Rewrite From Hell

The darling husband is sentimental about everything he sees or hears these days, which I think is a comical side effect of his brain finally being able to function without the noise and pollution of our erstwhile environs. Me? I just play loud music at home and walk past weed stores an awful lot to maintain my inner balance.

So anyway, here's an extract from a recent poetic post by the husband:

Imagine a cold, overcast day. Now imagine a quaint pub at the corner of a street by a canal. Entering it on a day like this is like entering a new world. You are sitting, chatting with colleagues with a glass of iced tea in your hand. Music plays in the background but faintly – for it doesn’t want to intrude on your conversation. In fact it is so faint that it sounds like a whisper from a world beyond ours. The music changes and your ears catch a vaguely familiar strain. But they can’t quite place it. Besides this is a pub – most of whatever little reached your ears is drowned in conversations around you. That nagging sense of familiarity persists – and the inability to clearly hear the music strengthens it. Then suddenly, by some stroke of good fortune, the conversations at your table and at the table beyond and at the bar stools pause for a fraction of a second – as if everyone was reading from the same page and encountered a full stop. And you hear with unmistakable clarity a voice that you know can only be Paul McCartney softly crooning:

Michelle, my belle.
Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble,
Très bien ensemble.

I challenged him that I could better this, and here's my version:

Miserable cold day! Thank God for the cosy pub. English music drowned by chatter and tinkling glasses, as usual. Wait! Don’t I recognize that song? Maybe if I could HEAR it you know! Ah! Paul of the Mc Cartney variety of course! I love you, I love you, I LOVE YOU with increasing urgency, as if waiting in a long bathroom queue. But why is it so quiet all of a sudden? Oh nerve gas! Ouch! Bye! Logging out!

Look at the economy of words! The depth of feeling! The stream of consciousness! I'm wasting my talent I say! :)

And now look at Maamu McCartney putting the song to real good use!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrRLH-ZGZEs&feature=related

Notes from the first month in Amsterdam

Language:
I slept during My Name is Khan, so I don’t know what the plot is
But thanks to that blasted movie I know all about the epiglottis
Grammar, even English, has been tantalizingly out of my reach
But in the Netherlands I know the epiglottis is THE part of speech

Transport:
My facebook status message has a cute little heart
That says Inky is in a relationship with her OV Chipkaart
It’s the choice that’s so amazing, but it’s the choice that I loathe
Debating between tram and metro, I often miss them both

Food:
I have zout popcorn in one hand, zoet popcorn in the other
It’s all good roughage, I tell my concerned mother
And the only problem with Oude and Jong kaas
Is that they are bleddy going directly to my arse

Paradigm Shift

So I'm all shiny and clean at 4pm, dressed in slimming all-black (note to self, you need black MAGIC to look slim) and walking down the road along the canal humming a Bollywood song to myself. A bike slows down beside me, and the raggedy rider says "Excuse me? single? single? EXCUSE ME? SINGLE?"

My first Dilliwali impulse is to abuse him and shove my shoe into one or more places in his anatomy, but then I remember I am in Amsterdam. I smile and say:

"This is Prinsengracht. Go a bit further up and take a left. You'll be on Singel"

P.S. Dilli or Amsterdam, you will be rammed into by two-wheelers even when you're crossing the road correctly. Some paradigms never shift.

Moving and Stuff

On the night of April 8, we were standing at Indira Gandhi Airport with two-and-a-half bags, and over the preceding three weeks, we had ensured that those bags contained practically all our worldly possessions (56kg in all, to be precise).

Making a fresh start involved not just the mandatory letting go of a rented house, phone number etc. but a practical erasure of our Bangalore footprint! All our furniture. gadgetry and electronics were given/sold away, practically all the books we had collected over the past many years were sold to Blossom or given to friends, the husband's painstakingly collected music CDs, all 500 of them, found new homes, and when we handed the keys of the apartment back to the landlord, it was as empty as the day the husband had moved in.

We’d always taken pride in how little stuff we owned, and how we had been able to emotionally detach ourselves from our possessions. While turning the house inside out, we discovered that we were not quite as virtuous as we thought.

One month later, here we are: in a bigger house(!) with very little stuff and very limited storage space. Here’s hoping we’ll be able to live out our philosophy this time.

Amsterdamned Fools

The early thirties are a defining period in many couples’ lives in India. It’s time to start a family, to buy a home, to get onto the managerial track at work (for one or both partners), and suchlike. It’s too late for the rash decisions of youth, and too early for the follies of a midlife crisis. Although it is the time to enjoy the thrill of definitively coming into adulthood, it is also the time of the birth of fear. The need to hold down that job to pay that EMI, the need to hold on to your senses to be able to be there for your parents on the one hand, and the kids on the other.

