Short shorts

How did we ever manage to wear those ill fitting shorts during our difficult years?

Found some black and whites from 1980...

In case of any doubts, the dude on the right is me.

After starring at these photos for some time, started thinking, will Jr. and the little one will ever understand what it means to be poor? You can always start poor and climb up in economic strata, but the other way around is very difficult to deal with. San and me have been promising ourselves to take the kids to local soup kitchens to volunteer and it keeps getting postponed.

Then again, does one have to live in an asbestos shed to understand the concept or is it enough if you watch others living in difficult times?

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Check List

Thanks for all your comments!

A follow up to Wish List...

A day with my dad where he gets to talk and I get to keep quiet for once

Check

Although it was a very emotional and tired dad who mostly gave me the "life is short, make sure you do this after my time... blah .. blah.." bit and I listened and then gave him a retaliatory lecture on why life is what happens when you play with grandkids at this age.. Yep Sujatha Ramesh was right on the previous comment. I do not stay quiet for long.

A day with my grandpa and grandma, put my head on her lap and sleep for a minute, even if only a minute, just like when I was a small kid, put my ear to grandpas tummy and listen to rumbling noises and giggle
Check

I could not say bye to my grandparents this time. It was too difficult. My grandpa keeps falling down into his imaginary chair and hurts himself one too many times a week. He has good days and bad days. Happened to catch this on one of his good days!

a trip to kapalishwar temple in mylapore with grandparents, share a goli soda with my brother, a paalgoa for each of us with a transluscent paper with the kapali temple on the paper in bright red, some kaara sevai from the ambika appalam depot, a stop at RUBY stores to buy a chandamama or champak, watch grandma bargain with the vegetable vendors

Check check check check .. . hmm lets see.. went with my mum and aunts, uncle , different people, different days and times (10AM, 4AM, 8 AM, 9AM) to see the "utsavam" where they carried the gods on various vahanams. You will get the complete Kabali Kovil Utsavam series over the weekend! here is a sample ..

a trip to the marina with my brother and sister and some soan papdi from the cute bell jar

No beach trip. Did buy some Soan Papdi from grand sweets for Jr. and the little one though

a jackie chan movie at alankar with my brother

Right now the only thing my brother is watching is angio scans on a CD. this has to wait for better times or just wait for time...

So do the next three things. Mom walks and stands enough in hospital waiting rooms. She was sooo tired after the trip to the utsavam on the "ther" day, it was hard to watch.

walking around the srigery mutt temple behind my mom

perform topaz blade surgery on my sisters dolls with my brother as assistant surgeon

watch my dad bargain with an autorickshaw driver for 15 minutes for a trip that might take him only ten

Dad does not have his bargaining voice back yet. He also cannot pull off that brick walk away from the auto with the "if you dont come down to my price, I am walking.." dialogue. My dad almost tangos with the auto driver.. it is a dance and the drivers do the sequence of negotiating in this weird way almost to humor themselves. This time every auto driver in the stand told me "enna saar.. appa-vukku attack vandhudche..avara romba miss pannarom saar!" and I went WTF? he is my appa, you guys talk as though he is yours! Guess the man touches peoples lives in ways I cannot understand.

fold clothes from the clothesline on the terrace and watch the kites

Check . No kites in April. fold clothes I did!

eat pori kadalai from Kapali kadalai Nilayam and savor it one rice grain at a time, and marvel at how some pori tastes a little bland, some a little salty and once in a while that single grain of arisi pori just tastes perfect!

Check. A full post on that later..

etc.

etc.

etc.

Some of these might come true soon in some form or other. The rest will be retreived from permanent memory, savored in otherwise sad times, and be neatly tucked back in, for the sights, sounds and smells of a time long gone are still in the head, with definition better than any blue ray disk can offer, better than any photo or video ever stored.

Life takes you places, but sometimes when it takes you to the same place, there is a certain magic to it!

