Its old news now, but I hope you remember Barack Obama’s remarks about religious intolerance in India towards the end of his historic visit to the county. The next time he makes one of those visits, I request the CIA or whoever decides the president’s itinerary to let him drive through the busy st
You know what they say about the earth being round and everything that you do coming back to get you? I realized this was true when I saw my son rummage through all his baby toys and ask me the history of each and every piece, and leave everything, including several pieces of jigsaw puzzles, scatter
I hate it when I miss my office bus. It’s not because I’ll have to travel by the BMTC and then bargain with auto drivers who quote more fare than is required to buy an entire auto stand to get to my office. It is just that I can’t stand my co-travelers on a Volvo. I can get a better view of the lad
When we were children, we always wanted to eat at our favourite restaurant that was called Hassan (in Salalah, Oman). It was not always easy to convince our dad to take us there especially since the food almost always gave him a stomach upset. So he often made stories about the poor hygiene at restaurants, his favourites being that cooks didn’t wash the chicken and they didn’t wash their hands. Not very imaginative, which may be why they always fell on our deaf ears. We slyly roped in our mom to help our case because even then we knew that no man can deny his beautiful Mrs something as simple as a trip to the restaurant.
I can remember the restaurant very well. There were two huge dining rooms and some private booths as well, the doors of which children (the unruly ones, not us) loved to slam shut. We once spied a lone diner lick tomato sauce off the bottle rim and resolved never to use anything from an unsealed bottle. Other diners cooled the soup in large saucers for their kids, but
If you were given one more life, a chance at rebirth, who would you choose to be? Do I hear Sachin Tendulkar? Shah Rukh Khan, Big B, Bill Gates?
I would be reborn as “Kuttan”, the notoriously lazy cat at my aunt’s house. With looks (a super white coat and a bottlebrush tail) that work in his favour, he has been living the life of a Badshah, and has caused me some serious envy. To this day, he has never raised a paw to obtain his food. Instead, he eats to his heart’s content and rather a lot more than what he actually needs. Being overweight doesn’t seem to bother him in the least, infact, the fatter he is, the cuter, the more spoilt and admired he is. He can sleep all day long if he wishes to, and he usually chooses the sofa or the fluffiest mattress in the house, wherever it is quite and comfortable. And whoever said cats have limited facial expressions? Try giving Kuttan company when he doesn’t feel like it, and he walks away with an expression that says just how repulsive he thinks
Onam is a festival to be celebrated at home, home as in Kerala, with the rest of the family. My mom has been telling me in very enthusiastic tones about the girls and boys dressed in traditional kasavu saree, pattu pavada, kasavu mundu and juba, the increased rush and traffic in town as people go about their Onam shopping, the sales and offers everywhere; and I feel a twinge of regret that I am not home. Though I have never laid a pookalam (floral decorations), or participated in singing and dancing, or lighted crackers, or seen any vallam kalli (boat race) as part of Onam celebration, I have never missed an Onasadhya. An OnaSadhya is a lavish feast of 20 to 30 vibhavangal (dishes) served on a banana leaf; tropical vegetables of all kinds, steamed, sautéed or fried, mostly with coconut in some form or the other and curry leaves; parippu (cooked lentils) and ghee, sambar (lentils and vegetables cooked with spices), rasam (tangy tomato based soup), pulisseri (sweet and sour curd based cu
Exams, how I hated them! Student life was so much fun with exams being the only blot on an otherwise beautiful picture. In the four years spent in CEC, the college where many of us “studied” engineering, we spent approximately 370 hours writing exams! And that does not include our practical tests! It sounds scary to me now, scarier that it had seemed then, when it was just another part of life.
Mid semester exams were fine because they were conducted by the college, covered fewer topics and only a small percent of the score was considered into the final total. Indeed, our single digit electrical exam scores shocked many people (it was first year, and we were not yet used to getting poor scores), but after sometime (when we realized everyone had scored poorly), 2/25 started sounding funny and people who got 8/25 were immediately termed nerds (and were secretly envied). Just why did computer science students have to study electrical engineering basics anyway?
But the university exams w
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