Distorted Images

Yesterday many of my 'Friends' on Facebook were busy liking an article on why Godse killed Gandhi. I've heard this thing for long now, from my relatives and lots from Rajani. I'm not surprised but I'd rather have their leaders stop invoking Gandhi when they go abroad. It must be so allergic to them to speak about his legacy and stuff and hear others praise him. He already sounds more like a long-lost mythological character anyway.

I watched Mr. and Mrs. Iyer after so many years of wanting to watch it. When P saw what I was doing(I didn't call him for company this time) he said, "I think that guy kisses her", as if nothing else mattered. After I finished it I wanted to tell him that he didn't kiss her after all.  But I refrained, knowing that I would sound disappointed, even if it didn't matter really.

Brownies finally! They taste damn good, for the first time in the history of my cake-making, I must admit. I can't wait till Rishi eats them, he's been so restless waiting for them.

Miscellaneous

Today's interviews finished much before time and I was back at home for lunch. Java aspirants outnumbered PL/SQL guys by scores and even the ones I interviewed were below average. I spent more time waiting for someone to turn up at my room than interviewing them but The Bell Jar gave me enough company. It was a surreal feeling sitting in that glass room trying to figure out Sylvia Plath's lines with nobody to disturb me, except for some drilling nearby...I guess I hadn't had such reading time since the days of early youth.

There was a kidnapping of a small boy very near to our house last week. Details are slowly emerging but not the leads to the culprit. The neighbourhood(4 schools and a children's play park in the radius of 100 meters) is struggling to come out of the shock and there is a whole lot of caution while sending the children out to play, even to the basement. The usually crowded skating rink is also empty these days and I wonder if that is linked too.

After I complained about its absence, winter appeared for about 40 days and now summer has reared its head. Some trees are bursting with flowers already and walking to the office watching them is the only time I wish I had a decent camera on my phone. At least for now.

This is one tip I want to pass down to the next generation - Onion juice - a teaspoon full with little jaggery is the best medicine for children's cough. It works for older people too but I'd rather eat the onion itself instead of taking the trouble to grate it.

Fake Hallucinations

Yesterday night I suddenly woke up around midnight and realized that what woke me up was the music of "Bits of Paper..." being played somewhere in the house. It stopped after a round and I was confused if it was a dream that extended; both my daughter and husband were fast asleep. I checked the keyboard and it was off. We have a toy which plays such music when pressed but I hadn't seen it in quite some time but I looked for it nevertheless. It wasn't there among the toys. I went back to bed still puzzled.

I woke up again sometime early in the morning. This time "Row Row Row a Boat..." was playing. As I shot up from my bed this time, I was glad to see my mother going to the toilet. I asked her where the music came from and she said, "what music!" What was going on! What kind of dreams was I getting? But if it was only a dream, why did I wake up like this? Now I started thinking of Sacks' Hallucinations and it's a surprise that I managed to go back to sleep.

Third time was at 6:30 and this time it was "Mary had a Little Lamb" but I cracked it finally. It was that toy indeed and it was in the cabinet below the bed. My son had moved some things there yesterday and this one had moved up to touch the cot when we shifted our weight. Ho! Relief!

Tomorrow have to be in the office to take daylong interviews. Has killed my happiness already.

Tiny Habits

Attended a session for women on time management in the office yesterday. I hope they have it for men too. While it was nice listening to the lady for two hours, I didn't have really anything to carry from there. I'm someone who knows all my vices, all what I have to do but just does not want to change. Is there any hope for someone like that?

Anyway, on a different note, my latest favourite is "Toredu Jeevisabahude..." from Pt. M. Venkatesh Kumar and Kanakadasa's choice of words makes me chuckle. The gist of the song is that Kanakadasa can do anything but leave his beloved God's feet. So he says, "Tayi tandeya biTTu tapava maaDalu bahudu(you can leave your parents and do penance)" but look at this one - "MaDadi makkaLa kooDa tolagisiye biDabahudu...(you can even get rid of wife and children)"!! Anguish or frustration?

It's becoming so damn difficult to see the face of workplace and even I'm wondering why. I mean, I'm ready to slog (even when I'm on leave like last week) but I don't want to work from office! 

Staging the Protest

The kid had her annual day celebrations last Saturday. Practices had been going on for quite a while and she was to take part in a Rajasthani dance, a LavaNi dance and also some dialogues to be said in the role of Catherine, a lady from USA on a visit to India along with her husband. Some 10 sentences in all and we rehearsed at home and thought all was going well. Then last Wednesday I get a call from her teacher saying the kid is just not opening her mouth in the practice session but just cries! She was upset all the more because it was her who recommended Anu for the role and she was kind of being blamed by the in-charge.

