Why did the boy cross the road?

Q: How should one cross the road?
A: One should first look right, carefully walk to the divider, then look left, then carefully walk across to the other side.

I distinctly remember furiously writing this in my ruled CW (classwork) book in cursive handwriting.  We had to write this down quickly before Miss erased it from the blackboard.  I even remember my bench; with its distinct gouges probably exacted by elementary school vandals and its position next to a window overlooking a barbed wire fence and unkempt bushes.  I think I was in Std II or Std III, aged around 6-7 years.  

Those were the days I used to spend the majority of my school year at my maternal grandparents' home, a modest train-dabba-kholi style layout that occupied the ground floor portion of an old-time building.  The building was owned by a family that inhabited 3 out of 5 of its portions.  It had two common toilets and one common open bath mori in its stone floor courtyard.  It was located on a busy street in Rastapet, the then domicile of choice for many South Indians in Pune, and the chosen temporary residence for me because of its proximity to my school.  The street was always brimming with life, always filled with various Bajaj scooter models, old style autorikshaws, muscle motorcycles like Rajdoot and Enfield, occasional Ambassador cars, dusty buses and lorries, pedestrians, bicyclists, cycle rikshaws, roadside sabudana wada vendors, and the odd member of the bovine family.  On the other side of the street perennially sat a mochi (cobbler), who serviced all our podiatric needs.  I was particularly enamored by mochi kaka.  During my evening walks with my Thatha (spent trying to catch up with him for the most part), I would freeze in my tracks when we got close to mochi kaka, my eyes riveted to the master craftsman's hands weaving magic.

It was one of these days when after chanting four-wonzaa-four, four-twozaa-eight, four-threezaa-twelve, etc. as part of my Maths HW, I decided to take a break and cross the street unaccompanied to go watch mochi kaka work.  I recollected the valuable road-crossing lesson I had learned at school -- "One should first look right, carefully walk to the divider, then look left, then carefully walk across to the other side".  I set out to do exactly that.  I stepped out of the front door into the hot sun with no chappals.   After dodging a couple of cycle rikshaws, I looked right per the instructions and headed straight into traffic.  Needless to say, it didn't go well.  Problem #1 - the instructions didn't specifically say to wait for vehicles to pass after looking right, so I conveniently skipped that step.  This lead to furious honking and screaming by scooterists and motorcyclists, and my grandma rushing to the front of the house from the kitchen in horror.  Problem #2 - the instructions said to look left only after reaching the divider.  The street had no divider.  So I stood frozen in the middle of the scorching road, barefoot and petrified, not knowing which side to look, with lorries passing me in the front and two-wheelers passing me in the back, and rikshawale kakas staring at me disapprovingly as they whizzed past me.  I also remember looking straight through the traffic at mochi kaka and seeing him irrelevantly engrossed in his work with the focus of an Arjuna through all this!

My memory of this incident ends exactly at this point.  However hard I try, I cannot seem to remember what happened next.  I am inclined to say though that no one got injured and that I must have somehow gotten back home safely!

Uncle 'n' Auntie

Never guess someone's age based on their physical appearance.  Sure, a graying bean or a creased epidermis can indicate aging, but these are neither physiologically accurate indicators nor states that cannot be temporarily undone with the help of some age-defying makeup.  And before you think I'm going to go all philosophical and say that you are only as old as you feel or that age is just a number, let me state that society really doesn't care about how old you feel or actually are.  At the end of the day, your age is a nothing more than a social perception determined by your function in society.

Allow me to explain.

I started teaching music at the age of 24.  A relatively bantam age, right?  Not according to society!  Here I am, on the first day of teaching, sitting in my bicep hugging Aeropostale t-shirt and juvenile faded jeans from Old Navy, feeling all youthful and buoyant (you get the picture), and the mother nonchalantly says to her child:

"Beta, ANKAL ko Namaste bolo...".  

