A Typical Conversation In The Spill Household

Mr Spill: I am so hungry, I am Ravanous! I could eat with ten heads!

InkSpill: Hehe! Do you think Ravan ate with all ten heads?

Mr Spill: Yeah!

InkSpill: How? He put in food into one at a time? That would be tedious…

Mr Spill: No, he put all the food in a big plate and ran all ten heads across it and lapped up his food. (with actions)

InkSpill: He was rich. He could have had people feeding his heads… Achchha, do you think he ate roti with one and sabji with another? Or everything with each head? Or did his wife only make slop*?

Mr Spill: Can we please talk about something else?


*Slop: Frequent dinner at the Spill household: consists of veggies, daal and rice all cooked together and eaten with dahi, plum chutney, and good humored tolerance…

Closing The Door...

... on a three-day excursion to Coorg, full of long drives and walks, delicious homemade food, naps in the afternoon silence of the hills, and oh, lots of coffee!

Dear Job/Monday/Bangalore Traffic, here I come!

Objects Not In The Mirror Are Farther Than They Appear

Dearest Wendigo,

Though we are in two hot cities in two hot third world continents, and real life has dust and pollution and anxious waiting for letters, never forget that my you and your me are perched there on the riverside ledge, dangling feet in coloured socks over the rocky banks of a muddy river…

Cats Killed The Curiosity

This blog’s been dead for a long time, like a lot of other things. So I’m guessing nobody reads it anymore. So now it’s become a pensieve or something. So I’m gonna pour random nonsense into it. Not that I didn’t use to do so earlier.

In class 10 or 11, there was this girl in my class: A.R. She looked like Utpal Dutt minus moustache even at her age of 14-15…I don’t know how she managed but she did. Anyway, one day she stands up in Biology class and asks the teacher: If urine is not at a much higher temperature than the rest of the body, how come it feels so hot when it’s coming out? 59 laughing slaves of the Indian education system shut her up instantly, and the teacher never responded to her question…

A.R, I hope you made it big in life. You deserve to, much more than any of us spineless idiots ever would…

सभी कर रहे थे तो मैंने सोचा...

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

हिंदी को सहारा मिल गया है ज़िन्दगी!

छोटा सा साया था
आंखों में आया था
हमने दो बूंदों से मन भर लिया
हमको किनारा मिल गया है ज़िन्दगी

ला ला ला ला ला ला ला ला ला ला ला ला
हमो किनारा मिल गया है ज़िन्दगी

ए ज़िन्दगी गले लगा ले!

Chalo Chalein Mitwa...

Watched Billy Elliot last night and cried when I saw the National Express bus! And he performed at Theatre Royal, Haymarket! Boo Hoo Hoo and then some!

Dying here. Must. Travel. Someplace. Soon.

Chaand Khaarish Kyun Karta Humaari....

I am unable to get over the fact that someone (Flimfair) chose “Chand Sifarish” as the best written song of 2006. It's not just the fact that they overlooked Omkara (beedi, dude!), but they chose like the yuckiest muckiest song that I bet Prasoon Joshi secretly regrets writing! You could award Rubarooo if you wanted to scratch Joshi’s back, or Crazy Kiya Re if you wanted to scratch Chopra’s back (in his own backyard, which explains Kajol for Fanaa and Hrithik for Dhoom).

But you cannot play with “sifaarish” so lightly, or you end up in knots, which the husband and I untangle through parody quite regularly. Here are some we came up with:

Chaand maalish jo karta tumhari, deta who tumko chamkaa

Chaand parvarish jo karta tumhari, kehte tum usko pitaa

Chaand baarish jo karta tumhari, lete hum raincoat silvaa

Tch Tch Tch

Feel free to add your own.

Khimchi-Ben

Is the name of this quick and dirty recipe for when a daal-paalak and rice dinner for two needs to turn into a meal for three:

- Heat one and a half teaspoon oil in a kadhai.
- Throw in half a fistful of raw moongphalis.
- Let Fry.
- Add a medium sized chopped onion.
- Let Fry.
- Add a finely chopped quarter of a cabbage and half a capsicum.
- Let Fry.
- Add Salt and Pepper.
- Let Fry till Dry
- Add two slit green chillies somewhere along the way.
- Cook till, well, cooked
- Serve

- And oh, remove slit green chilli from husband’s spoon one millisecond before it makes its way into him…

Ballooney

Once upon a time in ancient history I was in kindergarten. Before Sports Day, our teacher told us all to get a balloon each the next day, for the selection race for the grand final balloon race on sports day. So Mamma and Papa Inkspill bought me a balloon and sent me off with a hug and a kiss.

For the uninitiated, a balloon race involves running up to a chair on which a balloon is placed, sitting on the balloon and bursting it, and then running to the Finish line. Mamma and Papa Inkspill were definitely among the uninitiated, because they bought me a huge, industrial strength balloon that Godzilla could have sat on and not busted!

