Monday, August 8, 2011 at 10:23pm
Grannies can be broadly classified into two, based on the furrows that time has left on their faces: the smiley ones and the frowny ones. Nature ensures that our youthful dispositions leave indelible marks on our final face. So besides age, Botox and facelifts attempt to erase the past as well. Ironically, amongst the grannies to whom I was reintroduced in the last few days, it is the smiley ones who have had a history of hardships. Munching on a cookie sitting on her front porch, one of them recollected how she had built the original version of that house herself from clay and mud bricks after her husband threw her out when she was 8 months pregnant with her first baby. Later on, she had 3 more boys from the same man. Female tolerance seems to have been limitless back then. Or there was no alternative known.
Today the home garden project was formally inaugurated. Armed with an iron rod to till, an iron claw to claw and a spade to make new furrows on grandmother earth, I was out in the front yard with Amma early in the morning. Task one involved tilling evenly spaced holes for a new row of basil.
Squatting down caused major pain at the knees. Damn you, you comfortable western toilet! The pain meant I was doubly quick in tilling the holes. More holes were needed for the hibiscus and rose stems. I was punished for carelessness by the black thorns of a young lemon tree that is growing near the water tap.
Ginger and tapioca were designated to the backyard. There are two PVC pipes that lead the kitchen sink and drain into the backyard. All the waste over the years have been converted into a magnificent Gowrigathram coconut tree short enough to allow plucking of tender coconuts without climbing.
When I told Achchan over phone about the backyard project, he expressed doubts because of the flourishing ‘peruchazhi’ (big rat) population. We went ahead and planted ginger roots and tapioca stems anyways. The soil is well aerated and dark with humus. Earthworms the size of Pei Wei noodles. I spaded a few into pad thai.
Mosquitoes are very much like politicians. Bloodsuckers with such reckless abandon that they are too full to escape the final swat.
Went to the BSNL office to request a new internet connection. The JTO (Junior Telecom Officer) was out for some event. “He will be right back. Please wait here for five minutes.” My mind was officially blown. Did my ears deceive me?! The words “please” and “5 minutes” in a government establishment. The politeness was spooky. But this I am told is the new India. The sleeping employee and the gang embroiled in relentless political discussions are still there. But the big ledger books and multicolored forms have been pushed to the corners of the desks, where they hold on precariously awaiting their impending inevitable death and disappearance. Flat-screen monitors dominate the desks.
Though the Junior in his title had nothing to do with it, the JTO turned out to be an energetic, jovial dude. His desk was set in a dusty cemetery of telephones. It took us 5 minutes to upgrade to a new ‘Unlimited 1350 Combo’ connection.
If paid in full for a year, 2 months are free. Government employees, even retired ones, get 20% discount. He was firing away the information. Noticing my perplexed look, he said, “I know what you are thinking.” “Yes?” “What if you need to downgrade to a lower plan if you are going out of town? You can change your plan twice in any month and we charge you accordingly!” He said BSNL is planning to stop supply of modems and routers which will be taken over by private agencies. I shook hands and left. This has been by far the best experience I have had in a government office in India. Deeply impressed with the change. Once the connection gets done, I will be able to add photos to these notes.
There is the constant chatter about corruption in all levels of government. Nobody can deny the existence of corruption. But I am yet to see it firsthand. When I do, I will report faithfully. But for the time being, I am tempted to think that the narrative of omnipresent corruption is simply habitual. Even in the flight over to Thiruvanathapuram, fellow passengers were talking about the horrible customs department and the palm-greasing that needs to be done at immigration checking. Nothing of that sort was experienced by anyone in the 3 flights that landed one after another that morning. This is sort of like the India Association at TAMU website in 2000 that described College Station as a desert where it never rains! As Goethe said, we humans have a strong affinity towards the false! Powerful perceptions, how much ever deluded, die hard. The experience at the airport and this morning at BSNL prompt me to keep the jury out for another 100 days in the top-to-bottom corruption matter.
On the way back from BSNL office, stopped by to buy some fish for lunch from the Matsyafed outlet and a new pair of casual footwear from Bata showroom. Both cost the same!
Traveling over the weekend, I had noticed the disappearance of an integral element of Mallu heritage. There are no more Shakeela-sque movie posters around. My mole in AP reports that such posters abound still in Hydi and Vizag. From what I gathered this weekend, actress Priya Mani is currently single-handedly handling all the soft-porn vibes for the Thiruvananthapuram district through the posters of a Telugu-dub movie with the rather fruity title, ‘Salam Police’.
