929, 928, 927

-
There was a trip to Bombay. In the pouring rain, through crowded roads, and ghats so misty that one imagined the rolling hills to have done some heavy breathing. My school friend, who I had reconnected with a while ago, had made sheer khurma for me for Eid. She'd frozen it and I had been dreaming of this all year. I am not joking. There is sheer khurma and there is the sevaii kheer. Most people make the latter and call it the former. But they are different. When I was growing up, my neighbors would make sheer khurma with very little vermicelli. It was light and frothed really well with dryfruits. It was rich and flavourful but also liquidy and light. I haven't eaten that sort of sheer khurma in a long while. As one can imagine, the build up was really strong. But my friend's dish was sublime. It really was. It was so brilliant that I maybe heard music and saw dazzling streams of stars or something.

Also visited another close friend at Goregaon West. Now, maybe it's because I visit Bombay and not live there, everything about the city feels so easy. Hailing a rickshaw, handing over a hundred-rupee note and getting change back,  having the auto-rickshaw fellow not make a fuss about taking a U-turn. I soften when I have that experience. Somewhere I know that is not always so. It wasn't like that for me all the time either. But in that downpour, I traveled from Sion to Jogeshwari, from Jogeshwari to Goregaon, from Goregaon to Juhu, and then from Juhu to Vashi without feeling hugely inconvenienced. I wonder if I am just able to do a whole lot more there.

Anyway, good days. August has begun really, really well.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more