Category: Uncategorized

Could Be Anything!

The Small Joys …

I remember it vividly. The father came home beaming one evening. The President of India was visiting our School and the general populace was abuzz. I remember all of us feverishly polishing our shoes for days, like the President’s prime task of the day was to check our shoes. This activity was encouraged almost with indecent glee by everyone. Really, I don’t know why we polished our shoes that hard.

So, why was the father beaming? Oh..yes…sorry, I lost my train of thought and got carried away with the shoe-polishing. The father was given the honorable task of signing all the permit cards into the auditorium where the President would give his speech. He thought that the honor was bestowed on him because he was a responsible member of the teaching community etc. I told him that it might be because his signature was the hardest to emulate. His signature is like a hot cooked ‘Cup-o-Noodle’ slipped off your hands and splashed across the pages. Something like this cool 3-D pen.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/3-d-printing-revolution-gets-first-pen-173841593.html

He laughed at my description and selected his best pen to get started. Around the 100th card, his hands started paining. He complained and carried on. By the time 500 cards were signed…well, there is no need to go into what shape he was in.

Every now and then, situations arise where my esteemed signature is required on paragraph 3.4 on page 12, and then again in 4.2 on page 16. Fifteen such pages later, the joy of using a pen (even a special one) fades a little, and I think of the father and the President’s visit. Maybe, one of those ‘Software License Agreements’ are the best. You know the ones where you don’t read what it says and just hit the cute looking ‘Accept’ button to proceed? Those ones.

Anyway, I noticed small things that can make the drudgery of this better. Some people have the forethought of placing those little placeholders to indicate the place of signature, but I recently had a 300 page stack without the placeholders and I missed them so sorely.

It is little things that make a difference. I have always marveled at the housekeeping staff in places I have worked in. For the most part, you don’t see them around and yet, everything is available. That is the kind of efficacy that the President of India would have liked to see. Not polished shoes. Anyway…

Imagine my joy every time I walk into our mini-kitchen and see the tea bags placed like this?

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What are the little things that you notice that bring you joy?

Lightning in the Butterfly Grove

There is something immensely enjoyable about being around babies I tell you. You ask them the dumbest questions and they buckle down, crease their foreheads in deep thought and give you serious answers. 

“Where is your nose?”
“Where is the car?”
“What did Curious George do?”
“Did you throw the blocks outside?”

The infant son enjoys sitting on my lap and reading stories. There is one he particularly enjoys about an elephant playing hide and seek with his friends. You see, the pages are filled with illustrations of a baby elephant, a zebra, a giraffe and a crocodile. In that book, there is one whole page dedicated to a giraffe. When I get to this complex page, I ask the son “Where is the giraffe?” He sticks out his little index finger at the giraffe and I beam like Einstein’s mother. Pride pouring forth.

The sister watched me carefully as we did the ‘stick-index-finger-in-giraffe’ routine. There was another book that had pictures of animals in it.
“What does a lion do?” He roars impressively every time he sees a tiger or a lion.
“What does a dog do?” He barks (bo-bo) in response.
Just to prove that the man can think about tougher questions, I ask “What does a snake do?” He hisses like one.
WE high-fived, low-fived and fist-bumped in glee.

Finally convinced of his zoological knowledge, the sister took him to the zoo. Aunt and nephew made a great show of it. They packed snacks, milk etc and headed off. Midway through their visit, I got a frantic call from the sister. Apparently, they had stopped in front of the giraffes and she asked him where the giraffes were. The question seemed to excite him quite a bit. He clapped his hands in glee, jumped in excitement, smiled and pointed to a bunch of lions gamboling nearby.

All that effort into the little giraffe book – anyway….

Never one to brood, I decided that what the guy needs is real life exposure. So, we headed out to this almost magical eucalyptus grove that is filled with monarch butterflies during the Winter. While in the grove, we were watching the beautiful butterflies flit past, and I asked my little zoologist “How does a butterfly fly?”.

The fellow pulls on his thinking look, creases his forehead and whips out a model of Lightning McQueen and goes “whiz…whiz…whiz” and demonstrates the flying motion.

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One can only hope those butterflies don’t fly the way cars do.

I need a new set of questions.

The Driver’s Spirituality

Somehow my India stories never seem complete without a driver’s story thrown in. So here goes…

Our driver for the day was Shiva or Murugan. Let’s call him Shiva. Shiva was a nice guy. Young-ish. He had a smile on his face and a can-do attitude in his stride. He was told that his duty in the cosmos that day was to take our family to the airport after stopping at a temple enroute. He smiled and nodded. He did not seem like a spiritual person himself but seemed happy to come along.

