Songs: Moon River

Leaves me rather wistful, this one. I do not know why I like it, but I do. Very much. #shrug#

Cooking with ma

This was march 3rd, 2011:

Hi jijima!

guess what I did at home?

I cooked!!!

I cooked ze cabbage n anda on tue night. But, u see, i was so worried about not burning ze cabbage that it ended up slightly undercooked, n just this lil bit bitter.

But jiji, ze cabbage haz the most lovely pale green color when it is just mixed with ze pyaaz n hot oil. The haldi n mirchi ruins the color, they do.

And then, wed, i makeses ze aalu-gobi for lunch. Ze gobi smells delicious, it does, when it iz added to the aalu n pyaaz n oil. mmmmmm..

This turned out nice and yum, but it didnt have the 'that' that makeses ma's cooking so rich and yummy. It's okay, i'll learn!

and guess what else I did? I watched Masterchef. With Ze Hon. Chef Ramsey. But this was ze semis n ze finals, so all high class cooking, n no blunders, and so no thunders from our fav chef. 
...


I tell you, my anxiety waiting for ma's opinion on the aalu gobi was as good as any felt by the contestants waiting for Chef Ramsey's. And this was march 13th:

...


speaking of, dinner was cabbage-anda, ma style; 

i tried to make it, okay? ma cut ze cabbage n pyaaz. n then i wandered into ze kitchen; i'll make it, ma? i ask. n so she says put 3 spoons oil. and i put oil, n get distracted by what to put next, i think a moment n ask, zeera? she says yes. so i take zeera and wonder if tthe oil is hot enuf. when i think it is, i put in zeera, n thn i wait wait wait for it to turn slightly brown, n i put in pyaaz, very cautiously, you know. n a lil oil splashes, u kno, just smallest drplets, n just a lil bit, but i gt startled and i jerk my hands, and most of ze pyaaz falls off the plate.

n then i turn off the stove n call ma. n she asks, you put only one spoon oil, no? n then i realize tht ya, i stopped at one spoon. (well, actually, I remembered vaguely wondering that there's too little oil, and pushing the thought aside)

n then i getses out of the kitchen, cuz i iz too slepy n i dont trust myself anymore.

I really ought to stop with the 'ze's and the 'es'es and the 'iz' and everything elses, but I have too much fun with it, and jiji doesn't mind. And so I go on and abuse ze language as I please.

Unseasonal

( The first three were written last April)

Unseasonal: 

1.Diagnosis

The monsoons retreat, and my home is flooded

with visitors come with fruits and scripted conversations:

There is nothing wrong with my father, they say.

2.Treatment

A lackadaisical winter sun bears witness

to electron beams scorching cancerous cells,

and anything else in their path.

3.Uncertainty

I walk in sync with birdsong, side stepping a dead leaf.

Once upon a summer, I’d have quarrelled with my sister

to crunch it, but now, my own father is a dry leaf, singed

by cancer.

4.Death

I know not when spring breezed in,

but there are plenty of flowers to choose from

to adorn the frozen memory that is his photograph.

In a wild and wonderful world...

This post is nearly two months overdue. Right. On with it, then.

You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons," they say "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron."

--Richard P Feynman, in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter*

Richard Feynman called it a wild and wonderful world of quantum physics, where the very particles of light dare travel at above and below the speed of light (and not necessarily in straight lines), where electrons go backwards in time. And then he dared to go accuse the chemists of complicating counting.

Speaking of counting, he had us count 584 beans and take out 236**, and have a marvelously good time at it. Genius, he was.

Ooh, this is the Feynman Van, with Feynman diagrams painted on the side.

_____________________________________________
* QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is a collection of four lectures where he seeks to explain, to a non-specialist audience, the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, without a single equation.


**metaphorically speaking, that is. 

Women's Day

Last year, I was startled by Kartheik, "Will you write something for Women's Day?" I had absolutely no clue what he was going to do with it, but I agreed, and found it doubly hard to think of what to write when I didn't know what it was for. I googled* for women who left a mark upon the world (and not the usual list); women whose story meant something to me, would mean something to the audience (whatever it was--I love creating brick walls out of nothing, because, had I thought clearly, it would have to be the students of my campus). I found Nellie Bly after some searching, but I wondered if my audience (again, whoever they were--yes, now they became real people) would relate to her. So I kept searching, and returned again, and again to Nellie Bly. As I ran out of time, I decided to stick to her and be done with it.

I do not have to look very hard this year; my ma is an unknown to all except a very small world, she is not (like Bly**) a whirlwind of a personality. No, she is a tender plant, one that looks lovely and fragile, but withstands harsher winds when compared to those tall, strong trees. From her, I'm learning that it is possible, to go on despite everything. I was given very good advice last summer: 'courage is not about being fearless,it's about doing what you must inspite of being afraid'; my ma, she has plenty of that courage.  

All women, they say, turn into their mothers. I'll be proud of myself if I become half the woman she is. 

And this is what I put together  
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*aside: ah, my blogger text editor still doesn't recognize google as a verb. Nor google as a word, for that matter.


**Okay, now that's too many parentheses.

Songs: Mili

Mili was the first movie I watched beginning to end. Daddy brought home a dvd, and we all sat down to watch it; the first time ma, dad, jiji and me watched a movie together. Uhm, not exactly. Dad stopped after the first half where all the comedy was, and I watched the rest another day when no one was home.

The songs have even greater memories: I remember, when I was six or seven, waking up to 'maine kaha phoolon se' playing on the radio. 'Tis a remarkably cheerful song, and happy, happy lyrics, and I'd distort them to 'maine kaha tune tu,' and insist it was so when ma tried to correct me. I laugh, now; I have no clue what kind of thought processes lead to that

Maine kahan phoolon se 

haso to woh khil khila kar has diye 

Aur ye kahan jivan hai bhai mere bhai

hasne ke liye hasne ke liye.

I did not hear the actual song for a long time in between, and Lata's voice gave way to my mother's soft, unadorned one, for she'd hum it occasionally while she went about her cooking. Indeed, I was disappointed in the song when I found it on the internet --I am still decided that Ma's is way better.

The other two songs, aaye tum yaad mujhe and badi sooni sooni hai offer a remarkable contrast. The former has memories with dad; tis one of those songs we'd listened together. Tis a beautiful song, infused with pain and longing, but daddy and I, we were both too wrapped up in each other to give much weight to that. We were too busy counting stars:

Jab Mai Raaton Mein Taare Ginta Hoon
Aur Tere Kadmon Ki Aahat Sunta Hoon
Lage Mujhe Har Tara, Tera Darpan

Badi sooni sooni hai... it is -will you let me use 'beautiful' again? Cuz it is. A perfect expression of the emptiness I sometimes feel. Of when I can not find sleep at night, of when I can not find happiness:

Kabhee main n soyaa, kahee muz se khoyaa sukh meraa aise

Pataa naam likhakar, kahee yoohee rakhakar bhoole koee jaise

Dear Mr. Dumkopf

Sometimes, you find amusement in the most unexpected places. Here, 'tis the lecture slides of our Computer Networks course. I still haven't figured out from which book/website our prof. picked up this particular picture. Will acknowledge it if I do.

Edit: Found the source! Tis from Computer Networks, by Tanenbaum