Boom!  --  From that day forward, I became an Uncle.  Sometimes Sir, sometimes Master, rarely Anna or Mama, but mostly Uncle.  Pavana wasn't spared either; she became an Auntie too around the same time!  

In reality though, it would just be a matter of time before these honorifics would start feeling appropriate.  Besides, I personally find honorifics petty and couldn't care less about what honorific was attached to me, if that.  I just find it interesting that students that are almost the same age I was when I started teaching still call the two of us Uncle and Auntie!

The Song of Winter

A frosty waft sails through his blanket

He writhes in the warmth of his sheets,

His ashen brows furrow as his eye meets

The calendar that he is never to forget.

'Tis almost the end of the autumn motley

The old man bethinks himself of his pact

With the child whose tongue won't redact

Until a snowflake descends on it softly.

He knows not though of the modest disquiet

At early morn that the young woman endures,

For the image of unruly wagons she conjures

On snowy highways they inconstantly striate.

His gaze pierces through the milky window

Straight at the verdant fir standing tall

Soon to be cloaked in a silvery shawl

Elegant but austere with nothing to show.

Powdery precipitation seemingly benign

Will soon result in routines so betossed,

For he's none other than Old Man Jack Frost

Snatching the last whit of warmth from thine.

In the Glow of a Diya

My most trusted companion in my teenage years was a crimson colored 'emergency light', a contraption my parents had bought for me to help me study through power outages.  The comradeship between the emergency light and me saw many important education milestones such as my Std X SSC matric and Std XII HSC inter examinations and even a couple of my college years if I am not mistaken.  The little gadget not only shone a white fluorescent tubelight on my formative years, but also provided entertainment during power outages via an inbuilt cassette deck and an AM/FM tuner.  It managed to survive through Y2K and lived long enough to see the birth of Pune's first private FM radio channel Radio Mirchi.  It had come with a free Daler Mehendi cassette (with 21 minutes of playtime and exactly four songs), which was the only cassette it could play without getting stuck.  Uncannily, the cassette and its player breathed their last around the same time.

The point behind recounting this story is that power outages were an elemental feature of growing up for many of us.  Not so much normalis situ in America.  As such, the resultant practice of stocking up on candles or investing in a battery powered lamp or an inverter/UPS is an alien concept here.  Luckily, with all our prior experience with power outages, we did not bat an eye when we lost power for 11 hours yesterday due to heavy winds and fallen trees.  What with it being Deepavali, we already had little diyas all over the kitchen and living room!  All we had to do was to bring out a couple of candles from the shelf and we were all set for a pleasant evening.  There was no hum from the refrigerator, the dishwasher.  The TV-Chromecast-iPad apparatus took a sabbatical.  There was no heat but we made up for that by huddling together and bundling ourselves in sweaters and blankets.  For the first time in many months the four of us plus my in-laws all sat the same room at the same time and had conversations without distractions!  We ate chaat, played antakshari, and recounted old stories.  A much needed power outage, this!

Honey, I Got You a Present!

Choosing the right birthday or anniversary present for your spouse is a harrowing ordeal.  Expectations usually run high and the pressure to deliver to these implied expectations leads to errors in judgement, like that one time I had to stand in the returns line at the mall because Pavana had expressed dissent at a CD player I had thought was the perfect gift.

While society at large has plenty of advice to give on this subject, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to interspousal gift giving.  For instance, society will tell you that gifting is less about the actual monetary value of the item and more about the sentiment it implies.  Basically भावनाओं को समझो.   Sounds like good advice, right?  But what if the भावनाs are misconstrued?  Society doesn't tell you how to handle that.  Let me illustrate.  We all have heard time and again that gifting your spouse a vacuum cleaner is a strict no-no.  The basis for this hypothesis is the sentiment implied by gifter to the giftee via the vacuum cleaner, which is, "Here's a vacuum cleaner, now I expect you to regularly vacuum the house while I lounge around.  Happy Anniversary!", when in reality the gifter might be saying: "Here's a vacuum cleaner, from now on I will start vacuuming the house regularly.  You may now lounge around.  Happy Anniversary!".  

