Category: Uncategorized

Could Be Anything!

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 ….

Angry Birds

Angry bird developers would do well to visit my home for a little practical demonstration of angry birds. There is one outside the home aiming his attacks at the home and there are several angry birds within swearing at the unfortunate bird outside the home. I know the situation makes ones head boil a bit, but all shall be clear in a jiffy. Here…

What does that look like to you? It looks like stained glass to me. But, when I look at a rose plant, and know that it is a rose plant, I will correctly guess the flower to be a rose. You know what I mean? The same analogy here. I know that is stained glass and maybe, that is why it looks like stained glass to my eye. I wish to give the bird a fair chance before judging it too harshly. So, if folks agree that it looks like flowers, I applaud the authenticity of the work, but deplore the fact that it should be flower patterned instead of a random modern art effect.

You see the bird that I have around my house seems to belong to a rather dim-witted variety. He (or She) comes everyday, pecks twice at the ‘flowers’, and finding no nectar blinks looking disappointed. Maybe, the learnings of its youth conflicting with real life experiences. We all have them once in a while. How your parents tell you that it is not okay to drink water out of a tap while growing up in India, and come to the US to discover that water from the tap is just what your Doctor prescribes for glowing health. Something like that. Mama birdie probably spent night after night telling stories of how she procured food and nectar. “Go for the bright colored flowers. They are the real stuff. You don’t want to spend time and energy going after the ones nature intended to be mere flowers, but did not endow with nectar.”

Hard to ignore this kind of ingrained birdic knowledge. Pretty sound theory for birds to pick up too. Yet this bird finds that his thorough application of these learnings yield nothing. Zilch. So, he (or she), pecks again – twice for luck each time. Then, the same thought process seems to surface – always with the same intensity and the same conclusion. I know the bird flies away for a bit, circles around and attacks from various viewpoints. How do I know? Because the silences are always approximately the same length of time and then ‘Peck..Peck’ followed by a scrapping of feet and a fluttering of wings.

I suppose he could try a different set of flowers around the place, but these are so strategically located. No need to alter one’s flying altitude – conveniently located at sparrow flying height. Brightest in the locality. It has all the factors going for it, except for being unnatural, and having a family swearing at repeated attempts to extract nectar from inside the house.

The only suggestion I have for dealing with the situ. may not be suitable: throwing a stone at it – just to get the bird to dislodge. But, birds are smart that way – they fly away, leaving the path clear to the stained glass window. I don’t think I have the time to deal with broken windows at sparrow flying altitude now given that the youngest bird in the house is also highly fascinated by the same windows, and spends his waking ogling at them.

Sometimes, inaction is the best action. I have decided to see how long it takes before practical experiences overtake theoretical application in birds.

Peck Peck – Got to go. Couple of things to finish in the next five peck attempts.

Welcoming Tucky

Throwing my mind back, I cannot consciously remember the time Tucky entered our conversations. He was named Tucky because he was safely tucked inside my tummy.

“Is Tucky kicking you now?” became a common question from the daughter whenever my face contorted with a random jab from the little one in my womb. Tucky entered our lives in a far more real fashion when he was born last week. Suddenly, the whole pregnancy has become a blur and the immediate needs of a newborn have overtaken everything else. We had a baby boy last week and it has generally been a emotionally-charged action-packed week for all around, but I am glad to say that we are all enjoying the little one in our own different ways.

I gave pregnancy related humour a huge miss on this blog, but have some nuggets that stand out. Like how one morning, I looked at my reflection in the mirror and moaned about how shapeless I looked. The candid daughter – the apple of my eye; came up to me and said with complete sincerity, “No amma, you don’t look shapeless at all…”
I started to smile, and was just beginning to clear the contours of worry off of my face. I had barely let the smile reach the corners of my own mouth when she quipped, “You look like an egg! Like an Easter egg actually – I love Easter eggs!”
I am glad to tell everybody that I now know how eggs walk, and my sympathies shall always be with cartoons of eggs with legs in children’s book from now on. If it takes pregnancy to truly appreciate Humpty Dumpty, so be it.



