No more and so not enough

Two people in this picture are now no more. Ba's death in 2016 is something that we, and especially I, have found very hard to cope with and yesterday, suddenly, we lost Papa, Nitin Mankad . One minute I heard him, the next, he was gone. Just like that! No, it wasn't Covid. It was a silent killer: Coronary Thrombosis.

Yes, people die, life is so fickle. But no matter what you tell yourself, a part of you dies when you lose someone you love. Unlike Ba and me, Papa and my relationship was more formal through these 13 years, because I chose to keep it that way. As personalities we were diametrically opposite: He, an extrovert, a huge fan of celebrations and extremely fond of society. I, as those who know me very well, hide behind a smile and am a very private person. Papa showed his emotions to the world. I hardly share them with myself. The number of people from all walks of life who came to attend Papa's funeral in spite of a pandemic was just an indicator to what he has done for Vadodara and Gujarat, for industry, institutions, friends and relatives. He had friends across political lines, from Narendra Modi to Ahmed Patel, they all know him as Nitinbhai, his first name. I thank you all for your condolences and messages.

He gave me a lot of lessons on life through his long monologues about his experiences in travel and industry. He and his wife had backpacked through Europe in 1989 for two and a half months. Then there was this farm in New Zealand where he had seen a hundred dogs. The picture accompanying this post was taken in Switzerland. I have lost count of how many countries he might have visited. He wanted to see the Aurora Borealis in Norway. That was his plan for 2020, till Covid struck, and my father-in-law took charge of kitchen duties during the lockdown. He surprised us with his cooking skills, more my mother-in-law, Minakshi Mankad than anybody else. Ba, his mother, would have chuckled.

A day after his departure to another world, my almost three-year-old was looking for his Dada (grandfather) for his 9.30AM drive around the city. Both of them looked forward to it. I sat with my toddler in the car and felt I was not enough. That's how we all will be for a while. Not enough, incomplete.

Why the Scorpions remind me of an Indian violonist

There are songs that remind you of certain people. Scorpions' The Wind of Change reminds me of violinist Balabhaskar from Kerala. He had performed with Sivamani and Taufiq Qureshi at a concert in Vadodara in 2010. I've watched Sivamani perform many times, but that was the first time he was overshadowed by a violinist. Balabhaskar rocked the audience. My friend, Vidisha Patel  and I were floored. At midnight, the two of us were sitting in 24 Carats at Express Hotel for dinner when we spotted the musicians. Vidisha had a fan-girl moment so I walked to Balabhaskar to get his autograph. We started chatting and he talked about Scorpions. Since then, their music has reminded me of that night. In 2018, Balabhaskar was killed in a road accident in Kerala. 

#musicmemories

Know Your Abuser (from a Facebook share)

Know your abuser and pay close attention to the signs.

These are the more subtle signs which we sometimes overlook.......

✅ Know that your gut feeling might be saying that it is abuse. 

✅ Know that your abuser might be labelling your gut feeling as over sensitivity, fragility or immaturity.

✅ Know that your abuser may have the best way with words and be very likeable.

✅ Know that your abuser will encourage you and others to be constantly doubtful about the perception of abuse.

✅ Know that your abuser may be powerful and responsible in their professional lives and may let that filter very subtly into your personal domain in a discreetly manipulative way.

✅ Know that your abuser may take pleasure in making you wait for something that you value or believe in and might give you the false perception that they value it as well - over and over. 

✅ Know that your abuser may share deep personal stories to manipulate your empathy and increase your sense of guilt for abandoning them.

✅ Know that your abuser may have narcissistic or sociopathic traits that give them a sense of superiority or extreme confidence.

✅ Know that your abuser never admits or accepts responsibility and avoids the hard conversations.

✅ Know that your abuser may use manipulative ways of communication to ensure that they are always in control of how much access you are given.

✅ Know that your gut has been accurate and has the final say and do your best to acknowledge that emotional abuse is real and sometimes difficult to detect. 

✅ Know that this form of abuse is non-violent in appearance but exceedingly destructive as a form of power and dominance at the hands of your abuser.

✅ Know that when your abuser finally realizes that you NO longer play into their lure, they infuse dismissive accusatory language into subtle messages to hurt your feelings.

✅ Know many times, that said abuser is weak and lacks esteem and uses these actions to achieve more assurance of their own value.

✅Stay alert for the signs.

