Running the last leg of my husband's thesis.

Chinmay is in the last leg of his Phd thesis. This means, he sees more of the computer screen than me or the baby.  

His room smells of economics and the words 'migration and remittances' have an echoing aura. And as he sits tracing the history of this and that, I refrain from entering his den, because I fear that some ghost from the past will pop up from the books around him. I dont let the baby inside either, lest he may get bitten by Chinmay's bug and enter the 'trance land'.

When Chinmay walks around 'to think', he looks at us in amusement, like we are some   creatures in a zoo, because most often we are on the floor screeching like monkeys and dancing to the tunes of nursery rhymes. He waves to us like a visitor and thankfully doesnt throw peanuts at us! I dont even try asking or telling him anything, his distant gaze drives me off.

The only good thing about his state, is that he eats anything I leave on his table. He has no clue whats going in, because he isn't watching, only typing. So i use this opportunity to sneak in milk, fruits, even some veges (wink) and anything else he doesn't eat other wise.

Each day, I can see that he is working really hard to finish in 15 days what he should have done over a year. My husband is right now giving 'last minute work' a whole new meaning. Even at this stage, his thesis topic and chapters seem to be changing so many times, that he can easily write up a couple of books with all the ideas. 

I hope these days pass by soon. My baby is longing for some silly-billy talk from him, not the "kuttu what do you think, this table suggests?" kind of discussion. And I am longing for a day where we can just laze around, like we did through most of his Phd. 

Until then, I am busy watching over him, to ensure some sanity! (of course, all this is being done in hope that some day if and when i register for a phd prog, he repays all my hard work) 

If you are looking for some entertainment do visit us in the afternoon some day. A sleepy mumbly head Chinmay, who works all night and sleeps till  afternoons, is a pleasure to watch. 

A sample of our daily conversation:

"Wake up, its one. You have missed breakfast, now you cant go without lunch"... that's me screaming these days. 

"Yes. But I ran a regression.." Chinmay mumbles and dozes off again!

"Chinmay"!!! 

"Where is it on the map?" 

"Chinmay" the scream gets louder... and a few shrieks later Chinmay opens one eye.....

p.s 

Secretly i don't want it to end either. With the completion and submission of his thesis, our beautiful four years here will come to an end! Long nights of board games and awesome times with friends will be over.... Sigh! I wish he could submit and yet remain a phd student for many more years to come! 

Cook...........

I love food - to eat and hence to cook. 


I started cooking the moment I realized that maggie and bread were great as midnight or Sunday brunch snack, but could never substitute a well cooked meal. 


When I reached Port Blair, far far away from home on my first job, the obvious thing that I wanted to cook was the holy Rasam - a spicy tamrind, tomato, dal water mixture that I necessarily need to make each meal complete. But Rasam did not reciprocate to the love I showered on it, as I failed attempt after attempt in getting it right. It was after several days that my mother, who had repeated the recipe a hundred times already, out of frustration screamed, 'I hope you are using the right dal'. Sigh! I had got that basic ingredient wrong, I randomly picked moong dal from the market, and Rasam needed toor dal (which wasnt easy to correct, as I insisted on toor dal and in that part of the country the shopkeepers called it Arhar dal, adding to my silly confusion). 


It was an epiphanic moment when my rasam matched my amma's daily creation, tingling my nostrils and palate. It was then that I realised that I had to learn to cook because my happiness lay in keeping my tummy happy!


Today, I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, experimenting often. My mom, Chinmay and our friends in the campus are my usual obliging guinea pigs. 


I cook when I am stressed and happy, when its raining or hot or cold, when I am bored and alone, when I want to sing aloud, when guests come home... I cook till Chinmay screams that I havent done anything but that all day!


Majority of my hits on the internet are on food blogs and my favourite show on television these days is Master Chef! When I itch to shop, its generally for food ingredients.. and if the shop has organic stuff, my wallet goes empty.  


Thanks to my constant pestering, Chinmay has learnt to cook a few dishes. While I cook intuitively, Chinmay cooks mathematically, amusing me as he converts simple dishes into complex calculations, measuring each ingredient minutely into spoons. 


