleamed with pleasure and looked around for accolades. There were none forthcoming, and the poor boy, in his mistaken stake at fame continued with renewed vigour. The saloon owner stepped forward and “Ahoy”-ed the boy, and said:

“Can you stop doing that please? Thank you!”

The boy said “Sure”, and simply changed the direction of his stone-rain.

I could not help thinking of the same situation in India. Fat chance the boy would have got a “Please” and a “Thank you” in the same sentence for his deed! He would most probably have had an assortment of expletives muttered before being asked to cut it out! But, the point is this: the boy listened, and the fact still remains that an adult did manage to stop a boy from pelting stones at his shop window.

Just the vast difference in the manner it was handled was interesting to note.

Life always gives everybody moments to cherish and nourish. I am sure most call-center representatives talk to customers with a gargantuan effort to stop from splitting their sides at our stupidity. Today, I have the supreme satisfaction of livening up a family’s dinner table with my knowledgeable call to my cell-phone’s customer service.

I have a cell-phone with keeps blinking to my face that I have n voicemails. I tried telling it, that I KNOW I have n voicemails, I just can’t retrieve it! My voicemail has been password protected (and my password works no longer) to ensure that nobody else retrieves my voicemails. I am trying to think of one person who is interested in messages left for a pearl-aged mother of a 2 year old, and draw a blank.

After a couple of indignant phone calls from my friends who had to repeat the message again, since I had no method of listening to their winding messages, I called customer service, and it went like this:

She: Sure Ma’am. Resetting your password should be easy to do.
Me: Gee….thanks

A minute later, she said I am all set.

I breezed into the voicemail, and the automated conversation took an ugly turn:
VM: Please enter your password
Me: —-#
VM: Please enter your password — in a more indignant tone, but that’s entirely my perception
Me: —-#
VM: Sorry you are having trouble, please try again later. Beep.

The blasted thing just blew me off! Perseverance thy name being me, I persevered.
I huffed and puffed, and called customer service again. Several calls later (Both to customer service and my VM), I was getting more and more piqued with the utter callousness with which the system cut me off while I was interacting with it.

The system kept cutting me off on my face. I pick my battles, but this one was rubbing itself on me the wrong way. I was ticked off, and intended to show it a piece of its own abyssmal behaviour. So, I called VM, and when it asked for the password, I disconnected – Ha Ha!!

Throughout this drama, I had Mike sitting on the other side displaying a remarkable restraint from popping out of his chair and laughing. I know what his family hears at the dinner table tonight!

PS: I still can’t access voicemail, so, don’t bother leaving me a message!

I.D.Iot was a proud man. His single contribution to the world of Science was purely unimaginable. He had a series of startling discoveries to his credit, and his genius mind had put every single grain of truth to use to change the world in the most remarkable way. I.D.Iot prided himself on his thoroughness and had painfully documented every startling discovery in his vaporizing sheets. The idea behind these vaporizing sheets was simple. He help the passkey phrase, and on whispering the passkey phrase to soap bubbles, the sheets would appear – a ton of information regarding atoms, elements, wormholes, time warps and what-have-you.

I.D.Iot was around for generations. He had mastered the art of travelling to the planet near a black hole where time barely passed, and consequently aged slower than most mortals. He was an amiable man with a humble demeanour, and his intentions were always noble. He had in him, as much knowledge to destroy as to create. He never once thought of destruction. He was considered God by virtue of all the above.

Now he lay dying. His time was up. He was tired and could not muster the energy to take up the time travel to rejuvenate himself. He had wanted to pass on to his most trusted follower access to all his learnings. His memory was failing him – but he knew the key to the vaporizing sheets had to do with the theme that “Everything was made up of atoms”, and that’s what he muttered when he died.

His disciples tried hard to get the sheets, but failed. Instead of using the knowledge they had from I.D.Iot, they spent time trying to retrieve his work. Time passed and only the mantra got passed down from generation to generation: none of the knowledge.

The idiot mantra was unquestionable.

The querulent few who did question what atoms were made of were quickly rebuked as mavericks and the world settled into a state of knowledge inertia. What we don’t know can’t hurt us. IDIOT was there to protect the world.

