Tex Mex :)

Vegetable and bean-zucchini quesadilla, mash potato , butter sweet corn and guacamole.
Chocolate cake with cherries , cream and chocolate :) :)

RIP jackson!

I woke up at four today. I don't know why I did but, I did. Jackson succumbs to a cardiac arrest, they said. Five minutes and ten sites later, I gave in to the truth. I haven't listened to MJ in the last decade but I have patronized BSB, Abba, Elvis which were much before I even came to this world , but I had forgotten MJ whose music I grew up to and with.
I put on my never used playlist of MJ songs, song after song bits and pieces of the past flashed through my eyes. Most family get-togethers would have one common factor those days and that was the music. We were careful enough to divide time between our two favourites those days-Baba sehgal (oh yes!!) and the aforementioned King of Pop. I liked Pop and particularly Jackson because my brother liked him. One of the best things about growing up with an elder brother is you know what you must like, what the brother follows you follow, what he likes you like! Things are very different now, of course.
The family would sit in a circle, as the brother and I would take the black tiled centre stage. We went in ellipses albeit in our own orbits. Jumped up and down, moved our hands, stretched our feet, collided, fell down, got up back again and also did imaginary hooplas. When, I watched one such video a few days back, I bashfully put my head down at my own stupidity. The mother called it "rendu perukum saami vandha madhiri iruku" as the video watching crowd burst into peals of laughter that are still echoing. Our theatrics were a theatrical disaster. After we would dance for 20 minutes or so, I would be taken aside and the centre stage would be the exclusive property of my brother. People would cheer and jeer as though it was Mr.MJ himself! This performance, my dear readers, was the favourite of many to date. Anna would do the moon walk like only MJ could. I tried very hard, I secretly try it when I am alone even today but No, this particular thing escapes my physical faculty. I hated him for it. The way he sashayed across the floor like an eel. The semi-spoilt kid that I was I would sit on my Mom's lap and wouldnt look at him. Jealousy!
An hour would go by and I would forget everything else and would come up with my own walk known as the "mars" walk. It basically was pretty simple and do-able. You walk normally backwards but put your hands forward and move it like the leg-motion in the moon-walk. My brother would then cheer me and I would sleep a happy kid.
I would do anything to get those days back again. I would.
Some such best memories of my life that i take everywhere with me in my mind's eye has been created amidst MJ's songs. Every good, bad and ugly happenings of mine have always been associated with music.
So here's to the King of Good Times, The King of Pop and To the eternalised King of Moon walk, We bow....

Update: An old classmate reminds me of my school performance on MJ's Heal the world.One of the best I have ever felt on stage was for it. :)

Heart Calls

His hand turned the golden of the door knob; a shiver ran through his veins on touching the cold metal. He entered the door to his empty home, no not a home, he thought to himself. This was just a house. The home is where the heart is and for him, it was amongst the Lodhi garden where he had let his sister score a ten thousand runs, the mama road staircase where she had written K anna with the mother’s red lipstick, on the study table in front of the window near the guava tree where me mugged for his board exams and the most in the kitchen that was once small but had been turned into what his grandmother pointed out was unnecessary extension by the new lady who had taken over the reigns. He remembered a particular day when he had tugged the sarree of his sleeping chitti at one in the night asking for roti and beetroot subji.
“Also a glass of bormee, chitti” he quipped, as she made her way into the kitchen from the bathroom.
He entered the coldness of the room and habitually switched on his laptop. The Microsoft opening credit gave a little tune to the otherwise serene surrounding. His stomach grumbled and mumbled as his laptop, Archie revealed the picture of his family. He would do anything for a plate of sambar sadam topped with the home-made nei. He waited for the wi-fi to connect him to the world he wanted to connect physically to but couldn’t. He carefully arranged his socks and shoes in the stand. Everything had to go to its rightful place after it was done, he always said.
“What about you? Don’t you have to go back to where you came from? Isn’t your work done in this place?” He closed his heart from taking over his head any further and made his way to the bathroom and took a quick bath while chanting the hanuman chalisa. He made his way to the semi-pseudo-ish God’s zone which he had tried to recreate like his pati’s, bare-chested but for a thread did the sandhyavandanam.He skipped to the kitchen to grab a bite. His mind half wandered through the pages of naukri.com and his institute job site and absent-mindedly re-heated the day before yesterday’s daal and the yesterday’s rice. The monster hunt for a job was taking a toll on him. The recession was sucking from within and without.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a wife who would make hot meals for you when you returned home? Why don’t you get married da?” the sister had casually pointed out yesterday during their usual morning conversations. She was half hoping he would reply that wives weren’t robots who only cooked and cleaned but equal partners whom you loved and cared for and vice-versa. When he hadn’t, she just rolled her eyes. Men!

