Parking Blues

Yesterday mom and I were getting ready for bed when the door bell rang.
Opening the door revealed this very bossy looking female who lives three doors away but never bothers to wish or smile when we pass each other.
Bossy Female: Excuse me aunty – can you please move your car.
Mom – Why?
Bossy Female: Because I want to park my car there.
Mom – But beta why do you want me to move my car. Why not park your car somewhere else. (Our car was parked in its designated place)
Bossy Female – Because I have just bought a new Honda and you have a wagonR (yes she actually said this) so I would like to park my car safely in the parking lot. You can park yours anywhere.
Mom- Huh !
Eventually mom told her politely but firmly that she can take her ultra selfish self and new shiny car and go to hell.
I have seen selfish neighbors before but you lady take the cake for chutzpah!

If you are a Punjabi living in Delhi ...

We were discussing Dev D at the work and I was told by some guys that you need a different sort of mindset to enjoy it and you can only appreciate the movie fully if you have ever lived in a hostel. Huh! (According to them 7 out of 10 people who live in hostels are on drugs and you need to be around such people to understand the movie).Weird I must say because I spent 5 years in JNU and I still couldn’t fathom the so called brilliance behind the movie.
Also, the self -same people tell me that this film very well depicts what the rich kids of rich businessmen in Punjab do and what happens if you live in Delhi as a student/all alone (apparently you don’t go to college at all but spent all your time doing drugs). Now as a Punjabi born and brought up in Delhi I take very strong umbrage to that. I just don’t get it... I guess all Punjabi kids ride about town in huge expensive cars and go abroad to study .. Then they come back and fool around with their girl friends and when the girl friend marries someone else they shift to pahargunj and do drugs…Thanks guys for educating me about my people !
While the whole world raves on about Anurag K’s bold and psychedelic take on life, all that my intelligent friends could get out of the movie is what kind of people Punjabis are. I am not saying that Anurag Kashyap shouldn’t have used Pahargunj or Punjab as backdrops. . What irks me is the kind of compartmentalization and generalization people do.
All I want to do right now is spew few of the choicest of Punjabi Gaalis on them ..

Childhood Reads

One of my earliest memories is of the passage connecting the living room to the study in my grandfathers’ house. Bookshelves lined both sides of the passage and they were filled with the Readers Digest. My grandfather was an avid reader and he had started subscribing to the Readers Digest as far back as the 1960s and he had saved every single copy. I remember sitting on the cold floor, just a child of 8; breathing in the musty crumbly smell that I have always associated since with old books; trying to make sense of the stories and trying to solve word power.
I started my childhood readings with Champak – I remember devouring the whole magazine in two days and then pestering my mom to get me another copy not understanding that it I would have to wait till the next month to get it. Champak was followed by Nandan, chanda mama and children’s world. And then came the glorious years of Target magazine. This wonderful magazine started by Living Media was a fabulous mix of stories, comic strips and General Knowledge. I don’t think there is any child who grew up in the 80s who has not read Target. We started subscribing to it as soon as it started getting published in the 80s when I was barely 4 and my brother 11. We continued till 1995 although by then I was too grown up for a ‘children’s magazine’. But I could never give it up. Ruskin Bond, Sigrun Srivastava, Geeta Dharmarajan, Mala Marwha, Vatsala Kaul – Target introduced me to these wonderful children’s writers and they did a great deal in inculcating the love for literature in me.
Another favorite childhood read was Amar Chitra Katha. I guess you can call them our first desi comic books. Beautifully illustrated with stories out of our mythology.
A few years back when cleaning up my grandfather’s house, my aunt decided to throw away the entire readers digest collection. I insisted on bringing it to Delhi; dumped in the back seat of our car. It has a place of honor in my bookshelves now along with all the old editions of Target. I take them down sometimes, to leaf through them and to re-live the pleasures of childhood reading.

Bloom Where you are planted

Although I work in the IT industry, I am not an IT person – I am a non techie – someone with a humanities background stuck in an IT company –When I started learning the language (Japanese) I had visions of myself wearing ethnic clothes from Fab India, doing literary translations and discussing Indo- Japanese art and literature over coffee. The only thing that has come true is that I wear ethnic clothes. Instead of doing literary translations I translate technical specifications and instead of discussing literature over coffee I spent my time with so called techie nerds who think Yasunari Kawabata is not worth knowing because he didn’t write an idiots guide to Java programming.
I wrote this post earlier about being stuck in a job we don’t really like but the truth is that in this country literary translation jobs are as rare as unicorns and what gets the bread butter on your table are usually jobs which we don’t like 100%.
My mom had a poster on her office wall that said [Bloom where you are Planted]. She always wanted to be a doctor but due to some quirk of fate, she ended up a teacher. Once when I was cribbing to her about my job, she told me how badly she wanted to study medicine and how disappointed she was when she couldn't. But she said “Once I was a teacher I put all my disappointments aside and tried my very best to be a damn good one”. And she has whole generations of grateful students to show for her dedication and commitment.
And so as I toil and tumble, and grumble about my job, I try to Bloom Where I am planted.

