What is a chair?

This is how it worked in the household. We have a dining table with six chairs. (And, absurdly fat legs, may I add). One of those chairs served faithfully as my computer chair for as long as I can remember. Now we are in a bigger place and the six chair table is fitting quite nicely in the dining area (and not acting octopus like and occupying every inch of space as it used to in the other one). Plus the dining area is down the stairs (which, by the way, are naaasty and require some serious heavy duty cleaning and scrubbing before my mum shows up and gets on her hands and knees at the task). So, net-net, I am standing, leaning down onto the computer desk (which is an old-fashioned desk not at all meant for computers but has worked much better after I got rid of my fat monitor and got a flat one instead). It makes blogging hard. Plus I am google searching stores that maintain a semblance of hygiene so I can buy food. Or a vegetable market which is a place I have come to love with its strong smell of pudina and dhaniya. Without having to go to the wholesale market at Koyambeedu (or some such).

So, yeah, a chair is a blogging-facilitator. cheers.

Lift me up!

So here Dipali has tagged me to do a story about the 6th photo and so on. I generally don't do photos. I mean not just on this blog. I rarely seem to take photos. And when I do, I almost never download them. And when I do, I never put them anywhere that anyone can see. So they lie there till one fine day the hard disk crashes and oh well. Cut to story.

The guy was called Pothathaana. Close family members will readily recall this person. He was mad. At least we thought so - we are sane, he is mad. I am sure he thought the same - I am sane, they are mad, those two kids with their faces on the iron gate with the creeper of jasmine on top... His claims to fame were many. To list a few:
1. He wore many clothes one on top of the other. Shorts with long pants beneath. That sort of thing.
2. He chattered continuously to himself in long English sentences (wait, that could be another person who was called 'Asper' by us. Maybe they were the same. The mind is weak).

These were his salient features. So whenever the inclination overcame one of us to, say, wear pants and then a skirt on top of it, we called it a 'Pothathaana Dress' and derived much giggling from it, both from the sound of the word and from the concept itself.

The name is attributed, as most creative exercises of my childhood, to my big bear of a cousin. He turned a very unhealthy fifty-two in January this year, but back then he was an angst-filled rebellious fellow in college who gave us many books, drew incredible things starting with two pencil scratches, and amused us no end.

So, Pothathaana. I am sure that fellow has long since passed on to places where he will not be considered mad. But his memory remains in our family. As a sartorial style, a remembering of those long-ago days of jasmines, and that bitter-sweet feeling of many a lost innocent childhood.

(that is a photo taken in a lift and that is an outfit that is meant to be worn 'Pothathaana' style).

And yes, I pass on this photo-story tag to you girls - pg, chox, airspy, wordjunkie.