If given a chance I will teach my son to chop vegetables before I encourage him to hold a pencil. That will be my ultimate tribute to his family.... I hope his girl appreciates a good chef. 


p.s. two brilliant food blogs
http://veganontheprowl.blogspot.com/: a vegan friend writes her. I love her food and even though i am not a big fan of desserts, hers are to die for :)
http://www.cookingandme.com/ : The recipes here are generally easy to follow and the resulting food is never disappointing. 

Mind your Language!

With my parents, I speak Telugu. Chinmay and I converse with each other and everyone else in English and Hindi. After three years in Bangalore my Kannada isn't all that bad. And if need arises, I can communicate in Bambaiya Marathi. Tamil and Gujarati are not alien sounding thanks to my many neighbours who speak these languages. And considering how crazy I am about Bengali food, I am now struggling hard to get my pronunciation of dishes on the menu right! 

I am not boasting. The ability to dabble in more than two languages is not uncommon in India, especially if you have grown up in a cosmopolitan area. The influence friends, neighbours or relatives have on your life is generally proportionate to the number of languages you can understand, if not fluently speak. 

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But things aren't always as easy as I make it sound. 

I can explain with two anecdotes from my childhood that send my parents into a fit of laughter even today. 

When my grandmother visited us in Mumbai, I apparently refused to talk to her. My anger was clear, "If you cant speak Hindi, why have you come here. Go away." I know it sounds very MNS/Shiv Sena like. But at that innocent age, I don't think the emotion was militant, it was the 'inability to communicate'. I insisted that she tried Hindi, because I couldn't speak Telugu.

The other incident is related to a two-month long vacation at my native place. In the madness of running around buffaloes, swimming and devouring mangoes, I picked up Telugu, surprising everyone including my parents. But when I returned to Mumbai, I realised that I had forgotten Hindi. The faux pas was so severe that I didn't go out to play, too embarrassed to face my friends who mostly spoke Hindi. It took many days of practice and persuasion to get out of home.  

Today I am better-off, but there is deep regret that I can only recognize and piece together letters and words, not fluently read or write any of the regional scripts.  

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Chinmay's case was a tad different. For long, he kept mum, not knowing which language to choose--Mother tongue Marathi or Father tongue Kannada, Hindi or English. Its pretty funny to think of little Chinmay mumbling, while the world around tried hard to make him speak.

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I am too scared to even imagine my child's confusion (Hindi, English, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu). Either way, both Chinmay and the Kid will have to start afresh. May be the best way out is to create our own language using words from here there and everywhere. After all every language has some beginning. 

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From wedding albums that get uploaded on facebook, I realize that there is an entire cohort waiting to join the language confusion. What else do you expect from the current marriage trends that bring together two or more geographically and linguistically different families....... Kannadiga-Punjabi, Sindhi-Gujarati, Bengali-Italian, Tamilian-German, French-Hindi. 

I would surely say try confusing the kid may be she/he will pick at least one or parts of all. Good Luck! 

Camera Cravings

Divya has bought a camera. It clicks. Sometimes, it doesn't. It weighs a ton and needs to be delicately placed in a gigantic kit bag. It's often embarrassing to walk with it. You can't take it out in the rain. Some simple features are amiss from the menu. Further, the picture file sizes massively hog disk space. It's impossible for lay people to use it. For this richness in complexity and stupidity, it is priced at ten times the cost of a simple camera. This is the world of the Digital SLR.

It took a long while convincing me that it was an absolute "necessity." I posed the obvious questions: What about the cost-benefit trade-off? Wouldn't our simple camera suffice? How could SLR stand for Single Lens Reflex and not Statutory Liquidity Ratio?

A few trips to Canon and Nikon showrooms were arranged to dispel my fears. The Canon showroom on Brigade room was true to its name: It only showed D-SLR's, it didn't sell them ! I should have taken this as the first pointer of the madness of it all. But alas, I persisted. After all, getting an expensive object for a social worker can at times be a matter of great consumerist joy.

I started seeing the cameras everywhere around me. At weddings, where they would make it difficult to know the difference between the official photographers and family members. At group outings, where they would intrude and break intense discussions. During bird watching trips, where they would be more chat about cameras than birds.

