IN WHICH THE AUTHOR GOES TO BUY A PACKET OF BUTTERFLY TEA AND A BOTTLE OF WELL WATER A FAVOURITE STORY told by the sales manager of what was in the old days known as Lipton Tea went thus: an elderly lady walks into a kirana shop in Chandigarh and asks, “Lipton di chaah haigi (Do you have Lipton tea)?” The shopkeeper grins broadly and say, “Behenji, lipatna hai to lipto. Mainu ki frank painda (Lady, if you want to hug, then do so. What difference does it make to me)?” Lipton, when pronounced as it is sometimes in north India as “Lipaton”, sounds like lipatna, or hugging. And chai when pronounced as it often is as “chaah” is the word for desire. I thought of that story, because now we have the very English brand name Tetley in our midst. And when I went to a shop in Delhi […]
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On the memories and anxieties of a convocation ceremony IT’S CONVOCATION time again and as the invitations start coming in, I feel that familiar lump in my throat. At the institute that I am associated with, the convocation takes place on the weather-beaten but majestic, red-brick Louis Kahn Plaza that has seen over 60 batches of bright-eyed young men and women “walk the ramp”, so to speak, in their fancy dress robes, on top of the world, even if just for today — because tomorrow they will be at the bottom of the heap of the real world! Their mixed emotions of anticipation and trepidation are so palpable, it makes me nervous just to breathe in their vicinity. And I really empathise with the bemusement on their parents’ faces, laced with pride, at this new avatar of the offspring that they are yet to get to know. My heart goes […]
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What’s it like for a city person to live closer to the real jungle I DESPERATELY wanted a place of my own that opens out to the outdoors. I lived most of my life as a “concrete jungli”, a phrase coined by my armyman brother after witnessing a command mother-daughter performance, when my one-year-old and I visited him in small town Assam. For the better part of the trip, every night my daughter would look at the sky and say “ite”, and we had no clue what it meant. Until it hit me one day that she was saying “light” whenever she looked at the moon, because the Mumbai child had not seen the moon thus far, and worse, her parents had not realised it either. It wasn’t visible from our window (only other buildings were), the car park was indoors, and exhausted Mumbaikar working parents never took the one-year-old […]
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The Indian Express - February 03, 2013
When the husband and the contractor renovated the house. My husband has a home renovation fetish. He itches to break down walls, paint them, alter window heights and enclose balconies. I am not enthused by the whole process. I have a theory that painters take as long as they do because our homes are more comfortable than theirs and there is a dis-incentive for them to finish their work. They get paid on a daily rate, and they certainly enjoy a nice afternoon snooze alone in the room that is being painted, get tea and cold water twice a day, or more if they ingratiate themselves with the household help. I walked into the house yesterday to find all the pictures taken down, and a happy husband telling me that the painters would arrive tomorrow. I protested violently that I hadn’t been consulted, to which he said I had been, […]
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The Indian Express - January 13, 2013
Role reversals when a pet adopts a parent. For over 11 years, we had a neurotic Dalmatian, Prince, who disliked people. He snapped at almost everyone, and bit those who made him particularly nervous. Whenever we took him out, children, drivers and watchmen in the building would say, “Hey bhagwan, yeh to danger wala hai (Oh god, this is the dangerous one)” and hurriedly move away. I used to think how nice it would be if we had a dog who loved people. And then we got Zak, our Labrador. Zak adores the human race. Yet, when we take him downstairs, everyone says, “Hey bhagwan, yeh to masti wala hai (Oh god, this is the mischievous one).” They hurriedly move out of the way as he tries to hurl himself into their arms and kiss them on the lips. Even the other dogs in the building don’t play with him. […]
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