Ciao, La Vita

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#DearZindagi,

It’s been long since we had a chat, or met with a cuppa reckoning the balance sheet so far. I believe I’ve crossed the threshold called ‘half-life’, and like an unstable radioactive element, will continue to decay exponentially for the rest years. This isn’t just a chemist’s blabber, dear life. It is the exact summary through midway, rather midlife.

Let me begin with gratitude for not deserting me. I know it has been difficult for you to put up with a brooding brat like me, but – you’ve been damn good so far! Since I gained enough maturity to ponder upon stuff, I’ve realised that you have clung to me. When the going got tough, you were tough enough to get me going against childhood bullies, teenage crushes, adulthood heartbreaks, or the corollaries of wedlock. Do you recall the huge transition that I had to make from a suburban school to a metropolitan high school? I was lost in the sea of people, everyone rushing past me in a bloody busy city, pushing and jostling me to the brink of oblivion. While I would sit alone on the penultimate seat of the school bus on chilly winter mornings, the fog mixed with strong but sweet charcoal fumes from tea stalls would remind me that you were right there, with me. When I have ambled along the college lawn, both alone and lonely, you have thrown surprises with vibrant yellow petals of Radhachura (Gulmohur) strewn all over the trail, just for me.

You’ve been holding my hand during every major decision I ruminated upon and led me carefully to what my heart desired. I would have been a failed, incomplete scientist if you hadn’t put words in my pen and prodded me to be a writer. It’s been quite a few years now, and I know you still stand by me despite a number of futile results. I’ve been worried that I can’t write as well as others, distressed that I haven’t been published yet, exhausted of rejections and writer’s blocks. And yet, when I open a new page and tap at the keyboard, you make me a writer – impervious to the mediocre and convoluted world. You’ve manoeuvred quite enough to get me a little accolade, a tiny prize, a monthly salary and exciting work to keep the ball rolling. Each instance I falter and risk crumbling down, you’ve sprung a sweet surprise and motivation to clench me up.

It’s you, life, to whom I owe the joie de vivre, the pleasure of creation in the form of words and stories. I have scooped up inspiration from you, life, and woven stories that have touched a few peoples’ hearts. They have praised me, but it’s you whom I should shower with thanks. If I have ever felt the fear of losing you, I’ve resorted to poetry and reading and waited patiently for you to resurrect. Because –

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

So long,

Yours.

————

I am writing a letter to life for the #DearZindagi activity at BlogAdda.

A Tale of Odd and Even Shares

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Do you remember the candies that you shared with cousins during a summer vacation, the ice lollies called golas on the streets with your college beau, or a plate of crispy pakoras on a rainy evening with the entire family? If you can share these and create memories, why not share a bucket of laundry with members of opposite sex in your family.

Sunkissed washing machine on a summer morning

Not getting into the nitty gritties of laundry duties in India (like I did in a previous article on #ShareTheLoad ) – I’d suggest, and may be coax you with my stories to jump into the bandwagon. The very basic and important household chore of laundry is often seen lonesome waiting upon women of the house. It was pretty common among my peers to heap trunkload of unwashed clothes all through their semester and carry them back home to be washed. A humongous task of washing was gifted to the mothers, sisters and domestic helps during the college kid’s semester break. Times are a’changing now, with washing machines costing cheaper than decades ago and invading the middle class household. High school kids and freshmen are just a button and few clicks away from washing their soiled jerseys and fancy jeans. What about the other chores though – drying, folding and stacking the clothes? The most arduous part of laundry.

Generically, an atomic family of a couple like us need to perform laundry twice a week with mini washes (without the machine) in between. Since Pune is facing a drought this summer, we’ve decided to keep the laundry minimal and accumulate them to maximum twice a week. Hence the #LaundryGoesOddEven becomes easier to implement with the better half (M) going gung ho on Sunday – first day of the week, and me choosing the fourth day (Wednesday). This has actually been working since the advent of summer this year as water became scarce and came in batches of hours each day. We chose Sunday and Wednesday mornings for laundry as they suit our leisures perfectly well. M jumps about as a hyperactive school kid in glee of just operating the gadget, laundry seems an excuse for him to play with the washing machine. Since he leaves early morning on working days, Wednesday works fine for me to wrap up the midweek laundry. We have been able to fine tune the chore to almost mechanical precision, and try not to miss our preferred days of the work. It’s a seamless process, each doing their own on time and saving rest of the day for important work like writing and blogging!