I told you about how we travel haven’t I? (https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/the-wedding-aboard-emirates-636-at-3-a-m/)  We had 3 large suitcases that needed to be hoisted atop the car and tied firmly with rope, or 3 large adults to be strapped and hoisted atop the car. Shiva chose the luggage to hoist on the car because he thought the people would be better company in the car. Well..I suppose everyone makes mistakes.

The family is generally genial and noisy and out-performing each other in the talking department, but this trip had it all stripped.

Now, imagine a broadway show where the cast introduction is bound to start and 2 major characters are missing because they were off visiting their uncle, who’d graciously offered to take them on a grand-tour of his new office parking lot. Backstage meanwhile, tempers run high…scripts are modified in the last minute to blend the introduction without the parking lot tourist characters, hoping against hope that they would make it in time for their real character scenes. Then, just a minute before the curtain goes up, the characters arrive and the whole cast shouts at them for being late. Not only that, tempers are running high because the script-writer has been ticked off for not being quick enough at redrafting the whole play without these characters, the orchestra is being told to cut out songs about these two characters and add extra ones about random characters instead and the percussionist had a few things to say to the drummer about this and all in all, melee reigned in the circus tent.

That was the scene back at the old home. The brother-in-law and sister-in-law went a-visiting somebody, got held up and came back bitingly late. Meanwhile, things were heating up to baking capacity nicely inside the home. An injudicious remark here and a callous remark there was enough to set some tempers going. The remaining were taken care of by the lack of electricity. Let’s just say that by the time the family piled into the car, the atmosphere was icy. Poor Shiva the driver watched the scene for a while and then decided that he couldn’t bear the quiet anymore and switched on a movie to keep his sanity.

It didn’t help that Shiva did not have rope on his person to tie the suitcases up and we had scrambled for rope at the last minute. The father-in-law kept kindly pointing out to him every 3 miles or so about the benefits of any driver keeping rope with him. Shiva might have been okay with the 3 minute reminders if it wasn’t interspersed with 2 minute reminders to ask somebody for directions. (I had my reservations on the driver-keeping-rope-handy theory – Shiva looked ready to hang himself, and readymade rope would not help matters, would they? )

All in all, he decided to trust to a greater power and switched on a movie about two elephants(one mad and the other not quite) and a bunch of lovers. The movie that Shiva had banked on to raise our spirits was doing its job at a snail’s pace. Jokes were eliciting a grunt every now and then, and the coldness in the car was melting. Once when I commented about how wonderful the songs were, Shiva said that they were the best part of the movie, since it was a tragic one and we’d all be pulling our tissues by the time the movie ended.

To everyone’s stupendous relief, the car rolled to a stop in front of the right temple, and the temple was open after all. Not only that, there was a huge elephant. Now call that uncanny. The temple elephant was decorated beautifully. In a moment, the family’s mood lightened. The children were awe-struck by the elephant and went in turns with their affectionate grand-father to touch him.

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A short visit inside the temple and the family was miraculously back to being the gregarious-guffawing-silly_jokes lot.

If anything were to convince Shiva about what God really meant to people’s hearts the question was amply answered for him that day. A turning point in his life. I mean look at the facts:

Input: Morose, quiet, brooding family
Output: g-g-sj lot

To make matters worse, when we piled back into the car and the movie came on again; it tried its best to get us to turn on the hosepipes, but nothing happened. We laughed at the misery in the movie and called the director a dumb fellow for whatever he was doing.

Shiva either thinks that we are a family to gains love and laughter by going to temples, or thinks of us as potential clients to some excellent mental health hospitals he has heard of.

The Orange Torn Balloon

I’ve always liked balloons and my children seem to like them too. Our local Traders Joe has balloons that they dole out to kids. I almost always pick one up for the kids and can then be seen chasing the balloon for at least a few feet in the parking lot because of one of the following goofy reasons:
(a) I thought the balloon was inside the car before closing the door, when it really wasn’t
(or)
(b)the daughter opened the other door through which it floated out
(or)
(c)some such bloomer.
In any case, I had no idea my liking balloons in general would permeate to the extent of my hobnobbing with torn balloons for several hours every other day.

