The Butterfly

I am but a butteryfly,
colorful, small and gay

Oh!!! Don't teach me to fly,in the straight way!!
I am destined to be this way,

to float on the spring
to go with the wind
to flutter on the flower in May
to live freely
and die in a day.

Children's song for Friday
(For kids like me too old to go to school and go to office instead)

There are poems about Monday blues
but there ought to be some bout fridays too

when I will go to office, in red and blue
don't bother much about coming home too

Tonight I will sleep like I never have to get up
And if you bug me much, I will just say "shut up!!"

Will watch movies perhaps three back to back
and get up late tomorrow to cook a real great snack
Then I will roll on my bed to sit back and relax

May be I will visit a zoo
or meet my friends just one or two
or just watch winne the pooh
or may be read a book or two

but there's also washing to be done
and cleaning wont be much fun

and these two days will be gone
like real short song
like the whoosh of the wind
or flower in the spring

Spotted!!!!!!!!!

New in the spotted series, after 'all types of water'!!

Painted on a bus just near hitech city

"Alpha ---- The flying boat"

huh?

The ugly doll

Among my toys was a doll
As ugly as she could be

She was taller than my pet giraffe
And she couldn’t bend her knee

While my toys could move and sing
She stood still in summer and spring.

So, I ripped her dress and punctured her face
Cried to my mom for a pretty face

Mom just smiled and said to me,
‘Though your doll can’t sit or sing’,
‘Didn’t you notice her deep brown eyes, How lovingly they blink?’

I cried and cried, but mom didn’t budge
And in fit of rage I grabbed my doll and threw her in sludge


Years have passed and time has gone,
I walked on the road
But the directions were wrong

I did sing but the song was wrong,
I cried in pain but voice was gone,
I called for you but you were long gone
I reached for my heart and the beating it lacked.
I looked into the mirror and an ugly face stared back

And though it couldn't smile or sing,
It had deep brown eyes that lovingly blinked.

The Perfect 'Batata Vada' Recipe.
(also known as 'Aloo Bonda' and sold as 'Vada Pav')

This is the way Maharashtrains make Vadas at home!!
These are simple, healthy and yummm..

Time to prepare 40 mins
Ingerdients:
The stuffing
Potatoes: 1kg
Green Chillies: 5-6
Garlic: 4-5 petals
Ginger: around 3/4th of the quantity of the garlic.
Mustard seeds: 1 teaspoon
Turmeric: 1 teaspoon
Oil: 2 teaspoons
Salt to taste
Coriander to garnish

Covering:
Besan (Gram flour)
Salt, red chilli powder, Water
Oil to fry

The recipe
1. Boil the potatoes in water.
2. Mash the potatoes in a container.
3. Make a paste of green chillies, ginger and garlic.
4. Heat the oil in a kadhai. Use very little of oil, we do not want the stuffing to be as oily as the covering.
5. Once the oil is heated, throw in the mustard seeds. They should pop and change their color to white.
6. See to it that the cooking is done on a low flame.
7. Now throw in the paste we had just prepared. Sautee it for sometime till the color begins to change.
8. Add turmeric to it and sautee it for some more time.
9. Add the mashed potatoes to this paste and cook for some more time.
10. Potaotes can be finely mashed or you may leave some lumps as preferred.
11. Keep mixing the ingredients as they cook. Add salt to taste and mix for atleast five minutes.
12. Taste the mixture and adjust the taste by adjusting the quantity of the chilly paste. I recommend, while preparing keep some paste and mashed potatoes aside so that they can be added to adjust the taste at this stage.
13. Add some chopped coriander and mix well again. The cooked stuffing should look light yellow in color, so keep the quantity of turmeric powder in control.

Covering:
1. When potatoes are getting boiled, mix besan and water.
2. Add red chilly powder, salt to taste. Mix well.
3. The consistency should be like whipped yogurt.

Final Step:
Make small balls out of the potato mixture we prepared above.
Dip them in the besan mix
Deep fry till golden brown.
Serve with pav, chutney or just salted fried green chillies.

Metrics:
1. Home made vadas are golden brown and not yellow as in the shops.
2. They do not taste like the ones in the shops. If rightly made they taste just divine.
3. While frying they do not suck in a lot of oil.

And finally they should look like the ones in the picture above.