So I had a session with the kid that evening. She said she didn't want to be a foreigner; she wanted to be from Bangalore. I told her there was more fun in playing someone you were not; I was Alexander once! She looked somewhat mollified by my example and said fine. Next problem was that she had to sit too long; throughout the whole show and that day because of the practice she couldn't eat her snacks also. I told her that way she got to watch all the dances which was a privilege indeed! But the hardest part was yet to come - the in-charge teacher had called her a naughty girl! I told her that the teacher was being nice to her by calling her only that in the face of her own difficulties. Finally after many rounds of convincing(I thought so) it was agreed that she was going to be alright the next day.

We went on Saturday, all curious how it would turn out to be. It was half-relief and half disappointment in the end. The teacher made her husband tell all the dialogues except saying Yes occasionally and her sole job was to nod her head vigorously(it was very funny) and take photos every now and then. But she was very happy as she came home and said, "Didn't I do well? I didn't cry even once!".

Conspiracy Theory

Pathanjali brand is spreading its wings and I smell foul. They have launched their noodles now, after various other products like sugar(which tasted like a mixture of jaggery and coffee), biscuits, masala and I don't know what else. I'm just trying to connect the dots together - the noodles are coming soon after the Maggi ban, Maharashtra government has decided to appeal against lifting the ban on Maggi and also they want Pathanjali to be the official buyer of their forest produce. So they aren't really on a level-playing field. Add to this people like my uncle who are buying these biscuits in bulk and distributing it to people who don't need them!

Feeling Needed

Just to add further on Awakenings, the conclusion if there is any, seems to be that the patients live longer and are able to overcome their crippling disabilities at least partly or occasionally, if there is something they can hold on to in life. And care is not necessarily love and they can perceive that too. So many a times in their case, family may not be that someone - sheer monotony of it, unspoken but daily-felt contempt,  too much 'understanding' of the patient's needs - but something entirely new. Little soul-searching I did myself.

SM had a baby and seems to have exploded on the FB stage. I had lost touch with her for some time now which got renewed after she became my 'friend' . She said nobody was living in her house now - both her parents are no more - and I felt it a pity. It was and still is one of the best houses I have seen and it's part of my good childhood memories. It was everything that my old house wasn't - well-lit, spacious and elegant. And may be, her mother was also different from my own - she seemed to have the best of tempers and she and SM were like sisters in their interactions. I seemed to have only one advantage - Pappa - one who came home for lunch everyday to listen to my school-stories and one whose pleasant voice would float through the radio and people would recognise it and tell me excitedly about it ...

It's been 10 years now since Pappa had a heart-attack and he's leading a most active life, some times much more active than my mother wants it to be. But we still get subdued whenever there is a mention of the word in some context.

Awakenings

I'm reading Sacks' Awakenings now(I'm kind of getting obsessed with his books) and feeling spooked a little bit. He talks of some of his post-encephalitic patients having had sleep disorders like sleepwalking and sleep-talking and I used to have both till almost high-school as I remember. Once it seems I even went out of the house, stood in front of our landlord's house and asked for milk. Both V and I used to talk quite a bit in our sleeps too. Anyway, it went away after the high-school.

I think that I had a delayed growth. Everything I understood late and even my body grew more slowly than my peers.

Sweet Talk

V came for Sankranti lunch today and opened the memories of childhood days - going to distribute Sankranti KaLu to various houses around, going as far as KonkaNi Amma's house, being pampered by them, V losing her ear-ring - she never used to walk those days, just run - and mother scolding me for that...sending greeting cards, coming home for lunch everyday guessing whose cards would've come...

Rajani's blood report showed elevated HbA1C and she's alarmed, because it was the last thing she expected. So the lunch table(we are four of us) was all abuzz with diabetic talk yesterday. It's tough on anybody - it seems like yet another infringement on your time somehow.

I wore a saree to go out today and P said I looked like a holy cow. Nice name for an unholy mess like me.

Being Earnest

Rishi and I were going to meet L yesterday evening and we met Teacher Auntie on the way. I greeted her as usual and was proceeding but she had something to say. She said, "You know, I met your daughter with her cycle just now and asked her if she could give me a ride. She didn't say anything so I pressed her saying my leg was aching and it would be great if she could give me a ride. You know what she said? 'Take an auto'!! Your husband also heard it!". I was all set to laugh but the last sentence kind of put me on guard and I ended up expressing solidarity with her.

