Nourish-n-Cherish

I watched Oscars like millions did. Some random points that came to mind:

I did clap when Slumdog Millionaire reaped in the awards, but the logical side of me couldn’t concede that the movie was worth 8 of them. I would call it a nice enough movie, but just that. Not great, not wonderful – tad better than mediocre. Another example of how right place at right time far outweighs merit.

And then, of course someone comes along and does an illogical thing, and basks in the narrow glow of publicity it brings. They gifted the children a concrete house and claimed they are working for the upliftment of conditions in slums. My head reels – how?! By moving the children who already made some money to a concrete house? How does that equate to “working for upliftment of slums”?

I loved the way Danny Boyle jumped up and down like Tigger in Winnie The Pooh when he won his Oscar. It was a helpful reminder that we all have a child in us, and sometimes takes hard work finding it.

I watched as the cameras rolled on the best dressed women. Speaking with a sense of negative fashion IQ , I am not the person most suited to make judgements I am afraid.

I scoured the crowd and found only 2 women wearing a pair of glasses, but the same was not true of Men. Are men more comfortable with glasses or are women more self-conscious about the bespectacled image?!

I am sure my Biology teacher still remembers my gifts with the pencil. I am probably the benchmark in that teacher’s mind, and let me tell you being a benchmark figure in anything is satisfying! I can readily imagine how many pupils would have been spared the agony of redoing their cockroach drawing, because all the teacher had to do was close their eyes and visualize the cockroach on MY page. Instantly, I could make people look like Michelangelos. How many people can live up to that boast?!

I seemed to have passed some of my varied talents in the field to my daughter. When the tummy was bulging and I was wondering which genes of mine I would like her to have, I am quite sure I hadn’t asked for this one to come from me – but apparently it has. A while ago, my daughter proclaimed to her Aunt that she had drawn her a picture, and my sister being who she is demanded that the groaning masterpiece be scanned and sent to her. I complied – I mean nobody EVER wanted to see my pictures, and if somebody wants to see the offsprings, the proud parent can’t be stopped! So, there it was sailing through the cables under the misty waters waiting to be revealed.

Here it is: it is a wrench giving it away free on the Internet like this, but one can’t be selfish.

Quick as a whip, my sister’s exuberant interpretation made it across.
There are fire-crackers on top…shows celebration time

There are hearts…shows that she loves us all

Two little faces with a mop of hair…shows the kids celebrating

A red dustbin…shows that you clean up after you celebrate.

All the colours ….shows how interesting and colourful life really is!!!

Modern art can be interpreted in multiple ways, but really I think she was way off!

1) The dustbins are cupcakes – you need food during a celebration!

2) There aren’t only 2 happy faces, there is a sad one too stuck in the corner to make all sorts of people make up our world

3) And, the sun was drawn in two places – high up and below somewhere. That should symbolize the rising and setting of the sun! Just the same way that the celebration starts so too must it end.
While I was explaining this to the husband, the artist pops up in her classic tone, and says:

“Actually, those are not crackers – they are trees! “

“So, what is that thing on top of the trees?” I ask

“Those are fountains!” “Oh … and the hearts say you love us right?” I ask pleading for her to endorse at least one intepretation of ours. She does no such thing and scoffs at me and declares – “Those are flowers – some are heart shaped, but there are trees, fountains and flowers with sad and happy faces!”

And, that is the artistic touch of the future! I think the whole family needs to attend some classes in Art.

Having said that, we sat down last night after dinner preparing Valentine Day Cards for all of my daughter’s friends in her class. While I joked about how I did not classify the activity as important enough to rank high up in our list, I enjoyed it all the same. It made a nice change from the regular. She drew little pictures in every card and wrote out her name arduously. She particularly liked to draw Saturn for some vague reason, and I must say, it was one of her better attempts at drawing. (That is saying something!). So she drew Saturn on a couple of cards. I am not sure whether Cupid and Sani “Bhagawan” have any qualms, but if they did, my daughter just took a brave stab at attaining mythological peace.

More than the cards and the drawing, I like to think of Valentine’s Day as a day of love – I am pleased to hear that similar sentiments are being voiced elsewhere too. Instead of marking a day for lovers, it is nice to mark a day of love for all your friends and family.

