Ab Samjhe!

Everybody and their Amma blames the Indian education system for not teaching people how to think, just making them learn by rote. Am guessing Pakistan's education system is not much different in this regard. Look how nicely the Pakistani bookie remembers each and every upcoming no-ball while the sting journalist, who has obviously had a "thinking" kind of useless education, has to write everything down! And look where their education has gotten them! This is probably the only day in his life that the journalist will have seen so much money, whereas bookie dude is dealing with it so casually!

Please rethink your attitude to your education, fellow Indians/Subcontinentals... Your divorce rates are lower because you can remember birthdays! Heck, even your promotions are guaranteed because you can remember which metacarpal on which hand your boss' mother has broken!

Careening Into Insanity

Where does one belong? And to whom? And with whom? Apart from one 32-year-old 6-foot certainty, everything seems to be mad whirlwind. Whose pathetic idea was it to grow up?

Each new revealed expectation is like a three or four or six of spades added to a teetering, fragile house of cards. Spades ought to be for graves, not houses!

So much time in such a little space! I’m tackling life as a filigree piece, not as a checklist. Dear world, please just let me be that way!

Back?

Can’t recall where the last couple of months have gone. Anyway, here I am and this morning I sent a little paper boat sailing into a storm. Praying fervently that it reaches the other shore safely!

Travelled to Ladakh, this time for the snow and the apricot blossoms, neither of which disappointed. Came back with a killer cold that had to be nuked with a swine-flu-blaster medicine, but that will not stop me from going back to Ladakh the first chance I get!

Speaking of blossoms, I've been reading 2 Davids who are poles apart: Mitchell and Lodge, one a confirmed dopehead and the other a literary critic whose work I was force-fed at college and whose funny, wise and un-put-downable novels I discovered entirely by chance (I can never resist the temptation of buying a 150-rupee trilogy at Blossom). Loving them both equally, and while Mitchell has vanished from the shelves at Blossom, Lodge is hidden behind other books on a shelf that only I seem to know of! (We pay extra rent to stay within walking distance of Blossom)

Speaking of Blossom, it was awesome (sorry) to see Mayim Bialik make a reappearance on TV as the possible love interest of Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory. Being married to a Sheldon Cooper-esque specimen character dude myself, I'm eager to see if these guys can write a future for the two!

Blogger is tempting me to explore the template design feature. Off I go! Whee!

Free Lunch

Ok, I don't know if this is a shameful thing or not, but I realized the meaning of the phrase "There's no such thing as a free lunch" only yesterday. I used to think it means that "you have to pay for whatever you get, it might look free, but the price will be extracted from you by other means." Frankly, that's the context I have seen it being used in all around me forever.

But no. It means: "If you're having a free lunch, you can be sure that someone, somewhere is paying for it!"

Which makes so much more sense, doesn't it?

And now, raise your hands if you have been similarly mistaken! C'mon! Give me company!

Update: ok, ok ok! It means much more than the narrow "You get nothing free." It means that someone (and that someone could be you) is paying for your lunch somewhere, somehow, sometime. But that's still a different (if only much larger) definition than most of us are used to. Thanks Papunda, for the wikipedia link!

BRC vs RR

How excited can you be about twenty twenty?
Is the question and the answer is: plenty

And that's why we hopped, skipped and jumped to the Chinnaswamy stadium yesterday, for the husband's first (and my second) live match ever! What seats! What weather! What light! What crowds!

And then Rajasthan was challenged royally!
C'mon! Even I could have made 93!

The fireworks were good. The hat-trick was go-ood. The lab rats who yell each time the weird siren blows were terrifyingly Pavlovian!

We screamed, we yelled, we made Mexican Waves
Coz that's how a Roman in Rome behaves!

Of course I knew precious little (ok nothing) about the technicalities of the game, and my expert comments made the husband hold his head in dismay whenever he was not jumping up and down aping the umpire's gestures.

The voice you heard yelling "I AM NOT WITH HER"
Belongs to the son-in-law of my mother

Luckily for us hungry and be-car types, the lopsided match ended before three-wheeler-drivers turned extortionist and pizza delivery shut down for the night.

Hoarse-voiced we woke Dominos from their slumber
They thought Big B was calling from our number!

Alibhai

I had a very busy fortnight: travelling east, then north, attending Bengali engagements and weddings, restoring a temporarily re-bachelorised home to normalcy, and whatnot. So please forgive the absence!

A couple of days ago, we were in an electronics shop, and an IT dude with a backpack walked in and asked the salesperson a very crisp and very pertinent question: "How big a flat LCD TV can you give me for under a lakh?" He was probably just shy of 30, was obviously coming in straight from work, and you could SEE a thought bubble over his head: "What the EFF am I earning all this money for if I can't even watch the IPL on a big fat TV when I come home after a hard day's work? My parents will marry me off soon enough, and forget TVs, I won't even get to see the remote ever again after that!"

Feb 28, at last!

This was not too difficult!

(famous last words before collapsing onto the keyboard.)

Feb 27, Almost missed it!

