Humour – Page 72 – Nourish-n-Cherish

Talk into a skull?

I’d heard a few months ago that the nephew was going to take part in the "Young Entrepreneur’s Contest". Among other things, this meant his team of 4 could learn the basics of sourcing, inventory, estimation, accounting etc. As part of the contest, they were meant to set up a stall in Dubai and man the booth. I was agog with excitement and much to his embarrassment insisted on seeing photos of him dressed up in a suit and standing in his booth.

He refused point-blank and allowed a photograph of himself to be taken at home and sent to quieten his aunt. I goggled and sent him an SMS that he probably hid from his cool teenage friends about how grown-up he looks and all that. Another aunt of his tramped up to his booth to encourage the young entrepreneur. This aunt took ‘Aunt-pride’ to a new level. She lived locally and gathered all her friends and extended family and arrived early in order to make them buy stuff from her nephew’s stall. She kept pulling him out from the crowd and gushed about how proud she was of her little boy and how tall and dashing her young entrepeneur looked. He said the upshot of the whole thing was that, the busload of people who accompanied this aunt bought a lot of things they did not need and ‘helped business along’.

When asked about the whole experience, he looked visibly grateful that the young entrepreneur’s contest was over and behind them. I was excited to learn that they’d made decent profits, and learnt that it is ‘quite hard to bargain with Chinese traders’. He went on to say "We pretty much landed up buying more than we wanted from these people chitthi. They reverse bargained us!".

The conversation was going well till my sister came and shoved something hideous at my face. I recoiled in horror, yelped "GAAAA!" and toppled out of my chair. Hardly the thing that folks fling in your face when one is admiring the young entrepreneur, what?

I told her so, and she said that the thing she had showed me was what she was forced to ‘buy’ from their son’s stall, since they wanted to reduce inventory and the Chinese trader who sold them that refused to take it back. I totally identified with the Chinese trader (although, why he procured it in the first place beats me)

This is what it is. Just in case the message is too subtle, it is a skull phone, and when the phone rings, the eye sockets glow red or blue or something.

Why on this earth, one would buy a phone that resembles a skull beats me. Oh! The horror of picking up the receiver when it rings.

I just let the nephew know what I thought of his skull phone when he told me that they had procured 4 pieces of it and 3 of them had been sold. I can’t imagine anybody willingly spending money on that kind of thing, but again, what do I know? I would have predicted 0 as the number for skull phones.

"Chitthi! Relax – we all have one in here you know?" he said sagely and pointed to his head.

Wise words from a profitable entrepreneur indeed, but I still made him put the phone away from sight.

Chitthi: Aunt

Santa Followed Us!

Here is wishing all of you a wonderful new year! For those of you who noticed the quiet blog, I have been offline on a trip to India and the Middle East for the past few weeks. The daughter was sick with worry about whether Santa would know where to find her, since she was to be away during Christmas. She left letters and cookies under the tree in our home in the US (‘Just in case’ she says!) But she need not have worried. We knew a manager who worked at one of Santa’s factories and arranged for Santa to drop his presents off for the children halfway across the globe in our hallway in Chennai.

You know? If I were Santa, I’d be quite flustered with all the last minute changes that he had to deal with last year.

1) The lists changed in the last minute. For a whole month, there was something on there, and then the day we were leaving for India, a new list appeared with a bunch of cookies. I had to physically ban the milk, since we were scheduled to be away for over 3 weeks. ("Huh? I Changed my mind" – the daughter shrugs her shoulders when quizzed about the change in list contents!) IF I were Santa, I would have stuck around and shrugged my shoulder too, but he didn’t. He was very accommodative of requests procuring items from the local markets at short notice.

2) The location changed. There was a large Christmas tree with an updated list and a post script saying, "Santa: We will be in Chennai for Christmas for this year." I mean. What?

A number of questions arose in my mind. First of all India is ahead of us in timing. So, technically, by the time he read the note and zipped past time-zones, he would already have been late, but he wasn’t!

The daughter and her cousins spent all afternoon on 24th cutting up pieces of paper and coloring them to be Christmas tree and decorating them with stickers and bindis. Santa behaved admirably and left the gifts for them under make-shift paper trees that made for endless days of fun.

Happy New Year!