And so it goes, till another Renaissance was born.

We are trying to contact Karthik.

Any South Indian knows the futility of this statement before they hit the full-stop. I am a bit fuzzy on the statistics, but it surely figures in the top 10 list of most frequent names. You see my parents-in-law and his parents became friends when they last visited here. Time passed…Karthik changed apartments and moved on. Now I want to contact them without their contact information.

I have a friend who works in the same company Karthik works for, and I shot him an email asking for Karthik’s contact information. So, he must’ve dutifully contacted the Karthik and within the hour, I had all his phone numbers.

My husband (H) called him and this is how the conversation must have looked:
H: Hello…..May I talk to Karthik?
K: Yes…..that’s me
H: Eh……how are you? So, did you guys move?
K: No…..why, and who is this?H: Introduces himself – ** Still not sure because he doesn’t sound anything like Karthik**How is Chitra doing?
K: Who Chitra? My wife’s name is Lakshmi.
H now feels that the conversation is not going as well as it should. So, he volunteers more irrelevant information
H: Oh, doesn’t Chitra work at Google?
K: Chitra may be working at Google, but I am married to Lakshmi.

At which point, H would have found it prudent to end the conv. BTW, the above piece of conversation is purely fictional. Point is: We got a different Karthik.
So, I shot off another email to aforesaid friend, and qualified it saying: He speaks the Coimbatore dialect of Tamil.

So, now what would my friend do with this useless piece of information? Stick a mike to another Karthik and ask him to say a few words in Tamil to validate?

I can’t stop myself from giggling while imagining the following:
1) The quizzical look on Karthik’s face when my friend approached him for contact information. He must have thought that his parents sphere of influence extends far & wide, and given him the numbers anyway.
2) The increasingly embarrassing conversation between the husband and the above Karthik.
3) Friend sticking a mike to all the Karthiks in the company and asking them to say a few words in Tamil (Thankfully, there was only 1 person by this name, and we had already established that he is not the person we were looking for)

We had just moved to Coimbatore (a city bustling at the foothills of the Nilgiris), and within a few days had several offers from prospective maids. We recruited the one who was amongst the first few to approach us, and had a strong recommendation from our neighbour. She was a sturdy lady in her sixties, and weilded a broom like a brickbat. She was a lady of few words, and generally nodded her way through the home. If she had to sweep, she would, whether or not you were in the wake of the broom’s sweep. If you were prudent and nimble, you would jump away from its wake.

Usually, we were up about the time she came, and so were in possession of our mental faculties to escape the broom. One day, my brother, after a late night movie was sprawled out in front of the TV on a straw mat, and was asleep when she arrived. She had decided to give herself an oil massage before coming, and stepped into the home beaming like Durga Devi. She was dark complexioned, her eyes were red (probably with the heat and fury of her oil massage). With the shining oil, all she had to do was stick out her tongue, which incidentally was extremely red thanks to the betel leaves that she relished, and she was all set to attract the most ardent devotees!

My hapless brother was probably smiling in his dreams when he stirred at the sound of the broom swishing around him, and to date I can visualise his extremely adroit move that was pretty much how salmons travel upstream. He leaped from his supine position on the floor to the sofa in one graceful move and his eyes didn’t blink for an entire minute.

PS: Don’t ask me why I came up with this post, I was reading about the migrating patterns of salmons, and this incident came to my mind!

The tea vendor had tears in his eyes. His shop: the one he had christened “Kajol” after his favorite idol was closed, and he knew not when he would be allowed to reopen. He had poured his heart and soul into his tea-shop, and it had acquired quite a clientele from the neighbouring offices.

Apparently, it was found that a gangster, sought heavily by the Police department, had been observed drinking tea. Therefore, all tea shops were closed with immediate effect. Nobody drinks tea, gangster or otherwise, to deter future gangsters from refreshing themselves before their drastic deeds!

Does this fictional piece sound sort of far-fetched? This is the parallel I could think of when I heard the Indian Govt had banned all bloggers, because they believed some terrorists in the recent Mumbai blasts had used the blog media to communicate amongst themselves!

God help Policy makers!