The month that was

Sometimes recession has its benefits. One of the benefits I got was that I managed to get almost the whole of December off to spend with my brother and sister in law who were visiting from New Zealand. The month was spent in Chandigarh in the “new house” with its huge floor to ceiling windows and airy rooms. But the only problem was that Chandigarh can be really cold in winter and airy rooms and floor to ceiling windows that are so delightful in summer aren't that great in winter.
Any how before Bhaiya and Bhabhi landed in India, there were frenzied discussions on the phone on how this holiday was supposd to be quality family time and mom shouldn't be spending it all in the kitchen cooking for us. We didn’t want mom in the kitchen but we still wanted to eat all the delicious holiday food; so we promptly went ahead and hired a cook in honor of Bhaiya’s visit. Harbans the cook came armed with his own tools - One huge kitchen knife and his own kitchen towels. And once he was firmly installed in the kitchen out poured dish after dish of sumptuous food.
The day started with cups of ginger tea which the cook brought to our rooms. After that we hogged on paranthas .. aloo, methi, gobhi, mooli; you name it we had it. And when Paranthas got too monotonous we shifted to bread rolls and Gajar halwa.
And when all this got too boring we spiced it up in the evenings with chaat and tikkis or pakoras.
Does it seem as if we spent all our time eating? Well ya actually we did! Rest of the time was spent in talking and catching up and generally arguing and giving in to incessant demands from a very adorable niece and nephew to either play ball or go to the park or the Lake.
And since I am so fond of bullet points…The highlights of the visit were:

• The good food whiffed up by the cook.
• Sitting on the big comfy sofa, legs curled up beneath us, conversations – sometimes desultory and lazy, sometimes animated arguments, sometimes just reminsces
• Shaivalini (my niece) excited about the treasure hunt I organized for her. I bought 10 gifts for her (as she turned 10 this year) and hid them around the house. Even I couldn’t have imagined her excitement as she found each gift.
• Bhabhis Birthday on 19th December. Two adorable kids with hand made birthday cards. Yellow roses and orchids. Early morning scramble to get the flowers and birthday cards in order before bhabhi emerges from her room. Mission failed due to Dad missing at the last minute and Vibhu (My nephew) howling because we didn’t let him hold the flowers. The howls eventually brought Bhabhi out before we could surprise her with the flowers.
• Visit to numerous parks and Sukhna Lake and McDonald with the two kiddos. The kiddos had a lot of fun because I never said no to anything they wanted to so they had a great time playing in the mud, having fries and ice creams at all times and generally having a blast.
• Watching Innumerable Dvds of Thomas and Friends. Vibhu loves it and his day doesn’t end till he has watched Thomas the Tank engine at least a trillion times. Every one in the family now knows each and every train engine in the Thomas and friends series intimately.
• Sunbaths and Saunas, lazing around in the balcony eating oranges and drinking juice.
• My birthday on 6th January. We decide to celebrate it on 6th even though it’s a week day. Later move it to 3rd as I had to absolutely get back to Delhi on 4th.Venue decided- Ramgarh fort. Venue changed to a restaurant as both kids down with tonsils and too sick to be out in the open. Later venue changed to home as both kids still not well enough to go even to a restaurant. On 3rd Venue changed from our house to Bhabhi’s mom’s house as the kids not well enough to brave the cold and come to Dadi’s house from Nani’s. So we put the food into huge containers and went to “Naani’s” house. Kids too irritable and cranky for a Birthday celebration.

So thats how it went. its rather strange isn`t it... we spend most of the yr waiting to get together;then when we do get together its such a whirlwind of a holiday...catching up, talking, arguing, eating, visiting,shopping, sleeping..before you realize it its over and you are left with your nostalgia and a kaleidoscope of memories .. and you tuck away each and every memory in your mind, to be taken out later and savoured ... as you eagerly wait for the next family vacation.