Confessions of a Manic Procrastinator

• There are five things marked VV Imp on your To-Do list, but you look at the clock on your laptop and decide you have just enough time to play three more rounds of Text Twist
• You know for sure there are no new updates, no status messages, no mails on facebook, but you just wonder what can be lost with one idle click.
• One photo of some acquaintance that you added a long time ago on Orkut or Facebook, in a random burst of bonhomie, leads you to wedding pictures of some random people and you still go through them as if it was a wedding in your family
• You rearrange the four different coloured post-its that are hanging on your corkboard twice and then put it back to the way it was, for it was put in that manner for a reason
• There are four bottles of water filled on your table, but you just manage to unearth two more bottles and suddenly you decide you need to fill them up. The logic: newly discovered truth that dehydration was the reason for your sleeplessness three nights ago
• Boxes of tea and cereal are stacked up on your desk, but you refuse to throw them away for the fear of overcrowding the bin which could force your procrastinating hand to clear it out
• BBC News and IPL telecasts of Youtube become appointment watching – not out of necessity but need to get out of the chores already lined up
• The alarm on your new phone goes off with the literal impact of shock therapy on your sedated sleep-heavy body, but despite an appointment in the next 45 minutes, the next 15 are spent in bed wondering how to complete all the processes of getting ready in 30 minutes and not 45..
• Making those dreaded ‘of no use’ shopping lists that will never be found by the time you defeat your body’s compelling reasons of laziness, seems like a fun thing to do
• Writing this stupid list that lists out my capacity to procrastinate while there are still 800 words left on my term submissions – the Word Doc tab left opened gives me those Yawnnny vibes forcing me to open a new fresh blank page and compile this – Now isn’t that the heights of procrastination???? 

The Case of A Mysterious Disappearance

If you are receiving this message, that means you have been named in the will of those dear and near who needs to be intimated about my recent bereavement.Atleast it feels like death..

I am bitterly hurt to inform you about the mysterious disappearance of my companion of 2 very long years - my mobile, the virtues of whom I'd waxed eloquent about in just my last post.. After the physical and technological abuse it has been through at my hands,I have always known this day has been long in the coming, but that does not reduce the blow that has been dealt on me.

Even as I continue to grieve, I know I have to move on. As a part of that, I have already arranged for a new companion to join me. I have not yet got over the fact that my SIM card chose to elope with my mobile phone. So I have decided to expel both and all their sweet memories from my life- however involuntarily...

Even as I mourn inconsolably, I realise that the practical chores of living have to continue...And all I need to do is look around my once massive, now completely devastated home lovingly called 'My Addressbook' to know that rebuilding my life after this unexpected desertion will not be easy..

That they went away heartlessly, with an 'out of sight, out of mind' swagger,completely switching themselves off and rendering them totally untraceable just adds insult to injury. In my defense, I did go around like the hapless companion that I was, in my demented state of mind, from shop to shop, restaurant to restaurant, every where that I had even thought of stepping in in Brighton, seeking to know if anyone had any information. But they seem to have had the conspiracy much earlier...And it was a near flawless execution to give the devils their due..

My sighs and sobs continue unceasingly. All I hope and pray is that this fate not befall any of you....

In mourning,

Journomuse

Wordsworth's Daffodils

My Sony Ericsson P1i has been my constant companion over the last two years....And every day these days, as I walk down from my University residence towards the Library or my class, it quietly pops out of my pocket and nudges me to use it to capture how beautiful my campus looks, fresh out of its winter slumber....

Some of you might have seen the glorious snowscapes that I had put out in December last year....Now it's time for the Spring Collection....

 

I'm sure this is the sight that inspired Wordsworth two centuries back to write his wonderful poem Daffodils...

I wander'd lonely as a cloud 

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host, of golden daffodils; 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine 

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line 

Along the margin of a bay: 

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they 

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay, 

In such a jocund company: 

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie 

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye 

Which is the bliss of solitude; 

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Mama's Cookbooks

Psst...These days I'm in the throes of writing my term papers before the D-day for submission- April 19. But after every 250 words, my thoughts freeze. I hate academic blarney, for want of another word...And like a guilty child, I come back to my blog to write things I don't have to reference or attribute to someone else or write in a way that if it were to take the form of a person, it would be appear a stuck up frigid creature...Yuckkk..the thought revolts, so here I am creating my pet posts - which makes me feel infinitely better about going clack clack clack on my keyboard...

So like I was telling you I am so bored with my essay, I have turned in desperation to God's gift to poor students who don't have access to television in Britain...the BBC iplayer.. A friend who is the best chef amongst us is a fan of Raymond Blanc, the French chef who says 'Voila' more times than I can count coherently. So there I am at the stroke of midnight, watching him whip up a mouthwatering souffle and parfaits and lots of other yummy thingummies...Just looking at those dishes, I'm sure I have put on a stone or more...But do I care, we live vicariously don't we?