M & me on a Sunday and Wednesday respectively

‘I am taking part in the #LaundryGoesOddEven Challenge by Ariel India at BlogAdda.’

Watch this video to #ShareTheLoad.

Memories In March

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Memories are best served cold. They are created while you’re young, so you can carry them inside your head till it is alive. As you grow old, day by day, it’s time to ruminate on the memories, warm them up and have them served apiece within a mundane daily routine. There are some that don’t taste the same after days or years, and then there are others that sizzle up with time and fill your senses with longing for loved ones.

Watching young ones in the family grow up is a beautiful process that enriches one and makes for endless memories. I’ve had the scope to witness my young sister-in-laws (SIL) transit from school to college and transform into beautiful ladies from cranky teenagers. For a large part though, we’ve been living in radically different cities and corresponding through occasional phone calls, text messages and holidays. The moments spent there would be hurried and sporadic, in a frenzy over a few days to soak away the minutes slowly into our togetherness. We’d catch a movie, hop off to lunches, meet at their places, our place and any other relatives nearby, sneak away time for a chat on the terrace while mothers and aunts carried on their chitter-chatter. Each holiday would remain a collage of these moments, with images popping up in our minds months later, causing roars of laughter on either side over a call.

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Words of Wisdom #SachchiAdvice

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The maladies of youth include aversion to advice. It applies to almost all of us, more of it in our early adult years when peer influence is greater than golden words from elders. I was resistant to advice too, I used to sit with a flat face and blank eyes before relatives and acquaintances who would lecture me on various stuff, some of them even unimaginable. Things were better with my parents though. Still, at times, during a long dark phase in academics, advice was something I’d be intolerable to.

When I was in the last year of my Master’s degree, there was a lot going on – classes, lectures, projects, thesis, experiments, exams and confusion. Few of our professors wanted us to go abroad for further academics and motivated us with their advice. A few others wanted us to pursue doctorate under them, to work in their lab and be guided by them. My classmates were divided into three groups, the first two wanted academics in and out of the country and the third group opted to search for Government and Private sector jobs.

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Of Scents, Stinks and Whiffs

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Each household has its distinct orbit of odours. When you enter a house, the first thing that hits you is how it smells. I’ve been put off quite often by living rooms and corridors that reek of sweaty socks, possibly the worst stink in the world. Given the fact that we live in a humid sub-tropical country, it is extremely difficult to maintain a house free of any bad odour. Our food habits lead a big way into this phenomenon too.

Since we belong to the Bengali clan, our staple is fish and meat (as you may already assume)! Living in Calcutta, it is well accepted that every family cooks and eats fish, rather the exceptions are looked down upon. But in other cities, especially in other countries – I’ve been sceptical cooking fish in the apartment. While we may savour the aroma of freshly fried fish in mustard oil, I’ve heard neighbours complain and frown, which is pretty normal in the circumstances. It even happened that in our student condominium, we used to pull open the fire alarm, take out the batteries, cook our fish fry/curry and assemble the alarm again. The property laws in USA are so strict that we’d be fined and warned if the fire alarm ringed owing to the fumes while frying fish. So much for comfort food of fish and rice!

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A Trip to Culinary Heaven

Calcutta is arguably the culinary heaven of India, with Delhi and Hyderabad as close contenders. The mention of culinary heaven must take you to an olfactory, ocular and gustatory paradigm of experience. It should leave you with a phenomenon, not just an eating experience. Calcutta is pretty much capable of guiding you through an unforgettable culinary tour comprising of unimaginably varied food. You will find almost everything under the sun, especially with nuovo restaurants offering both world and local cuisine. But it is the heritage that still reigns the city’s food map. Allow me to introduce you to, and enlighten about five unique dishes quintessential to what we call ‘Calcutta cuisine.’ While you can still make/cook all of these at home, they are best tasted and tried at restaurants/street corners.

Kabiraji Cutlet – Most of us have been induced to believe that the wonderful, our own Kabiraji Cutlet has been derived from something called the British ‘Coverage Cutlet’. I’ve believed this blindly since time, but as I delved deep into the beloved Kabiraji Cutlet roots, it seemed Coverage Cutlet didn’t exist at all. To know more, read this wonderful article at Presented by P. I’d keep the discussion about the origin and etymology of Kabiraji Cutlet for later, and concentrate on the making and availability.

