Because

Because I downloaded the blogger app that lets me blog on the go.

Of course, the instinct has tapered off these days... I remember a time when I reached for the laptop almost every day.
Now, there is much to say, some things too important, the rest not at all. So what to say, then?

Nevertheless, a post.

Reaction

Impatient today.

Of specious sentiment, of aggrandisement of petty things, of small outlooks and small concerns. Of the constant need to pity someone, to tendency to be immersed in sickly sentiment.

Stop!
Look at the sky, I want to shout!

Stop, or at least stop pulling me in to participate. I am not sufficiently established, and so cannot play with you. I will only get entangled, and incoherent, and confused, and angry.

Just. Look at the Sky.

On hold

It seemed certain a couple of weeks ago that we were not going to have a glut of mangoes this summer. And now, into the second week of April, it appears we are not going to have a summer either.

In February the mango trees were bare of flowers. Ours told us quite frankly that it was taking the year off, the usually bountiful tree across the northeastern wall was sparsely dotted with the pale green blooms. Word trickled in that Sita Mami's tree was sulking. When Ugadi came around, Bhudevi was shocked and indignant: We may have to BUY a raw mango for the Ugadi pachchadi, akka! For a residential area well supplied with mango trees, it was a bit of a stunner. So yes, it came to that in the end. I paid Rs 10 for a smallish bit of sour green.

There are hardly any green mangoes and certainly no yellow ones. The desperation will obviously mean that fraudsters will hurry to chemically ripen the available crop, which renders even those inedible. 

But what was happening to the season itself? February was pleasant and we gloated somewhat, with a wary eye out for the punches that March would hurl at us. March marched past, with the higher temperatures hovering around 37 C, sometimes 38. It's hot, we said to each other in a compulsive fashion; it was what we should be saying at this time, but our tones lacked conviction. Now, in April, we are getting the most dramatic storms. Gusts, thunder, lightening and all-night rain. I'm pulling on two sheets and the fan's regulator points at 3, occasionally 2. I'm actually wearing my denims. What on earth is happening?

We may yet get the usual treatment in May, but it is already safe to say that it's going to a highly truncated version.

Pausing
for dramatic effect
Hyderabadi summer

Tech Upgrade

Every neighbourhood carries its own sounds - we all know that... from years of listening to those hawkers, this traffic, the driver with the annoying backing tone who takes forever to park, tinny Suprabhatam from a distant temple every morning, that moulvi as he raises his voice in azaan five times a day, the coppersmiths, the tailorbirds... there must be a unique sound palette for every street in the world.

Ours is seeing a new trend. Loudspeakers. The Cantonment Board is sending out an auto with warnings of the dire things that will befall citizens who do not pay their taxes. We get blaring voices asking if we have any old zari in our coffers that we'd like to recycle. The sofa repairers have a neat professional set up in rather chaste Telugu: "We have all the material, equipment and wherewithal to set your living room right again."

Now into this rather ambitious terrain has sailed our Muggu man. He sells rai muggu - white stone powder that we use to make adornments on our doorsteps. He need not have bothered, in my opinion. His hawking call was very distinct... "Rai Muuggggu! Amma, Raai Muugguuu!" Anyone with a ear cocked for the sound would hear it several houses away and rush to the door to accost him. None of the vegetable, flower or broom vendors have felt the need to improve their system, which is already very effective.

However, there is no gainsaying an adventurous nature. So Muggu Man has employed a 'friend' to record his call for him. It has not worked very well. First he runs it from a small contraption in the front of his moped, which he finds uncomfortable. Then the recording itself is a 12-second audio: "Mugguammomuggu!" The voice is fraught with self-conscious anxiety and since there are no spaces between what should be words, it feels like someone is trying to sell the last grain of muggu before he dies. Certainly, for the householder, there would not be enough time to go out and enquire.

"So, what's all this?" I asked him the other day. MM switched off the sound in disgust. "He has not done a good job," he complained about his friend, "I have to go to him again!"

I heard him again the other day. Some spaces had been inserted but the voice was still tense. And since then, I have not heard him at all.

Ta da!

The longest break this blog has ever had! The reason is a personal (secret!) writing project that gave me so much joy and fun, I didn't have time for anything else.

But this back-from-the-break post isn't about anything I HAVE to speak about. Just a moving target of a deadline that won't kill me or go away.

I've had an exciting few months - more later!