The Ride of My Life

Still remember the ride on biker Pankaj Trivedi's Yamaha XT 660R from Worli Seaface to Dadar TT at 140Kph on a Monday afternoon in Mumbai way back in 2007. British bike journalist Damon I'Anson and Indian adventure tour leader Pankaj Trivedi had ridden from London to the Himalayas in 2006/7 to set a world altitude record for a motor vehicle. They reached 18,743 feet. We did a photoshoot with Pankaj for TOI's South Bombay supplement, Downtown Plus. Pankaj told me the bike was going to be shipped to UK the next day to be displayed at the Yamaha showroom there. After the photographer left, Pankaj asked me, "Do you want to sit on it?" I thought he meant just sit and so I sat behind him. Then he wore his helmet and said, "Let's go for a ride. I'll show you what she can do." I didn't have a helmet, of course. I put my hand on his shoulder. He wrapped them around his chest and said, "We're going to do 140. Hold me tight." Worli Seaface to Dadar TT... 7 minutes flat. We flew over road dividers. He took me home and we shared a lunch of chhole puri as we finished the interview. That's my bike story.

#memories

Rose petals in pages

The husband opened Ma Jian's Beijing Coma and found rose petals. I got the book from Singapore, after @kati.au recommended that I must read it. This was 2010. The flower petals are that old. People I have lent books to have found notes, post-its, petals, sketches and visiting cards of people they've never heard of. There was one time when I passed Sun Tzu's The Art of War around a classroom and my students read only the first page which had a love note to my husband. I had forgotten about it till they started showing it to each other. I looked at my shoes and turned red. #MSU #FJC #Books #SharingBooks

Egg Story

Here's an egg story that cracks my mom Sujata K. Sarkar and me up even today:

Circa 1999, in FYJC, I did not know how to cook. With both parents working and the elder brother hopping classes for his twelve standard board preps, Mom had recruited Indubai to do the cooking. Her expertise was limited to cooking doodhi in two ways, cauliflower, bhindi, tendli and cabbage. Usually, I would eat a meal of roti-sabzi before going to Jai Hind College at Churchgate for my classes that would start from 12.30pm and go on until 5pm. Most of you know that sabzi doesn't really appeal to my palate, especially if they're cooked with masala into a mush. That one day, I tried to cook an egg. I put the whole egg in the month-old microwave and set it for one minute. There was a blast. The next ten minutes I spent cleaning up the mess. I was too shaken to eat anything. Mom had to know what went wrong. So I wrote on three Post-its:

1. Tried to cook egg

2. Was a blast

3. Cleaned up the mess

#memories #memoriesforlife

Come, walk with me

Another jog down memory lane and I remember just randomly asking Shraddha Kamdar if she would go with me to the Kanga Library at Wankhede Stadium in 2006. We'd finished our day at office at the TOI Building at CST in Mumbai but I was doing a story on cricket statisticians (the guys who kept the scores and records) and wanted to look at the scorebooks from the early 1900s. Shraddha and I weren't exactly friends. She was a senior colleague in another paper in the Times Group. But we loved walking, talking and reading so I asked her. We first walked to Kanga where I found some old books but many of the records were being digitalized so they weren't available. Half-disappointed, I asked her if she would walk with me to Marine Drive to see the waves. We walked through Marine Lines and Marine Drive, Hughes Road, Balbulnath, Kemp's Corner and talked till we reached my home at Pedder Road. She told me of the loss of her mother in an accident and how she taught tuitions to run the household when her father was in the hospital. I talked about my life in Pune and New Delhi before I moved to Mumbai. We chatted about food, clothes, people, places and books. She had not travelled much but wanted to see the world. I had seen pretty much all of India by the time I was 23. I wanted to see the world next. We became friends. That 6Km walk from office to home remains my favourite till date.

#anecdotes #comewalkwithme

Have a Day

One day in Brisbane in 2014, I was feeling really low. My husband was away in Perth for a week. It was one of those days when I spent the whole day scrolling social media and finally found a post my friend had put up. She suffers from depression and her little son had said, "Mummy, just have a day. Not good or bad day. Just a day." Six years hence, I still think that is one of the most beautiful things I have learned from a child.

#kidsinspiration

Old song, old colleague

Suddenly remembered Trevor Manuel, my senior colleague at the Mumbai Mirror, whom I irreverently called, "Trev," as we worked on the Mirror's World and blast pages together. I called them "blast pages" because for three consecutive months, everyday, I made those pages about the serial bomb blasts in Ahmedabad and Bangalore and follow-up investigative reports. My job was to sift through hundreds of pictures of blast sites (the World pages also featured Iraq and Afghanistan), sometimes 700-odd a day, to figure a few less disturbing ones to put in the paper. Trev, with his humour and stories, was a relief. Once, I was playing Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven while doing the page when he mentioned it's one of his favourite songs. He often told me, "The only other person who calls me Trev is Sunil Gavaskar." He talked about the start of his career, how he betted on the fact that India would win the 1983 Cricket World Cup even before the match started in England because the page deadline in Bombay for printing was 5pm. After moving to Vadodara, I would make it a point to drop in at the Mirror office for a few years just to say hello to him and then my visits dwindled and stopped altogether. I learned he passed away a few years ago when his brother Mark Manuel posted on FB. It's amazing what music can bring back from the recesses of your mind.

