Were you served, Krishna?

As my regular readers know by now, my excitement levels peak around this time of the year. Starting August, all the way until November almost every other week, there is some festival or the other to celebrate. When all this has died down, comes Christmas and New Year, and customary holiday cheer.

This year my celebration marathon started with Krishna Jayanthi. As usual, Krishna was born all of three days this year. We celebrated on the second day (Sunday) for convenience when in fact by our family traditions we should have actually celebrated on Monday. We had our friends (P, Fa and S) over as well as my bil and his wife.  Since bil’s wife takes a minute to figure out that I am referring to her when I say bil’s wife, for her convenience, I will henceforth refer to them as V&V.

I started at 11 in the morning and cooked up a storm that ended around 6 in the evening. The krishnar who visited our house had a plateful of bakshanams (snacks) – Mul Murukku (a) Manankombu, Rava Seedai (which was quite a breeze considering how apprehensive I was), Appam and Sooyyam. They all turned out really well. He also had a plateful of dinner – the usual pandigai thaligai (festival meal) which always includes paruppu, mor kozhambu, kootu, karamadhu, rasam, vadai and for a sweet, akkaravadisal (which actually ended up being more like sakkarai pongal). He was also served his all-time favorites of milk, navaneetham and aval-vellam.

I had to change his path into the house though. Instead of walking in from the front door, he had to take the more convenient route from the backyard. You see, our home has carpeted floor most of the distance from the front door to the poojai shelf. The route from the backyard however is all on wood and vinyl. So I happily made feet all the way from the lawn till the poojai room, and they turned out bright and neat too.

For calling myself a maami, I actually know very few stotrams. This time however, I made it a point to at least read krishnashtakam out of the book. (I really need to improve my stotram skills a bit more.)

I was soooo happy that everything turned out well this time. I had this nagging feeling that the past few krishna jayanthis had been so unsatisfactory – this time I made up for it. I think this year, Krishna was well served!

Due to popular demand, my own interest and good weather outside the house, I took a few pictures of my krishnar kaals. Here you go…

P.S: I don’t know if any of you iyengars out there have heard of this fabulous book written by an old iyengar maami called Rajalakshmi Raghavan. It is like the bible (or may be gita) for maamis like me who go crazy around pandigai time. It has a list of festivals for every tamil month, plus what food to make, what stotrams to tell, what kolams to draw etc. I only wish it were in English. Thanks to my poor tamil skills, it is quite hard for me to figure out some of the things she has written.

Happy Valentine’s Day

I don’t recollect when I first observed Valentine’s day. Perhaps a few went by when I was in college, wondering if perhaps some miracle might drop an archies card my way signed by ‘???’ or ‘you know who’ or ‘your special someone’. Of course none of that ever happened.  My last year in college, the 28 girls in my class decided to turn some attention on ourselves by all wearing identical pink sarees. The only effect was that we got a second look wherever we went that day.

Then I was engaged to my husband and married to him before a valentine’s day came along. On our first valentine’s day, I took the trouble to buy the typical archies card, stayed up until 12 that night and presented it to him as a surprise. He retorted – ” I don’t believe in this valentine’s day and all…. anyway thank you”. Of course, he saved himself that day by quickly following with ‘For me everyday is valentine’s day’, but all my aspirations for valentines day for the rest of my life, ended right then.

However, there are those couples who still do special things on special occassions. Suprise each other on Valentine’s day. Some help the economy by going out and paying exorbitant prices for a box of chocolates or a stuffed monkey holding a big red heart. We on the other hand, do our valentines day shopping on Feb 15, help the stores by buying the chocolates on clearance and enjoying them for a few weeks after. We also buy the monkey, cut loose the heart from the monkey’s hands, and get it to hang from the ceiling fan in my daughter’s jungle themed room.

I suppose many years later, when I am deaf and hopefully my husband is fussing over me like a dog after a bone, we will finally decide to use a valentine’s card with good reason.

The Spirit of Nightingale – By Pati

My maternal grandmother for many years now has impressed many with her literary skills. Few people have grandmothers above 80 who can talk English, forget about flawless English, written in the form of poetry. She has written in the past more than probably a 100 poems on pieces of paper now turned yellow with age and often tucked away from the public eye within notebooks and diaries.
The most recent one, is about the Senior Citizens Club, of which she is a member. The club, based in Malleswaram, Bangalore is called “The Nightingale Club”. I read the poem and felt it was worthy of publicity because it is a well written poem, written by a person who deserves some appreciation for writing it at her age and also because the Nightingale club does a great job of making so many senior citizens feel special.

