Sand

This was the third post I had started working on, way back when I started writing this blog.

I was stuck after "the last three days would have been for nothing." Because I didn't know where this was headed or what I wanted to do with it. I still don't, except that I feel like the runner is in a race against time. So I added another paragraph, and I still don't know where to take this. 

Even after almost eight months, this remains incomplete. Make what you will of it, I shall keep updating it when things begin to align.

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Its hot and dusty. The sun is burning my back. My lips are parched, my throat feel scratchy. My face burns, it feels dirty. My legs ache and my back is raw. The sound of the crows in the sky has a scary edge to it. But I must not stop. I cannot stop. I have to get there before I can drink any water, wash my face or look at my burns. Everything will fall apart if I stop now. The last three days would have been for nothing. I am running out of time. It saddened me to think it would all be over, whether I succeed or fail. If I fail, it will be over for everyone, nothing will remain, but if I succeed I alone would perish, never to return again. The thought of it was making me ache with a longing I hadn't felt before. I wanted to turn around and settle down in the soft sand of the beach outside my house. To dig myself a grave in the sand and lie there while the breeze filled in the emptiness about me. But I knew I must go on, I could not turn back. I could not be the reason the world ceased to exist. With that thought in my mind, I continued on my solo journey across the dry land, towards the blue horizon.

By Myself

Oh Glory of Glories! It's summertime again. And I had to go meet a lady, two bloody hours away, at 1 pm. Right about the time when the Sun is at its highest. I considered blowing off the appointment (again), but then I figured, what has to be, has to be. Suck it up, brave the sun, and do it. 

I tried, rather unsuccessfully, to convince my dearest friends to accompany me on the journey. Traitors. None of them wanted to leave the comfort of an air conditioned room to help a friend in need...They shall pay. What if I had to go to Mordor to destroy a ring?

On the way to my "meeting", I was wondering, was I always this snooty? Isn't summer back home much worse? I have travelled and spent time outdoors in worse conditions. Heh, drawbacks of working in an air conditioned environment.

I have never been able to understand the autowallah. First, they fight the government to up the prices. They claim they can't ply with the metered rates, because the rates are too low. Then, when the government complies, they still refuse to use the meter. It's always, "Madam, one-way street" or "Madam, U-turn too far off" or "Madam, you look like you can bullied" or "Madam, you need my services more than I need your money. So shut up and pay." And then, after half an hour of haggling over an atrocious price, they finally agree to take you to your destination. Only, somehow, they ALWAYS drop you at least 1 km away from the agreed destination. "It's right here Madam, just cross the road, take a right, then a left, then go straight, and then the last left on your right". I don't get it. Why did I just pay this guy? To give me directions? For the amount they charge, they should ideally be lifting me up and dropping me inside!! Not growling at me and telling me to poo off. 

So, anyway, meeting done. There was no food involved, by the way. (Who invites you at 1 and doesn't give you food! I think this should be illegal in all the nations of the world.) I was now left to fend for myself. The food hunt is usually my favorite part about being out by myself. Some people find it horrifying that I would go to a restaurant and eat all alone. They feel I am suffering from some acute form of depression and that I am capable of jumping off the top of a roof this very instant. To them I say, chill. I am hungry. And alone at the moment. I could die of hunger, not of loneliness. I am beginning to realize that I make too much use of the comma in my sentences. They shall be avoided in the near future. Hope you don't mind. 

I began my hunt for the perfect lunching experience. I crossed a nice looking place called BFC. It looked so like the KFC, I was tempted to go in and give their Arabic food a shot. I decided against it and settled for a Bengali mess. As I walked in a little apprehensively, the man at the door looked at me and said, "Kya chahiye didi?" Aila! Hindi bola! All apprehensions left me, and I walked in and ordered a fish meal. I suppose the fish was what a Bengali would have for lunch on a daily basis. Nothing that drove me wild. But ohhhhh...the bhaja. Potatoes, brinjal and lady finger cooked in a wonderful paste of mustard. Heaven..I have a newly developed fondness for mustard. I often wonder why we don't use mustard as a spice in Punjabi cooking. It takes a meal to a whole new level. The pungency! (Do note, the Punjabis use the leaf of the mustard plant to make saag. A beauty in it's own right.)

Fully fed, it's time to return home. I walk to the main road and realize that I would need to cross the road in order to get to the bus stop.Except that this was a major road, with no traffic lights and heavy traffic. I thought I could do it. I waited for almost half an hour. I was beginning to contemplate hiring another auto to take a u-turn and drop me off to the other side. I wished my knight in shining armor would come to my rescue, He would hold my hand and say, Come my love, I shall take you across. And all the traffic would come to a standstill. And I would walk across with my head held high. Alas! I am not a Disney Princess. I think after the first twenty minutes, the people in the shop  behind me had begun to place bets on how much longer I'd be standing there. I kept wondering why I was the only one trying to get across to the other side. Did everyone happen to get down at the same side of the road they wanted to be on? And then it hit me. Subways. What a dastardly thing to not remember! Numb skull. Of course there has to be a subway. It's a bus stop in the middle of a very crowded road! I found myself chuckling at my idiocy.  I take the subway, get onto a bus, and return home, dying for a nice cold shower. 

