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