Madam Shakeela and her voluptuous clones had provided a degree of sphericity to the square walls of Kerala for long. One must not look down upon bulbous boobies. You see, M.P. Veerendra Kumar’s travelogue “Hymavathathiloode” informs me that according to Vyasa it was not first time Draupadi laughed when he fell into an indoor pool that Duryodhana was enraged. He completely lost it only after her “breasts shook as she laughed” seeing him trying to avoid getting wet in a nonexistent indoor stream.
It was that fateful boob-shaking laughter that caused Duryodhana to challenge Yudhishtira into gambling. Subsequently the epic war and Bhagavad Gita. So verily, bouncing boobs cushion the very foundations of Hindusim. In fact, the incomparable Vakkom Mohammad Basheer wrote a short story titled ‘One Bhagavad Gita and Many Breasts.” No author can get away with such a title in today’s India… especially if he or she is not Hindu!
Paid a casual visit to Amma’s Ayurvedic physician in the evening. He declared that no one who has lived in the USA or Europe should ever be interested in coming back to this state and nation hopelessly beyond repair. His plan to launch a diabetes cure business was shot down because he sought a capital investment of 2 crores and the investors were not interested in any project less than 200 crores. “People don’t think, listen and change. They will queue up for any snake oil if it is advertised for a week on TV”, he fumed sitting beneath a huge portrait of Satya Sai Baba!
“We have reached such a low that wives consider it a status symbol to announce that their husbands had a cardiac arrest!” Soon afterwards the conversation stumbled down the usual topics of upper caste Hindus being shortchanged and everything being controlled by Sonia Gandhi’s Christian mafia and the Muslim league.
Since I started the note discussing grannies, I will come full circle. I paid the first visit to my sister’s fiancée’s family today. His grandmother (a classic smiley), an affectionate, articulate lady, had come to Thiruvananthapuram in 1951. Her late husband was a famous history professor. After a cordial, enjoyable meet and greet, as we were leaving, the granny gifted me, neatly packed, a couple of books written by her husband. One is a thesis in English titled ‘The History of Sri Padmanabhaswami Temple till 1758”. The other one is in Malayalam “Bharatheeyakala Noottandukalilude” (Indian Art through the Centuries). Brilliant!
People who love books are akin to smokers and drunkards when it comes to quickly bonding over their addiction.
ps: Number of discussions of my prospective marriage: just 1. The S&P downgrade news seems to be having a personal impact!
Grannies can be broadly classified into two, based on the furrows that time has left on their faces: the smiley ones and the frowny ones. Nature ensures that our youthful dispositions leave indelible marks on our final face. So besides age, Botox and facelifts attempt to erase the past as well. Ironically, amongst the grannies to whom I was reintroduced in the last few days, it is the smiley ones who have had a history of hardships. Munching on a cookie sitting on her front porch, one of them recollected how she had built the original version of that house herself from clay and mud bricks after her husband threw her out when she was 8 months pregnant with her first baby. Later on, she had 3 more boys from the same man. Female tolerance seems to have been limitless back then. Or there was no alternative known.
Today the home garden project was formally inaugurated. Armed with an iron rod to till, an iron claw to claw and a spade to make new furrows on grandmother earth, I was out in the front yard with Amma early in the morning. Task one involved tilling evenly spaced holes for a new row of basil.
Squatting down caused major pain at the knees. Damn you, you comfortable western toilet! The pain meant I was doubly quick in tilling the holes. More holes were needed for the hibiscus and rose stems. I was punished for carelessness by the black thorns of a young lemon tree that is growing near the water tap.
 |
| Low hanging coconuts for the refreshing water and soft flesh for appams. |
When I told Achchan over phone about the backyard project, he expressed doubts because of the flourishing ‘peruchazhi’ (big rat) population. We went ahead and planted ginger roots and tapioca stems anyways. The soil is well aerated and dark with humus. Earthworms the size of Pei Wei noodles. I spaded a few into pad thai.
Mosquitoes are very much like politicians. Bloodsuckers with such reckless abandon that they are too full to escape the final swat.
Went to the BSNL office to request a new internet connection. The JTO (Junior Telecom Officer) was out for some event. “He will be right back. Please wait here for five minutes.” My mind was officially blown. Did my ears deceive me?! The words “please” and “5 minutes” in a government establishment. The politeness was spooky. But this I am told is the new India. The sleeping employee and the gang embroiled in relentless political discussions are still there. But the big ledger books and multicolored forms have been pushed to the corners of the desks, where they hold on precariously awaiting their impending inevitable death and disappearance. Flat-screen monitors dominate the desks.