(Image from Google Search)

Walking on Water

You know how it is when you are growing up and folks (mostly parents, aunts and uncles) are always telling you about how life in their day was stern and earnest. The ‘You-youngsters-have-it-easy’ theme was an all-time favorite. They would gas on about how education was something they loved and why we should not be complaining about how easily education is served on a platter to us. How in their day, they had to walk across the town and then catch a bus that had no seats or fuel(sometimes): all to get to a school, that did not have teachers or roofs?

I always envied their stories. Because the most I could tell my children was that I had a wonderful childhood. It was true that it rained 10 months a year, but that was not nearly as bad as it sounds. When young, splashing in the rain and singing songs while walking up and down the hills was really not tragic. (I’ve tried the martyr theme with this and it fell flat, because I could not keep the glee of the good-old-days from my voice)

Which is why I am almost jealous of this class of students. Imagine this:

Septuagenarian Great Uncle: Youngsters these days! Pah! In our day ….
Kid: Huh? Telling me something grandpa? (unplugging music from ear)
Septua. Great Uncle: Grunt! Humph! You youngsters have no idea about the kind of lives we led. The perils we had to face in order to procure an education. There we would be waiting for the bus to come to the village. There would be a bus only once every 2 hours. So, if we missed it, we had to walk to school over 1.37 miles away. How long to stand for the bus?
A sound like a whistle of steam escaping a tea-pot draws the attention to the wistful sigh that the uncle just let go.
Kid: But you told us you whiled away time playing marbles at the bus-stop.
S.G.U.: Well…yes! But only while waiting for the bus. And when the bus did come, do you think we could waltz in and sit on the seats?
Kid: Why would anyone waltz into a bus, unless you are performing the bus-boarding-scene in a Broadway show?
S.G.U: *Completely ignoring the smart observation regarding buses and waltzes* Then…we had to study really hard. The homework we had was meant to make us think. Not like you – having free time to listen to music and not studying.
Kids: Really?! So you had to play with marbles while you waited and had a bit of homework, but did you have to walk on water for your homework?
That is our assignment you know?
S.G.U: What?
Kid: Our assignment: Walk on Water.

http://www.heraldextra.com/news/weird-news/weird-news-fla-students-walk-on-water-for-class-assignment/article_bc80890c-29ed-11e2-9c5d-001a4bcf887a.html

Ha! I could pay to capture the expression .. Sigh!

The Story behind the Menu

I am going to go out on a limb and say that things could be better. On the other hand er.. leg, it could be a lot worse. So, on the whole, I have decided to not put my foot down and complain about the state of things.

I could not resist the above paragraph folks. So, thanks for letting me get away with that. The truth is that I have a hairline fracture on my ankle and am hoisted up on one foot for weeks. At first, the daughter remained in denial. She kept telling me that she can barely notice the limp in my stride, about how the foot would not pain if I don’t think about the pain etc. It was only later I found that her hidden agenda was making me believe I was perfectly fine. Fine enough to go to Disneyland for the Thanksgiving break. Well, we put a stopper to her Disneyland dreams when she saw me hobbling into the house on crutches. Even she knew that no amount of psychological counseling can get me to Disneyland at this point. So, she buckled down to a week-end at home and teamed up with the husband to "take care" of me.

The pair of them made a sufficient noise about getting me to rest over the week-end and said I was to remain upstairs while they cooked up a Thanksgiving lunch for me.
Very gallant of them of course, but I have to say, I have whipped up many a meal in my life, but rarely have I made such a noise about it. I mean neighbours heard pans clanging and music blaring. Not to mention questionable noises and smells. After about an hour of this cacophony, I asked them what the menu was, and I got the following:

Pan-seared vegetables:
What that means is that the duo had cut up vegetables in haphazard shapes and let them burn. My longish nose picked up a smell like burning rubber and I asked them in a slightly alarmed voice whether everything was under control.
"Oh no….!" moaned the chef
"APPA! You said not to cover it. If we had covered it, amma would not have smelled the vegetables burning!" the sous chef’s accusatory tone rang out. I must say I would have preferred it if she did not burn it at all in the first place.

Potatoes with a hint of Cumin:
I distinctly heard the husband say "OOOPS! The lid just fell inside and it plopped all over."
The daughter rang out, "What is that appa? You said chilli powder, but isn’t chilli powder red? This one is brown or is it green?" I decided I did not want to let my imagination explore what the powder might be, but a few seconds is all it took for me to realise that the "Oops" was the Cumin bottle.
I heard them splashing water on the pan. They must have washed the cumin off because by the time I ate it, they were boiled potatoes.