(to be contd, when feel like)

Make Peace with nature

The men of steel in an attempt to know the mystery of the world began a journey - their reward was the knowledge they discovered and invented.
But these champions sighed in pain because what they had discovered might have been a personal achievement but for the world, no, it wasn’t. They were laughed and mocked at and often chided. But, too soon it was getting too late to realize what we must have accepted and rectified a long back.
We wanted to ride an engine instead of horses, we wanted to fly high, and we wanted to get our jobs done faster. In the name of industrialization we plundered and looted the Mother Nature. Alas, she retaliated, unleashed her wrath. We sadly had to accept the truth. We had played with her for too long. We used more machines, we got more heat. The temperature rose and the snows melted, the ozone got a hole.
When she oohed and aahed we did not listen but she is too kind-she has given us a chance to make this world a better place for us and our generations to come. This is an attempt to bring to your attention the causes, effects and the mitigation possibilities of the climate change that the earth is so rapidly undergoing.
I, as a responsible citizen of the world, wish to put forth my view points about how we can and we will stop our home-the earth from becoming what we have seen in the movies. So, now is the time for all of us -youth and not-so-youth from across the borders, oceans and seas to become one and make our nature and us co-exist. Let us look for the sustainable path towards greener tomorrow. Let bygones be bygone and let us make a change.
"Be the change you wish to see in this world."
Go Green. Stay Green :) :)

Read This on : http://youthconnect.climateofconcern.org/cc_blog/article.php?a=53&section=youthvoice
Picture courtesy : http://www.dfg.ca.gov/climatechange/images/ClimateChange.jpg

Dark Love

The night is dark, as dark as the girl watching it grow darker. She gives a customary parting glance to the God’s acre replete with poppies of every color-red, green, yellow, black and white as she walks back to the church. She had traced and retraced these paths one Sunday after another. She morosely walks towards the cross to confess a sin she hasn’t committed but which no degree of absolution can take away. it is a sin the humankind has committed against her. The choices that the peccancy had culminated in had been against her will but so was the way she was made by the almighty God. The ecclesiastical architecture gave her a sense of reassurance about herself and of the choices she has made in her life. Closing her eyes, she elegantly knelt beside the pew in tacit contemplation.

Katherine mariammal Athyal was born in the small town of Kattathurai in Tamil Nadu as the only daughter of a couple that had not borne an offspring for 5 years of their matrimony. The Athyal household had rejoiced on the fateful day with balloons, crackers, cakes and had given out huge sums of money on charity. The mother had had a hard time in labor as the doctors confirmed the relative’s agony.” The mother and the daughter both are in danger, I am afraid” the doctor mechanically said. But the child agreed to disagree and made its way out.
“You look exactly like your grandfather”, said the grandmother, lovingly reminiscent, as she oiled Kathy’s hair. “The way you read with a clicking of the tongue, the way you smile with a lip slightly stretched on one end, just like your apupan. Even, your math skills, you know your apupan had been the most famous kanakupillai. If only the man was alive to see my little princess. Also, dark just like him.But he was a man;didn't matter.Lucky your father is rich otherwise these days even ugly fellows want fair kuttys for themselves. njaan parenyjanthu cheriyille?”
After the hair was oiled and braided she ran into her room to observe herself in front of the mirror. She opened the intricate powder holder with a handle having a figurine of a fairy, and gently picked the puff and smothered her face with the Yardley powder her uncle Jacob had got from the gulf. He had promised it would make her look as pretty as the moon on a full moon night. After the little exercise, she did look like the moon, she thought. But without the powdered talc she looked like those dark clouds through which the moon played peek-a-boo sometimes. Her moist eyes pierced through the glasses at the dark girl that was looking back at her.
She wanted to hate herself for being this color. She hadn’t been picked up in her school plays for which she had rehearsed the lines a million times over for her favorite part of the red riding hood. Instead, she had been under the hood for the part of the fox. Why does beauty have to be associated with white? Hadn't the fair-skinned medusa become the monster of lore because of her vanity? What use was such external appearance? In such times her only solace had been her God

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. John 13:34

Who were we to differentiate one from another?

Having so many questions but answers to none she put all her efforts on being fair at what she could. She was a fair human being-loving, caring and gentle and studied as hard as she could to forget it.Soon,it was time for her to move her base to madras. Her small town had been happy to send a daughter of the land to a pattinum for higher studies. The importance of external beauty for the city-folks had made her appearance more obvious than they ever were. She eventually made friends of all kinds-ones who accepted her for what she was and others who didn’t. One such relationship that had creeped in as an acquaintance was a man named Roshan.On their first meet , he eyed her enquiringly as though wanting to know more of her while she coyly hid behind her friend. The acquaintance gradually turned to a dream as she held hands with him in the beach and they kissed passionately under the moonlit night. She asked him innocently "You don't have a problem with me being dark, do you? Why do you still love.....", as he kept his finger on her lips motioning her to stop and kissed her again.” Look at the sky, my love. Don’t we see the beautiful stars only when it grows dark? Beauty is found in places you least expect it”. As these days turned to years, they promised to be there for each other through thick and thin. He promised "We will get married in a month as soon as I attend my sister's marriage"
She remembered the day, it happened. She had been missing her periods for a week now and when she opened her message inbox

Parents have found me a bride. Engagement’s done. Our picture is attached. Please forget me.

Her world came crashing down on her.

The picture attached showed a beautiful young "fair" lady hugging the man who had been the cause of her state now. Her suspicions were later in the day confirmed. She was going to be a mother. A million thoughts rushed through her head. Should she cross the proverbial Rubicon and be an unwed single mother to the kid that was hers? What would the world make of her and treat "them”? Her household would treat her as an outcast.” If only i had been fair, perhaps the world would have been fair to me” she cried.
A hand touched her head which nudged her out of meditation. She opened her tear-filled eyes only to realize it was nobody she could see. She walked across the Holy Cross and lachrymosely uttered

"Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I killed my child......"