Though the Junior in his title had nothing to do with it, the JTO turned out to be an energetic, jovial dude. His desk was set in a dusty cemetery of telephones. It took us 5 minutes to upgrade to a new ‘Unlimited 1350 Combo’ connection.
If paid in full for a year, 2 months are free. Government employees, even retired ones, get 20% discount. He was firing away the information. Noticing my perplexed look, he said, “I know what you are thinking.” “Yes?” “What if you need to downgrade to a lower plan if you are going out of town? You can change your plan twice in any month and we charge you accordingly!” He said BSNL is planning to stop supply of modems and routers which will be taken over by private agencies. I shook hands and left. This has been by far the best experience I have had in a government office in India. Deeply impressed with the change. Once the connection gets done, I will be able to add photos to these notes.
There is the constant chatter about corruption in all levels of government. Nobody can deny the existence of corruption. But I am yet to see it firsthand. When I do, I will report faithfully. But for the time being, I am tempted to think that the narrative of omnipresent corruption is simply habitual. Even in the flight over to Thiruvanathapuram, fellow passengers were talking about the horrible customs department and the palm-greasing that needs to be done at immigration checking. Nothing of that sort was experienced by anyone in the 3 flights that landed one after another that morning. This is sort of like the India Association at TAMU website in 2000 that described College Station as a desert where it never rains! As Goethe said, we humans have a strong affinity towards the false! Powerful perceptions, how much ever deluded, die hard. The experience at the airport and this morning at BSNL prompt me to keep the jury out for another 100 days in the top-to-bottom corruption matter.
On the way back from BSNL office, stopped by to buy some fish for lunch from the Matsyafed outlet and a new pair of casual footwear from Bata showroom. Both cost the same!
Traveling over the weekend, I had noticed the disappearance of an integral element of Mallu heritage. There are no more Shakeela-sque movie posters around. My mole in AP reports that such posters abound still in Hydi and Vizag. From what I gathered this weekend, actress Priya Mani is currently single-handedly handling all the soft-porn vibes for the Thiruvananthapuram district through the posters of a Telugu-dub movie with the rather fruity title, ‘Salam Police’.
Madam Shakeela and her voluptuous clones had provided a degree of sphericity to the square walls of Kerala for long. One must not look down upon bulbous boobies. You see, M.P. Veerendra Kumar’s travelogue “Hymavathathiloode” informs me that according to Vyasa it was not first time Draupadi laughed when he fell into an indoor pool that Duryodhana was enraged. He completely lost it only after her “breasts shook as she laughed” seeing him trying to avoid getting wet in a nonexistent indoor stream.
It was that fateful boob-shaking laughter that caused Duryodhana to challenge Yudhishtira into gambling. Subsequently the epic war and Bhagavad Gita. So verily, bouncing boobs cushion the very foundations of Hindusim. In fact, the incomparable Vakkom Mohammad Basheer wrote a short story titled ‘One Bhagavad Gita and Many Breasts.” No author can get away with such a title in today’s India… especially if he or she is not Hindu!
Paid a casual visit to Amma’s Ayurvedic physician in the evening. He declared that no one who has lived in the USA or Europe should ever be interested in coming back to this state and nation hopelessly beyond repair. His plan to launch a diabetes cure business was shot down because he sought a capital investment of 2 crores and the investors were not interested in any project less than 200 crores. “People don’t think, listen and change. They will queue up for any snake oil if it is advertised for a week on TV”, he fumed sitting beneath a huge portrait of Satya Sai Baba!
“We have reached such a low that wives consider it a status symbol to announce that their husbands had a cardiac arrest!” Soon afterwards the conversation stumbled down the usual topics of upper caste Hindus being shortchanged and everything being controlled by Sonia Gandhi’s Christian mafia and the Muslim league.
Since I started the note discussing grannies, I will come full circle. I paid the first visit to my sister’s fiancée’s family today. His grandmother (a classic smiley), an affectionate, articulate lady, had come to Thiruvananthapuram in 1951. Her late husband was a famous history professor. After a cordial, enjoyable meet and greet, as we were leaving, the granny gifted me, neatly packed, a couple of books written by her husband. One is a thesis in English titled ‘The History of Sri Padmanabhaswami Temple till 1758”. The other one is in Malayalam “Bharatheeyakala Noottandukalilude” (Indian Art through the Centuries). Brilliant!
People who love books are akin to smokers and drunkards when it comes to quickly bonding over their addiction.
ps: Number of discussions of my prospective marriage: just 1. The S&P downgrade news seems to be having a personal impact!
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