Clues

Q. How do you know when an elephant has been in your fridge?
A. You find footprints in the butter.
So cute!

Q. How do you know what an Indian has been in your toilet?
A. Footprints on the toilet seat.
How offensive.

Or so I think until I see them in the loos at work.
There are shoe prints! Can't they at least get barefoot? I'm too disgusted to say more.

And the Larder Too

I want Nigella Lawson's kitchen.
It is enormous; equipped with the best, er, equipment; has a beautiful view of the garden; and best of all, it's white!
Can you imagine cooking Indian food in a white kitchen? Frying ilish maach, slow cooking mutton masala, marinating tandoori chicken..... ooh the spots from that one!
But I figure, I only cook Indian food 50% of the time, and if I had a kitchen as lovely as this one, I'd look after it.
If I had Nigella's kitchen, I could be a professional chef. I too would scoff at the calorie-conscious and slap bricks of butter into a basin-sized wok. Drop in slices of herb-coated potatos and serve them crispy alongside juicy spare ribs. Followed, of course, by something sinfully chocolicious.
I'd invite everyone to dinner and accept compliments with quiet pride.
Sigh.
I deserve that kitchen.

As Time Goes By

I've often felt like I spend a good percentage of my life waiting. For someone to call, someone to come, someone to leave, something to happen, something to change. Just waiting and waiting.

A few years ago, realizing that one truly needs to be the change one wants to see, I changed jobs, cities, expectations.

But I'm still waiting. Less, but still waiting. For a sign that I've finally hit upon the right approach to life, the right path at work, the right balance of self and others.

I think this is in some way a subversive fantasy. You know, the one in which the princess waits in her ivory tower to be rescued by the handsome prince on his white steed. (Yeah, right!)

It's time for a different fairy tale. Lara Croft.

Free Association

Crackerjack!

I decide to revive my blog, and sitting page open, I wonder what to write about and the first word that pops into my head is crackerjack. And for the life of me I can't figure out where I heard that or why I thought of it just now.

I google-discovered that it's the name of a British TV series for kids, and it's also the brand name of an Ameican breakfast cereal. I thought that was cool - serial/cereal - just so cool ! But I still don't know why I thought of it.

Then I got thinking about the names of Indian breakfast cereals - Mohun, Bagry's...... sorry to say, none of these names would just pop into my head if I were pondering over what to write.

So, crackerjack.....

Not much of a lead that.

Hmmmm.

Ok next time.

House of Horrors

So it's become quite cold in Bangalore these days (will I have to issue a public apology for not saying Bengaluru?) and the wind is turning my house into the perfect set for a B-grade horror flick. For some architectural flaw, the sliding windows in my room don't close perfectly shut, and the mm-thin gaps that remain form the perfect whistle. Remember all those really bad movies in which the wind shrieks? That's exactly what happens all evening and all night. OOOOoooooOOOO
I mean WTF! Not only that, the loo door keeps banging and waking me up. The window in the loo has louvres that are too tight to shut, and the door has lost its knob so it doesn't anchor shut. So every time the wind picks up, I have to be startled awake. I've been jamming it shut with paper, but I guess the best thing would be to replace the knob - what say?
But coming back to the scary movie thing - the howling wind, the banging doors, the unfathomable noises from the upstairs neighbours at 3 am - it's all the ingredients of the flick that forces you into fright!
All that's left is for the power to go off and the white-masked creature from the Scream to appear. (Like I'm Neve Campbell!) Tonight I will wear 3 sweaters, use two quilts, jam the loo door with a doormat, and keep the window wide open. Damned if I'm kept awake again!

And again

If I like something I want at least two of it. For example, I can never buy one bar of chocolate. Or one book. Or one top in a design I like. I'd like to have two of the same persons I like too. One to go do what they want, and one to always be with me. I've actually discussed this concept with someone, and he asked whether I'd know which one is the original and which the clone. I wonder. If the answer is yes, then what's the point of the clone? If the answer is no, then how am I appreciating the uniqueness of this person?