Or the fact that one day I entered our train with a bunch of balloons quite late in my pregnancy, looking … like I really could use a break. My colleagues had thrown me a surprise baby shower at work and I was obviously looking like the balloon seller in Disneyland; when a cute boy with freckles pointed to me and asked his mother, “Oooh….why does that fat lady have so many balloons?”

I burst out laughing partly because I imagined how I looked, but also because of the way his mother looked. Appalled and apologetic at the same time, she mumbled a whole lot of sentences that set off her purplish pink complexion very nicely at that moment.

Please wish us luck as we try to find balance as a four member family.

Ranking & Rating

Evaluation is a solemn task and deserves to be treated as such. The father has not been called to use his rating, ranking and evaluation skills for sometime now and when the opportunity presented itself, he took to it like an elephant spraying water on himself on a hot day. His face lit up and his facial features shone with the light of sincerity.

He had a ready quip for all those interested – something about doing a task with complete sincerity or not doing it at all. The occasion was the culinary competition that the mother took part in. The competition was a fund raiser for the Cancer Institute Foundation. Once the judges did their part of the judging, the audience were called upon to weigh in. We were asked to rate the dishes on a scale of 1-10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest for every entrant. The announcer had barely finished her sentence when the audience made a beeline for the tasting extravaganza. While most people tasted a dish and rated it then and there; the father was studiously writing something on scraps of paper and screwing up his face with intense concentration. I asked him what he was doing and he said something about correcting a brilliant student’s paper first was always a bit of a disappointment (for the student) because one subconsciously compares different answer scripts in their minds and when one had seen a number of average answer scripts before seeing the brilliant one, one tends to award more weightage to the brilliant script, while if the brilliant answer script came up first, we naturally assume that the remaining will be comparable. My head swam a little at this point, it may have been the effect of the dish I was popping in my mouth to taste at the time, or the fact that I had listened to this philosophy once too many times – the effect of growing in a household filled with teachers. I decided to leave him to it, just telling him not to take his own sweet time about it, since they planned to use our feedback for judging by the end of the day.

By the time I had made my way to the end of the line, he was midway through – weighing and pro-ing and con-ing no doubt. This was the mother’s entry for the competition. Reluctant though she was, I went ahead and registered her name and she pulled off an admirable dish.


The father was asked to stay away from the kitchen and further told to keep all jokes regarding the dish and what he thought of the mother’s ability in the kitchen to himself. Therefore, he decided to show solidarity to his wife when it came to the audience judging round and came beaming around to her after he had evaluated every single entrant.

“You know? Objectively speaking it was your dish that I liked the best taste-wise….” he said still looking rather proud of himself. “I ranked you first in the whole lot!”
He received a smile from his bride, and his face became happier still.

“You mean, you gave her a 1?” I asked incredulously.
“Of course….” he said, and cracked another joke about his knowing his wife’s worth in the culinary department always, but competitions such as these served to remind him, and chuckled good humouredly to himself. The poor man, I could not have helped him – it was too late. Thine loving eyes of his bride were piercing him with arrows other than what Cupid would have used.

Being quick on the uptake, he said, “What?”
I then proceeded to illuminate him that what he had been asked to do was rate the dishes on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest.
“You mean rate, not rank?” he asked looking worried.

I nodded. Suddenly, it all made sense. The comparative brilliant paper philosophy, the noting down everything and then ranking them 1-10. Since there were more than 10 teams, he even seem to have applied dense ranks.

It was like watching a balloon deflate before your eyes – the smile waned, the look was worried, and the expression sombre. He had the haunted look of a man who had more than dinner at stake. I sympathized with him and patted him gently on the arm. Luckily for him, the mother was selected to go on for the Finals in spite of his ..er.. ‘help’, and he revived a little on hearing this news.

Well…there is always a next time….