I inquired Anu about it later in the day. She complained too. "How could she sit on my cycle? It would break!" . She didn't seem convinced on either of the points that I explained - that Auntie's weight wouldn't break her cycle or that Auntie was only saying it for fun.

Environmentalist God

I find it very hard to understand why one should have temples in almost every lane - 3 in our lane, in fact - because when people can take all the hardships and go to faraway places for pilgrimage, they might as well walk a mile to visit a temple once in a while. But I do recognise their value in preserving the greenery in our midst and I'm hoping they continue to score over the commercial interests at least till people genuinely want to have more trees.

I keep thinking of the mini-forest that we lived in when I was a kid. It had two Nagabana(snake god's forest)s and around them was a thick growth of all sorts of trees. We had so much to do everyday while moving through that stretch - smelling various flowers, eating wild fruits(I saw Renje tree in the palace premises last week and just made me so happy),collecting seeds and fancy leaves for our games and being on the lookout for snakes, of course. Now all that is gone and plots have come up in their place(must be houses by now) and roads for them. But a small portion still remains where no sun enters and it is surrounding the Nagabana. This is the story in many other places also and I'm grateful to the Gods for that. But for how long?

I want to reduce our plastic 'intake' this year. That would mean that I have to make more snacks at home and I have to learn to make them. Jai Ho!

Reading Voices

L has come down to Bangalore on a surprise visit and made us all very happy. Of course I'm yet to meet her but happy looking forward to it. :-)

I called her up today and spoke in general and when I kept the phone down, Anu said, "It was Auntie, right?" I was not sure how she figured it because I hadn't addressed her by name or said anything that really suggested it was L. So I asked her. And she said, "You spoke in such cute voice that I knew it had to be her!". I said I hadn't noticed.

Kanyakumari Diary

Too short it was, only of two days. Yeah, now I don't know why we didn't make it at least a 3-day affair. So like typical tourists, we crammed a lot of places in those two days and came back with mixed feelings of happiness and dissatisfaction. What would've I done if I had stayed there for two more days? I would've had a daylong drive around Kanyakumari - beautiful all around, except near the monuments - sparkling water bodies, rocky mountains giving you company almost everywhere, green paddy fields, coconut trees...reminding you of some place or the other back home but summed up in one place. I would've sat in the cool surroundings of Padmanabhapuram Palace, so unlike Mysore Palace and so much like a big country home you wish you owned. I would've stayed longer on the Rock Memorial and hopefully overcome that unknown fear that was at the back of my mind - I couldn't define it but it didn't really let me enjoy the place in peace and it seemed to have afflicted only me.

Smoking Tower!

Lonely Beach

3D Jump!

At Sunset Point

Waking up to Kanyakumari

The Palace Sun

I was somehow expecting much more people than what I saw. What I saw was mostly Bengalis(or Odiyas; I can't yet differentiate the two) at Kanyakumari and MalayaLis at the palace. I saw a couple of young foreigners at the Sunset Point and they were quite obliging to the local youth requesting a photograph with them. Food was just average on the first day; even the usually safe idli was under-cooked, even looked so on the posters pasted on the walls of the hotel. The guy at our hotel confirmed it - there was nothing called the best vegetarian hotel in Kanyakumari. 

Sanguthurai Beach was beautiful and looked lonely. I guess we were just early and felt immediately at home. While we frolicked, Pappa found that Kumar, our driver and guide, had worked in MRPL for a year and it felt like a new bond between them. 

I had forgotten that we were crossing over to the new year until woken up at midnight by the sound of crackers and some loud cheers - not loud enough to wake anybody else in the room it seems!

At the Wax Museum, I ignored Gandhiji, Obama and Johnny Depp(!!) and placed myself between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, quite uncharacteristically one might say. But I actually prefer Die Hard BW to the Pirate JD, so there was no choice really. 

Some of the beautiful rocky hills around are shrinking I guess. I saw one face of a hill badly chipped off, may be for granite. These hills are very inviting, even for someone like me, who trekked last may be almost a century ago. They seem to add an extra grandeur to all the places - the restaurant or the palace. 

Sunset Point was crowded with people, especially at the western edges. If you by chance happened to take your eyes off the sun basking in all the attention, you could see flashes and flashes of mobile cameras all around, with their backs to the imposing statue of ThiruvaLLuvar.