That time when you sweeten your coffee

-
Usually, I have my coffee black. I like it that way. Also, I have lots of coffee - more than 10 cups a day. So my tongue us familiar with that bitter, coarse taste of black coffee. It has also become my mood, I think. The mood of stark survival - slanted towards something simple and strong.

But what this kind of a boot camp mentality does to you, I think, it makes you a little brittle. You may be getting strong but parts of you may also be getting chipped off.

Yesterday I'd gone to Phoenix with mum. I had such a lovely time! Yes, I was working a little and taking calls and setting up meetings. But just spending time with her in a plush place felt good.

We went to one of my favorite stores - Muji. I love that brand! Everything is so simple, beautiful and basic. Usually, I do not like earthen colours. However, I like these colours there - especially for their cutlery and tableware. And stationery. Really like their black erasers.

Anyway, the last week or so, there has been a knot of anxiety in my stomach which goes away when I focus on it and breathe deeply and all that. It comes back again. But I believe it can be tricked into submitting to a will.

Yesterday, that feeling was there - but it was like that as a full-grown person sitting inside and in front of me. It is very surreal. And I did with it what I would do with a friend. I invited it to have coffee with me. And this time, I did not have my coffee black. I had it milky and frothy and sweetened. When I tore open the sachet of sugar and added in spoons of  it and stirred it, it felt like adding in some power. A sweet, soft, gentle power.

I had that cup of coffee and really enjoyed it.

After that, for some time, there was peace.

We're back to black coffee though.


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