Of hounds, pups and fate

I normally ignore marketing calls or deflect them with dexterity. But one day, I got stuck. I was feeling particularly lethargic after a largish meal and sitting out in the garden thinking of this and that – you know musing on life. One of those rare days that life awards you, and in this weakened state, the telemarketer caught me. The hound.

He told me I might die any instant and that by not insuring my life for an additional amount, I am doing my family a grave injustice. It seemed a bit unlikely. I mean, I was sitting under some very large trees, but there did not seem to be much of a storm about to dislodge them from the soil and crash them on me just then. Moreover, I told him I already had insurance. It did not seem to deter him. He just went on, about how it would cost me nothing, and all I had to do was die. I didn’t like the strain of this talk, and told him I wasn’t interested. He increased his level of whatever-it-was he was trying to do, and I increased the strength with which I resisted his efforts. Neither budged, neither gave in. We circled each other at that perfect stance that boxers reluctant to throw that first punch do. Our words were our punches, though I cannot claim to infusing any sort of variety into my comebacks. They were all variations of “No thank you, I am not interested right now.” As you know there are only so many ways one can say that sentence, and my patience was starting to wear thin.

I could not use the technique of not knowing the language, since I had already explained in perfect English that he was being a relentless hound, and he would be better served if he diverted his energies elsewhere. Finally, when this fellow refused to give up, I asked him with all the remaining reserves of energy left in me, if I could ask him a question. I felt him gloat on the other end. Finally. He had elicited my interest, and now all he had to do was close the deal and get the fat commission check and go home basking in his triumphant glory.
“Do you like dogs?” I asked.
“Yes…” he drew out his response. Unsure and wondering where the conversation was going. The very effect I was going for. Serves him right – he isn’t the only one who can gloat.
“So, as long as I am polite, you will not relent is it? Is that how it works? Because if that is the reason, I can just say something rude about dogs and end this conversation for both of us right now. Quick and painless…”

Do you know what he did when I asked him this? He chuckled and giggled like a pup caught in the act of chewing the carpet. I have already called him a hound and compared him to a puppy, so I find it a bit unfair to compare him to any other animal now, but I am sorely tempted. At least he had the decency to hang up soon afterward, but left me wondering for a few minutes. I mean what a job to be trained to make otherwise polite people impolite?

A slight breeze shook the tree overhead and I scrambled indoors. I didn’t want to tempt fate just yet.

Over the Top

Waiting in a room with a slew of magazines affords you the luxury of browsing through topics, one might otherwise overlook, like how the most luxurious looking hair belongs to the Asian community (around Hongkong and China). The article went on to state that the Asian obsession with luxurious hair might be attributed to the average Asian hair strand being 5 times thicker than the average Western strand.

http://www.aralifestyle.com/article.aspx?UserFeedGuid=cda9e966-c488-4a23-91fa-52aff308fb6b&ArticleId=2254&ComboId=5471&title=The-Asian-secret-to-strong-lush-hair&origin=222838-APP12

This simple statement caused my mind to go into full drive. Have they not seen the Indian obsession with the tresses? In fact, the theory most rampant in South India is: the shinier the plate, the thicker the hair. Entire coastlines of coconuts are crushed by the millions, just so men can look bald and shiny while women can squirm with the oil tightly braided into plaits that are supposed to ensure the quintessential South Indian beauty look.

Let me be very clear that I hate the shiny hair-oil look – it haunted my childhood more effective than a bunch of spectres escaped from the local cemetery. My mother is/was a strong proponent of the oiled hair syndrome. In fact, had you interviewed me then, I would even go on to say she had a theory that unoiled hair induces moral turpitude in teenage girls, and thereby did the best she could to make sure that all good looks are wiped out with the sleeziest oil look. This, in a school, where none of my friends applied oil to go out in Public. Horrendous I tell you – horrendous.