So, here it is: Happy Valentine’s Day – may Love spread and eradicate the darkness of hatred!

I am sure my Biology teacher still remembers my gifts with the pencil. I am probably the benchmark in that teacher’s mind, and let me tell you being a benchmark figure in anything is satisfying! I can readily imagine how many pupils would have been spared the agony of redoing their cockroach drawing, because all the teacher had to do was close their eyes and visualize the cockroach on MY page. Instantly, I could make people look like Michelangelos. How many people can live up to that boast?!

I seemed to have passed some of my varied talents in the field to my daughter. When the tummy was bulging and I was wondering which genes of mine I would like her to have, I am quite sure I hadn’t asked for this one to come from me – but apparently it has. A while ago, my daughter proclaimed to her Aunt that she had drawn her a picture, and my sister being who she is demanded that the groaning masterpiece be scanned and sent to her. I complied – I mean nobody EVER wanted to see my pictures, and if somebody wants to see the offsprings, the proud parent can’t be stopped! So, there it was sailing through the cables under the misty waters waiting to be revealed.

Here it is: it is a wrench giving it away free on the Internet like this, but one can’t be selfish.

Quick as a whip, my sister’s exuberant interpretation made it across.
There are fire-crackers on top…shows celebration time

There are hearts…shows that she loves us all

Two little faces with a mop of hair…shows the kids celebrating

A red dustbin…shows that you clean up after you celebrate.

All the colours ….shows how interesting and colourful life really is!!!

Modern art can be interpreted in multiple ways, but really I think she was way off!

1) The dustbins are cupcakes – you need food during a celebration!

2) There aren’t only 2 happy faces, there is a sad one too stuck in the corner to make all sorts of people make up our world

3) And, the sun was drawn in two places – high up and below somewhere. That should symbolize the rising and setting of the sun! Just the same way that the celebration starts so too must it end.
While I was explaining this to the husband, the artist pops up in her classic tone, and says:

“Actually, those are not crackers – they are trees! “

“So, what is that thing on top of the trees?” I ask

“Those are fountains!” “Oh … and the hearts say you love us right?” I ask pleading for her to endorse at least one intepretation of ours. She does no such thing and scoffs at me and declares – “Those are flowers – some are heart shaped, but there are trees, fountains and flowers with sad and happy faces!”

And, that is the artistic touch of the future! I think the whole family needs to attend some classes in Art.

Having said that, we sat down last night after dinner preparing Valentine Day Cards for all of my daughter’s friends in her class. While I joked about how I did not classify the activity as important enough to rank high up in our list, I enjoyed it all the same. It made a nice change from the regular. She drew little pictures in every card and wrote out her name arduously. She particularly liked to draw Saturn for some vague reason, and I must say, it was one of her better attempts at drawing. (That is saying something!). So she drew Saturn on a couple of cards. I am not sure whether Cupid and Sani “Bhagawan” have any qualms, but if they did, my daughter just took a brave stab at attaining mythological peace.

More than the cards and the drawing, I like to think of Valentine’s Day as a day of love – I am pleased to hear that similar sentiments are being voiced elsewhere too. Instead of marking a day for lovers, it is nice to mark a day of love for all your friends and family.

So, here it is: Happy Valentine’s Day – may Love spread and eradicate the darkness of hatred!

I like being a sandwich!

The daughter had a chest phlegm and a cough. We heard vivid descriptions of her friend, drinking 3 coloured medicines everyday! She has red Tylenol in the morning, purple Tylenol in the evening and pink Tylenol at night. As a parent, I can intepret this to mean 3 different medications, possibly anti-biotics, for a bacterial infection, and further that the said friend was coughing like her. So, off to the Doctor’s office she went.

“Good Evening Honey! How are you?”
“I’m fine!”
“So, do you have any little brothers and sisters”, asked the Doctor by way of making conversation, and probably checking to see if they were any more minions waiting to be treated.
“No…just me”
“But, you know I have a little sister – she is 3 and half in India. And I have another sister – but she is 5 and a half” (My nieces, and yes, the “half” components of their age are very important. )

“So, she comes home and regales the conversation, and says – “I am in the middle, like a sandwich!”
I join in and tell her, I am in the middle too. I have an elder sister and a younger brother, so I am a sandwich too!