Chicken Kabiraji Cutlet at Mitra Cafe, Golpark

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Wash the Blues Together

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I’ve realized over the years that household chores are best done when shared. Since this fact has been validated by my father throughout, it was obviously expected that my husband would do similar things too. The fact that M (that’s my better half) has been away from home since he was 18 for academics and later job, has made things easier for me too. As I’d written in my earlier post, he has been doing his own laundry much before I shed the dependency on my mother and started doing mine.

Funny enough, he cooks better than me too. #ShareTheLoad seems to be very well applicable in our household of just over 5 years. While we were contemplating marriage, we made a list of things both of us liked doing around the house.

Cleaning utensils – Me (I don’t like the way M does it, not enough grit there, he hates it actually)

Dusting and Floor mops – Him (I don’t like the dusting part, I’m allergic and bored to death)

Cooking – Me (Weekdays), Him (Weekends). Since he likes to experiment with all kinds of exotic stuff like different meats, those are reserved for the weekends and special occasions.

Laundry – Me (I am probably one of the rare women who likes to do laundry. The aroma of a good quality detergent on squeaky clean clothes is something that freshens me up).

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Style Bhai(s) of CWC

I haven’t been watching the Cricket World Cup since its inception in 1975 as I wasn’t even born! Back then, it was called the Prudential World Cup and wasn’t as glamorous as it is now. The game was black and white and so are most of the photos from that era. The jerseys and styles were very ’70-ish with the players sporting long sideburns, hippie hairstyles and bell-bottoms. Our Ravi Shastri was arguably the most stylish emerging cricketer as evidenced in the picture below.

25 June 1983, India lifting the World Cup. Notice Ravi Shastri and his unkempt hair.

As the world moved on, the Cricket World Cup did too. With the advent of coloured jerseys in 1992, the ICC Cricket World cup added more glitz in terms of day/night matches where the audience in front of television could see sweat glistening on the forehead of a parrot-green clad Imran Khan. If someone is the most handsome cricketer still, it’s him.

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Satyanweshi

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The most common question asked to every child or teen is “Who is your favourite detective?” At least, that’s what used to be in my generation, about two decades ago. I’ve been gorging on detective stories since my pre-teens, haate-khori (baptism of writing) being done with Feluda. With Sonar Kella (1974) and Joy Baba Felunath (1979) being constant features on summer television, we didn’t have many options. Feluda ruled my childhood, along with Bangla translations of Sherlock Holmes in magazines. I loved Feluda, and was in awe of Sherlock, which strengthened as I began learning Chemistry. Those inferences from the criminal’s stained hat or a cigarette stub with his saliva on it made me wonder Holmes’s prowess. Could Feluda do similar stuff? Well, no, he was mostly a cerebral detective, with his Magajastra being the ultimate weapon.

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Unlike many other children who just read and loved detectives, I wanted to be one. Seriously. I’ve read Holmes at an age when others didn’t, I’ve religiously read Kakababu and Arjun’s escapades, I’ve read Colonel Niladri Sarkar’s young adult stories, I’ve read Jayanta-Manik and Gogol. Bangla literature has a vast ensemble of detectives/sleuths, and that’s what most of them liked to be termed. All of them were smart, not all were young men though, and only Samaresh Majumdar’s Arjun had the suaveness to second Feluda. I wanted to be someone who had the forensic analytical bent of mind and yet an uber emotional psyche to grasp the criminal’s mind. As I grew up, I found him and though I couldn’t be like him, I let him rule my mind as the best ‘detective’ ever – Byomkesh Bakshi. Well, the most striking thing about Byomkesh is that he never liked to be called a ‘detective’. He fancied the term ‘Satyanweshi’ (truth-seeker) and stuck to it until Dibakar Banerjee decided to rip it off in his next film.

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Tata Hatched The Bolt!

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This probably would have occurred somewhere in the globe a year or two back – picture a serious boardroom drama, with the design folks being present.

“Alright guys, settle down soon, we are planning to surprise the Indian automobile fellas; well, can’t drive everybody nuts neither can we shed the ‘Tata-for-commercial’ tag so easily, but let’s give a decent try.

We call this HORIZONEXT strategy, the focus is to be on the products intensely. We plan to build a car, a sedan for the entry level sedan segment and a premium hatch, with most of the goodies packed in it, and of course, guess what, with a superb price tag. Surprise, Surprise, Surprise – here cometh Zest and Bolt.”

(We would just limit this article to BOLT petrol variant as Zest is out of scope for this one). Hey, we are still in the boardroom meeting, reckon, the design folks are all ears to the lead voice.

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