So it is

But listen to this pattern of causality I've observed in the universe!

I seldom wear nail polish, but when I do, when I do... two or three days later, as night follows day, the maid will not turn up and I will have to wash a sink-load of dishes.

So it is

Broadband internet has been maddeningly erratic for the past three weeks. We have registered our complaint on at least four occasions with innumerable follow-up calls. They came again today and tinkered with a variety of options.
It seems to have worked. I've had uninterrupted connectivity for more than three hours now. The World of the Internet is open to me and, as it happens, I've nowhere to go.

Pendulum

Swinging from left to right, but aiming, on the whole, for dead centre.

Distress post

So, again, we face a deadline - and today, I deliver or die.

It's a nice enough document that I'm editing. A development project report on watersheds: positive, with solid results to show and interesting as well.

We had quite a bit of rain last fortnight and one neighbour was quite anguished that in spite of so much water all around, he had still needed to order a water tanker. There's the story in a nutshell. Nature is bountiful, even for the way we are multiplying now, but we can't seem manage her gifts.

This watershed story is so much fun - contour bunds, check dams, trees... small, common-sensical interventions and the groundwater table goes up.

We'd gone trekking in the Sahyadris a few years ago and stayed one night at a village that had a most beautiful water tank a little distance away. The men and women in our group were allotted different time slots, and we had trudged across with plastic packets stuffed with toiletries and clean clothes. The village folk were bemused at this sudden descent, but willing enough to share... and the bath was an exhilarating business. I remember being so charmed with this common resource... it had only fed my desperate wish for a rural life.

Trivia for the day: The most popular drumstick variety in some parts of Tamil Nadu, I learnt, was a high-yielding, drought-resistant variety called PAVM, or the Pallapatti Alagarsamy Vellimalaimurugan Moringa - named after an innovative farmer who developed this new type. More here.

Sheetal say...

Cynicism is not cool.

Portmanteau

So, I'm talking to my sister today and, in the middle of narrating her dinacharya, she says, "I found an unusual sympath... sympathy-giver... today."
"Confidant, sympathiser...," I suggest synonyms.
"No, no, it's not enough - I mean sympathant."
And so we see the birth of a new word.

Overcast

I move about in a personal cloud all my doing.

For now, blanketed grey, a hint of melancholy drizzle
and a forecast of storms to come.
Something temperamental is in the air
I hesitate to leave the ground;
I would judder, I know, in this turbulence.

I have made a study of the weather.
I know, I think, where the clouds came from,
Even, where they picked up the rain.
I cannot account for the lurking high winds, however,
or chart my course through what's to come.

Uneasy, suspicious, I board up for the storm. All defences up.

Outside, the sun shines brightly on every living thing
and I move about in a personal cloud. All my doing.

Good morning, World

Test

So I finally downloaded Swype on my iPad, which makes it an absolute pleasure to type out long sentences. Makes it possible to blog on the go, respond straight away to urgent mails when earlier I found myself waiting till I got to a computer. I learned to type on qwerty keyboards as a teen and type fairly speedily, so you can imagine the torture of tapping.

Hurrah for Swype.

The unkindest cut

We feel that the local man in charge of our regular power cuts has given over to megalomania. We used to have them initially in two-hour slots spaced out considerately for households needing to use kitchen gadgets for the day's meals and such, for harried people leaving for school and work as well as others doing their morning kriyas. (Electricity is strictly not a requirement for this activity but it helps, of course – the buzz of household gadgets keeps other intruding sounds away, and there is always the menace of mosquitoes that can be held at bay with a breeze propelled by electric power.) Of course this also served for everyone requiring to charge their tech paraphernalia.

The first cut used to occur promptly at 10.30am and was restored at 12.30. As humans, whose thing in life is adaptability we, accordingly, adapted. Early in the morning, we fought over power plug points, made our chutneys, sent off last minute mails at 10.25 and sat back in somewhat of a smug attitude. In the break, we puttered around the garden, caught up on the bird scene in the neighbourhood, read the newspapers, and some even going so far as to read a book! It was idyllic.

At 4.30 in the afternoon was our second cut of the day. Walkers would reach promptly for their shoes, others for grocery bags, the colony uncles chose to huddle for leisurely powwows. Dusk would gently fall, leading some to make quite a to-do about their sunset pictures. With normal life restored at 6.30, the populace would withdraw indoors to prayers, television and dinner.