The Grocery Shop

Its pretty late in the night and its drizzling. The air is colder than usual. I take a turn leaving the main road behind and walk towards the lane which leads to my home. I leave the honking of the cars and the glimmer of the city lights behind. The lane is illuminated too, but the street lights do not glimmer. They cast a dull orange light on the road reflected on its wet surface. The silence is disrupted by occasional bike or car passing by. Round the corner there is a small grocery shop.
Its like any other grocery shop in India. It feels like any other grocery shop. Almost all the iron is rusted and almost all the wood has been feeding termites for years now. Plastic sheets lie sprawled on the roof in a half hearted attempt to protect the shop from rain.
I approach the shop, to see a clutter of people. A sole shopkeeper is busy getting orders, calculating the change, sorting the things to be given out, keeping an eye on the goods displayed outside and keeping off the flies buzzing over jaggery all at the same time. He does not greet anyone, he does not ask if he may help us, in fact he doesn't even appear to be listening, but the moment someone asks for something it magically appears in his hands and is passed on to the customer.
I look around as I patiently wait for my turn. The shop seems to be warmer, cozier from inside. I have the sudden urge to step from the drizzle outside into the warm moist interiors. I look up to see the sign board of the shop. It has a name I never really bothered to know. The name is misspelt, but it hardly matters till the phonetics are correct. Below the name in a smaller font the words "general store" are written. I look at the myriad of the things on sale inside and think it is such an apt description.
I look closer into the shop and see that all the walls are lined with dusty wooden shelves. Goods on sale are stacked on them. At the first look it seems like utter chaos, the first thought probably will make anyone realise the pattern in this chaos. There is shelf for perishable items, one for toiletries, one for snacks, one for vegetables, one for grains, and so on. The sweets however lie in the glass jars displayed right in front. Its the most important part of the shop's decoration apart from the calenders that cover the cracks in the walls.

The goods do not look like being on a glamour display, like the stuff in the supermarket. The goods here seem to be waiting to be taken, to be put to use, to serve their purpose. The wooden shelves that hold them creek under their weight, but none has been broken.
A mouse scurries down on one of these shelves. No one notices it, no one would have cared about a mouse even if they would have noticed it. After all hygiene is not what we expect from the stores like these. The mouse disappears as quickly as it came into a small dark hole in the corner. As I stand there in the cold, I feel a bit jealous of the mouse getting into even cozier corner of the shop. I glance around the walls of the shop, the walls once whitewashed are now light brown in shade. There are several cobwebs that hang down the ceiling, like curtains of a stage. I do not see any spiders although.
The crowd around me ebbs away. I approach the shopkeeper and say, "four eggs and a Rin soap." I do not get a reply, not even a grunt. The shopkeeper is busy calculating someone's change while I place my order. But he next thing I know once he has returned the change is he is busy finding his way among the sacks lying on the floor to the shelf where soaps are stacked. As he hands over my stuff, he asks "Anything else?"..He doesn't bother to be polite neither he says thank you. I wonder why I liked the sound of that curt "Anything else?".
I say "no" attempting a smile and walk away. I wonder if I am nuts when I feel slight flicker of pride to be the owner of four eggs and Rin soap. I feel satisfied of having bought things form this shop. The shop is not branded or none of the goods that I bought are going to last long.
But I know these goods will complete my day tomorrow. I know that I would have contributed to a small part of the meal the shopkeeper will have that night. I know that a mouse will still have its cozy dark hole, I know the spiders will still have the walls to spin their webs. I know the flies will have their share of jaggery. I also know tomorrow there will be a small tuft of grass growing on the mound of wet soil collected on a corners of the shop or perhaps on the cracks of the wall. The shop is not just a dilapidated structure. Its a home to many lives and a world in itself.

In Conversation

(with my room mate)

Me and my room mate have a healthy communication between us, the sorts even couples would envy..Here are some pieces of conversations I had with her, which are worth a mention....umm lets call her MRM (my room mate) for convenience.

Scene I

We in process of setting up our house and are busy buying utensils in a shop, My room mate busy looking at two exactly similar pieces of steel container.....

MRM (to the shopkeeper): ये दो बर्तन तो एक जैसे है, फिर ये बीस का क्यों और ये तीस का क्यों ?

shopkeeper (to my room mate): मैडम क्वालिटी मैं फर्क है दोनों के इसीलिए

MRM (to the shopkeeper): तो फिर इससे भी घटिया क्वालिटी का कोई बर्तन दस रूपए मैं दे दीजिये

Me: HuH??????

Scene II

We are getting ready for the office. I come out of the bath and am busy doing other chores. My room mate, smelling something...

MRM (to me) : That smells good, looks like its your hair. is it the new shampoo you have got? What brand it is?

Me (to MRM) : Its Nyle, the orange one we saw at the store yesterday.

MRM (making a face): Oh that, I really hate that smell..

Me: HuH???

Scene III

Me and MRM are woken up by a call very early in the morning. Totally irritated we are both unable to go back to sleep.