At one point, our school (a residential one) decided that those in the Inter School Athletics team needed more nutrition to take up the physical challenges posed by a rigorous sporting career, and decided to give all the athletes an extra egg in the morning. While the boys seemed to gobble the eggs up with little effort, for the girls, it was a different matter. What should have meant more strength failed to manifest itself. What did happen, was that the girls on the team ran with a bigger bounce in their hair, flouncing up and down like those advertisements on television. Quite the Sunsilk princesses we were. Our coaches found to their horror a theory that eggs acted as a wonderful hair conditioner and had to undertake drastic measures such as boiling the eggs, so they could not be used for over-the-top purposes.

That was how much good looking hair meant…..

Evolution….

Ever heard of the story where Akbar asks Birbal to find the biggest fools in his kingdom? Birbal walks around looking for fools and is rewarded with a candidate on that very night. The night air is cool and the full moon is shining down benignly on the Earth below. A tranquil night, interrupted by the restless presence of one man. This man is looking agitated and is frantically searching for something in the clearing in the moonlight. Birbal asks him what he is searching for, to which the poor man wrings his hands in despair and tells him he has lost an expensive ring. Birbal asks him, “Did you lose it here?”
“No”, says the man, looking positively teary faced now, “I lost it there under the trees, but it is brighter here. So, I am looking for it here…”

I know that is one man, but is seems to me that entire regiments of armies are guilty of the same thing several centuries later.
“Which is the best hiding place in Afghanistan?”
“The deep caves in the mountainous regions..”
“Good! Don’t spare a single cave.” says the commander and the commandos comply for a full decade. The sheep, and wildlife are tired of having commandos peeping into their humble abode every night, but the poor animals have no choice. This is for a global war on terrorism – so if you think having a soldier peeping into the snow leopard’s cave at night, so be it, they tell themselves and mumble themselves back to sleep.

The best hiding places may be in the mountains, but was Osama in the mountains? No…he was watching the manhunt for him with considerable interest for a while from his mansion in a different country housed in the Army Cantonment area, and then he himself lost interest in the search for him. How long can you watch bumbling children play hide-n-seek in the wrong location?

Ah….Evolution…..

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-05-04/pakistan/29508386_1_bin-al-qaida-leader-osama

Stupor Drones

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/04/09/holly-thompson-cant-shut-her-mouth-after-yawning-in-class/

I feel sorry for both parties in this story.  Holly Thompson and the Professor. Holly Thompson is the poor girl who gave in to a perfectly natural impulse during a fascinating political theory class, and could not close her mouth. She yawned.While the agony she experienced is no laughing matter, it opens up other venues of thought.

The perfect treatment for insomnia. If I were a doctor, I would treat patients coming in to see me for insomnia by prescribing a course credit with Professors whose tapes I have listened to, and create a soporific index to go along with the intensity of the problem.  I once had a Mathematics professor who made my jaw bones beg for respite. This: when I thought, you couldn’t really fall asleep while solving Math problems. This Prof used a soothing technique of 0.02% voice modulation coupled with a loving stroke of his extremely pregnant looking belly in a clockwise direction for 3 minutes, followed with the anti-clockwise pat-down for another 3 minutes. Just watching that was enough. Coupled with his tone, the man was Grade-A treatment for the most severe of insomniacs.

I feel sorry for the Professor too, who thankfully has not been named in the article. But, there are few things that are more consistent than stupor inducing lectures that unite the atmospheres of college and school – the unifying factor transcending geographical and ecological barriers. In the Hall of Infamy, this poor Professor will surely have a place for making a student’s jaw drop in his class!

Blessed as some people are with droning voices, I wonder why Scientists don’t tap this simple source for warfare. You know play the lectures of a stupor star non-stop over the Kazaksthan mountain range or to diffuse the tensions in Libya? Who feels like picking up a rifle and firing when sleepy?

And that is why I am not offered the post of Defence Minister or that of a qualified doctor…. Sigh!

Do Tooth Fairies Have Baggage Restrictions?