Stop the Bullying

Remembering all those times you got bullied in life because you wore glasses, you were younger than everyone else in your class, you were shy, you were a nerd, you were a girl, you did not know a language, you could not adjust to a life in a new city as a teenager, your hair was different from everyone else's, you did not wear designer clothes, you made acquaintances not friends, your food was different from what everyone else ate, you had put on a little weight, you had lost a lot of weight, you never shouted at anyone, you cried in public, you couldn't physically fight off older, bigger boys or men, you spoke in an accent that was your own, you did not practice any religion, you got tongue-tied when boys asked you out on a date and then when people ask you why you're so tough, you just say, "There was no choice but to be tough."

#bullyingawareness #antibully #WorldMentalHealthDay2020

Bullying the boys

I moved to Mumbai from Pune in tenth standard, the final year of schooling in Maharashtra. It was a difficult year to make new friends in a new city. My dad suggested I join a coaching class so that I could meet some people before the start of the school year. On my second day, I met my first male friend in Mumbai. He came from one of India's oldest and wealthiest industrialist families, a household name. And yet, in spite of that name and background, he was bullied by his schoolmates every single day for his pink cheeks, his gait, his awkwardness, his hair. He would hide his head behind his book. He rarely talked. But he always waited for me to arrive to copy my chemistry homework. I used to be a bit of a chem whiz in school and college. (I can still balance complex chemical and biochemical equations in my head.) He disappeared from my life for a decade, during which I became a journalist and met his celebrity parents many times over. They're very down to earth. A few years ago he came back to India after his studies abroad and has been at the helm of affairs in the industry, carving a niche for himself, but still media and people shy. Some of you might have met him and would know who I am talking about. It's amazing what you remember after all these years.

#memories #bullying #bullyingawareness

Walking the Fifth in New York

I remember the time when I forced my mom to walk from the UN Headquarters down to the Fifth Avenue and then almost halfway through it to go to the MET in New York because I didn't want to sit in the damn traffic. If you've been to New York, you know no one walks the length of the Fifth. I was pregnant at that time and suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, a very severe nausea. An NYPD officer politely suggested that a cab might still help me reach the end of the Fifth Avenue faster. It's what I love about travel: the weird stuff you remember long after those Instagram edits are forgotten.

#WalkingTheFifth #memories

Mom Tales: Puddle-jumping

These last 10 days have been about teaching the toddler an important life skill in the 21st century: How to navigate a waterlogged road (what with global warming and increasing floods each monsoon). By jumping into mud puddles, the 2.5-year-old has learned the vocabulary of water - ripples, splashes, reflections, drops, slippery sides. And he has learned to make way for cars and bikes. He now knows why Peppa Pig loves muddy puddles so much.

#teaching #momlife #momtales #rain #monsoon #muddypuddles

Brekkie: Caprese with salami

#Brekkie: My take on the Caprese with pepper and herb chicken salami from #Yummiez, #burrata from Dairy Fresh, Vadodara, tomatoes, basil, olive oil, soup spice and balsamic vinegar from #Modena

Spiced green tea

The first time my former student  me green tea from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, I discovered the joys of having green cardamom in tea, like they have there. Then, I started experimenting with cloves and cinnamon too, till I stumbled upon my second favourite Indian spice after black pepper, the black cardamom or badi elaichi. It's essential to most of our meat and fish gravies in northern and eastern India, but with some loose leaf green tea from China, Afghanistan, Darjeeling, Assam or Kenya, it's simply divine 💓

The Kissing Booth Review

Watched the movies and then read the books by Beth Reekles she wrote when she was 15 to discover why books are better than their movie adaptations (and I actually liked these). The Kissing Booth films on Netflix have reduced Noah Flynn's multi-layered character from the book to that of a badass seducer (played by the gorgeous Australian actor Jacob Elordi) and Lee Flynn's (Joel Courtney) to a childish side-kick to Elle Evans (Joey King).  Shame! Because Beth, at such young age, is brilliant with details, which older screenwriters have overlooked.

Hinduism/Hindutva

Hinduism calls for inclusion.

Hindutva calls out to Ram.

Hinduism is about temples and idols of different make and stones.

Hindutva is about pink sandstone replicas all over the country.

Hinduism is a practice, a way of living.

Hindutva is an ideology.

Hinduism is about different foods, different forms of sacrifices, different forms of devotions in different faiths.

Hindutva is narrowing Hinduism to just one stream of Brahmanical thought.

Hinduism is of the old, dating back to the age of the Vedas.

Hindutva appeared in the 1880s.