After I am showered and watered, as I lay down to mend my dehydrated soul, I can't help but think, thank god we still have Sunday.

Until later,

Naina!

The Original Sin

Food...it means different things, to different people. To some, it's a means of staying alive; to others, a curse; and to most, a delight. Today, has been a wonderful gastronomic journey, of epic proportions! Does that even make sense? I don't know. I am way too excited to get started with my dinner RIGHT NOW.
What started off as a simple project, is turning out to be an amazing smelling pot of rice, complete with two layers of some realllly amazing looking/smelling/tasting chicken.
I have come to realize, that the actual process of cooking is more exciting to me than the eating itself. The smell of the juices, the color of the marinade, the texture of the gravy...bliss!
It all started with Krishna grinding garlic, red chilly and ginger in our iron grinding thingy (you know? the heavy iron thing with the rod, in which we grind spices? I am sure it has a name, Google it!). Have you ever smelt this particular smell? Do this as an experiment, peel some garlic, some ginger and green chilli. Put it all in a little bowl and grind it. And while it's being beaten to a pulp, breathe in. Intoxicating! I love the smell..it makes me drool! It makes me giggle like a little girl. This smell, reminds me of all that is good in life, like everything is perfect, as it should be. It makes me want to sleep with its memory forever etched in my (Olfactory?) mind. If there was a heaven, I bet this is what it would smell like. I think somebody should make a perfume with the smell of ginger garlic paste. I would follow anyone who wore this smell like a puppy in love. And I actually think I mean it.
The girls are usually very averse to the idea of adding ghee to their cooking. So when Krishna asked me to add 50 mL of ghee, with 100 mL of oil in a pot, I was delightfully surprised. For those of you who don't get the importance of that measurement, that's a lot of grease. That's almost a glass full of it!
Next up, we had to add all the nice smelling spices in the hot oil. Ho ho ho ho!! The smells!! I can't even begin to explain what went through me at that particular moment. You have to experience this, to really know what I am talking about. With every ingredient that was added to the pot, my excitement rose up by a notch. The frequency of my giggling was up by several. I couldn't wait to get started with our meal.
By the time the food was ready, I was quite worked up with all the smells seeping in into my room. I took three (very generous) helpings of the Biryani. It was everything I had imagined it to be. I give full credit to Krishna for providing me with 4 hours of uninterrupted foodie bliss. I hope we don't have too many of these experiences in our lives, I would hate to die of a heart attack at the age of 30.
I also hope I made you crave something delectable and completely unachievable. Good luck with raiding your food stores, I doubt you are going to find anything satisfactory to eat at this very moment. (evil laughter) Meanwhile, feel free to feed on these pictures!

Happy Hunger Pangs.
Naina T.

The Death of a Man

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014)

Today morning, as I was going through my morning ritual of checking out the news on Twitter, I read of the demise of 87 year old Marquez. It felt weird, lying in bed, with the sun streaming in through my parted curtains, to learn about the death of a man, so many loved. It almost felt like a scene from one of his books. The morning silence. The Sun. And death. 

The above quote, are perhaps the first words of his that I ever read. It made me wonder what kind of a man he was. I wish I could say I fell in love with his writing, that I bought every book ever written by him and gobbled them up, but I didn't. I never understood what I was reading. I put it down to age, to inexperience. Then, recently, I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, thinking, that maybe, Memoirs..wasn't his best book. I am sorry to say, I still didn't enjoy his work as much as other people did. It was only today, when I was going through his quotes, that it hit me. It wasn't about the what he wrote, it was always about the how. All three books that I have read, feature "love"  so prominently. It may be love of the flesh, love unrequited, love of power, the love of a region, love, love, love. His words show he had a deep understanding of living and loving. 
Here is a list of few quotes, that I personally liked, from his works. Feel free to share your personal favorites.

“...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love” 

“There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.” 

“For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.” 

“No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.” 

“Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.” 

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.” 

“He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.” 

“With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: 'My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”

“But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.”

I guess the list could go on for lots and lots of pages. I shall end it here, and urge you to try out one of his books, if not more. You may not like it, you may not understand it, but you will find beauty in it.

Naina T.

Of Spoilers and SpoilerJerks

The following post contains NO SPOILERS at all. Please, read on with ease. I would never do that to a fellow believer.