“Yeah! I like being a sandwich!!” we yelp and the doctor rests easy in her knowledge of my four and half year old’s 3.5 and 5.5. year old sisters from a different continent and we are happy being the middle layer of a sandwich – it is a complex world!

PS: And all, this conversation has made me hungry. I think I will go and make myself half a sandwich (the half is very important!)

Anthropologists are forever finding evidence on some tablet or inside some godforsaken cave, telling us all about life in the era. I mean when we see caves full of paintings showing tigers being strung with a sleek bow and arrow, we know that the cavemen weren’t launching supersonic jets, followed by rockets to the moon and just dumbing themselves down in the paintings. They really were slaying tigers with sophisticated weapons of their time such as bows and arrows. Then, as time went on, people discovered the funny thing that starts with an ‘h’, that essentially is between drawing and script writing, and used that to depict what was going on. Mythology grew from a combination of bad paintings and imaginative minds. There was some record-keeping albeit one left more to imagination than to facts, but something.

The clay tablets yielded slowly to the tree bark, and the cryptic grew more descriptive. The three barks became parchment rolls and then the Chinese saved the day by coming up with paper. So far so good – you see paper, you can figure out what is written there. You see a tree bark with a sign engraved
Z *big heart sign* X, and can figure out that Z loves or loved X, and was daft enough to proclaim love on a tree bark, after probably getting his or her hand chiseled a couple of times with the rough stone used to engrave their undying love. But, we still know what happened, so long as the bark survives, we know that Z and X were in love at some point.

The printing press and full blown books were a blessing. Suddenly, everything you needed to know about any nook and corner of the world was available in some book somewhere. Then, you did not even need books to get information, all you needed was access to the net. E-reading became cool. Now as we move on towards paperless functioning, a most disturbing thought just struck me, and I do not wish to be taken frivolously here. I am as serious as a rabbit running from a fox on a wintry night can be.

What if future historians are like me? It could very well happen that one gene triumphs in the coming generations and that gene is my technology retarded gene, couldn’t it? It is not that I can’t operate technology – I just can’t keep pace. By the time, I figure out how to use the remote to change the setting on one contraption, the remote changes, or worse the contraption is gone. Let me think of some gramophone records that my father prided himself on – in fact, I reluctantly got him to get rid of the foghorn after decades, knowing that we could never listen to another gramophone record again, and the space is better used in conserving the tape recorder for the next 2 decades, before it too meets the same fate.

So, some songs that were only there in the gramophone records no longer exists, same for some songs on tape too. You get the picture. Now, with the internet, and the blogosphere, most news and creative writing as moved to the e-medium. What if future generations are unable to retrieve these great gems of the era- voltages may change, servers change, the electronic medium destroys just as soon as it creates.

Well, I suppose the graffiti on the world heritage sites would still tell us who loves who, but what if future archaeologists only get the Harry Potter books, and believe life was that – they have no method of knowing it was a fantasy world.

I haven’t even started on the Modern Art phenomenon yet. If those were the paintings left for interpretation, I can barely imagine what it would come out as.
Pray tell me what you can make out of this?http://www.milesmodernart.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/modern-art-41108-24×48-w.jpg

I can almost hear you sigh that if these are the kind of gems of writing the future is missing, they are better off without it. But I stand by my notion that 50 years from now, when there is no paper, record retrieval will be all the more difficult, and a blip in Earth’s history – 500 years later, that era might well be a dark one

PS: Ahhhh..hieroglyphics that is the “h-word”
PS1: How curious it is that I typed this blog out, and then couldn’t connect to the net to publish it, and had to snuggle up to the husband to help me?

See what I mean and what I fear for?

I noticed a number of times when I have been granted ownership of the vast landmass of America, including its culture, population, interests and quirks.

I find any objective questioning and/or reasoning can grant me ownership.

All I have to do is hang on to my mother’s hand and question why on earth she is preparing Payasam for the n-th time, and she would say her voice dripping with incredulity – “In YOUR America, you may do it differently, but we make payasam when the son-in-law visits. “

“Yes….but this is technically part of the same visit, we just went out yesterday! Besides, do remember that I am very much an Indian citizen. Should I show you my passport?”