Utterly disillusioned by DSLR's, Divya finally pointed out a massive discount on a website giving home delivery. I finally assented, more in order to close the months long parliamentary struggle than any agreement with the merits of its possession. The monster arrived one fine afternoon and Divya erupted by taking hundreds of photos of each corner of the house.

Happy to see her happy, I turned to have a short nap when she came and whispered "When are we buying the lens?"

Sex Ratios and Male Engineers

Among the many people unhappy with the dismal Census 2011 sex ratio statistics are young male engineers and their would be male engineer children.

Male engineers have clearly suffered the most from the skewed sex ratio in India. I am told that the first day of college is a huge eye opener for them. They keenly scan the classroom for prospective romantic stories over the next four years. Forget mechanics. Forget comp science. Forget instrumentation. With gushing testosterone in their heads and unfulfilled dreams from all-boys school days, there's just one question on their mind: 'Where are the girls?'

This question takes a very literal meaning in Andhra Pradesh where boys and girls are often made to study in separate buildings of the same college to avoid any distraction.

With no clear answers from batch mates and the few girls in class, they resign themselves to their fate. They are reassured by their seniors: "Things will get better. When you do management after this [which is why you chose engineering in the first place], the sex ratio dramatically trebles from 5% to 15%. Just be patient for four years."

You can see the impact of this thinking in management schools. So much so, that recently a guy with MBA offers from IIM-A and IIM-B chose the latter on the basis of its marginally better sex ratio. Once they get through, male engineering graduates then face two kinds of cultural shocks on campus: (a) The fact that girls and boys hostels are meshed together in the same block unlike engineering days (b) Contact with the other species- Non-engineering male graduates- who have a significant competitive advantage nurtured in colleges with inverted sex ratios in their favour. How these dynamics play out is a topic of intense ongoing research.

The Census 2011 results meanwhile suggest that things are not going to change much for the engineering class of 2031 as the 0-6 age group sex ratio continues to deteriorate. The only way out of this quandary is for more girls to get into engineering and more boys to go away from it.

Prospective male engineers would be well advised that understanding trigonometric ratios counts for nothing if they are not prepared to face the great Indian sex ratio.

p.s. I figured this out a decade ago (after Census 2001 results) and promptly joined the social sciences where boys constituted 5% of the class!

Filmi Chakkar!

My father belongs to the era of black & white Telugu movies. Then, the stories were mostly mythological. NTR was the super star, played multiple roles—Arjuna, Krishna, Duryodhana and Karna— in the same movie and the characters delivered dialogues in the form of poetry.

As a kid, I found my father’s maniacal love for these movies very amusing. I would run out of the room, when he would suddenly burst into a loud poem, lifting his hand like NTR, mimicking his style and accent. Sometimes he would force me to listen, explaining each line, in spite of my disinterest and deep scorn.

Many years later, I began to watch Telugu movies too. My cousins tried to fill me in with the year’s hits when I visited Andhra, by borrowing DvDs or taking me to the theatre for the latest releases. Over time, with television channels like Enadu and Gemini playing movies every weekend, I caught up on all the movies that a respectable Telugu movie fan should be aware of. Though not head-over-heels in love, I also started to appreciate my father’s select league of movies. And before I realised I had turned crazy about films, just like my father.

Of course, our choice of actors shows how time has passed between us. He loves Nageshwar Rao, I flip over his son Nagarjuna. He can’t get enough of NTR, and most movies of my times have NTR’s sons and even grandsons. The Jitender of his times is Krishna, but his hot hunk son Mahesh Babu is my favourite. His heroines—Jayaprada (I see my father blush), Jayasudha, Savitri, were the dusky South Indian beauties, while heroines I know are fairer, skinnier and generally from the north of this country.

After marriage I have been trying to influence Chinmay. He patiently watched a few. He knows now, that if Prakash Raj is the father or villain the movie is about opposing love, few tears and a happy ending. And though he gently snubs my Telugu movie craving over weekends, to humour me once in a while, he lets our house screen one. On those days I am the happiest, even if I have filled a bucket with tears!


If you ask me what I aspire for my children, I will shamelessly add, making them love Telugu movies in the long list!