Metamorphosis

I've had a fascination for owls ever since I was a little kid. I love them - their big round eyes and the general "who the heck are you?" expression they have on their faces. The trouble with liking something so much is that you begin to take on either its features or its attributes.

I think I'm turning into an owl. I've become positively nocturnal. I can't sleep when I go to bed early; when I go to bed late I wake up early. What it is? Next my head will turn 360 degrees! Well, I never got any wisdom teeth - I guess this is as good a way to get wise.

Breaking Up

The doc who finally put a name to my pain says I gotta lose all the lovehandles I'm carrying around cos (as we all know) I'll face problems later in life. Hmph. Like I don't have any now. Anyway, I've heard this a million times before but I never really cared, but for some reason this guy managed to psych me out. It's been a couple of weeks, and I'm watching what I eat and generally feeling better. However, the seed that the dude with the steth planted in my head seems to be growing into this crazy wild bush that's almost completely driven my appetite away. In the last couple of days, I've hardly eaten anything, and I'm not hungry at all. Einz, if you're reading this, can you believe it??!! What will we do if I'm not khau anymore? If the lovehandles were coming off, I wouldn't feel so bad. But WTF! Not eat and still not be thin? That's not happiness! What will I do for fun? What will I do for comfort? Food doesn't love me any more! Waaaaah :'(

Animal Pin-Ups

I hate house lizards. They're clammy and ugly and downright gross. Shudder! Au contraire the garden lizards (geckos, chameleons, and so on) that I quite like. Not at close quarters - they should be at least 5 feet away. I like their colours and their speed, and the fact that they don't look slimy. A garden lizard is the animal version of the surfer dude. Fit and radiant, and a true worshipper of the Sun.

When I'm 64

No romantic song by the Fab Four this.
Instead it's an ambition.
When I'm 64, I want to be a spiritual leader to whom people donate their 5-figure monthly salaries.
I just heard of someone who gives up their sizable monthly income to a swamiji. Every month!
I don't know what he/she gets in return.
So why will I wait till I'm 64? Cos I think I'll look more trustworthy with grey hair and wrinkles. (I refuse to admit to either till 63).
What will I give in return? A kind look, and a gentle pat, and a "Sab theek ho jayega."

Where from you hail?

I've always been interested in accents and trying to determine where someone is from based on how they speak. Sometimes it gets difficult cos people who live near the state's border can just as easily sound like someone from the next state. But I've found a great way to tell their place of origin. Put them on speaker phone on a bad line. From the inflections in their English, you will be able to pick up intonations peculiar to their native tongue It really works. Very recently, I was in a training that was being conducted over the phone, and it seemed to me that the facilitator was from Bengal, but couldn't tell for sure. In half an hour or so, I got tired of holding the phone to my ear, so put the call on speaker. As is common in long trainings, my mind started wandering and in a while I stopped really listening. The voice receded to this drone in the background, and after sometime I thought the guy was talking in Oriya.
Voila !!!

Jeez! - I mean Cheese!

In Jan this year I put 12 photographs into a customised calendar to commemorate a family vacation. It was quite an effort, as I found that most of the pictures I'd taken were of the sky, mountains, winding roads, birds, insects, flowers.....well, anything non-human! I wouldn't have minded a calendar based on the inmates of Mysore Zoo, but the rest of my folks lean towards pictures of the two-legged variety. 

So after that bit of difficulty, I vowed to take more people pics whenever I'm on holiday. Staying true to my promise, I kept asking to be photographed when the husband and I took a weekend off last month. You should see the results. Gosh! The torn-winged moth from last June's holiday looked more animated. I have this impatient "hurry up and snap already" look in all of the pictures. Aargh, I hate it. I'm ok in group pics, but the ones alone - I have bared teeth in some semblance of a grin, or upturned corners to my lips, but cold eyes - gaaa. Horrific! The only time my pic comes out OK if I pretend to be someone else, and that's just too much effort.

I'll leave you with the pic of the torn-winged moth. It's not pretending to be someone else.

Under Pressure

The whole world's crazy about it, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I'm talking about Facebook, which at this time seems to be the center of the universe !

Why?

