Around the world in eighty clicks

Parul and chox, thanks for the tag. Here goes. (I am nothing if not verbose).

Rules:
Guys, you need to post 5 things that you love about being a mom/dad) and find someone to link to and tag - someone from your own country, if you like, but definitely someone from another country ..and to leave a link to the post at HBM, who started this tag.

What do I like about motherhood? Five things I like? FIVE things? You have GOT to be kidding me. You mean FIVE as in one less than the number of fingers on Hrithik Roshan’s hands? FIVE as in the number of years old the monster of a child of mine is? Is it not too big a number? Oh well, if you insist on it. Though to balance things out I do think that one should also be asked for at least five things that one hates about it. Or at least dislikes. You know, to be absolutely fair and all.

* I do enjoy the absolute sense of purpose it gives to your life. I mean I do have my job and I am a hundred other things such as a daughter a wife a daughter-in-law and all that jazz. But none of them have given me that sense of fullness, that feeling that ‘Ah ha! I am a somewhat important bit of flesh on this earth’ as the fact of being a mother. As always, what I like are the details. The innumerable little things to put on the list of things to do and pack (and not forget), such as extra crayons, and clips, and juice.

* Bibliophilia, I mean bibliomania. It is in the eyes. We walked into Landmark yesterday and two pairs of eyes were searching furiously. Found the corners and then that was it. No one could talk to either of us, we were like possessed creatures. Thankfully, being thirty years older, I came back to earth with a thud, quickly grabbed the Aseem Kaul, and dragged a reluctant monster out (clutching some book, of course). But those are times when I KNOW that this child is mine, that it has some of my genes. Otherwise it is hard to tell since she looks so much like her father and as far as I can see is so different in nature than me in other matters.

* The father. Other, wiser, better, saner moms than I have said this. But it is true for me as well. I love the man who is the father of my child a lot more now. And though he would never admit it, and cribs incessantly that this obsessive mommy-kenny is a poor shadow of the former Kenny, I am super sure that he is lying. He has been trying to convince the monster about my powers (whatever they might be). She has resisted believing him, probably recognizing it for what it is, blind love.

* I am a teacher, I suppose I cannot help it. It is quite in the blood with the weight of whole generations of the BunkPort family. And one of the good things about being a mother is that I can pretend to teach all nature of things to the hapless soul that has to spend so much time with me. Needless to say I learn a lot more than I manage to teach, which is in any case my aim in life, to masquerade as a teacher so no one thinks you are mad for going on reading and solving problems simply because you like it. And being a mother gives me unimagined opportunities for indulging in this pastime.

* The monster is a monster, despite the denials of some of my well-wishers and friends. They say be careful what you name the child, it will weigh upon her, and make her that. Well, that is clearly the case here. She periodically exhibits absolutely monstrous behavior, as befits her e-name. But her other name, the one we have picked out of love, she lives up to that one too (albeit occasionally). And those are times I cannot help feel that heart-wrenching love for her. And please I will stop now because I do think that it is as important for a mother to love as to let go and not impose too many expectations on her child.

I am really supposed to tag someone. But all (most of?) the mommies I know are tagged. So that leaves me the lounger, who is, of course, daddy^2 from Bengaluru, for perspective.

Booked for life

Tag
Ludwig is pressurising me about this one. So here goes..

Procedure:The following is apparently a list of books, "most of them sitting unread in people's bookshelves to make them look smarter". The rules are: bold the ones that you have read, underline the ones you have read in school, italicize the ones you have started but didn't finish.
One doubt. School = high school and earlier, or in the American sense, college? We will assume former. (Says Ludwig, and so do I)

I have very very few books on my shelf that I have not read, so there! HMPH. Regarding many of the classics, I have read most of them, but it has been EONS ago, so I cannot remember whether it was a real good version that I read or a vaguely Disney-fied version. And, of course, there are this toddler versions of stuff that I have read now to the monster - all in all very confused in old age about these things. I don’t know whether to leave it, italicize it, or bold it, so, in line with my general philosophy of life, I just leave it. Unless I am sure… I also have trouble remembering the titles of the Marquez books that I have read and the ones I have been hopelessly looking for at Crossword for the past three years. So don’t hold me to that!


1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude (I think!)
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake8
7. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

So, to the best of my memory, this is it. My list. Aspirationally, I am going to buy up classics & read them. I did used to enjoy them a lot, whatever versions I could lay my hands on in my youth... As regards showing off to the world how well read I am, well, surely I would fare much worse if the books were engineering ones, so that is what is strange about my list!

And here goes the next tag.

Rules:

1. Pick up nearest book

2. Turn to page 123

3. Find the fifth sentence

4. Post next three sentences

5. Acknowledge who tagged you, and pass the tag along

The book is 'Self' by Yann Martel (the Life of Pi fellow). The book is sli-sha weird but I got a real funky message out of it. The message is for later. Pages 123 aaraam-se it has. Five sentences on page 123 are more tough. OOh but the next lines are totally apt:

This preluded by PMS so bad they circled at least one day a month when they would "disconnect from reality". This is an arduous feminine normality. It would push anyone to worship the goddess Anaprox.

After hoping that Mr.Martel does not sue me or something, I will say that this is relevant because of the recent debate on periods and practices related to it that the blogosphere has seen. As punishment for not expressing my strong views on that matter then, I have stumbled upon these lines in this book! There is plenty about periods and bleeding and so on in the book so I suppose it was reasonably likely. But the real reason I picked this book is that it was lying on the CPU just now (which is my 'safe' place for the library books I mean to return shortly; at least for now).

Okay folks. Please consider yourself tagged if you have the tools to copy paste. :-)

Waste Not!

Okay, I have been tagged by the exuberant madmomma to provide one tip we could follow with regards to the food crisis. I am going to go ahead and interpret it, with some disclaimers.