There was a nice prayer in school

O Master grant that I may never seek

So much to be consoled as to console

To be understood, as to understand

To be loved, as to love with all my soul...

I think this blog is an exercise in just the opposite. :o|

Do spare a thought for those killed in Afghanistan, and Chile, and let's hope the tsunami fizzles out before it hits land.

Feb 26, and the laundry needs to be hung out to dry

In the olden days, all the planets needed to be in optimum positions for any auspicious tasks to be performed. These days, the simultaneous presence of electricity and water supply is the shubhest muhuratam possible. That is why 10:12pm is laundry time tonight.

Nobody, myself included, can figure out how I manage to work up 6 machine loads a week. Apparently the house is empty for such a long time that some naughty clothes jump off the shelves and dive into the laundry basket just for kicks! That has to be it.

And since you can do nothing but listen or close this page, why don't I blabber on about how I am too lazy to wash pretty Fabindia clothes by hand, and just dump them all in the machine, throw in some Genteel/Ezee and let the machine do the rest? My "trousseau" clothes, having been worn once a month on an average (yes, it was that kind of trousseau) have been into the washing machine about 40 times, which is more than any Fabindia garment can stand. No wonder they often go krrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr without notice, which is not a nice thing to happen when you're in office. I can understand why I have the same job since my wedding, the same house, and maybe even why the same husband. But why can't I give up these clothes before they desert me during a meeting???

If my ruthless washing was not enough, they go for a brutal ironing regime to the local Iron Man, whose name is, I kid you not, Jesus. He has a mobile, and when I am stuck in office and the husband is at home, I call Jesus and ask him to drop the clothes at home, and then call my husband to alert him. "Hello! Jesus is coming. Wake up!" People around me never fail to fall off their chairs when this happens.

Ok, so this is what happens when you try to blog for one month straight. All your dirty linen gets washed in public. Am off now to hang the clothes out, and if you too run up 6 loads a week, you need to lock your cupboards before you go to work.

Feb 25, and I'm Exhausted

So you can see some nice pics from my old phone's camera.

If anyone ever offers you lemonade, now you know what you have to say...

This tricycle usually takes on people its own size, but the temptation of the safely locked gate was too much!


One of them was allowed to wear it on Mondays and Wednesdays, the other on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Nobody said anything about Friday...

Iske papa kehtey hain bada naam karega....

While I was uploading the pictures, a mosquito bit me and then perched on the keyboard. I must go now, and let her use twitter to tell her friends all about it!

Feb 24, and you won't believe this!

Loads of people say that your name determines your profession, but this is incredible! I just googled this name to see if anyone was naive enough to name their kid this (sorry!), but what I found is beyond my wildest expectations!

Feb 24, patience ka “test” and inspiration ka “run out”

"Nothing new is happening in this movie. Let's watch the match instead."

These would have been the final words of Mr Husband Man had there not been other people in the room that day. Three minutes into a film, he was bored beyond endurance , and itching to get back to the edge-of-the-seat, nail-biting, handkerchief-strangling, abuse-yelling and chair-smashing action of…… a test match.

With every ounce of self control in my voluminous body, I channelized my murderous age into an animated performance of "WHAT THE BEJEESUS DO YOU THINK IS NEW IN A TEST MATCH???? ONE GUY IS THROWING A BALL, ONE GUY IS HITTING IT WITH A BLEDDY STICK AND EVERYONE IS RUNNING AROUND OVER AND OVER AND OVER, OVER AFTER OVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" All this was enacted with violent yelling, arm flailing, and crazy hair flying. That was better than the movie and the match, performance-wise.

Many people who are not cricket buffs share homes with those who love the game. Even TV series wrap up before the IPL and new ones tempt you in the ad breaks to become addicts when your evenings become meaningless after the league matches. The folks in office follow every ODI on cricket websites and yell each time something happens, causing you to spill coffee on your keyboard. All that is fine. But a test match? Even Sachin's wife does not have to watch a test match instead of a George Clooney film! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! (Ok, the last test was kinda fun when we whooped SA and retained the ICC ranking, but that's RARE)

Meanwhile, if you want to know the latest score of a Lahore Zoo vs. Amritsar Zoo match, ask my husband. If you want to know who's the 21^st man for the Kolkata Knight Riders, ask my husband. If you want to know who's playing Hong Kong and Holland in their March 2052 triseries, ask my husband. If you want to know any of this, however, you are probably a test-match watcher, and WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??

Feb 23, Mi Casa, Tu Kaisa?

Please leave your housekeeping standards at the doorstep if you enter the Inkspill household, dear people. You will be made to sit uncomfortably on a pile of mattresses while your hosts type away silently at their computer keyboards. You will be fed basic food served directly from pressure cookers and kadhais, and neither the plates, nor the bowls, nor yet the spoons will match, even if there are just 3 people at the table. The rotis will be all shapes and sizes, and each roti will demonstrate varying thickness in its various "corners". If you stay long enough, I will have no option but to hang laundry about the house, and you will have to walk through a moist and fragrant curtain of kurtas and shirts as you pass from one room to another. You will get a mismatched set of pillowcase and sheets at night, and your morning tea will be made with ours, no matter when you actually wake up. We will love you, but we will be unable to express our love too much, just like Mr Khan in his movie, and just like him, we will probably not look at you when we talk to you (because we're reading our twitter feed), but we promise not to repeat words twice, or bring 500 people to restore your village of 200 while a hurricane is still on, instead of just carrying you out of there for the time being.