Since I don’t mind exposing my many idiosyncrasies on this blog, I shall tell you what I was doing one evening.
I walked into a room full of serious minded people. You know folks frowning with deep lines of concentration etched on their faces. There was Ms. Dont-Disturb-Me, Mr. No-eye-contact , Mrs Dopey and Mr Smiley all minding their business of the day.

I took off my shoes and planted myself on the floor. I first sat on the mat, but then shifted my butt to the dirty carpet instead. The freshly laundered pant of mine shuddered a bit, but I ignored it.

I pulled an orange colored torn balloon fastened to a chair’s leg toward myself and heaved and ho-ed like no man has heaved a torn balloon before. Mrs Dopey gave me a wince and turned back to what she was doing, while Mr Smiley was a bit taken aback. At one point, the balloon even made funny noises against my skin. You know one of those sounds like a dinosaur playing with whistles (the kind that are handed out in children’s parties).

Yet I pulled on the torn balloon till I could tear it no more, and looked up hopefully at Ms Dont-Disturb-Me. She merely passed the buck to Mr No-eye-contact. I sat there feeling dumber and smaller by the minute. After all, which adult sits on the floor pulling strands of balloon from chair-ends in a room full of people engaged in activities not involving pulling balloons? Huh?

After what seemed like hours, but was in fact only several minutes, I was invited to lie down and the old ankle received a wonderful massage.

The physiotherapy session was coming to an end. Hopefully I can get to using the pretty blue torn balloon one day…blue balloons have always fascinated me. Even torn ones.Image

 

How Prowling Panthers Enabled a 100-km Race

There are some stories that cling to personalities for years, even decades. Most of them, while initially painful and embarrassing to endure, soon envelop you in its warm mockery. If only, we develop the mindset to laugh at ourselves a little; we can enjoy them. We can work really hard to purge them or add to them exotic flavors that make that little story about ourselves develop into a complex one. So, here I am, about to concoct another story from a childhood one, and see how it goes.

The brother (the one who almost masochistically went on a 100 km bike ride across London in the pouring rain to support a worthy cause) has always fancied wheels. He is a loving man and loves his family almost as much as he loves bicycles, bikes and cars; but if you were to plant some wheels on us and stick an engine to our rears, he would love us more. Just saying.

Wheels have not always given him warm, fuzzy experiences though. I once saved his life by shouting at him to move out of harm’s way when a scooter hurtled towards him. He becomes defensive when I say this and claims that since I was the one driving the scooter in the first place, I should not paint rosy pictures of myself (Po-ta-to, Po-taa-to). Anyway, the fact remains that I saved his life. Sister #2’s contribution. You can read one of my past posts and decide for yourself: Bajaj Chetak and how I saved my brother’s life.

 https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/hamara-bajaj-how-i-saved-my-brothers-life/

We sisters are a competitive lot, and not to be outdone, Sister #1 saved his life too. See? We lived in the mountainside with narrow roads overlooking steep valleys and often parapet-less roads showed us what happens to careless rocks that slide down the mountainside, hurtling hundreds of feet into the valleys below. Every now and then, in this beautiful haven, there would surface rumors of panthers and assorted wildlife designed to test the brave. When this happened, our School had a No-going-out-after-6-pm rule in place. Fertile imaginations, stoked by ridiculous stories fanned the hype and no one dared test the rule. It was during one such time that Sister #1 had to get down at a bus stop called Valley-View and walk down to our house, a few kilometers away. Since she was to come well before 6, we had no fear of panthers getting her first, or at least were tactful enough to not say it to her face. No point scaring the girl and all that. But we were worried. The brother was always eager for anything that allowed him to take his bicycle out and he volunteered to cycle to the bus-stop and accompany her cycling slowly beside her while she walked back home.

The plan was perfect. She got down at the lonely bus-stop at Valley View and found the young fellow atop his bicycle with a huge beaming smile on his face. (He always seemed to smile while on the bicycle.) He put his plan to action as swiftly as he could and asked her to start walking while he cycled with her telling her about the Panther on the prowl. This Valley-View road had sweeping, beautiful views of the Valley on one side, and on the other still had tree cover. (Now, I hear luxury vacation villas have claimed the land). The birds were chirping their noisy way home and the setting sun had an annoying habit of throwing spooky shadows at you. One jumped at non-bird like noises on the best of days. On days where the Panther story made the rounds; it is prudent to take the brother’s cycle, have him cling to the cycle carrier while riding pillion and cycle your way home as fast as thine pedals would allow.  That is precisely what the Sister did. All with me so far? Good. For this is where the point of her saving his life comes.