We bolster independent decision making. I know … you think these are mere words? In our case we have proof. The television in our household has taken the philosophy straight to its heart . The television now decides for us when and for how long we get to watch television. The one thing it lacks is finesse. When cutting off our viewing, it does so rather abruptly and rudely. It just goes BLEEP accompanied by similar cursing from the viewers and sits there smirking at you.

This behavior on the part of the television has been viewed as base treachery by the husband, who regards the TV with a fond affection, having spent many fruitless hours in its company. He simply cannot believe that when it has received so much attention, it should flip out in this uncouth manner. When simple things did not work, the husband resorted to the one thing software engineers are comfortable doing to televisions. He gave it a well aimed whack on its backside. He claims to have seen the mechanic in his locality as a boy doing the same to radios and tape recorders with amazing results. I personally think the first one was delivered in frustration and passed off as scientific nudging.

Anyway, that seemed to work for a while, but the TV now seems blaise about even this and refuses to start up again till it finds a time convenient for it.

In other news, there has been considerable excitement about a tooth fairy visiting the house. The daughter exclaimed loudly and bursting with excitement that the tooth fairy gave her EXACTLY what she wished for. I must mention that the tooth fairy from Amazon.com has been hiding in the closet for more than a month now waiting to give the gift.  The daughter’s tooth shook and shook, till it finally fell off one day. The historic event happened in her school and they were sweet enough to give her a tooth case with the precious tooth to place under her pillow for the tooth fairy.

Since tooth fairies are this intuitive and give you exactly what you wish for these days and considering the husband seems rather forlorn with the television’s continued apathy towards his state; it may be good idea to knock out one of his teeth one of these days just to see what he’d get. There is one problem though, the tooth fairy seems rather petite and bringing in a TV might not be possible. Wonder if they have any baggage restrictions. Hmm….

Man barks at Dog & Software Engineering

Man barks at dog .. gets arrested for animal harrassment

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20051029-504083.html

This news item snuck straight through to the part of my brain where the memories of my college life reside. I don’t know if any of you have taken the subject titled ‘Software Engineering’. If you are considering this horrendous credit, please back off now. Pull yourself away like an arm near fire. The thing with subjects like this is that you can take an entire chapter or half a book and condense it into one diagram on half a page to prove you understood, but that would not get you marks. It was our firm belief that no examiner likes to see an answer script that runs to two pages (front-to-back) and credit you with understanding the subject. Plus you had to kill three hours in the exam hall and that can’t be done without filling your answer script with stories.

I was always okay with leaving after the first student took the brave step, but could never bring myself to leave first. It had something to do with the look that teachers reserved for you when you did this. Part disgusted, part wondering what this person would make of her life and part amused exasperation. So, I sat there prodding myself for ideas and non-existent explanations. Sometimes, inspiration would strike, and I would write ignoring the envious glances cast by my classmates and the reams of paper I was running through. It is all a performing art I tell you. The moment one bloke or blokess casts you an admiring glance to write through reams of paper, you want to surpass your previous attempts and write more.

It was one such occasion, I was sitting looking quite bored in a Software Engineering exam, and thinking of something to write, when I wrote, “Dog bites man”, is not news-worthy, but when “Man bites dog” is the title, it is news-worthy. See?! It is called ‘Philosophical Insight’ and can be cultivated with the combined effect of a stupor and a reluctance to leave the exam hall. Or maybe, some brilliant Software Engineering author wrote this shining jewel and it made an impression. Nevertheless, I took the title and spun an impressive yarn about this very thing for 5 yards and a bit.  If I were any good at drawing, I might even have drawn a dog barking like this, and explained how this does not kindle our sense of wonder, but I didn’t. I have limits.

Professors, I am sure, just feel sorry for the students having to write such muck for so long that they give marks, more out of self-pity than anything else. Think. If they don’t; they get to read our creative genius one more time. It is not as though we are going to improve the quality or quantity of our churn, so they might as well do the less painful thing and make you pass.

In any case, when I saw this news item my heart sang the song from those days, and the fact that that little bit of philosophy made it this far to CBS news is heart-warming.