“I cannot serve food without sweets when the sons-in-law are here!” she would voice in a tone of finality, and go about gathering the ingredients anyway.

“There’s another thing! Why do you have to serve? People can perfectly serve themselves!” I say to no one in particular. But since I now own all of America, why should I worry about who serves anybody else food?

When I am not visiting India, I can still feel rich anytime! All I have to do is call home. 70% of the time, It would be the occasion of some festival. We don’t begrudge any of the 3500 Gods/Goddesses their birthdays, or anniversaries or the general tendency to want to keep awake through the night. There is of course a special sweet dish to mark every occasion, and all I have to do is ask the reason for that particular savoury on “X Jayanthi” or “Y Krittikai” and immediately America becomes mine!

In MY America, I don’t have to do anything – except get to work early in the morning, slog through the day and jog back home for a back-to-back session with classes and children and the dishwashing and the cleaning and the cooking.

Green chillies always bear the brunt of a sore person’s temper at the food table and rightfully so in my opinion. There are certain cooks and cook’s assistants who cut all the vegetables and the chillies in exactly the same dimensions. While I like to see vegetables cut a certain way, there are certain types, especially chillies that I like to see stick out! It is also for this reason, that I don’t take endearingly to the chilli hidden in the omelet or the oothappam. That to me is guerilla warfare.

When I am having lunch, you can visualize a person who stuffs food in the opening where usually the mouth resides. One day if my nose were to shift downwards, I would be in a sorry state indeed. I gape at the computer screen, and immerse myself in the mundane-surfing routine that my lunch time allows me to do.

So, you can safely assume that I am not on a chilli-weeding routine while tackling my lunch. I might catch a peek of the dangerous thing if I were expecting it, but the hiding in batter/egg variety freaks me out. One minute, I am stuffing the faithful mouth, and the next I am shooting up from my seat with the green from the chilli and the red from the taste coursing through my veins and bursting forth in pink spurts on my face. My nose inexplicably starts watering and so does my mouth. When the nose and mouth do that, the eye feels the compelling need to keep them company and before you know it, you have liquid leaking from all the open pores in the face. I feel my ears turn beetroot, my tongue refusing to quiet down, my hand reaches for the tissue – one for the eyes and another for the nose, because obviously once can’t do for both.

I once read somewhere that drinking hot water quietens your tongue quickly. Nope – now you have the hot water and the burning to deal with! Sugar doesn’t help either. And no, I don’t think honey with warm water would help. What would? Time perhaps.

Chidambaram was cut off from the rains. The headlines for all of the previous week said nothing other than terrorist scares in airports and roads being washed off in the heavy rains. The venue of my brother’s wedding, Chidambaram, was marooned people said. It turns out that the roads leading to Chidambaram were little more than mud roads that were coated with tar. The rains washed the tar with them, and tiny bridges had disintegrated.

We found out around 2-3 days before the wedding that Chidambaram was accessible after all. Yet, the source of my brother’s apprehension had nothing to do with washed away roads, or the wedding itself.

He had been recently informed that his portraits were to be mounted in all prominent locations in Chidambaram. “WHAT? WHY?” my brother had demanded rather alarmingly, but he was brushed aside. This was to be grand wedding, and no embarrassment was to be spared! There were posters and billboards to spread his fame – replete with his degree, job title and office name. I can’t quite explain how much fun we had at his expense on this account.

He tried everything from growing a moustache in the last minute to pleading with his fiancee to take the billboards down. The moustache achieved little apart from making his nieces assume it was a fake moustache and making him look like a badger with cat’s whiskers.
And so, he was forced to shave and we arrived in Chidambaram bearing with us the man most wanted in the town by the looks of it. The billboards welcomed us all the way from the railway station. We helpfully pointed to the man in question everytime we stopped to ask somebody for directions while the groom squirmed in his pants!