All my friends are on it, and under duress I signed up, but gosh! It's like a busy Bangalore street. People all going here and there, and doing this and that, and all talking at once. Random folks bumping into you. So why am I still there? Probably cos I invested a lot of time setting up my profile, and ocassionally I do get to hook up with old friends I'd completely lost touch with.

Like recently, when I managed to locate a childhood pal after 24 years! So worth the noise, isn't it?

Je Ne Sais Quoi

For the past year and more, there's been this pain that visited my tummy every so often. I thought it was from eating crap all the time, so I would cut down on one type of yum food a week to identify the culprit. I could never pin it down, but the general consensus was that it's the 4 teaspoons of bournvita in one glass of cold milk at bedtime (the erstwhile highlight of my day). So I gave that up. But the pain persisted. So I went to the doc, who through a series of tests discovered that I had a little unnecessary piece of benign being inside me. I had that removed with the hope that I had bid my pain goodbye, but oh dearie me, no! It was back. By then I'd had enough of doctors so I ignored the whole thing for a few weeks. The pain would come and go, till one day it was so bad that I had to rush to emergency, where the doctors wanted to prove their prowess by taking out the least complicated body part - the appendix. Of course, I stood up for its rights and said no way are they doing any such thing, esp when all the tests were negative. So with great reluctance, they let me out with only an injection. Then I figured it was time to see another doc, so I went to one who referred me to another, who gave me some meds, which made me better. So I was happy and I went home for a week. Then I came back and the pain came back. Every day. Lots. So I went to ayurvedic doc cos I thought at least that won't have side effects. I have to have the stinkiest meds on the face of the planet and rub an oil on my tummy. But I think that's better than popping pills all day, which I am prone to do. But the next day the pain was so bad I went to emergency again. They made me wait for two hours. So I figured it's cos I wasn't screaming in pain. That's a useful lesson for anyone who wants quick attention. Please scream. Well anyway, they checked for many things but it was all clear, so I came home. The next day I went back to the doc who made me better for some time. He gave me the same meds. I am better again. I think I will be better for 2 weeks cos that's how long this course is. After that, when the pain comes back, I will go to an astrologer and ask him what I should do. He will tell me to wear a red stone. I will not wear it cos I don't like the idea of surrendering my health to a piece of jewellery. By then there will nothing else to try. And I'm sure, being the loyal thing that it is, the pain will still be around. So I will have to start the alternative healing that I used to practise all those years ago. A valid question at this point would be why did I not do that all this while. The only time I think about doing it is when I am in pain. And then I am in so much pain that I can't focus. So I don't do it. What then? Sigh. What a pain.

The Simplest Recipe

I was channel surfing this evening and stopped at scene showing a group of 4 women curled up around a coffee table drinking vodka and eating chocolate. It was obvious that they'd had a crappy day and were trying to make themselves feel better - and succeeding from the looks of it.

Greatly inspired, I decided to google a chocolate fudge cake recipe. I found plenty, for cake as well as for chocolate, but the strangest one by far is this one for sugarfree dark chocolate:
Ingredients: 500 g - melted & tempered sugar free dark chocolate
Method: Melt and temper Sugar free Dark Chocolate and put in a mould. Cool in refrigerator for 25 to 30 minutes. Tap each chocolate out from the mould. Arrange nicely on a serving tray and serve.

How can the ingredients for a food be the food itself? This is like saying I make great biryani. I get it from Hyderabad House!

Cinema सिनेमा

I watched a movie on TV called The Transporter. It's about an ex-special forces operator, Frank, who now lives in France and works as a transporter making not quite legal deliveries of people/cargo. I'm not going to provide the whole plot here; suffice it to say that Frank gets involved with one of his packages, a young, attractive Chinese girl named Lai, and all hell breaks loose when they attempt to rescue 400 Chinese people smuggled into the country to be used as slave labour.

I must confess I kind of enjoyed it. It was fast-paced and reasonably gripping. No great acting - the characters were true to type. The strong, silent, I-work-better-alone hero; the young, vulnerable-but-gutsy heroine; the handsome villain known only as Wall Street; the I'm-tough-but-I-have-a-heart middle-aged cop. It was good watching if you had something on the stove and had to get up periodically to stir without missing much.