In case you are wondering, Pavana and I did actually buy a vacuum cleaner together for our 10th wedding anniversary two years ago.  We really needed one.

The scope of anniversary gift giving between Pavana and I has been elastic and fairly inconsistent over the years of our marriage.  Today is our 12th wedding anniversary.  We did not give each other presents this time.  The fact that there was no verbal clash between us throughout day leads me to believe that our marriage graph has reached the we-no-longer-need-presents-to-show-love point.  Pundits will no doubt tell me that I am delusional.  But I am comfortable being delusional.  I have no intention of standing in line at a mall to return a CD player. 

It's a Virtual Virtual World!

"I'm not sure why it isn't working.  I just had it working a few minutes ago!"

"Try clicking on the top right corner where you see the little note like icon..."

"I did, but it won't allow me to type!"

"Oh, you need to go to settings and enable it."

"Oh okay!  Is it in the meeting settings or do I have to go out into the main settings to enable it?"

"Umm... not sure.  Do you want to share your screen?  We can try to work through it together."

"Yeah okay!  Lemme see...  okay here we go.  Can you see my screen?"

"Not yet, it's thinking... oh there it is!  Yes, I can see it now..."

One would probably assume that the above conversation was being had by two adults, presumably during the course of a work meeting or a call with IT.  What if I told you that this was actually an exchange between two 7-year-olds during a Zoom call?  

The technological adroitness exhibited by today's youngest generation never ceases to amaze us senile Gen-Xers, a generation that supposedly was right in the middle of many major advancements such as personal computers, the internet, smartphones etc. and has yet somehow developed a sentiment of antiquity.  The said talent is all the more discernible this year with society almost completely metamorphosing into a virtual world in the wake of COVID, scilicet virtual school, virtual classes, virtual work, virtual play dates, virtual lunches, virtual happy hours, virtual concerts, what have you.  At the beginning of the school year we had felt a bit apprehensive about virtual school, partly because this was Medha's first time in public school but mostly because we were concerned that virtual school might introduce a steep learning curve for her and that it might come in the way of actual school work.  Our apprehensions were however brought to naught within no time.  Medha has not only became a pro at operating her school issued Chromebook (it took her all of two days to become an expert), but has also gained enough wisdom to give us recommendations in allied matters, for e.g. whether to restart Chromecast or merely end and restart the Hotstar app on the iPad, whether to add the Google meet link in the Google classroom header or send it via Whatsapp for music classes, whether to be on gallery view or speaker view during bhajans, whether to use the reverb tool in the Fx panel or right click on the voice track to select preset effects in BandLab (a cloud based digital audio workstation) etc.  

Mira is not far behind either.  She knows exactly how to switch her 'singing' toys on and off; how she discovered that little switch on the stuffed puppy's lumbar region under the velcro of his coat is beyond my grasp.  She even taught me a sophisticated hack to make the puppy resume his singing if he goes silent for some reason; gently tapping his head and then hurling him violently to the floor usually does the trick!  She also understands how do-while loops work evidenced by her ability to create exact conditions for a given toy to play the exact song she wants to hear.  She has even figured out all by herself how humans of yesteryear used to talk using flip-phones; her latest activité de choix is to roam the living room holding an old flip-phone to her cheek, babbling and giggling incessantly into it.  Oh, and she also knows how to end a Facetime call whenever the conversation turn to topics she might not prefer!

The world has now turned into a real-time sci-fi movie.  And frankly, I am not complaining.  Why would I?  After all, scientific advancement is nothing but a natural consequence of human intelligence.  The concept of technological singularity, i.e. the notion that one day robots will rule humans, is, I think, absolute drivel.  To quote sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov - "I do not fear computers.  I fear the lack of them."

Nighttime Nibbles

Five years ago.  

