Fleeting

-

 I think Papa will go away for a few days. Tonight he fell asleep and woke up around midnight. He always says no when I offer a snack or a meal but doesn't refuse when I bring it to him. Tonight I got him steamed spinach dumplings. He can't digest refined flour anymore so these millet and buckwheat preparations are good.

I am feeling really exhausted and wiped. Don't feel like meeting anyone or talking on the phone or even staying at home.

Anyway, my way of climbing out of some emotional ditch is to record all the things that made me happy:

1. Talking to J.

2. Eating chilled lychees that Papa had peeled and kept for me in the fridge.

3. Yummy tea that the cleaning lady made. This was a surprise because I didn't know she could cook on the induction. But the weather being what it is, a second cup of nice hot tea is enough incentive to figure out something.

4. Went to a bookstore and it felt so nourishing and good. To be around books, to scan the spines for an interesting title or a familiar author, to play judging games with the cover...it was so soothing. Temples aren't open yet. A bookstore comes close to some kind of salvation.

Came across this book. Found the title funny. It's really about growing vegetables at home using only one bed. But imagine if it were about two vegetables hooking up...a tempting tomato and a sullen zucchini. They meet through an app called 'Tinda'. Silly but it made me laugh.


5. Went to Starbucks for a glass of iced tea. Didn't think they would let me in. They did. I sat by the window and watched the world haltingly go by (considering not much of the world was out and the part that was out was stuck in traffic.)


These things got me through today. 

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