But all through the movie I kept thinking that this was actually a Hindi movie made in English by mistake. I could almost see the writer explaining "Is mein sub kuch hai. Action, romance, comedy, family drama. Fight sequence mein hero ka body dikhaenge, highway mein car aur truck ka chase dikhaenge. Superhit fillum banega!" And seriously that's what it was - an out and out Dhoom 2. I am happy to say that Hrithik and Aishwarya are way better looking and had better chemistry than the lead pair in this movie, but the fact that Lai didn't have that silly giggle was a huge factor in her favour.

So my rating, 2/5. For Dhoom 2, not The Transporter.

The Fine Art of Letter Writing

When I was in primary school, we were taught how to write our first letter to a friend. Here's how they said it should be...

My dearest friend {name of friend},

How are you? I am fine. I am so happy to hear that you are coming to visit this summer. It has been a long time since we last met. Let me know the details of your arrival so I can receive you.

Looking forward to seeing you.

Yours affectionately,

{your name}

I don't know why I thought of this after so many years. I think I miss the definiteness of relationships. Earlier there were best friends, schoolfriends, tuition friends, neighbour friends, friends of relatives friends, ex-friends (friendship broken cos someone shared lunch with the sworn enemy). I could immediately tell you how I knew someone, and how close or not I was to them.

But now, I can converse freely with anyone I meet, and make you think I've known them for ages. I can have a party for a dozen people where everyone meets everyone for the first time, and I would introduce them all as "my friends". But in all this soical frenzy, I keep myself essentially isolated. There's no real sharing. Noone who's met me for the first time in the past two years would know that I write poetry, or sketch in charcoal. They wouldn't know I've run an alternative healing center. They'd never believe I pick up the cell phone a second before it rings. Ok the last one, practically no one believes. But it's true. 90% of the time.

Anyway, coming back to the point. I think I've become commerically savvy but emotionally impoverished. Except when my REAL friends are around or in touch. I know myself through my relationships. So I'm happy that the lasting ones are so great.

By the way, if I had to write that letter now, here's how it would go:

Duuuude! you're finally coming to {name of city}. The last time we met I wore plastic jewellery and you had big hair. When you getting here? I'll take a couple of hours off from work and come home to let you in. Let me know. Yayyyyy!!

{no signature}

You got the job.

The usual demand at interviews - Tell me something about yourself. Hopefully I won't have to hear this in the near future, but if I do, my response will be "Deep down I'm very shallow."

What the..! (or Part 1 in the series of 'I Just Don't Have a Clue'

Just how tech-unsavvy am? Internet Explorer 7 blinks when I launch it on my new laptop, and I'm staring at the screen wondering why. It asks me to choose personal settings, etc; but doesn't allow me to cos it's blinking, and I have no clue why. So I stare at it for a while, then close it. Then after a minute of waiting, I think perhaps it's fixed itself so I can launch it again. Oho, but no. It still blinks. Ok then. I'll just wait till someone who is marginally better at it than I am happens to be home when I'm trying this out (read husband). But I so know what'll happen. He'll say do this, I'll say why, he'll say just do it, I'll say but it has to make sense.....and so on.
Alas!

Toilet P&L

The recession has the corporate world implementing cost-cutting plans with a vengeance, and sometimes I'm inconvenienced, but mostly I understand, and try to do my bit to help save whatever resources I can. But here's a weird side effect of cost cutting...
They've recently introduced movement-sensor-driven light fixtures in the office loos, which are all very fine, but do the new high-tech systems have to be anti-women? Consider the following example.
I sit when I use the loo cos I'm a woman and proud of it. But when I'm in the middle of my little task, the light goes off. And why? Cos there's nothing below it. The sensors in the stalls have been placed exactly above the place I would stand in front of the commode if I were a man. As this spot remains unoccupied once I'm seated, the @#$% object assumes that there's no one in the loo and switches off!
My workaround for the problem is to do leg lifts. Might as well get some exercise while I'm at it. At the current rate, I can book a reduction of 1 mm off my tummy by the end of the 1st quarter.