The billboards were a little ghastly considering our family has never been anywhere close to fame. We revelled in the mundane and kept newspaper clippings in files accessible in the drawing room cabinets amidst a flurry of other papers, of the times when our names did appear in print. The less fortunate who blundered into the territory of how well the children of the house had done were treated to the frayed clippings along with a guided tour of the medals hanging in the showcase. But that was the extent of fame we had achieved. To see larger-than-life billboards with my brother’s photograph on it was a bit overwhelming. One thing I hadn’t noticed in earlier photographs was that the bride looked positively fat. Not that there was anything with being fat, just that I had had quite a hard time imagining her with the photographs and the various descriptions I’d received from everybody else – I was the only one in the family who had not seen her, and I was really eager to see her. When I did see her, there seemed a reel-real life disconnect on multiple levels. The photographs I had seen earlier looked nothing like the posters and the posters looked nothing like the bride in person.

I just had to reconcile the matter before I could immerse myself in the wedding. I mounted a mini investigation into the matter pronto. It turns out that the photographers of Chidambaram were quite bright. They had with them the latest tools of digital imaging and were waiting for an opportunity to showcase their talents. A perfect opportunity presented itself with the wedding posters. My sister-in-law had given a photograph in a salwar kameez. The photographer decided that the subject should have been dressed in a saree. Instead of taking the simplest route, namely asking for a photograph in saree, he morphed the image – he transplanted the face over the image of a person dressed in a saree. The saree clad woman’s image he had taken was on the larger side and resulting image was what had greeted me
in the streets of Chidambaram – and that my folks is the advantage of having folks with digital imaging tools in a town like Chidambaram.

Now that the photograph mystery had been laid to rest, I devoted myself to the remaining aspects of the event management. One thing that I really liked was that there was a poster at the local bus station manned with an information desk – all our relatives could find directions to the wedding venue as soon as they descended from their buses. An elephant was to garland the groom on his arrival. I was half expecting a band – except that the only available band in town apparently refused to be up in the wee hours of the morning. The groom’s nieces & nephew spent the entire 11 hour journey from our hometown to Chidambaram fantasizing about the elephant and the horse-drawn buggy that was to be used for the procession. The nieces confused the proceedings for a circus in their fertile minds, because
they asked if a clown would be available on the premises. I assured them there would – and what’s more, the clown would be their favourite Uncle. My brother wasn’t happy!

On arrival, they felt letdown when they were informed that it usually takes a week to bring an elephant from one of the nearby temples and because of the rains, this part of the proceedings had to be dropped.

Let me be frank – South Indian weddings are higher on the ritual factor than the fun factor. In fact, the grumpier elders frowned on any sort of merry-making. There was a solemn ceremony at a nearby temple. Every available God was petitioned to bless the couple in long-winding sanskrit phrases and at the end of the whole event in the small temple, everyone looked ready to cry. We were determined however to lighten up the mood as much as possible. The moment the horse-drawn buggy was available, we went crazy at my brother’s expense. To date, I have never seen a person look so embarrassed. He ascended the chariot looking extremely uncomfortable and tugged at his nieces and nephew for comfort. There was a band playing music. The music was even discernible once you cut out the noise. There was a jeep ahead with flashlights helpfully focussed on my brother, as though he needed any more attention in his life at the moment. To make matters worse, the traffic that was easing along were all
peeping through windows to take a good look at the subject. There were fireworks in front, and we were hoping that the firecrackers wouldn’t frighten the horses. I voiced my concerns regarding this to my brother on his perch in the chariot, and his embarrassment quickly mingled with an acute sense of foreboding. To add to his misery, the nieces and nephews on the chariot were egging the horses to go faster. It would have made a dashing sight to see my brother galloping along swiftly through the dense streets of Chidambaram, making the cows move aside in a hurry and have the elephant race the horses.

But none of that happened, that would have made things finish too quickly. The horses walked on slowly and the motorised chariot at the back was set to move at the slowest speed possible.

Because of, or in spite of the band, I had an overwhelming desire to dance. The band had christened themselves James Band and performed aboard a tram. The band sometimes confused melody with volume, and we found ourselves yelling over all the din to talk to the person right next to you. However, the band did its best to bring about a festive atmosphere. I started to dance with my husband, and discovered something. All people, old and young, the serious and frolicky, the men and women everybody had an urge to dance. The moment my husband and I abandoned all reservations and started jigging on the streets, hordes of relatives joined in. Our reasoning was that, no matter how badly we danced we can’t attract more attention to ourselves than the old bird atop the chariot with spotlights focussed on him and half a dozen brats for company! My mother, who was always a stickler for self-control herself swayed the crowds with her dance number and my father felt compelled to join in, once his sweetheart started dancing.