And, very rarely, it is the time of sticking your middle finger at the slings, arrows, bouquets and brickbats of outrageous fortune, chucking your secure jobs, hugging your forever-to-be-grandchildless parents, selling/giving away/throwing out all your worldly posessions, packing your life into 23-kilo suitcases, and moving to a new country where only one of you has a job (with the same designation with which he started 11 years ago!)

In four days, we celebrate one month of moving to Amsterdam, for better or for worse (for good? there's no way to know.)

I’ve learnt some disturbing things about myself along the way, and the silence of the last few months has not been due to the absence of things to say, but because I’ve had too much to process.

The husband has been posting in his Zen way on his blog, so you can check out how we’ve been passing our days if you’d like. For the uncensored craziness, watch this space.

Phbbbt!

I recently traveled to Amsterdam, where much fun was had, although not the kind you’re imagining. However, this post is not about Amsterdam. No Siree, this is about the amazing, amazing place called the Charles De Gaulle Airport (Pronounced Sharlesdegaul, or Chardegol or Chago depending on how much of a hurry you are in, or how French you are, or both) I am neither in a hurry nor French, so I’m gonna call it CDG (Pronounced Seedy Ji).

I’m not in a hurry now, but at Seedy Ji, I had 2 hours to catch my connection to Schiphol (pronounced Skhiple and as Achmed the dead terrorist informs me, is spelt Ess Phlegm Eye ….). So anway, according to the map on the plane, Seedy ji is in France. Ten seconds out of the plane (no aerobridge was provided, since the weather outside was so brrrrrrrrrruddy beautiful how could anyone miss it) you know that either France is a tiny cold India or you have been tricked and taken round and round in the plane for ten hours. Not to sound unpatriotic, but we do seem to mop the floors of our arrivals halls with a random mix of phenyl and pee. If we mop them at all, that is.

Then we climbed up a rickety spiral ladder-staircase and collided with passengers trying to use an aerobridge to get to their Emirates flight. For a couple of minutes, we got all mixed up with folks whose boarding cards were not going to be checked again before their plane took off! How cool is that? Eventually we were shooed back down the stairs in French, and we waited for our turn to use the corridor. Which led us to a hall where hundreds of people waited to board shuttles that would take them to their terminals. “Eff Eff Eff “ (not the swear word, the letter) we shouted and probably broke a few necks and legs as we made our way through the crowd into the shuttle. Thankfully it was so cold that the people we injured did not feel a thing till we were safely out of their reach.

We made it to our gate ten minutes before boarding, and this time was used in trying to find the rest room, and let’s just say we are not sure whether Madame and Monsieur went to the correct sections. Thankfully everyone else was even more lost than us, so we did not encounter anyone in the process of conducting our business.

I’d heard the Amreeka-flyer husband complain about Seedy ji and assumed he was too fancy, but looks like the poor dude was just asking for a clean and organized place as he got off one long flight and on to another, longer one. Seedy ji had their lavatory exhaust next to the cafes when we were taking off for India, so I’m hoping not to have to go there again. I do love their language though. And that pathetic view of the Eiffel tower from the plane is not crossing that goal off my bucket list. What to do? What to do?

Recipe Of The Day

The right and proper way to fry and consume an egg if you are me:

1. Stick a slice of bread into a toaster. It’s nice if it’s the mini-oven kind, because it dries up and browns the toast very evenly.
2. Take a very, very clean non-stick pan and heat it for a couple of minutes on a low flame. Add 2-3 drops of oil.
3. Break an egg into the pan, taking care not to pierce the yolk with the jagged edge of the eggshell. (This accident has a higher chance of happening when you’re cooking the egg for yourself or for someone you want to impress. See Murphy 179:2)
4. Now take a clean spatula and resist the temptation to mess with the egg for a minute.
5. Ok now stop playing with the spatula, switch off that toaster already, and gingerly test the edges of the egg to see if it’s ready to come off. If it isn’t, your gas flame has switched off and your house is about to catch fire, or your pan was dirty and your maid is about to be fired.
6. Once the egg is happy to let go of the pan, lift it onto the spatula. If you’re like me, your yolk is obviously not right in the centre of the arrangement, so lift the egg such that the yolk rests on the spatula. Now take the naam of Jai Sri Ram and flip the egg.
7. Not so hard! You’ve broken the yolk! Yellow goo is flowing out from under the pretty egg. Find someone who will appreciate a cooked snack and feed this to them, and make yourself another. This time, turn the egg over gently.
8. In a minute, begin the spatula prodding again, and convince the egg that the toast is a nice and comfy bed to lie down upon.
9. Turn egg upside down and sunnier side up onto the toast, this time saving the yolk from your spatula’s incision, and sprinkle salt and pepper.
10. Now, like a 2-year-old, break the yolk with the spoon and smear the golden awesomeness of it all over the egg.
11. Enzoi!