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The Sister, whatever she may claim, is horrible when it comes to anything on two wheels. She asked the brother to get on and started off. Rocky starts are her best starts and she jerked the cycle into action. She pumped her heart into the thing and kept a ticking pace as she maneuvered steep turns on the road. As is her wont when worried, she jabbered on more than usual. When she got in this mode, we would ‘Aah’ and ‘Oh’ at regular intervals, and that was enough. Just when she’d got into the rhythm of the thing,  a dog ran across her path and fear gripped her. She swerved right and left and right again. I don’t know exactly what happened after that, since details were not forthcoming at this point in the story, but she managed to de-seat the little brother. She threw him off the cycle on the winding road, and made off. The problem was really not throwing him off. It was the fact that she hadn’t realized what she had done. She pumped on for another mile or so, before she realized that the bike felt easier and lighter to ride. The nerves gripped her.

Setting the immediate problem of the cycle upsetting-dog aside, she had left her brother somewhere near a forest with a panther on the prowl. She cycled back as fast as she could shouting his name as loudly as possible. Her voice sending reverbrating echoes along the valley. She says this was to let prowling panthers know that they were to keep off her brother. See how she saved his life?

She found him jogging towards home, with a mildly irritated look on his face. She scooped him up on the cycle and came back home. Ever since, the brother has always hesitated about giving his cycle. He used to take us riding pillion, if need be, but would put up an extra-ordinary fuss about giving up his cycle.

It is this trait, that enabled him to finish cycling 100 km in the pouring rain and sleet. I am sure cab drivers could have taken him and his cycle along when the rains pounded down, but he held on. Cycling by himself to the last kilometer of the race, pouring rain or not.

What did you do over the week-end?

Come Monday mornings and I am cooking up interesting answers to the ‘What did you do over the week-end’ question. See, sometimes Geeta Ben comes a-cookin’ and we get some good old Hindi action. But really nothing that can make people sit up and say enviously, “Wow! How jealous I am of your captivating adventures over the week-end?!”

A friend of min had blogged about the very thing a few years ago:

http://am-kicking.blogspot.com/2005/10/how-was-your-weekend.html

I suppose “Ate more than usual” sounds far less glamorous than “Holidaying by the lake nestled in the mountains and having a moonlight dinner to boot. Oh and did I mention that my brother did a 100 km cycle race in the pouring rain in London? No? Well…not only that, my brother-in-law ran a half marathon in New Delhi in the stifling heat. But you know – nothing else!”

Yet, that is what happened. The week-end saw different continents bear the brunt of the exercising streaks that seem to have hit different factions of the family tree. We cheered them on in spirit (and food) and applauded them as they each achieved their targets, while we holidayed in the mountains.

Congratulations to the cycling and running brothers – we are all proud of you.

I sloped around with an Ask-me-about-my-week-end look all day and folks ignored me.  Years of being at the receiving end of boring answers does that I guess. When I could bear it no more, I decided to come online and blog about it. You see the window of opportunity for a question like that is so slim. By Tuesday morning, you are already pushing your luck. On Wednesday, if some one asks me about my plans for the upcoming week-end, I plan to deftly steer the conversation towards the last week-end and give them the works.

Edible Love

It is Tucky’s first Valentine’s Day. Apparently, it is a big deal. The daughter has been making him cards and more cards to honor the occasion. She wanted to be the first person to give him a Valentine’s Day card. So, she started a week ago. Tucky was beside himself with glee. He jumped at the card, blushed hard, giggled through his gums and ate it up. Literally. He took the card and used his stubby arms and drooled a liter of A-grade saliva onto it and within minutes, he had a soggy mish mash and a dour expression on his face.

When people make Valentine cards for their loved ones, they probably expect slightly better treatment and there might have been a moment of displeasure. I swooped in and tried to keep things light by telling her that next time she might try a tastier card for him, and the daughter guffawed.

Today, the poor girl gave him a ‘Glow in the dark’ card. That was met with the same enthusiasm and if possible, even wetter treatment than before. She, however was not in a mood to let little things like luminous infant bellies trouble her and laughed some more at his spirited performance of ‘Eat the Card’.

We are waiting for tonight to see if his stomach will glow.

Happy Valentines Day to all of you. May love, health and laughter fill your lives.

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.