Pongal

‘Sakarai Pongal’ is not made by throwing everything into a pressure cooker and hoping for the best. But my cook-book naps in the afternoon!
After all, need the recipe be any more authentic than the ingredients?
Milk from a tetrapack packed in Pune. Rice marketed by a firm headquarted in Calcutta, grown who knows where. Pulses bought loose from the grocer. Jagery left over from last year.
The steamy lump is not Sakarai Pongal. But it is sweet.
I don’t care. This is not an offering to Surya, it is a tribute to my father. And he loved anyything sweet.

Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.

Blowing his own trumpet

Somehow, I thought Moharram was a festival associated with mourning - this picture definitely seems to suggest otherwise.
But when you see such happy faces, why complain?

Rubik's Cube

Six faces. Six colours. How hard could it be?
But it is. You get one piece into place, two others are disturbed.
Keep at it and you figure out some simple rules…
There is always that one stubborn piece that refuses to flip around– you want to yank it out and push it back in.
Books reduce it all to a series of moves. A perfect cube is easy to attain.
But is that the point? You like bumbling around, trying to reach your own levels of satisfaction. The thrill is in the quest.

Isn’t that how Life is too?

______

Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.

Life on the Streets

Is it a novel they pen?
The real story about life
on the streets.
Not the poetry in poverty
which only those
with full-bellies can see.
Or the anger imagined
by a man who thinks
heritage hotels are civic spaces.
But the Real Story.
The pain of hunger,
The joy of a community.


Or, are they working
on a get rich quick scheme?
Do it the traditional way.
Hard work, more hard work,
and bundles of Gandhi's portraits
being passed under the table.


Maybe is it just their maths homework
that they are working on.
Sitting there upon that kerb.

_____
Drabble (n) - an extremely short work exactly one hundred words in length. The purpose of the drabble is brevity and to test the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in an extremely confined space.

The Face of the Race

When I think back on the run I did at the Mumbai Marathon last year the things I remember most vividly are two things that were not even there. The more prominent one was the absence of traffic – intersections where I have spent hours in cabs, busses and cars took only minutes to cover on foot. But far more memorable was the sheer absence of litter.
Think about it- roughly three thousand people ran the half marathon. Even if they slowed down at an average of five drink stations each, that is a minimum of fifteen thousand bottles of water discarded around the 21.092 km route. Which works out to about 70 bottles that should have been found discarded on any 100 meter stretch. Taking into consideration the fact that there would have been people running slower than me, the number may have been lower– maybe even as low as only around 50 bottle per 100 meter stretch.
How many bottles did I actually see – never more than seven or eight bottles at any point of time, even at the drinks stations where most people were tossing in the water and tossing out the bottle. What I did see were dozens and dozens of BMC workers picking up bottles from along the route and either chucking them into bins, or putting them in the sacks they carried on their back.

Running along Marine Drive, I finished the water in the bottle I was carrying and finding a BMC worker there, I slowed down and handed the bottle over to her instead of chucking it down for her to pick up. I was stunned by her response – in heavily accented English, she said, ‘Thank you.’
It was she that I had to say ‘Thank you’ to.
Thank you, each an every BMC worker for individually and collectively ensuring such a clean track for us to run on.
To me, the person who most deserves to be the Face of the Race is not the event sponsor, or the event ambassador, or even the event winner. To me, that Face is the face of the lowly paid worker who performed her job with such dedication despite perhaps not understanding the significance of any of it.

And this is a picture of the mob at the start of the Delhi half. Having started late in Mumbai, I missed the excitement, and the pushing and shoving that went with the official start.

The richer the better

Tucked away in a corner on Carter Road, I loved this cutout of Farhan Akhtar that said, "Men, Chocolate and Coffee... richer the better".
Firmly puts women in the driver's seat, though not quite in the way a feminist would approve of.
It also proves what I already knew- that he is the man most 30+ women would want to go on a date with.

Women on track

This picture speaks for itself.

I am so glad I allowed my hubby to buy me a phone with a 3 megapixel camera.