Now I guess the "matching towels in the guest bathroom" ideal is quite impossible to maintain for most, at least I hope nobody has the time for that anymore. But there's surely a decent standard that you can maintain as a host? Does it come naturally or is it a cultivated art? Would subscribing to Good Housekeeping help? Or can we just expect to bumble our way through life with our disgusting attitude?

Meanwhile, please oblige me by answering three questions in the comments box if you have a moment.

1. How many people in your household?

2. How many people can you host overnight (with a single or half a double mattress under them)?

3. How many people can you have over for a meal (space-wise/plates-wise, if that number is more than seating-wise)?

Don't worry, we're not going to come over. We're too busy making polygonal rotis and tweeting about them.

Feb 22, and I have the answer to life's biggest question

What is worse? A botched up root canal job, or My Name Is Khan?

Not that I'm telling you, though. Each man and woman must seek out life's answers for him/herself! Not that you should need to go to my dentist, ever. God forbid. I do not wish that upon anyone, except maybe SRK?

Feb 21, and some days are

... blank.

Feb 20, and the power of Rajma...

...must never be underestimated by the Punjabi woman. You might not have beauty, you might not have brains, your Daddy might not be a millionaire, but if you can cook Rajma, you can get whatever you want in India.

1. When I was up-setting (the opposite of setting up) my house in Pune, I offered to sell my TV to a guy who wanted one. He thought the offer price was steep, so I invited him home to lunch and to check out the TV for himself. After a hearty meal of Rajma Chawal, gujjubhai took the TV at offer price and carried it home the same day. RP, if you're reading this, I hope the TV is still working. It was practically brand new!

2.I was sick with jaundice when the then-friend-now-husband came to see me for the first time. Despite being restricted to a lauki diet, I was fit enough to cook. One Rajma lunch, and we were unofficially betrothed.

3. I had the whole Banneghatta Butterfly Park in my stomach as my parents and I went to be introduced to my in-laws-to-be. One spoonful of mom-in-law's 10/10 rajma, and my parents were sure I was going into the right family.

4.Whenever any guests are coming and I am even a little nervous, I turn to rajma for assistance. Except for my extremely hard-to-please-in-the-rajma-department sister, most everyone likes it, and things go smoothly.

Yes, someone is visiting today. Yes, there pressure cooker is singing "don't worry, be happy" as I type this.

The best thing is that you don't even have to try hard to get it right, since the rajma itself does all the work of being tasty. All the guys who eat it are just grateful for a hot and fresh meal, and the women like to say it tastes just like the rajma they make, which is a compliment in women-world.

So now you know. The Punjabi weapon of mass destruction. The next time it's unleashed upon you, be careful and look out for hidden agendas. And if I invite you over with a Rajma offer, submit without resistance. I know other ways of getting my job done, but you might miss a treat if you refuse.

Feb 19, and what do YOU do when:

• Aamir Khan says that lyrics are not important to a song? It's officially over now, dude. Your Name is Khan, and you are an Idiot.
  
• The IT department sends you a mail asking for your phone number when you leave a message on their site saying your email is not working?
  
• The saleswoman says that the emergency light you are buying needs to be charged for 24 straight hours before it can be used? If I had 24 hours of power…
  

Feb 18, And the Tooth will prevail

I have achieved the impossible. Got kind of drunk on local dental anesthesia, of which I was given an industrial grade helping (it was spilling over into my eyes and nose from the syringe). All the doctor's cries of "relax, relax" were in vain and I clenched my fists as he administered the shot, but afterwards I felt a little too relaxed, and blabbered a little too drawlingly, and my head swam around beautifully, and don't blame me if I become a local anesthesia junkie, ok?

Anyway, the shot did nothing to numb the troublesome nerve, and I jumped three feet into the air when the doc drilled it.
Let's skip over the gory bits and totter home, where the main tooth kept giving me 140-character pain as it tweeted its woes to its friends and neighbors. I was ok, till the neighbors started retweeting. Ow Ow Ow!

As you can see, the spiritual effects of the anesthetic have not yet worn off, and I should stop blogging for the day, because when I wake up all hung over tomorrow morning, I will regret this.

Bye!

Keep smiling! It might improve your face value. (The poster in the dentist's office has this very tentative message)

Feb 17

There is no electricity and no water. They are both missing since this morning. This is like a doomsday movie minus the billion dollar special effects. Blogging from the phone to keep the promise.

Feb 16, Ow, ow ow!

The eyes, they hurt from reading Little Women on the computer screen all day.
The head, it aches dully for the same reason.
The teeth, they chatter in fear at what the dentist said today. It's time for some road repair work in there.

Must go to sleep. Have nothing cheerful to say today. Apologies.