the camels welcome the year of the horse!

and so the year ends and a new one begins. or will soon. the year may have gone by quickly but when it is punctuated by unexpected black swan situations, we tend to think that it suddenly developed the consistency of molasses! we shall not regret the year that went by. the year to come is as yet an unknown and we have learnt the hard way not to forecast what will be.

but there were bright spots too. we shall not comment on the world as we usually leave it to its own devices. and to the media. but our numbers improved dramatically, and the challenge is on to maintain or lower further! we celebrated 45 years of bachelor status and managed to keep the tonnage in check. well it didn't increase...! silver anniversaries were celebrated, a new anniversary situation was kicked off and wee tots gave us all joy and faith in the future!

given that we try to be optimistic we shall hope that the year to come is full of bonhomie and cheer. we expect it to be a good wine year and shall continue our explorations in that domain. and we shall spend time and cranial effort to plan better this year. for the unexpected, if expected, stops being unexpected! more blogging, less tonnage, more engagement and less solitude. less badvertising and more selectivity. and we shall try to abide by what winston said:

bonne année all!

Happy birthday to the guv'nor!

We raise our hat to our father Vinayak Baxi MBE (Member of the Baxi Empire) on his birthday! An absolute privilege to be your offspring (though we shall never be able to match your felicity with crosswords!) and we hope this day is full of joy. Thank you for the wisdom, counsel and a house full of books! Tally ho and lots of love 

goofing off [aka eid mubarak!]

the last three days have been very zen-like! especially since we rejoined our reading library and the pretty lass behind the counter separated us from 200 camels with a charming smile and some strategic corporeal display! but we now have stuff to read and pass the time. not the usual high-brow stuff but material that entertains!

this was interspersed with much needed sleep periods. necessary and essential in today's stressed times, to recharge batteries [that old saw!] and so on. we are amazed at our ability to sleep at the drop of a pillow. truly.

then of course there was the degustation. regular food intake is important for sound sleep and we adhered to tried and tested principles to aid digestion.

all this because 'twas eid here and we had a 3-day holiday. bad time to be a goat but otherwise quite bracing! and now the weekend is nigh so we shall do more of the same!

a burnt roti and memories of a gurkha

tonight's dinner - dal chawal and a roti - took me back 30 years to my first meal with a fine body of men: the 3/11 Gurkha Rifles.

i was a mere beardless youth at the time with pretensions of serving the country. and the gurkha regiment seemed to be the best place from which to do so.

i distinctly remember grumbling about the quality of the meal - the 1st day of a training camp under the benign gaze of a [surprisingly for a gurkha] 6 ft tall subedar - bhim bahadur chhetri. known as BBC behind his back [never in front of him for he had a habit of pulling out his kukhri and running his thumb along the leading edge with a rather menacing glint in his eyes]. he had seen combat in 1971 so a burnt roti was a mere bagatelle for him. besides he was the mess chief so we couldn't mess with him. BBC was the man responsible for the few times i almost stopped eating. but he had a fund of stories and late at night when i was part of the quarterguard for some misdeameanour or the other and he was suitably primed with rum he told us of gurkha traditions, of battles inner and real, won and lost. but for all his story telling he was a terror on the field and struck the fear of god in us ungodly youth.

move forward 17 years and i was in darjeeling. i went to ghoom loop to pay homage at the gurkha war memorial and came across a man on a wheelchair who looked strangely familiar. i did the homage thing and was walking out when the man in the wheelchair called out "baxi". in a voice that was disconcertingly familiar, loud and authoritative. the shoulders straightened automatically and i turned back. straight to a dusty field near deolali. it was BBC. but a BBC who seemed to have shrunk. was this the same BBC who had kept me up for 3 nights for not polishing my boots? i walked up to the wheelchair and knelt besides the man who had demolished a bunker single handedly in1971. took his hand and felt his thumb. serrated and full of the power of a gurkha. he had retired and returned to his home. he still remembered my grumblings about those meals in that dusty field near deolali. and i was grateful that of all the men he had commanded or trained he remembered me. all because of a burnt roti.

death can be a breath-taking experience...

i do not normally write about the dark side. however recent developments have led me to ponder on the suddenness with which death visits!

one moment life is going on as usual, the world is a pleasant place and all is well. the next moment everything has changed. new status labels are in place. a wife has become a "widow", children are "orphans", in-laws are no more parents-in-law and the person becomes a past tense!

the process of death begins at birth and we are all geared to the eventuality in some way or the other. but it is the suddenness of the event that leaves me wondering "why". coping with such suddenness is not easy. nor does it happen overnight - to me the coping process is a lifelong process! avoiding the voids, filling the emptiness and erasure [ok, fading] of a person from our collective memories is perhaps part of the process but does it work?