Lentils with the freshness of roma tomatoes:
The dal was fine – only in the last moment, the sous chef decided that she did not like tomatoes and the Roma t’s retained their freshness.

I groaned as I hopped into the kitchen. Every single spice bottle was on the counter and every inch of counter space was full. I must’ve looked a sight because the husband said he was going to clean up and that I had come too early. The daughter said that if they had aprons, things might have been better

And so it goes … never a dull moment in the nourishncherish world.

PS: My friends and neighbours have been wonderful they’ve sent food across, so the kitchen is holding up after the last bout of cleaning. Thanks all 🙂

Some Precious Spittle for Diwali?!

Our family loves Diwali. The light seeps into our hearts and our inner self glows with all the mellow happiness of good food and excess sweets. President Obama makes sure that he wishes folks a happy diwali too and I loved his message urging us all to remember our less fortunate brethen as we celebrate this wonderful festival. I tried to beat the greeters, but by the time I went online and blogged about a Diwali, folks were already losing the mellow looks that ghee and sweets bring on.

In fact, they seem to have gone a step further and are vying with each other to act nasty. Like this open challenge and I quote:
"A local religious leader has announced a reward of Rs 5 lakh for anyone, who spits on lawyer and BJP MP Ram Jethmalani’s face for describing Lord Ram as a bad husband."

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-11-13/india/35087443_1_bjp-mp-ram-jethmalani-lord-ram-seer

Hardly the spirit of a wonderful holiday to pay good money for spitting at folks. Yet there it is: religious leaders are the ones apparently loaded with money enough to squander Rs 5 lakhs for some precious spittle. Ugh.

This seer went on to proclaim that "A threat presupposes violence and spitting is a harmless non-violent act." I doubt whether his stance would be the same if he were at the receiving end for some reason.

PS: I am not going into the the whole Ram-is-a-bad-husband argument for obvious reasons.

Will Macedonian Job Listing Interest Korean Elephant?

I’ve read through a fair share of job listings. I remember looking in the Indian newspapers as a girl, hoping to find some hidden gems of novelty, and was almost always rewarded. If nothing else came up, there was at least the seedy lawyer asking for someone to be employed in some capacity and almost always had a combination of the words: prosecuting, witness, clerk, short-hand, typing etc. in legalese. (Lawyer offices are incapable, by design, of simple sentences and take pride in complicating things.)

However, I must say this Macedonian minister takes the cake. He wants to employ certified genii as assistants. He would not settle for any IQ scores below a 140 it seems. Apparently, the intelligent minister has not stopped to ponder about why a person endowed with an IQ of more than 140 would want to work as his assistant.

http://www.modbee.com/2012/11/08/2447578/macedonian-minister-looking-for.html

Maybe, somebody would be kind enough to send him Koshik’s resume for the position if Koshik is interested.

Who is Koshik? Well, he is an elephant in a Korean zoo.

http://news.yahoo.com/elephant-south-korean-zoo-imitates-human-speech-080222456.html

Koshik is astounding scientists there with his intelligence. Koshik can utter more than a few words in Korean, and is evidently picking up human speech patterns.

The question, of course, is whether the Macedonian Minister will he have the IQ enough to understand what the elephant is telling him?

Curious George Dances Gangnam Style with Tinker Bell

For those who haven’t read Curious George and his adventures, I suggest you do so. I love the little monkey and his wonderful adventures.

This time, Curious George was in an adventure of sorts with The Man with the Yellow Hat, Professor Wiseman and Tinker Bell the naughty fairy.

When Curious George the monkey heard that Tinker Bell, that amazing fairy, was going be at large, he was excited. He was a curious monkey and fairies, especially plucky ones like Tinker Bell, always interested him. He climbed on to the Man with the Yellow Hat and said, "Oooh oohh aaa aa! Awwww! ooh ooh aaa aaa!" The Man understood him as usual and arranged for little Curious George to go to the party where Tinker Bell was going to hang out with her friends.