A glow of blue light emerges through a comforter in a bedroom that is otherwise dark.  

"Switch off that damn phone, I can't sleep...", grumbles Pavana.  She is hanging onto the edge of the mattress on her side of the bed.  Separating her from me is a tiny two-year-old laying spread-eagle, defying the laws of geometry by occupying 75% of the bed area.

"I can't sleep either...", I mutter.

"Exactly, it's that damn phone... switch it off... now!", she responds in a loud whisper.

"I think I am hungry."

"No, you are not.  Go to sleep."

"I'm going downstairs."

"Lalit, switch off that phone and sleep."

"You coming with me?  I'll make us papdi chaat."

Five minutes later, we find ourselves plopped down on the couch, watching late night comedy and chowing down layers of papdi, onions, dahi, and chutney, while the tiny two-year-old somehow manages to occupy an additional 10% area on the bed upstairs.

Cortisol has a rummy tendency to surface past bedtime.  And once cortisol spikes, the mind loses its restraint relative to dietary discretions.  Hallucinations of food items that are the antithesis of fruits, veggies, or whole grains manifest.  The immediate course of action in such a situation is to head straight for the snack pantry.  One knows this is imprudent, almost reckless behavior, and yet one cannot evade this cortisol bait.  What ensues then is the unlawful presence of humans in the kitchen and living room at ungodly hours, and newly dirtied dishes in the sink upon conclusion of the misdemeanor.

Like I said, these midnight snacks are seldom healthy choices.  Our choices have almost always belonged to the chaat family, ranging from simple concoctions like mixture + curd to more elaborate preparations like sev batata dahi puri.  On occasion though, we have fired up the stove to griddle up a couple of buttery frozen maida parathas, also known as 'junk paratha' in our family parlance, to be eaten with oily thokku.  Our midnight snacking desires have become a bit subdued now compared to five years ago, but we still fall prey to the cortisol bait occasionally.  While Pavana does not have the opportunity to admonish me for nighttime smartphone usage due to our current avant-garde (and hopefully temporary) sleeping arrangement of occupying separate bedrooms with one kid each in custody (necessitated by our baby's jumpy sleeping habits, the knack both kids have of being able to occupy more surface area of the bed than their bodies geometrically permit, and the impact all this has on all our sleep patterns), our thoughts continue to be pretty aligned w.r.t. midnight cravings.  Snacking heist operations are periodically carried out when such cravings hit, provided that the little one is not sitting up randomly saying "Apple" or restlessly circumvolving in the area assigned to her for sleeping.  For instance, sample the below text conversation that transpired last night - 

Biryani is NOT Pulav!

The first time I lived by myself was when I was in Youngstown (read this post from that solo Youngstown era) in an aging apartment unit that was half under the ground.  The landlady, an elderly lady of German origin, had somehow considered me worthy enough to adopt as a tenant without even running a credit check.  It was an eccentric place, to say the least.  The front door to the building was perennially jammed so all tenants had to enter through the back door.  A little coop like structure next to the building constituted the laundry room where the landlady provided free laundry supplies to all tenants but charged $5 to make a copy of the key to the laundry room.  Mine was a 2 bedroom unit; well, 1 bedroom where I had blown up an airbed and 1 room with a weird purple carpet where I had set up a cassette deck and would practice music.  The living room had two levels, 1 foot apart in elevation, separated by a jagged line that ran obliquely through the room; a bizarre architectural choice, one might say.  The kitchen was a separate room that was incongruously spacious for the one frying pan, one copper-bottomed vessel, one rice cooker, one plate, and 4 spoons I owned.  Every morning I would put a half a cup of rice, a cup of water, some frozen mixed veggies, some salt and garam masala in the rice cooker, switch it on, and go off to work.  When Amma or Appa asked what I had for dinner, I would proudly say 'Pulav'.  

Strange days, those.