So here goes:

 The Spirit of Nightingale

By

Jaya Sundararajan

Singing merry nightingales are we,

Always like this we will all be;

Young we are, in our minds,

Our thoughts, our desires, that binds;

 

Our ages, all above sixty

Limit though, is five and fifty;

Active we are, forgetting our age,

How old we are none can gauge;

 

Some of us are heard, not seen;

Talkative souls, we’ve always been;

When others talk, some enjoy,

Smiling of course, expressing joy;

 

Counting beads, sitting in corners,

Now, want to be roamers;

Dull days, for the aged, ahead,

Are for the books, to be read;

 

Lack we not in social work,

Spending for a cause, we’ll not shirk;

Slums and old age homes, we visit,

Spreading happiness, we never desist;
 

Reviews, comments and criticism will be duly passed on.

Tamil Serials – Enna Ulagamada Adhu..

We temporarily switched to Dish network so that we could subscribe to Sun TV for my in-laws who are here. Somehow, I’ve gotten hooked on to it big time. It’s surprising that I am hooked on though, considering that scene after scene, serial after serial, is one cliche after another.

From what I see:

1. The name of the serial has to be feminine – a particular woman’s name(Arasi, Mekala), female relationship (Magal, Mannaivi etc..) 
2. The title song has to be realllllllllllly long – long enough so that people who just started cooking dinner or lunch can finish before the actual story starts. They are usually not worth watching, because the idea is to give an aspiring singer, music director and choreographer an inexpensive platform to showcase their work.
3. The protagonist has to be a woman.
4. The protagonist has to be one that goes through unimaginable (and I mean unimaginable because nobody could imagine these in true life) burdens in succession.
5. The protagonist usually has either a ‘villie’ mother-in-law or a ‘villain’ husband or both.
6. If the villie mother-in-law and the villain husband aren’t villie or villain enough, then there will always be the official villain of the serial – one who is keen on ‘pazhi vaangifying’.
7. If there is a priest(father) in the serial, he always (and I mean always) walks around with a rosary and bible in hand. I mean, come on, a priest has to be prepared at all times – What would he do if he were questioned on the bible by any of the other characters in the serial?
8. The heroine or her kin have to visit prison for a crime they actually did not commit.
9. The heroine has to have had multiple attempts on her life in the form of a speeding truck (which would be hard to ignore in real life, considering that it actually hits on slow bumpy out of the way chennai roads) and at-least one attempted poisoning.
10. The heroine will have at-least one person in the good part of the family giving up his/her life for the former.
11. The heroine or her family has to lose all the money they ever had by being naive enough to let the villain cheat them.
12. If the background music is a happy tune, it’s because in the next few minutes, someone is going to have an accident, or the villain has unleashed a new form of attack on an unsuspecting family, because let’s face it – happy tunes are short-lived in tamil serials.
13. If there is a death in the serial, the only way the viewer can empathize is, if they see all those involved wailing and mourning at excruciating decibel levels, see the nose-stuffed person acting dead, actually see a funeral pyre burn to the end, and watch people walk back in full ‘sogam’. All of the above needs to extend across at-least 2 episodes, so the viewer actually believes that the person is reallllly dead.

And if you are lucky enough to witness the almost non-existent occurrence of a last episode, then I’ve heard they usually end with a family get-together and surprisingly this time they are all laughing.

 Enna Ulagamada Idhu?? Thankfully not our ulagam!

The party friends

All of us have all types of friends.. close friends, old friends, new friends, office friends, school friends and college friends, family friends. I am not sure if other people have what I call “party friends”.

Party friends are characterized by the fact that, you never see them anywhere except at other people’s parties. These are people you have nothing in common with but you see them every now and then at parties of common acquaintances. You get introduced once or twice and then you “have” to do the customary “Hi..”

So this is how a typical conversation would go.

 Me: Hey Hi.. How are you?

PF: I am doing great.. How are you? (Note how we don’t use each other’s names, because we are not sure.. that’s why) wow.. Look at your daughter.. Shez grown so much since X’s party in March.

Me: Oh ya.. Shez now 19 months old. How is your son? blah blah..

PF: Hez good.. very naughty… blah blah.. (Few mins of proud mommy bragging by both of us)..

Me: Come home sometime.. We should catch up.. (Thinking to myself – Who has the time.. We hardly know these people)

PF: Sure.. You guys should come too.. We dont live too far.. You know that Walgreens at blah blah blah.. (She knows I don’t plan to come and she isn’t planning to come either).

(Now we’ve run out of topics and are itching to end this forced conversation. Both of us start looking around to see what excuse we can find)

Me: Smrithiiiiiiiii.. (I run behind my daughter who is actually just standing and staring at me)

PF: Oh Hey Hi (to the next person).. 

Me & PF: Ok then.. I’ll see you later..

End of conversation!

Sometimes, however we meet more often like during the Christmas season – So you can imagine how much worse this conversation could be.

Return of the blogger

Hey everyone,

I am back in the business of some wasted time spent more usefully a.k.a blogging. There have been times when Ive sat and written out my thoughts on an inconspicuous piece of paper just to have an outlet for my thoughts. I was however pleased to see the blog concept evolve and become so popular. Now I dont have to run to a piece of paper that is bound to get lost one day. Folks, keep peeping in as I am determined to make regular posts up here that may interest you.