longevity is something that we all look forward to and hope to achieve. but we have not yet developed the ability to look at the possibility of death squarely in the face and still live life on our terms, not overshadowed by the worry and fear of one day not being there!

take the long way home

with apologies to supertramp...we like to believe that we generally have the placid outlook of a monk but 4 days at home after 18 months is NOT enough!! and when the 4 days are granted 3 hours before departure the matter turns grey enough to be a human rights issue!

be that as it may we were home last week and gladdened some hearts [we hope]. the parentage of course took the whole whizz-by in their stride - in fact they even asked us if we wanted to get a bride while we were around - while 3-decade old friends refused to believe till we landed up in front of them. the siblings were busy but managed to make the come over for a wee and for that we are grateful.

home food, warmth of home, the times of india with the first cup of the day. simple pleasures. worth more than many treasures. for once we did not look forward to returning to the sands.

the grandmother of all grandmothers!

today we celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of my nanima [maternal grandmom]. to me she was always "batiben". and she could make maggie thatcher look rusted!

i was perhaps more fortunate than her other grandchildren in that i grew up round the corner from her massive house [where my mother and aunts grew up]. so a daily round to check on her and on her kitchen was the norm. her kitchen was of especial importance to a growing lad like me as she would always have something or the other sizzling. her fondness for sprinkling liberal handfuls of red chillies in her food was something that literally and figuratively afire! mondays were important for thats when she made "sabudana vada". she sure knew how to speak to a guy's heart! my nana was sure a lucky guy!

i sadly did not know my dadi [paternal grandmom] too well as she passed on when i was just 10. so batiben was to me the epitome of all things "grandmother" - the love, affection, care, occasional raised voice [she could be heard down the street] and general being around for all the sundry dilemmas that a lad could have. some of my fondest memories are of sitting on her swing and chatting away with her. this was a lady who had a string of stories to tell [i have a photo of her somewhere on a beach in france way back in the 50s- perhaps thats how the french bug hit me?]. she was not given much to drama and emotion - stoicism was built into her. but when i went to france she came home and wept. and i could have just cancelled the whole thing and gone over to her place to check out the kitchen.

ah i could go on and on. but the best memories are always savoured in privacy. she passed away in typical style: no fuss, brave till the end. and i will always regret that i was not with her in her last moments.

batiben, you live on in our hearts. thank you for all the grace and wisdom and fun! thank you also for your progeny - my mother and my aunts [fine women all]. and today is monday so i hope that that sabudana wadas are sizzling up there :) happy birthday!

uncorking champagne: art or science??

came across this slightly dated but still relevant article from the telegraph:

with the festive season going on people have lots of reasons to pop that bottle of bubbly and now scientists at Coventry University have developed a mathematical formula which enables people to uncork the bottle without wasting even a single drop of champagne.

The formula, which has been named "Smith's Law" after its founder, Dr. Steve Smith, is P = T / 4.5 + 1, where P stands for pressure and T indicates the temperature.

It is based on the well-known fact that the pressure in a typical bottle of champagne at room temperature is equivalent to the pressure of a double - decker bus tyre.

As per the formula to stop the cork from flying off, the temperature of the liquid should be between 5C and 7C, which means that the pressure will be 2 to 2.5 atmospheres, a third lower than when the bottle is at room temperature.

The researcher says that keeping the temperature right is the most important thing as if you get the temperature right, the pressure will be right and you will be able to enjoy the champagne at its best.

we get confused by so many numbers. for us the hold and twist method of uncorking has always worked - not for us the "pop" which sounds quite vulgaire. we prefer the soft, gentle sigh of the music being released and the golden drops staying in the bottle rather than being sprayed all over the folks gathered for a fluteworth of the liquid!

a tale of two cities

two crimes against women - one in india and one in pakistan - are poised to be  a tipping point in the way women are treated in these countries. both malala in pakistan and the unnamed one in india [we have some rather quaint rape laws that prevent naming of rape victims] have engaged public opinion like no other incident involving women. malala is likely to be nominated for the nobel peace prize. the unnamed one has got her peace, having lost her battle for life.

both cases have reinforced the inherent "unmanliness" of man - malala's case because one cannot imagine a frail, 15-year old being a threat to large, bearded, machine-gun wielding gentlemen [who probably smell], and the unnamed one because how "manly" can 6 men be against a puny 21-year old girl?

two cities, mingora in the swat valley and new delhi, could just turn out to be the fulcrums of women's fight for justice, emancipation from "manly behaviour" and access to simple and basic freedoms: the freedom to learn, the freedom to be happy, the freedom to live.