Now this is a thing of the past. The man at the switchboard has lost his rhythm. Sometimes, at 6.30am, when most of God’s creatures and snuggling in their razais, dreaming their last dreams of the night, they are awakened most rudely by a cessation of fan-blades. Now having thus dragged oneself out of bed, there is no easy method for obtaining hot water for one’s ablutions, the overhead tanks have not been filled and plans for breakfast must be altered very quickly to include Spencer’s wheat bread. You will note that I said ‘sometimes’. For, at other times, it is another time. Sometimes, 7am, sometimes 7.15, once 8am, occasionally 11am and now he has passed over the morning slot altogether. For two days now it has been 12-2pm and 4.30-6.30pm, which gives us barely two and half hours in between to get the fridge cold again. Food is spoiling and for persons who worry about laptop batteries forming the wrong kinds of memory, this is bad indeed.

Although I have described vividly the torments of unexpected cuts, I have not yet touched on the other kind – the torment of uncertainty and hope! What happens when the citizenry is expecting a power cut and it doesn’t occur? As a sample, I studied my father. At 10.40, it becomes clear that the schedule isn’t being adhered to. Having put off eating so that he can maximise on the router being available, he is famished. Should he have breakfast anyway? Or perhaps he should fit in one more response to an email in the next five minutes before it might be shut down? He teeters, Dear Reader, between work station and kitchen in the most piteous manner. But worse, when we have braced ourselves comprehensively and nothing at all happens. “Is it a festival today? Or some holiday?” Why, we wonder in private, aloud and during every interaction, has there not been a power cut. Having no faith in free lunches, we wonder what retribution will be like.

The maid discusses the cuts as much as she discusses the weather: “Ee rozu teesinadaa, akka?” and then tells me how it was in her locality these past 24 hours. We have concluded that we have a control freak on our hands. Our lives will run, he imagines, on his say-so (as indeed they do). Do you think he breaks out into maniacal laughter every time he pulls the plug? Or that his eyes gleam when his hand hovers on the button and then withdraws, knowing well the consternation he is spreading?

As I write this, my father has been wandering around the house muttering to himself. Tufts of hair stand upright on his head, and he wears a pinched look. There has been no cut today.

Bah

I'm beginning to really dislike feminists. Super aggro, man-hating, society-reviling feminists who're on the case ALL the time. For heaven's sake, let up sometimes and just be a PERSON, yes?

Edited to add:
That came as a reaction to some very silly and extreme views I encountered here and there. I swear I didn't know this movement was rising:

Deadline woes

जानता हूँ सवाब-ए-ता'त-ओ-ज़ोहद…

पर हाय रे तबीयत!

The temptation to blog in Hindi! But I will embarrass myself hugely if I do, since in a very South Indian manner I invariably get the streeling/pul'ling wrong. Much more dignified to quote now and then than venture out with full sentences of my own. जितनी लम्बी चादर हो, पैर उतने ही फैलाने चाहिये!

Terrace survey

So fatigued by my social network timelines, the various issues, the stridency and the hullabaloo. Have we become even more chronically agitated than we used to be a decade ago? It feels that way.

Tired of being cooped up, I went upstairs to my terrace just now, hoping to spot the golden oriole that comes to sit on the cotton tree some evenings. It didn't put in an appearance but a shikra gave me the fly-by, and I saw green bee-eaters do that winter thing they do.

Overhead, I sensed small whirrs, and saw two shiny kites amicably whizzing about. Being held on a roof somewhere two or three houses to our right. I was glad it was two and not one - flying a kite by oneself is such a lonely business.

The coconuts are doing well. The tree drops one or two at judicious intervals (and considerately, when no one is underneath). Happily, the next crop is being readied too. We had two coconut trees at one time and when they did nothing interesting at all, someone decided they needed a fillip. Some fertiliser was introduced and they both reacted rather drastically. One died and the other shot up by a few feet in a month.

As I looked down to see if there were any lemons on the shrub that I'd missed from ground level, a frond of jasmine put its tentacles on my arm in the most friendly way. No buds or flowers at this time, but you know, just saying hello.

Then the mosquitoes came out and I came down. That's all.

For a spotless mind

Something atmospheric has left me restless today. Impatient, bored and above being pleased.
I tried the old remedies and oiled my hair; tried the new and spent an hour on youtube... but neither took care of it.