The only saving grace was that the entire camaraderie took place in a town where we were hitherto unknown. The preparations, the wedding atmosphere, the histrionics of the day before the wedding – something we will remember for a long time, and definitely not something we will let my brother forget in a tearing hurry!

The bride and groom were given the night to mull over the proceedings and prepare for the intense wedding ahead.

I attended my brother’s wedding, and had a very good time. I have already been dubbed a black sheep by the rest of the extended family. While numerous maamis pointed out with displeasure that I was not following tradition, my close family was just glad to see that I didn’t pack a pair of jeans in my wedding wardrobe, and were absolutely thrilled when I wore some bangles! It is all about setting expectations.

The day I did wear a saree, dozens of people took it upon themselves to impress upon me the graceful look a saree alone can give. One particular aunt declared while pinching my stomach lovingly – “See! How beautiful and graceful a saree is? It is the most decent of attires too!”

Our traditional wedding attire is a 9 yards saree. If ever there was a more confusing manner in which to drape oneself with 9 yards of stuffy silk, please let me know. I would like to see it. My sister and I wore the whole 9 yards for the wedding. Our cries that the girl is the only one who should be in a wedding attire were obviously ill-founded because we found the gasp emanating while voicing such a sentiment the loudest of all. This gasp knew no economic nor educational barriers. So we relented. We dressed like road rollers and steamed about the wedding hall. It took us all of twenty minutes to traverse twenty feet because after every 3-4 steps, some lady would take it upon herself to “rectify” the saree. They would tug at the pletes near the legs, pull near the hip and clasp the saree near the shoulder. Within minutes of the proceedings, my sister’s saree had reached such a sorry state of affairs, that the only option open to her was to whisk my eldest aunt who was an expert at 9-yard-saree-tying to redo the effort.

Now for a bit of family background – my sister is the elder one between us. So, she gets to do the honours whenever a sister of the groom was called for. Since the 9 yard textile mill ream draped around her showed every indication of rolling itself back into a ream again in public, she went to the dressing room with my aunt. My brother, meanwhile, was looking quite harrassed during the proceedings and silently sent pleas for some company on the stage. I went up to the stage partly to give him company, and partly to save my own saree from the self certified 9-yard-saree-rectifiers. I must have looked quite happy chatting on the stage. Everytime I scanned the crowd from the pedestal, folks would mouth – “Where is your sister?” I would mouth something undecipherable and cock my head towards the dressing room. Immediately, they would shoot off like a bunch of rabbits. This got a bit boring after the 102nd time, and I decided to go the dressing room myself till my sister actually finished dressing.

I went in to find my great aunt looking very harrassed and upset. She was pushing past 90, and bustling around tying a 9-yard saree must have been an effort by itself. My sister and aunt immediately accosted me, and asked me how come the main event of the wedding was reached soo soon. The sister of the groom was mainly required for the 2 minute event when the groom ties the “thali” around the bride. The groom ties one knot, and the sister of the groom ties the remaining two. This event was usually preceded by an hour and a half of mantras and followed by another 2 hours. I explained to them that there were nowhere close to the thali event and my aunt could take her time and relax. Now remember, I mentioned all those people scuttling off like rabbits? All these people had taken it upon themselves to summon the sister of the groom. “Sister of the groom wanted!” they would announce loudly, and peek in to make sure things were going along smoothly. This had made my 90+ aunt extremely nervous and she was quite stressed that the wedding was being stalled because of the saree!

Finally, after half the folks had seen my sister standing like a passenger taken aside for checking at an airport terminal, with a 90 year old lady running around her, she was dressed and we ascended the stage together.

My mother glowed with pride – she had achieved the pinnacle of her dreams. Her maverick daughter had conformed! Her son’s wedding was a success.

“How does one use the restroom in this?” I asked.