About the mishti in the mishti doi

There are three ways to make mishti doi:

1. Add a generous amount of nolen gur (date jaggery) to hung curd and steam it in a matka/cup to set

2. Caramelize sugar and add the caramel to hung curd and set it at room temperature. You may skip the steaming.

3. Add a tin or two of sweetened condensed milk to hung curd and steam.

What sets mishti doi apart from the regular doi is that it's sweet and has the colour of caramel. Gur makes it dark. Sugar makes it pinkish-brown. Condensed milk makes it creamish white. So when Pranav Patel of #DairyFresh asked me to check theirs out, I did. He warned me it isn't going to be as sweet as mishti doi usually is and he couldn't get nolen gur in #Vadodara in this season (it's only available in winter) so the sweetness of doi is a combination of regular gur (jaggery from sugarcane) and sugar. Yup, the Bengali in me is not happy about it. It's a sweet and sour dahi that isn't quite mishti but for the health freaks out there it's a decent choice of yoghurt.

Music sharing then and now

A large part of our childhood and early adulthood was spent in sourcing, copying, buying and pirating music in the form of mixed tapes, CDs, mp3 downloads, etc. The husband and his sister spent Rs 7 per song to get a cassette of their first English songs taped in the early 1990s. I paid Rs 25 to a pal from the Middle East to get a CD before music CDs became a thing in colleges in India. We hacked into secret folders on the office computers to unearth stashes of music and movies (many of us staying after-work to collect our loot). We made friends with those who knew our music. Now, all you have to do is send your Spotify/Saavn/Gaana/Prime/YouTube links to anyone who wants it.

#MusicSharingThenAndNow

Education in the time of Corona

Homeschooling and apps work when you are privileged and have multiple devices. If school was the only place where you could get a mid-day meal, the only escape from bonded labour, your only escape from crippling patriarchy and debilitating poverty, then the closure of schools hurt you in a way that no balm can heal. The longer the poor, the underprivileged and the girls are kept away from school, the less likely they are to be able to go to school again. So while you have a tough time getting your child to do their home assignments and sit through digital classes, think about how many leaps ahead your child is from the millions who have not that privilege.

#Covid19 #AppsAndHomeSchooling #Privilege #EducationForAll

Music as class in Gujarat

Music as Class in Gujarat

Bhakti (devotion) to different deities (metaphysical or human) is the backbone of Hindu cultural life in Gujarat. Each sect has its own set of devotional songs or bhajans. Sects are often class-based or caste-based and so there are high-class bhajans, middle-class bhajans and pure bhakti bhajans. They may all pay ode to Lord Krishna (or any avatar of Vishnu) or Ambaji (a form of Goddess Shakti) but what you sing often determines where you stand in society.

#MusicAsClassInGujarat

How long-division decides which school you go to

As someone who moved through three cities in three schools and gave her ICSE board exam in a new school in a new city  with a different subject paper in the whole of Mumbai (and aced it), I find it difficult to understand why people in Vadodara are so obsessed with schools and boards at the primary level. Lately, the decision to change schools and boards has rested on long-division. Some teach at grade 1, some in grade 2 and some in grade 3. In our days, your parents just picked the school and you did your long-division sums whenever the teacher taught them to you. Changing schools to postpone your agony of doing arithmetic to a later stage was unheard of.

#HowIndiansChooseSchools

Mom Tales: Teaching A Toddler About Buildings

Instead of putting my toddler in an expensive playschool with a sand-pit, swings and car toys, I choose to walk with him in our neighborhood to look at the two construction sites. My son has learned more about building by watching masons layering bricks, sieving sand, mixing cement and digging with a JCB than he would through #Lego blocks. The mostly-women construction workers wait for his visits in the morning and in the afternoon. He now has a vocabulary for building. Ask him to build something out of blocks and he'll say you build with bricks 😆😆

#LearningThroughObservation #NeighbourhoodWalks #EarlyChildhoodEducation #ECE

About Lighting Lamps to Inaugurate Events in India

One of the inaugural procedures in India for any public event is lighting of the lamp. The idea is to start the event on a positive note. Most people might agree that usually one person is sufficient to light a lamp/dia. But public events are about celebrities and personalities with gigantic egos. So where one hand would suffice, you have many. So you have to ensure that each hand holds a candle and the lamp has as many wicks as the number of hands that may set them alight. Then after its moment of glory, the poor lamp is set in a corner, ignored for the rest of the event.

#LightingUpLamps #HowIndiansDoEvents

Also Goa

Somewhere between the pubs, beaches, five-star resorts, rivers and the coconut groves, lies a Goa where only the old people live in tumbledown houses in villages while the young ones have gone to look to make fortunes in Mumbai, Dubai or on ships. A drunk old man looks at loud Indian tourists with disgust, "Yeh, India ka paisa bolta hai."