There are several things I want to write about but this is not the mood to attempt them in. Sounds seem to grate on my skin, so music is out. A film perhaps, if I could zoom in on the right one? Or a spot of quiet mindless stillness. If it could be ordered.
 

Some samosas?

It's almost two in the afternoon, and I had a less-than-usually-heavy breakfast and the hunger begins to set in already. But I still have my surya namaskars to do, which I can only do by 3 pm, so it'll be some time before I can snack.

It seems the right moment to be thinking of food and while I'm doing that, I may as well do it thoroughly. Some time ago, I mentioned in the passing a fabulous samosa I had had. Then I got thinking of all the wonderful/memorable samosas I've ever eaten and well... let me just bring you the results. In random order, because I can't do hierarchies with these.

• It was in a cantonment in North India. I was staying with friends and, in turn, got invited to tea by Lt General A and his family, the first family of the community, so to speak. Now, M reported directly to the Lt Gen, and besides my friends were sticklers for proper army etiquette and managed to alarm me quite thoroughly about adhering to the mode in all respects. I was not to address the Lt. Gen. as 'Sir', we were to make sure not be late by so much as three minutes, we were going to spend just this much time, laugh at all their jokes and so on. I was in a tizzy before we got there. But the hosts were charming and glad of outside society. I ate moderately with one nervous eye on my friend's husband, and then only those foods I was sure I could manage with dainty grace. The samosas looked inviting, but was I allowed to eat them with my fingers? I wasn't sure, so I passed over them entirely. However the Lt Gen was keeping an eye on my plate and pushed the bowl forward: "You must try these, Sheetal, they're fabulous." They looked it and, now how to refuse, so I helped myself to one. Small samosas, amuse-bouche-sized, filled with delicately flavoured, perfectly cooked peas. I THINK, or hope that I took another. A third, I am quite certain, I did not permit myself - already M was glaring at me. But the memory of it lingers, mon amis, it lingers. 

• Cinema-hall samosas are nothing to rave about usually but the erstwhile Anand Cinema in Secunderabad was an exception. The aloo masala was always nicely flavoured with a hint-but-no-more of tang and sprinkled with coarsely crushed coriander seeds. But the real winner was the pastry dough - not maida but wheat. In its final years, Anand gave us some truly horrible film-viewing experiences and it was pulled down to general relief but I miss those samosas. 

• Now these matar samosas I'd had in the the Kangra Valley haunted me and it gave me great joy to discover them again. It was in Delhi, in a shop called Bengal Sweets, in the same market block as our office in Safdarjung Enclave. This restaurant supplied us with lunch when we hadn't packed any, gol gappas whenever we felt like it, and in the winter months, batches of fresh green pea samosas. Not as delicately made as those ones but good enough and plus you see, I could devour as many of them as I wished. 

• Since I live in Hyderabad, Irani samosas - crisply fried, sharp golden triangles filled with thin strips of onion - are easily procured. There have been some amazing confections over the years. In the Charminar area, in university canteens, in people's homes with adrak chai... but one of my favourites is the Corner Shop, that is to say, just round the corner from where I live. My dad brings them wrapped up in newspaper but the smell reaches us even as he enters the house. No one can have just one.

• The Hong Kong wala. My companions had been suffering the lack of desi chai for nearly a week. On the last day, there were just two of us, wandering the fascinating lanes of Wan Chai. We came to a small store called Kathmandu Store and here we could see was where the sub-continent community could come for products of Home. Hajmola, Kurkure, Maggi, MTR packets, namkeens, mehndi cones, bindis, DVDs with movies and music - it was a kirana shop, essentially. Plus, small tables and stools for those wanting to sit. Samosas were available. He whisked them out of the kadai, served them with a nice spicy mint chutney... the aloo filling was benignly spiced and we had to temper our haste with caution for the steam still rose from the pastry. Then 'milk tea' to wash it down. It was perfect. 

Honourable Mentions:

• A small samosa filled with sweet corn that I recently had at Nishu's. Store-bought, I think they said, but excellent!
• On a river cruise on the Zambezi (full story here), we stopped to picnic on an island in the middle of the river. They laid out the contents of the picnic basket and... samosas! It was a nice feeling.
• A teensy Irani samosa that is sold on the Sabari Express on the return journey towards Hyderabad. The seller gets on the train at Bhonghir, I think, and gives us something like eight for Rs 20. Since this is always around noon, I'm in a dilemma every time - eat now and ruin lunch that's waiting at home or indulge and let later take care of itself?