Side Effects: This recipe is known to generate a strong craving for Darjeeling tea afterwards. And rusk to dip in it.

Wakey Wakey

Remember the summer holidays, when the excursion to the mountains was done, the homework more or less completed, and the cousins had come and gone, and it was up to you to entertain yourself? Out came paper taken from dad’s office, with the letterhead portion torn off not-so-neatly using a footruler, and out came the box of poster paints, and the brushes. My brushes were always bent like a dog’s tail, and stuck stiff with the memories of ghastly artwork from many months ago. They were made with sable hair, apparently:

The sable (Martes zibellina) is a species of marten which inhabits forest environments, primarily in Russia from the Ural Mountains throughout Siberia, in northern Mongolia and China and on Hokkaidō in Japan…. It has historically been harvested for its highly valued fur, which remains a luxury good to this day. (Wickedpedia)

Yeah! And Camel/Camlin was making 2-rupee sable hair paintbrushes for my grubby generation of schoolgoers. Rrrrrrrrrrrright!

Anyway, the paints were all dry and cracked, of course. Asking the parents for a new box was risky. Before PowerPoint and Excel, it was difficult to make a business case for the procurement of new resources for a project that was not expected to even recover costs, so the old paints had to be revived. A bit of water, vigorous shaking (with the lid PROPERLY closed) and waiting a few hours yielded acceptable results. And when the brushes were dipped in water, they un-clumped and resigned themselves to the torture that awaited them.

And so it is with the blog. I’m putting water in all the cracked paints: the ochre of comedy, the Prussian blue of insanity, the crimson of angry rants, the black and white of memories, the green of uninformed opinion, and the brown of bullshit. The dog-tailed brushes are probably made out of dog tails, but I’m getting them ready again nonetheless!

Janworry

Happy new year neglected blog and all-gone readers. Facebook has swallowed me whole, I guess.

I'm the one who whiningly asked for a bit of stability in life four years ago, and have been awarded with it: same job, same house, same husband for four years! Which is all nice, except I have nothing to blog about. And the itch to shake things up is getting stronger. Let's see what mischief I can manage...

Fraud Pulao

Ever since I started digging my spoon into Malayali and Kannadiga lunchboxes at work four years ago, I have been envious of their pulaos (Yes, I’m calling them that, and let’s see who can stop me!). It does not help that I am too lazy to buy basmati rice, shell peas, or even buy coconuts. However, with help and advice and some innovation, I seem to have hit upon a successful recipe, and am sharing it with the world at large. The name is Fraud Pulao, because a lazy North Indian can con other lazy North Indians into believing this is an authentic South India pulao.

1. Take the wet grinder jar of your mixie, and throw in 5 cloves of garlic, half an onion, half a tomato, a fistful of coriander leaves, a half inch piece of cinnamon and three cloves. Grind it into a paste.

2. In a pressure cooker, put two spoons of oil, and let some jira sputter in it. Add the paste, and yell abuses at me while the steam burns your hand. Wash the mixie jar with water immediately afterwards, else the Husband will never be able to clean it later.

3. Now let the paste cook till it gives off a nice cooked smell. Add a pinch of turmeric if you are going to eat under a yellow light, because it makes the pulao look cooler. Under white light, you will need to add a little more turmeric if you don't want a sickly look. If you want an eco-friendly green look, leave as is. (If you think this is a vain, pretentious step, remember, I am half-Punjabi, and they are - allegedly - the women who put on make-up in the hospital after delivering babies, in case anyone drops by to say congrats.)

4. Now add the other of the onion (sliced into fine arcs) some carrot (1-inch strips) some beans (cut into 1-inch bits and split lengthwise, much to your thumb’s peril) and the other half of the tomato (finely chopped). Add a spoon of salt if you don’t want a burnt cooker (else the Husband will never be able to clean it later)

5. Now just add a cup of rice (for 2), 2.5 cups of water, and shut the cooker. Wait for one whistle, then leave on low flame for 5 minutes. Open when the cooker lets you. Eat with dahi.

6. Go back in the past and switch on the exhaust fan. Else this smell/aroma ain’t going nowhere honey!

So that’s what? 6 steps? Not bad, eh? No ghee, no basmati, and nothing that doesn’t exist in a North Indian kitchen (except maybe a darling husband who uncomplainingly cleans up after your culinary gymnastics.)

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!