Thankfully, both my accommodation choices and cooking skills have evolved.  With regard to the latter, I can unabashedly say that my skills have now reached a point where people who eat my food can clearly tell if I served them a Biryani or a Pulav.  Allow me to ascend the soap box for a bit.  If you are a vegetarian cook and are at a point where you are ready to learn how to differentiate between Biryani cooking and Pulav cooking like I once was, I am going to let you in on a secret.  All it is, is a marketing strategy.  Here's your MO.  The day you plan to make a Biryani, make sure everyone in the house knows that you are making a Biryani.  And don't tell them directly.  Instead keep giving them not-so-subtle hints all day.  Talk about how you decided to buy mint the last time you went to buy groceries.  Ask loudly where the javitri, elaichi and cashews are in the pantry, even if you know the answer.  Populate the kitchen counter with various unnecessary gadgets and make sure to use multiple cookers even if your Biryani can be accomplished in one.  Say things like "Now the rice is done, on to the next step!" aloud.  Make sure to announce "....and this is for the garnishing!" after you fry the onions, even if no one asks you.  And then strike the final blow by asking, "Do we need raita or can we manage with curd?".  Now when you serve your entrée, even someone who cannot differentiate between ginger and garlic will be able to tell that you served them Biryani!

A memoir of a...

I peered out the window with a little excitement and a little nervousness.  I was being driven to a park shelter in Solon on a late fall morning for the first ever assignment of my life.  Through the window I spotted a decaying Party City store with an 'Everything Must GO' sale banner.  Instantly, my mind was cast back to a time not so long ago when I would spend my days laying on a dusty shelf inside that very store.  The official party line, pun intended, was that our store was on Corporate's closure list and that if no one bought me and my shelf-mates soon, we would all be transferred to a mysterious dark place where spooky rats and creepy racoons supposedly roamed the aisles.  A shudder passed through my creases as I saw the store disappear into the distance through the SUV window.  I hated to imagine what would have happened to me if someone hadn't bought me in time!

The little girl had just turned one.  Her parents had planned an outdoor birthday party.  'Winnie the Pooh' was the theme.  Going by the tacky 8.5x11 sheets of dully colored Pooh pictures and handwritten notes that said 'Cheese Pizza', 'Coconut Laddoo', 'Cake', etc., I could tell that the family was fairly unschooled in the art of party throwing.  Furthermore, they had decided on an outdoor party in 40°F weather, which meant that had to figure out how to get the fireplace in the shelter going and keep it going for 4 hours.  I remember seeing people scurrying back and forth with bundles of firewood throughout the duration of the party!  Watching the parents scramble through the motions of the party, blowing balloons, setting up the tables, welcoming the guests, managing the pizza delivery, and blissfully forgetting to hand out return gifts, all while the little girl angelically slept in her car seat, I could not help but feel a sense of belonging with this clumsy little family.  My job was comparatively simple.  All I had to do was stay hanging on the wall by two nails and display the Happy Birthday message printed on me, which I did very proudly!

Seven years have passed since that party.  That I have seen the little girl blossom from a tiny little baby into a chirpy little seven year old is my claim to fame.  Over these seven years, I have truly assimilated into my family.  The little girl makes sure no one forgets me; she even made them bring me out for her 'half birthday' when she turned 6.5 years old!  I have been a constant in all the different types of birthday parties my family has organized over all these years.  I have been in outdoor birthdays, indoor birthdays, birthdays overseas, birthdays with music concerts, birthdays with kids making care packages, mom's birthdays, dad's birthdays, and what have you!  I have been with my family through many joys and sorrows.  I have seen career promotions, job losses, health issues, surgeries, address changes, new arrivals (we now have another cute little girl, who's first birthday we recently celebrated in the house amid COVID fears), and so much more!

On occasion, as I sit carefully folded in my cardboard box in the basement, my mind wanders thinking what would have happened to me if I hadn't found my family.  I shudder when I am reminded of that mysterious place with rats and racoons and thank my fate for deciding instead to send me here to this warm home!