It was a wonderful party and the Man-with-the-Yellow-Hat was a big hit. He could barely fit into the pictures with his tall hat. Even Captain Hook forgot about being evil and relaxed in the radiating yellow of the Man. Passing cars slowed down mistaking the Man-with-the-yellow-hat to be a yellow traffic light. But Tinker Bell the fairy swooped in with her sparkling green wings and set them going again. All in all, it was a wonderful party even though Professor Wiseman acted out of character on occasion. You see Professor Wiseman had come for the party and was talking to the Queen when a wonderful witch decided to kick the party up a notch by getting folks to dance to “Gangnam Style”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

Curious George and the Man-with-the-Yellow-hat loved Gangnam style (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangnam_Style) and really wanted Professor Wiseman to dance. Professor Wiseman rose to the challenge and tried to dance. But she chose her steps poorly and landed up twisting her ankle. Tinker Bell tried to heal Professor Wiseman’s ankle, but she was tired and there wasn’t enough magic left for an ankle to heal.

Curious George is now Professor Wiseman’s helper and plays with her whenever he can to make sure he distracts her mind from the twisted ankle. Tinker Bell is spreading her magical love about the place and making Professor Wiseman feel comfortable.

The End

Otter Pop Lessons

I came to the United States as an adult, but that did not stop me from soaking in the wondrous world around me with the enthusiasm of a 5 year old. Since I did not grow up in the US, every so often, something comes up that every kindergartner knows and has me stumped. The Case of the Otter Pops is one such time. When the call to volunteer at the School Sports’ Day at the daughter’s Elementary School came up, I jumped at the opportunity and I was assigned the Otter Pop station. I signed on a bit apprehensively. See my problem was I did not know what an ‘Otter Pop’ was.

I knew I would be distinctly uncomfortable handling otters. Having them pop out at me for a whole day seemed like a less than fun thing to do. Also, why Otters on a school sports day?

Maybe they are the mascot’s friends or something. But the daughter assured me with great enthusiasm that it is a ‘cool’ thing to do.
‘Cool’ – get it? Cool. And she winked in that exaggerated manner that someone just taught her.
She has taken to explaining her jokes to me which makes me wonder whether I am losing touch with my lighter side, or that she thinks that I am getting dimmer. Either way, I did not get it and asked her what the otters would do. I shall retain my shreds of dignity and gather them about me and suffice it to say that otter pops are some sort of frozen fruit juice treats. Why call them Otter Pops? You could ask the rhino’s grandfather, but I doubt he will have an answer either.

This famous Otter Pop Station was at the fag end of all the action. The children come up to the Otter Pop Station only after they have finished running and cheering around the track. That said, we otter pop volunteers got very little action to see. I kept running up between the races to see the runners and cheer them on, but I got to admit that the children were happier to see me when they came up for the otter pops than when I was cheering them on to run faster.

Self and co-volunteers at the Otter Pop Station started off being very accomodative. As the children came up, we offered them otter pops of their choice. We had cut and laid out enough otter pops of every colour available for the first batch of runners. The noisy bunch came and stood on their toes to peer at the table and they all went for the blue otter pops or the orange ones. The red ones and the green ones were slow-moving, but the pink ones languished. Frozen treats don’t languish solidly, and within minutes we had a soggy mess on our hands, while cutting out more blue and orange pops for the incoming folks. We had what one calls a ‘Sticky situation’. ‘Sticky’ because the otter pops melted – get it? Sticky.

Some children came asking for another otter pop after they were done (Of these, I distinctly remembered cheering some of them to start running since they seemed to think the run could also be a stroll and were merrily chatting around the track) We started giving out second helpings when a strict-ish teacher came up and shooed them away and glared at us through her spectacles and said ‘No more than 1 otter pop per child’.

So we gulped and shooed the second-helping-kids ourselves after that. Since the no-second-helping-rule was in place, we had folks exploring corner conditions with gusto. One came up and said he’d dropped his otter pop. We relented and gave him another one. This went on for a bit before we saw that while some of them were legitimate cases of dropping the otter pops, some others were being dropped after wading through 9/10th of an otter pop. (In case, one has apprehensions about the future lawyer population or the future QA test engineer population, one needn’t worry. This just shows you that our country will always a rich repertoire of lawyers and QA engineers)

Soon, we had a no-choice-in-the-matter rule in place because of the skewed preference for otter pop colours.

In summary, in every place, there are good jobs and bad jobs and sometimes, the bad jobs are the ones that bring most joy to the customers. I cannot tell you how much those children beamed when given otter pops. I tasted one to see what it was that was bringing them so much joy, but I could not get through a whole one. It was sugar based flavored syrup that was frozen, and it tasted as bad as it sounds.

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.

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.

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