MRM: Hey bugz!!!! lets get up and do some early morning exercise

Me: Yawnnn....what!!!!?? No way I need some more sleep..

Both of us try to go back to our early morning sleep, as I wonder that getting some exercise is probably a good idea.

Me (turning to MRM): You know what!!?, you are right, we should get some exercise done now that we are awake.

MRM (with really irritated look): Bugz!!!! पागल हो गई है ???!!! इतनी सुबह कौन exercise करता है

Me: HuH???

My first love poem

(If this doesn' suck nothing does)

Darling when we kiss
Darling when we kiss,

Its like a plunger on the sink

And it looks like between man and a monkey,

You are the only missing link

And when you hug me like a bear,

I will die of stink, I truly fear

And when you whisper sweet nothings in my ear,

I just wish, I couldn't hear

And Though you are kid at heart,

In the bed you are a 70 year old trying to be a brat

And when I cook and make u eat

you look like a constipated man on the toilet seat

But when u feed me with your hands

I feel like the penguin in the park

Honey even if you have money,

and try in vain to be funny

and care for me when my nose is runny

I wont go with you wether cloudy or sunny

And now you know,

when you popped the question with the ring,

I just said "I love you darling, but marraige ain't my thing'

The First Flight

It was a rainy day in June around 23 years ago. Monsoon was pretty healthy in Mumbai like it always used to be. Wet sparrows twittred on a branch of the tree just besides my window. The sky was so grey that I could hardly make out what time it was. The clouds seemed to have cast a comfortable blanket over the town as if they were gently telling us to go back to sleep. My parents like all the elders around of course had no clue what the clouds talked about. There was this rush in the living room, it was filled with sounds of people too busy to notice the fragnance of the wet soil or the beauty of the clouds lazily rolling down the mountain. It was a typical middle class morning rush. But that day was different. I had a feeling that it had something to do with me. I did not have to wonder for long, for my mom today was extremely happy to see me awake. Something did smell fishy. I was brushed, cleaned and dressed in a silly dress, I did not have the memory of forcing my parents to buy. There was a shirt with a lighter shade of chrome yellow with a grey pinafore. This wasn't the grey the sky was and I cannot remember if i liked it or not.

I do not remember the series of event that took place in the span of next two to three hours. The next thing I remember is the stronger fragnance of the wet soil. I was standing in a queue thinking and not really thinking, looking around the place. The breeze carried the fragnance of the soil towards me, it came from my school playground. There were other children of my size in the queue. (Oh! how I hated when people called me a child or a kid. I always thought I was a girl, child is a rather silly term.) Perhaps a lot of time passed while I was quitely absorbing the feeling of being in a new place. I didn't even realise that I was clutching my mum's hand till she tugged at it gently. She still had that happy look on her face. To be frank it was beginning to spook me out a little. She bend down and mumbled something. The only thing I could get from the conversation was that i would have to stay there for sometime. It was the first time I realised I was never away from my mom. I knew about schools and knew this would happen to me eventually like it happened to all the big boys and girls who played with us, but I did not quite realise that this would be the time. I always wanted to become a brave girl so I did not show off my anxiety. I attempted a smile and asked my mom to go. most of the parents were gone by this time.

I looked at the floor and I saw the footprint made by the rainy shoes she had worn. It was going away from me. I stared at it for a long time a very long time. The image of the footprint quickly fading away on the floor of my school is still etched in my memory like a fresh picture. I was too young then to think..I just didn't know enough words to articulate my thoughts even in my head. I don't even know if I can still articulate those long gone and not forgotten thoughts today. I remember trying to fight a tear which was slowly crossing the edges of my eye. That day I realised my mum might not always walk towards me as I had known her to. That day I realised that some journeys I will have to undergo alone. I felt like a warrior going on a very interesting battle, I felt like a grown up, I felt proud of not letting that hot tear touch my cheeks.

Most of all that day for the first time in my life I felt free... Like there was enough space in the world to spread my wings and fly.

23 years have passed, life had been a roller coaster ride. So many fresh memories, so many people, so many heartaches so much gained and much more lost, so much of pleasure and so much of self inflicted pain. I can no more relate my self to the brave child who at that age once could think of things that were not candies or toys. I cannot see my own face in the small girl who thought so much, who was felt so brave to have left her mother to accept the journey of her life, as a pure white bird in the cloudy sky. What I remember is that, once there was a little girl, who lived, who could think, who felt, who was ready to give life a chance to shape her into something beautiful....

Yes, there was a beautiful white bird which took its first flight 23 years ago and was lost forever in the grey clouds..