The new episode of Game of Thrones crashed HBO Go service. It shouldn't come as a surprise, considering the huge following the series has garnered since its inception in 2011. So, you automatically assume everyone who follows the series would have seen the latest episode by the time you got done with it. Right?
Wrong. Very wrong. And here is why I feel like kicking this one particular guy's arse black and blue. He Put up a major spoiler as his STATUS MESSAGE on Facebook. Who DOES that? What kind of imbecile are you? Sadist. How would you like it if I read the entire series of books before the series has time to catch up and post it on your timeline? Let's see who has the last laugh then.
All of us has that one friend/sibling/teacher in our lives, who derives the greatest pleasure in sucking the joy out of the one thing that matters to us in life. The more excited you are about a particular book/movie/TV series, the more likely you are to end up feeling disappointed because of some nincompoop giving out spoilers for free.
I, personally, like to feel my emotions first hand when I am reading a book. I want to experience the shock, the surprise, the pain of losing a favorite character. I want to feel the kick in the gut when I find out the good guy was the bad guy all along. Just being able to feel those emotions, are what keeps us hooked to anything. And when somebody comes along and casually mentions the plot of a favorite book in a conversation, my world stops. I feel cheated. Like somebody gulped down the last piece of kebab (or paneer if you'd rather read vegetarian today) on my plate, that I was saving for the end. And it is in that moment that I know that I am, perhaps, capable of lashing out in a murderous rage, reaching out across the table to smack that person across the face with all my strength. And yelling obscenities in the middle of a crowded room. And humiliating the person till they melt into the ground and are never, ever able to read or watch anything without my permission again. But of course, I don't really do that. I don't want people to think I am loony. So instead, I just smile, and tell them to bugger off, and try to tell myself that my brain didn't really register the truth that was revealed (Does anybody else do that?). But of course, I know now.

I was thinking, what would be the perfect way to deal with SpoilerJerks? I have a few solutions for you. Try them out, and let me know if you got some satisfaction.

1. If it's an ongoing series based on a book, like our GoT here, gobble up the book till the end, before the series catch up. Call your SpoilerJerk and tell him all in one go. BooYeah!
2. Reveal to SpoilerJerk how Breaking Bad season 4 ends. And say goodbye to a friend forever.
3. Of course, if SpoilerJerk has already seen Breaking Bad, #2 will be useless. So instead, reveal to him how Dexter season 4 ends.
4. If #2 and #3 don't work, write your own kick ass thriller, with the most unbelievable ending. And JUST when SpoilerJerk picks it up to read, tell him how it ends. With a smile.
5. Bake SpoilerJerk a cake. Chocolate cake. ;). For those of you who don't follow, go watch/read The Help.
6. Plan a very elaborate surprise birthday party with SpoilerJerk for his/her better half. And just 1 day before...reveal the truth.Works well if SpoilerJerk is about to make a marriage proposal.
7. Gift a super fast murder mystery to SpoilerJerk. And somewhere in the middle of the book, just when the plot thickens, pen down the name of the murderer. Sit back and wait for SpoilerJerk's call.

If any of these tricks work for you, don't forget to come back and post it here. I will sit back and think up better revengeSpoilers, meanwhile.
Happy watching. Happy concealing. And Happy Revealing.

May the spoilers, ever, be in your favor.

Naina T.

A Rose by Another Name...

I think the toughest part about starting a blog, is getting the right name for it. I thought I was being rather witty about the name when I came up with "Writer's Blog". I also believed that I was, perhaps, the only person in the world to have thought that name up. But of course I wasn't. That is SUCH a cliched name for a blog! (I hate it when people steal my ideas before I have had the time to have them).
So of course, I had to start coming up with something even wittier and sensibler than that. And of course, I spent all of five minutes trying to make that happen. And then, I thought, meh, it's just a name. Why beat yourself up over it? I may never even return to write a second post on this thing. Let it go. And I'll rise like the break of daaaawn. Wait, what? You haven't heard the Idina Menzel song yet!?
For the uninitiated, the lines that felt a little out of context, are from the new Disney movie, Frozen. PLEASE do yourselves a favor, and listen to the song. And maybe come back here and tell me how grateful you are to me for recommending it to you.
So, back to the name. Like I was saying, what's in a name? I know I am going to wake up tomorrow morning, remember what I named my *new* blog, and then think, Crap! Did I just name a "public venture" after something babies do when they have no control over their bowel movements!? That is SO mature. Way to go...
For now, I am at peace with the name. I shall maybe post updates about my moment of realization. Or maybe I won't. There are more important things in the world to talk about. Like, have you seen the new GoT episode yet? Or maybe, have you read Wuthering Heights? Did your baby just have a Crappy Nappy moment? (That, i think is what the world wants to know. Why else would they read a blog called thecrappynappy, anyway?) In case you had a crappy nappy moment, feel free to post your pictures and comments on ratemydoodies.com. There used to be a site like that. I am not about to check if it still exists. Feel free to check for yourself.
That's quite enough for today,
May the odds ever be in your favor,
Naina T.