But that's not the point of the story I have to tell you at this moment...As I sit watching this show, I wonder if my kids will ever get a cookbook like my mom keeps...or if they will be given convenient internet links to such archived programmes on a flash drive or maybe if I'm more benevolent a collection of my favourite youtube videos burnt on a CD each so that the kids don't fight over my years of internet research.

They shall be born unprivileged...They won't have a cooking aficionado for their mother...

What they shall inherit is a mother who is a master of short cuts...Of quick fix recipes...who has little readily purchased boxes of everything that her mother would whip up from scratch ...who is happy to use tomato purees and ginger garlic paste and lemon juice from a bottle..They shall have a master forger, who scans recipes she sees or reads for anything and everything that can be substituted with things at hand or things that involve zero human effort..

Mama's cookbook was different...Written in her very prim and proper handwriting, in English and Malayalam, depending on where she sourced it from, neatly in a hardbound diary...She used to have a notebook earlier that grew tattered. My mother too was definitely not one of those, who knew when they were born that their life was dedicated to cooking...I remember long conversations late into the night about how she had never had to cook till much later into her marriage, as there were always others in the family to do that, while she went to work at a bank. Later, when she started travelling to parts of the world where Papa was posted, she used to tell me about how she would be quivering at the thought of Papa bringing his friends home for dinner. The simple soul that she is, for her, a guest means someone for whom a special effort needs to be taken, even if it is a family we are really informal with. So out would come the best crockery and serving ware and her cookbook. 

When I began to take an interest in cooking, purely academic, I would love leafing through Mama's handwritten, well thumbed stained pages searching for the recipes of the meat cutlets and chicken biryani that she makes. And like any proud child, I'd say no one cooks like my Mama...The best part of her cookbooks would be the Good and V Good she'd have jotted on the right side of the name of the dish if she has experimented with it....I'd sometimes thumb through her books to check how many had received such honorary mentions...Later on, when my secretarial skills improved vastly, I remember jotting down some good recipes for Amma as they were being shown on TV....But she always kept written copies of the recipes. 

I remember trying to make my own cook book very early when I began college. I thought every girl had to do that as a rite of growing up. But somewhere soon, I think the project was quickly abandoned. Today, I have a trusted few websites and the google search engine where I enter the ingredients that I suddenly feel like combining, and there it throws up miraculous permutations and combinations of what I can rustle up with them...

Suffice to say, I shall have no scrapbook of cooking exploits....I'm told I can ensure that no one goes hungry for lack of anything edible to eat...I shall take that as a compliment...My recipes are rarely conventional, so have instant names. And then are instantly forgotten too, the moment the last bite is done...Rarely is any recipe revisited - either due to distinct disinterest or because the ingredients used the first time around have been used up...

This post makes me want to put together a book of my quixotic recipes...but even then I'm sure I won't have the patience to write it by hand anymore...I have become so accustomed to the keyboard....My cookbook might be a printed one, with copies saved on my laptop in case I misplace the hard copy.....

Look at the lexicon, hard copies and soft copy, typed and double spaced, with appropriate pictures copy pasted from the internet....

So clinical, so calculated....The smell of love is missing...and Mama's handwriting...that personal touch that makes it a treasure to be bequeathed and cherished.....

Antique Hunting in Covent Garden!!

On my last trip to London, I had some time to kill. So I took off by foot to Covent Garden..

For those familiar with Mumbai, the Covent Garden Market is a beautiful, extremely well maintained version of the Crawford Market in VT. The structures look very similar...The Market layout is pretty much the same..The comparison unfortunately has to stop there...

This is an antique hunter's paradise...Some stuff is exorbitantly priced. I guess anything sells in the name of antiques....

Some others seemed to be having a cranky day...told me not to take pictures, I guess they realised I wasn't the kind to splurge the pounds...

The musicians in the open restaurant area were a delight to listen to....They make the atmosphere just so festive...

And there was just so much colour and tinsel and glitz to please my eye...

Coasters with the name of most traditional pubs in England...When I first landed here, I wondered why most of the pubs were named Hares and Hounds or The Wellington or weird ones like the Slug and the Lettuce ( Why would you want to drink at a pub named that??). In every nook and corner of England, you would find one of these. I realised later that these were the English way of doffing their hats to pubs older than their entire family history in their area.

These telephones, I have always had a fascination for them. The first telephone I remember at my father's house, was a big black one, even fatter than this, and it used to be such an effort to put your finger through the right hole and dial the number...If you managed to dial five numbers right, what a sense of achievement it gave!!

If I had had a dress on, I might have purchased a set of these to dress up for the evening to have a spot of tea with scones!!

The British know how to preserve their history...Guess they have been doing it right for a long long time....If you are in London and have some time on your hands, it's a delight to roam around this tiny market which has open air eateries and road side entertainment and a lot of old junk to rummage through...