So during the selection race, we all ran to the chairs and tried to squash the balloons. Everyone who had got the holi-water balloon type contraption or the extremely tacky and mostly self-exploding birthday balloon was done in a second and ran to the finish line. I, however, sat and sat and the balloon would not bust. My face progressively became pink, red, purplish red, reddish purple, purple, tear-stained purple, but the balloon refused to bust. The selection race was over but I was still sitting on the balloon. I am sure people must have been laughing at me but I could not see anything. A teacher came and rescued me eventually.

I don’t know why this incident came back to me today. Maybe that was the day I was thrown out of the race (by which is implied the balloon race, the racing sport, the rat race, and, I am afraid, the human race)

Misc.

As I grow older, the profile of the people who bully me gets more and more pathetic! While it was the big didis on the school bus when I was about two feet tall, when I was in the twelfth standard, I was slapped on the selfsame school bus by a kindergarten student! And now that I am much, much older, I was held hostage yesterday by … a kitten!!!!

Locked out of the house without my key yesterday, I waited for my knight in faded t-shirt to come and rescue me. Near the elevator of my building, a cutesy looking but not cutesy behaving little kitten furiously drew a lakshman rekha around me and my bag of veggies, and with very angry mewing refused to let me get our of it! I tried to reason with it in English, as I (unsuccessfully) do with the rooster (who lives on the top storey of our building and thinks he’s Michael Jackson), but the kitten was clearly in charge of affairs and thoroughly enjoying the angry circling and mewing.

At forty, I’ll probably be knocked to death by a feather at this rate!

In other news, a cool friend sent the boy a digital photo frame as a wedding gift! It looks like a harmless photo frame but when you just connect it to your laptop or put your camera’s card into it, it shows you a slideshow of all your digital images! Best of both worlds I say! Too much excitement in a single gadget for a stepchild of technology like yours truly!

Quote From Mr InkSpill

(On being told that the current design of this blog was the first and only to be made without my interference)

Darling, if something productive ever comes out of a man, it will have to be without your intervention….

Skeptically Yours, on Feb 14

What he said:
Rose’s lips are red
And Violet’s eyes are blue
‘Ole Mary’s willin’ to wed
But my heart belongs to you

What he meant:
Jack and Jill went up the hill
And invested in mineral water
They got richer than Warren and Bill
And you’re their only daughter

What she said:
Humpty Dumpty just sits on the wall
For Valentine’s he did nothing at all
All the kings are horses, as are the king’s men
So let’s fly away and never see them again

What she meant:
Twinkle twinkle little star
The scheming golddigger that you are!
Our mineral water springs are dry
And you’ll pay our debts by and by

Belawadi Bytes

Found these while browsing through my picture collection yesterday…

I went to the Belawadi Hoysala temple at the peak of the recent language dispute in Karnataka , and look what I found sitting comfortable between the stones of the ancient temple… (Apparently the language dispute was not acute but chronic. Thanks D.)



At Belawadi, you are greeted by an obscure signboard saying that the temple is under the aegis of the ASI and the heritage monument is hajjar old. Workers are nonchalantly ripping up pieces of the temple and repairing other pieces of it, and the sounds are of a road-construction site, not those of an archaeological site by any means.

Surrounding the temple are homes of the villagers, separated from their heritage by a hesitant iron wire fence, which succeeds not because it is strong, but because nobody seems to want to pass through it in any case. We were the only tourists there, and immediately on our landing, we were greeted by faceless cries of “Pen please! Pen please!” As the children appeared, we gladly handed over our stationery, and I got this bright picture in return…

One Flew Over...

I’ve flown often enough inter and intra-nationally in the past two years to have become a privileged member of Jet or Kingfisher (which I didn’t because I always flew their cheapest fare and my boarding pass practically said “Class: None”). However, I still cannot help feeling all important and grown up when I take a flight, especially alone. I know it’s stupid in an age where practically everyone’s resorting to air travel, but I’m just a child of the age when flying was a huge deal!

So yesterday I flu (which means flew with a bad cold) from Bengaluru to Dilli, seated between two (other) executives from the telecom industry (coincidence?) who were not just acting cool like me, but were actually pretty cool about flying. The uncle promptly fell asleep and the girlie replied to an inbox full of mails on her laptop all the way. I just blew my nose and sneezed, and did not even get a chance to look important and grown up, but across the aisle was a girlie who was affected with the same syndrome as me, to an even greater degree.

When the air hostess offered her buttermilk/orange juice, she asked for the choices to be repeated maha-eagerly and then chose buttermilk with such enthusiasm that I felt like bopping her on her head! Idiot! Even I’m cooler than you…don’t you know it’s always buttermilk on Indian and Tomato Juice on international flights? (I think that’s only my rule, but what the hell?)

When my cold-infested ears popped painfully while landing, and my nosy-tissue and eye-tissue and cough tissue all became pulp by the end of my flight, I sighed at the lost opportunity to be cool, decided to fly more, and to think less highly about it from now on. I’ll become the laptop-murdering girlie on the right, or the sleeping uncle on the left, or the female version of the husband, who flies so much that I’ve had to cut slits into his vests where he’s sprouting evolutionary little wings, and who treats flights like auto-rickshaw rides.