At one point when the plane was half way across the pacific ocean, it felt like a "trishanku sorgam", neither here nor there, halfway from parents, halfway from kids.. too many words, too many emotions, tears that came from nowhere while sitting in the middle of a sea of people at 35000 feet, tears that could not be put in words or in the right context, because every thought as a parent came with an instant contradiction as a child and it all stopped after letting go of the whole thought process and just giving into the fact that not all questions have good answers. Not everything is right, or wrong.

Some decisions take you far physically, others take you far mentally. Have known people staying in the same house without as much as saying a word to each other for decades and people who care for each other very much living on opposite sides of the globe. All of us make choices and live with them and find brilliant ways to justify our day to day actions, from brushing or not brushing our teeth to deciding to have children to relocating to far off places.. and to everyone and nobodys bewilderment, life does go on.

All said and done, felt the magic. Still feeling it inside.

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Wish list

A day with my dad where he gets to talk and I get to keep quiet for once

A day with my grandpa and grandma, put my head on her lap and sleep for a minute, even if only a minute, just like when I was a small kid, put my ear to grandpas tummy and listen to rumbling noises and giggle

a trip to kapalishwar temple in mylapore with grandparents, share a goli soda with my brother, a paalgoa for each of us with a transluscent paper with the kapali temple on the paper in bright red, some kaara sevai from the ambika appalam depot, a stop at RUBY stores to buy a chandamama or champak, watch grandma bargain with the vegetable vendors

a trip to the marina with my brother and sister and some soan papdi from the cute bell jar

a jackie chan movie at alankar with my brother

walking around the srigery mutt temple behind my mom

perform topaz blade surgery on my sisters dolls with my brother as assistant surgeon

watch my dad bargain with an autorickshaw driver for 15 minutes for a trip that might take him only ten

fold clothes from the clothesline on the terrace and watch the kites

eat pori kadalai from Kapali kadalai Nilayam and savor it one rice grain at a time, and marvel at how some pori tastes a little bland, some a little salty and once in a while that single grain of arisi pori just tastes perfect!

etc.

etc.

etc.

Some of these might come true soon in some form or other. The rest will be retreived from permanent memory, savored in otherwise sad times, and be neatly tucked back in, for the sights, sounds and smells of a time long gone are still in the head, with definition better than any blue ray disk can offer, better than any photo or video ever stored.

Life takes you places, but sometimes when it takes you to the same place, there is a certain magic to it!

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Game - update

Now that all four clues are out for the round 1, and after the example post, the number of guesses that have come in the last day have been amazing!

The best part is, you guys caught on to the game and most of you are cracking round 1 and 2 and

three of you have already got round #3 right!

Current leaders are Gauri, Balaji Dilip in that order.. unless Bharvi cracks #3 with 2nd clue in which case she jumps back to first place..

So many of you guessed Abdul Kalam for #3.. Somehow "missile" immediately brings an Indian connotation and it is linked to Kalam!

:)

Giving mastemind clues in BHU 17-18 years ago was easy! There was no google then.

Giving clues that don't get you a google hit is more difficult and this has definitely challenged me.

This game also brings back fond memories of a bunch of dudes who were extremely good at this.. Deva, Durgaprasad, Abhijit, Kiran, Rajeev..and of course Sanjay Chugh (dont know if I got his name spelt right) who came to conduct the competition in BHU that year. He told me that I was amazing in this game. First real complement anyone gave me at any competition in BHU!

Here's to all of you, wherever you are!

Going to keep this game alive for another 3 rounds. (Yeah, I have the clues already in my head).. so this will be a week long event and we will tally it up Sunday night!

:)

Thanks for taking part!!!

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Stone Temple Pilots

As we were going through the old CD collection, a CD of the "Stone Temple Pilots" was spotted. They were a popular rock band in the early nineties. Popular for a very short time, but they had one single that I liked and hence the CD in the collection.