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Yesterday, I visited P’s room on campus to update my collection of Telugu movies. When I entered his room, he was animatedly translating the dialogues for R, like I do often for Chinmay, pausing the film after every scene. But the funny bit here was that P’s translation came before the character delivered the dialogue. He had seen the movie so many times, that he knew each line by heart. Now, that is taking 'love' for movies to an absolute other level. Imagine pre-empting the hero! We were joined by L, who is by birth a Tamilian, but is an encyclopaedia on Telugu movies too.

P and L are surely my pick for Kaun Banega Crorepati, if there is ever one exclusively on movies.

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p.s: while on the subject of movies, guess who is Chinmay’s all-time favourite heroine? It’s Neelam!! Before you say Neelam who, try to recollect her from Kuch Kuch Hota Hain where she is junior Anjali’s favourite television host! If you thought i was freak, lets here your comment on Chinmay’s love!

The point in pointless journeys....

I booked a room for a weekend at Vivekananda Girijana Kalyan Kendra (VGKK) campus, which is located in the midst of green surroundings, beautiful hills and water bodies. Initiated under the inspiring tutelage of Dr. Sudarshan and his team, VGKK has a hospital and a school for the local tribal communities. The spirit of the kids and the staff living there is infectious and each time I have been there, I have come back deeply motivated about life.

On two of my previous visits to this place, I had met Dr. Meghna and Dr. Prashant, who apart from being committed to work are avid lovers of the hills. Dr. Prashant had even taken us (a group of students and me) for bird-watching, and I remember it for the numerous birds we spotted and the wonderful stories he narrated. With all these pleasant memories in my heart, I forced Chinmay to consider this place for a weekend. And this coupled with the promise of spending time with the kids and playing football hooked him on.

Gearing our bags we left for BR hills, which get its name from the Biligiri Ranga Swamy temple that is located atop the hills. It falls in Chamrajnagar District of Karnataka, and is about 400 kilometers from Bangalore. This route through villages and forest patches is very picturesque, and though it takes a painful five hours to get there by bus, with a seat by the window, it is worth every minute of the journey.

View of the hills

We reached the campus by afternoon. We heard that the kids were out for the Ganesha festival and Chinmay threw tantrums about not getting to kick the ball. Hungry and tired, we spent the first two sunny hours resting our legs, before exploring the length of the hills. As we set out, clouds dark and thundery enveloped the sky. Ignoring it, I insisted that we walk to the sunset point from where the expanse of the valley, the Nilgiris on the other side and some picture-worth spots can be seen. And like I had hyped, Chinmay loved the landscape, and sat there for a good hour watching the sun dip down. We were forced out as the first drops of drizzle threatened to grown more intense. Hurriedly, we walked down, stopping for filter coffee at a small shack, where the owner warned us of ‘beasts’ en route if didn’t return before nightfall. With rain lashing at us, the beautiful landscape suddenly turned eerie, and against the heavy droplets, everything around look haunted.

Once back in our room, with no kids around to chat with, we spent a few hours playing cards, and an addictive game on the chess board called ‘Kill’- from Chinmay’s school days, which I have mastered now, and easily beat him in. As we set our beds, outside we could hear thunderstorm and heavy downpour. I began to wonder if birds would still grace us the next morning, when we planned to go bird-watching with one of the local youngsters, who has been trained on various aspects of nature and even birding, to take visitors like us around.

To our bad luck, though we were up at six in the morning, we couldn’t get out of the room due to the rain that blinded us completely. Having woken up, we played more rounds of cards and kill, munching on biscuits. And as we had not suspected, the rain refused to stop. We continued playing, until we realized it was lunch time. With no sign of the rain stopping, we decided to prepone our departure. Thanking the staff and paying our dues, we hurriedly boarded the bus. Once down the hills, the sun smiled at us brightly, telling us that only the hills were engulfed in rains. Six hours later we reached home, and laughed at how we had travelled for over ten hours to only click a few pictures, play chess and kill from six in the morning, things we could have easily done sitting at home.

The trip was very important nonetheless as it made us realize that some journeys are so pointless that there’s great fun in all the pointlessness.  

p.s VGKK has recently started eco-tourism, which the locals will manage. It has a beautiful location, tree houses, and if the rains dont cheat you, visit the place!