Ye ghar bahut haseen hai…

Have spent the last three weeks converting a bachelor pad into a home. Here’s a list of things you need to do, fellow geek-marrying women, if you venture into this exercise:

1. Find out how much the boy earned last month. Spend half of that sum on brooms, mops, cleaning liquids, cleaning solids, cleaning gases.
2. Open his clothes cupboard and pick every alternate shirt/t-shirt. Spilt them at the sides. These are your cleaning rags.
3. Wear a plastic bag over your hair, and scrub, swoosh, wash, rinse, mop etc.

Ok. None of this will make an iota of visible difference, except the net weight of the house will be 5 kilos lower. So move to phase 2.

1. Get furniture. At this stage, the boy might show symptoms of angina, stroke, or the flu. Ignore and Persist. Smart women will have had “the talk” about furniture well in advance, and when this stage comes, the boy will be a resigned-and-even-hyperenthusiastic partner in the shopping crime!
2. Begin with a cupboard for your clothes. Yes, so you brought three bags (one very small) of clothes. Add a dash of “you should have married a typical woman and then you’d know” in case the protest over this issue crosses 3-decibel muttering. Set up your cupboard and you’ll have your revenge when you catch the hero preening in front of the long mirror on the cupboard!
3. Get some cool storage space for his geeky stuff. This makes him enthu on shopping trips and shows him that he needs more shelf space for his CDs than you for your clothes. Remember, guilt is good!
4. Rip the archaic strings that hold up the prehistoric curtains. This will make him worry about the safety of the house that the landlord has left in his care. Don’t stop to wonder why dirty curtains are ok with him, but half suspended curtains aren’t. He will summon the landlord to stop the crazy wife, and the landlord will appear not only with a gift, but encouragement to change curtains, and will offer plumber and electrician help, which is much needed.

Simultaneously, or later, you can set up a kitchen. Here are the steps:

1. Throw away everything on the shelves currently. Save the pet jars and wash them and dry them.
2. Get a fridge. Ignore eye-rolling. He thinks one can live without a fridge. But then he also thinks one does not need three suitcases (one very small) of clothes. So get a fridge.
3. Get a gas connection. Setting it up makes him feel important and useful. Also the click of the lighter is a big event.
4. Get utensils. Be ready to field questions like “aren’t the ones we have already enough?” “what are you gonna use THIS for?” “so many?”… By now he will realize that resistance is futile and will silently hold the bag in a corner while you whip up a frenzy at Big Bazaar.
5. Get grocery. At this stage, he’ll be happy just being allowed to write out each individual item in his expenses sheet separately, instead of “home stuff” or “grocery” as you’d have put it.

Keep up the scrubbing and mopping everyday for at least three weeks, With any luck, you’ll be halfway through at the end of that duration. Here’s the rest.

1. Get curtains. Put them up. By now the boy is totally tuned into what’s happening and picks up a matching bedcover in the shop!
2. Home cooked food, and a cleaner floor, should have become incentives by now for boy to love the house that no longer looks or feels like his. Your moment of triumph will be when he brings in a friend to see the place, even before he has your permission (not clean enough yet, what will they think of me)

And then one day when you come from work and turn the key in the doorknob and hastily enter before the neighbor lady strikes up a conversation, you’ll see not a Ramsay Brothers film location, but a home. And hopefully a beaming boy at the clean dining table waiting with chai/for chai.

P.S.: The boy previewed this and said he fell for it all only because he wanted to. Ten extra points to you if you can hoodwink yours into believing that!!!

Crawling Back Into Blogging

Just settling into married life, with its blissful moments like when you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a savagely overfeasted rumbling tummy and realize it ain’t (just) yours, or when someone murmurs the most romantic words ever into your ears: “Let’s go buy a gas stove”
Back to work and trying to salvage a hint of normalcy in a world turned upside down…So long, and thanks for all the mithai….



Pic by the matchmaker himself…. What could be better!

Pigeon Post From London

Just pic abhi. Words after hunnnymoon...

Threshold

So I’m 12 hours away from metamorphosis: from Inky-Ji to InkyG. And no smart ones today….just butterflies in my tummy, nose-wiping into my mummy, and a humble request for the blessings and best wises of all who still visit this neglected abode of mine!

See you on the other side of tomorrow!

Geek Inviting Other Geeks For Wedding

"Hey, I’m getting married to Inkspill, and here’s the card… I made the card in Adobe Photoshop, and I used a Microsoft product for the header! Expression Graphic Designer, and I imported it in Photoshop! Yeah we got them printed… no we planned solid colors but the printing shop guy’s printer’s configuration (and here I believe it takes off into a language other than English), so there’s this cool gradient that’s come up on its own… and cut and we got envelopes and stuck that “Om” tile on it…I’ll send you the e-card also! It looks a little different on the LCD screen!"

Dear Geek Bhais who got the above-mentioned cards, if you're reading this, don't forget the MAIN message...please come to the shaadi and bless the happy couple. The verse invitation below is not applicable to you...