At that time, it was my opinion that,

Amitabh Bachchan : Mithun Chakraborthy :: Pearl Jam : Stone Temple Pilots

Anyways, this post as usual, is going to steer away from the opening paragraph. To a different world, a different time and place!

The very first time the name of this group was mentioned, and we (Myself, my friends Sedat Alkoy and Indradev Samajdar, may god find them happy wherever they are!) were watching the group perform live on one of the late night shows, it remined me of a different type of Stone Temple Pilots, and for some weird reason, that memory came back! Now we are going deep into my brain, for this is a flashback of a flashback, something not attempted, even in K. Balachandar movies!

Once upon a time, in a land far away, was a custom called Pradhosham. Every 15 days, the entire family would assemble at the Kapaleeshwarar temple in Mylapore and watch the idol of lord Shiva (on his silver bull) being carried around the temple three times, with a short break after each round. The temple would be "standing room only", and the oldies and the kids will go hours in advance to reserve vantage positions to see the prayers during the breaks.

Think of it as stadium seating where the half time show is viewed best!

My brother and me, would have our own agenda when going to the temple. While grandpa would be busy choosing a safe view point for grandma, we would go do our thing. We would watch and chase the peacocks behind the "punnaivana naathar", chase each other around the entire temple, put vennai to the hanuman on one of the pillars outside the Kapaleeshwar sannidhi, and last but not the least, chase each other on the stone elephants in the hall facing the subramanya deity! It was by far our favorite activity.

We would race across fantasy lands, throw in some Mahabaratha lingo learnt recently from grandma and beat the elephant on the head to go faster, faster! We would hog the elephants as much as we could till grandpa would dislodge us to give the the other waiting kids a chance.

The beauty of the pradhosham, is that if you pray to Lord Shiva over that narrow 90 minute window every fifteen days, he would forgive you for all your sins and grant you all your wishes! The other beauty of the pradhosham is that as soon as the final deepa aaradhanai is done, the crowd disperses within 10 minutes! The ladies disappeared to feed their family while the men had to go around the Mylapore tank and bargain with the vegetable vendors to buy veggies for the next days menu! The gaslit lamps, the crude weighing scales which made the bargaining moot, the cows that would be running the backlane between the open stalls for the discarded vegetables, the smells, the visuals... someone needs to come up with a software that can take the image in your head and convert it to .jpg and upload to blogger! Better, make that a request for video upload directly to youtube.

Where were we? Ah, the rapidly dispersing post pradosham crowd! You see, grandpa was a very patient man and he loves us dearly! That said, he would let us play on the elephants for an extra half hour. This would be followed by a request for drinking Kalimark goli soda outside the temple and he would yield. Then we would make our way to the Ambika Appalam Depot and buy :

1 piece Palkhoa each (wrapped in a translucent butter paper)
1 bag of kara sevai
1 bag of ribbon pakoda

and we would start the long trek back home. Occasionally I would roll and the floor and throw a tantrum outside the book store near Leo coffee for the latest issue of Chandamama and grandpa would buy me that too!

Every India trip over the last fifteen years has included a Pradosham, call it an old habit, a prayer for shiva or whatever. Except this trip!

We went to the temple one evening, to stand under the same Dakshinamurthy who was in some ways instrumental in me marrying San, while my brother pointed out the real Dakshinamurthy shining high and bright over the Madras sky!

Jr. is now about the same age as my brother was when we enjoyed piloting the stone elephants. She really enjoyed it. The little one will have to wait a couple of years, and then we can have the next generation race all over again!

San tells me that I live in the past when we visit India, and it is true. When you spend less than a month out of twelve in India, one does tend to live in the past, look for those connections, grab for roots, all in the hopes of refreshing the DRAM's in your head!

All said and done, it is great to go back to this temple, anytime, any day, be it Pradosham or otherwise, and take a look at those elephants!

I can be eight years old again!

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