I live in an idealistic world inside a utopian bubble. I rarely, rarely, form opinions about things that are currently happening in the real world. Keywords swirl around my head from newspapers and discussions and conversations with mum. Over the years, I have discovered that the moment I form a strong opinion about something, an argument comes along, usually from the other side, that make sense, sort of, and makes me want to think again, a little deeper this time. In resolving conflicts in one of the roles I play at work, I come across this almost every day. I am tempted to agree to something because it sounds logical, but then boom! someone comes along and tells me the other side of the story, and then my decision does not sound so good any more. Its like, the person should be shown no mercy for the murder committed, but then, if the person was, perhaps, insane, then, perhaps, you want to re-think your initial harsh stance. Not that I am screaming murder now. But just saying that the Kenny of the twenties that tended to shout out from the roof-tops is replaced by a more cautious one, who relates events to herself, and tries to lead her life differently rather than tell others anything.
So, if you tell me that suddenly the world has woken up to the fact that food should not be wantonly wasted, then, I will think, yes, I was always aware of this, but, let me go in and examine my refrigerator, my kitchen cupboard, and really, I must do something about the banana situation at home (they go from raw to over-ripe in seconds..).

Besides that, are some recipes. The thing that is carried over to the next meal in my house is invariably rice. We are veggie freaks and, as such rarely allow much (cooked) vegetable to carry over. In recent times, due to an unpredictable up-and-down in my husband's appetite for rice, we have had a lot of rice hanging out in the fridge. The recipes are not original by any means, but just stuff I make and find tasty.

1. Puliodarai/Puliogre/Pulihora. Call it what you want baby, this one packs the punch. Traditionally made from old rice. Put the rice out from the fridge for half an hour or so. Just so it thaws a bit. MTR makes a mean Puliogre powder. But very spicy. I get mine made by some enterprising individual back home. Rice-Til Oil-The Powder, mix it all up evenly. Eat with curd.

2. Pakoras. This due to mum-in-law. Consumes small amount of rice. Cut up onions, coriander, chillies (if you wish), mix with the rice, mushing it all up with your hand. You may add some rice-atta or rava if you want. Deep fry*.

* For deep frying, I typically don't bring out the giant kadai, although its admittedly more convenient. I use a small (non-stick) tadka pan, so that the oil that gets used (and left over) is small in amount. Used oil can clog your arteries, blah blah. I have never been able to pour it away for this reason though. Indians are classic re-cyclers. Ask my colleague who tried to get used cooking oil to make biodiesel out of. Five-star kitchens sell to three-star ones to small hotels to roadside stalls and so forth. I am like that. Or rather, being somewhat cautious of my heart and what not, I tend to deep fry very rarely so the question of what to do with the oil does not arise too often. And when I do deep fry I painstakingly use the small tadka pan.

3. Rice Pancake. I found this in a Tarla Dalal book (I think). Grate carrots, cucumbers to the rice. Add in rice flour, some water. Pat it thin with wet fingers onto a kadai, or non-stick pan. Cook, adding in some oil to the edges as you would to a dosa. It browns & becomes crispy in parts when its done. Eat with chutney powder.

Whatever the current situation, whatever the current prices of things, I think wasting food is *not* an option now, or ever. I used to be a picky and poor eater as a child, and the thought that I used to be wasteful of food fills me with shame. The story of the rice grains going up to god and crying because I wasted it still rings in my ears. My husband was far less tolerant of this, once we were together. He just gave me a nice good yelling, and would insist I finish what I took on my plate. The child is pretty much just not given an option. Sometimes when she has spent an hour eating the same thing and its ice-cold and nasty, I might allow the remainder to be popped into an adult mouth. On a daily basis, its easy to be disciplined.

Famous Five

I am not at all sure what this summary of my posts is supposed to achieve. But then when ludwig sends me a tag, I feel I must comply. Besides, I am on the edge of my seat on a weekday afternoon at the home computer, having retired home hurt, and being deliciously out of touch of trouble-makers, having lost my mobile. And yeah, the ever-present monster is semi-asleep in between coughing bouts in the other room.

Here goes then.

Instructions:
Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

Family:
The family is husband and monster-child. Monster-child's every cheeky comment and sputum analysis report is dutifully recorded here. The husband marginally features below. Let us talk instead about other family members. I have been meaning to crib about my parents, when I get around to doing that there will good material for this section. But till then...

Friends: In principle, I have tons of friends in tons of places around the world. Since I stink at having phone conversations, it is up to personal visits and cute exchanges on emails when we stay in touch. Heres one where I met a whole bunch of old friends and it was really timely.

Yourself:
Talk about myself, oh no, that would be so wrong, so unlike me. Heh heh. This entire blog is about exactly three people. Me Myself and I!! So lets skip on & refer to things I love, stopping merely to comment that I dislike spitting.

Your love: I generally dont write much about this, but perhaps this one?. Yes, its fair to say that although its been a gadzillion years now since I first fell in love on a basketball court of all places, sentiments are pretty much the same. Dashed funny the whole thing is.

Anything you like: I like so many damn things and write so often about things that I like that this could again contain my entire list of posts to date. What the heck, you guys. Anyway, for purposes of easy digestion here goes-
1. I like running.
2. I like to sleep near a wall. ]
3. I like PGWodehouse (perhaps not the man himself, he looks fat, I mean his books).
4. I like sports - here and here.
5. I have revelations and I like to make lists.

Kayo. Let us go ahead and tag choxbox (who may already have been tagged but has not responded yet so..), airspy (who seems to be hibernating this winter), csm (assuming he has not gotten mugged for his comments about Australian cricketeers), neha (who will deserve a break from her work right about now) & vanessa (who should consider writing new posts about all items based on life in new country).