OUT FOR A DUCK

The Copy-Kitten is having some sort of elaborate programme at school where she has to go all dressed up exactly like Donald Duck.

The teacher in charge of such superfluous entertainment called me and stuck a shiny photograph of Donald, with eyes closed and nose in the air (Donald’s, not the teacher’s), in my unwilling hands. “Make it at home,” she loftily said, “we don’t want cardboard cutouts,” (reading my mind), “You’d better make it with cotton-stuffing. IT MUST LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THE PHOTOGRAPH.” (Or else…)

Meekly I nodded, saving my indignation for later. I am poor even at darning and button-sewing, let alone such ambitious projects like home-sewing the iconic bad-tempered duck.

Donald’s bad temper was rubbing off on me. None of the shops which sold fancy-dress costumes on hire (I got the names off the Net) had anything near an exact replica. One shop (a “high-end” one) had a coming-apart-cardboard-mask you would really have to imagine hard to be DONALD, which they stuck on top of some ubiquitous Charlie Chaplin-type costume with a tailcoat. I wanted a nice stuck-up fluffy white ducktail, not a dirty black coat with a tail.

Wherever I searched, I got a duck (as in cricket, not cartoons).

Finally, when I attended a pre-programme meet organized by the teacher (which, I suspect was to catch hold of laggards like me and push us into getting the costumes done), I met a pair of parents who had brought along a Doremon who looked exactly like his namesake. A tailor, who mercifully happened to be quite close to my college, apparently specialized in such complicated costumes. You just had to give him the photo (and a rather obscene amount of money), and within two days he would give you a 3-D costume.

And so I rushed right out of the meeting into the shop of the tailor with the magic Walt Disney-esque scissors. And two days later, like a conjuror pulling rabbits out of a hat, he pulled out a Donald Duck costume in luxe velvet-with-sponge-stuffing, looking exactly like that da---ned photograph, with gloves, webbed-feet-footwear, mask, right down to the fluffy white ducktail!

Only snag is, the lookalike costume is tailormade…to fit some child three sizes larger than the Copy-Kitten.

So, as she waddles about like an overstuffed inebriated duck, I’ll have to bring out all the large child-safe pins in the house to keep Donald Duck on his feet. And keep my fingers crossed and hope that Donald a.k.a Copy-Kitten does not have a wardrobe malfunction on the stage.

And if anybody mentions how sweet cartoon characters are, especially Disney ones, especially a cantankerous yellow-beaked duck called Donald, I’ll shove an entire roasted Peking Duck down their throats…on second thoughts, down mine. Or maybe Duck with Orange Sauce…and chew all of it down really viciously. Quack! Quack! Quack!!!

KOLKATA: BACK TO THE FUTURE

We are back from a few weeks vacationing in Kolkata, where the more things change, the more they remain the same. Or seem to, at least.

Kolkata welcomed us with a host of new flyovers and a not-so-new 'aborodh' (obstruction) because of some political agitation when we all got stuck for three hours on these very flyovers and newly swanked-up roads. Red or green, whatever be the colour of West Bengal's political affliation, it seems that the roads are still stuck in the STOP-RED-LIGHT mode, whenever any leader worth his/her weight decides to sulk and scream.

During our stay we were caught in the midst of the GREAT AUTO DIVIDE - that is, the divide between the new-green-and-yellow autorickshaws that have switched to LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) and the old-black-and-yellow autorickshaws that have not. They are environment-unfriendly, and so, have been rudely ostracised by the Kolkata Police and pushed to fringe roads in areas like Haltu. But many people live there, too. Don't they need environment-friendly conveyance, or are they less important that the residents of posher places like Ballygunge and Jodhpur Park?

Any such argument unarguably made us hungry and during the vacation we had a lovely time feasting at many of our old Kolkata favourites like Peter Cat, Bedouin, Coffee House, and Kafulok at Tangra. Food to die for, at prices that do not take your breath away.

The more things change, the more they remain the same? Not such a bad thing, going by our drool-worthy food experiences at Kolkata.

BLOGGING FM - FREQUENCY MODULATED

I am visiting my blog after a long, long time.
The reason for the hiatus is WORK. Here goes the list:

• Two daughters - way too much to handle, at least for me. It is fun and frustrating and fulfilling, but it is very definitely WORK.
• Full-time job as teacher in a college - paper correction, tutorial checking, class lectures, and election-duty-whenever-there-are-elections.
• New part-time job as copywriter - now that I have to go twice a week, it is simply not leaving any free time for me. Although I am lovin' it, the deadlines, the thinking from the other point of view, the variety of products we work on...

Earlier, I used to blog about once a week, sometimes twice. I would feel restless and guilty if I did not post anything in a week. But blogging is my stressbuster, something that I love to do. So, why should I get hassled about not being able to blog?

Now, I have made peace with my inner compulsive blogger. Now, the frequency will lessen. It'll have to, if I have to manage two kids, two jobs, one spouse (as of yet) and one self (which needs some amount of sleep).

Maybe once a fortnight, or once a month. Maybe, whenever I feel like. Maybe, if and when I find time. Maybe...

HOW OFTEN DO YOU BLOG?

A LITTLE BIT OF BENGALI BY MY SIDE…

Living away from your hometown makes you nostalgic. You yearn for those old familiar favourites – the places you used to hang out (never mind the cribbing about the traffic and the toilets), the home-cooked food that you dissed but slurped over, the bookshops and the boutiques that came alive because of the shopowner you could chat so long with, the movie-watching and eating-out experiences which were always more about the adda, really. And, of course, the language – the familiar cadences and rhythms and syllables you had grown up with.

And so, in Mumbai, when I hear a snatch of Bengali on the streets, in the malls, inside some office, spoken by somebody on a cellphone calling up home a hundred miles away, a mother scolding a child, a wife lilting to her husband, two friends chatting about something…my heart gives an involuntary leap and my head turns to see who and my ears strain to catch a little bit of the conversation.

I love Mumbai – no two ways about that – but my soul still jumps up with a maybe-silly-kind-of-joy when I hear a bit of Bengali. And for a moment, I feel a strange-but-strong bond with some stranger-who-is-somehow-familiar.

Now it is Durga Pujo time, a time for food and festivity, and yes, a time when the stray bits of Bengali I sometimes catch in the breeze will merge and mingle in the Durga Pujo pandals dotting Mumbai. Bengalis praying at anjali, Bengalis greeting and goodbye-ing frenetically while pandal-hopping, Bengalis boasting self-importantly, Bengalis bickering good-naturedly, Bengalis bargaining at the food stalls, Bengalis laughing and bonding at Pujo-special addas.

Have a happy and sonorous Pujo.

NOW WE ARE SIX…

But only five of us turned up for this time’s Bloggers’ meet. At the sylvan settings of IIT, Mumbai. We welcomed our newest entrant who has expanded the Famous Five: Manju. And we missed the amiable and gentle Harekrishnaji, who, however, remembered and called us on the phone during our anecdote-swapping. catching-up-with-what-we-have-been-up-to, dissecting-common-blogfriends talkathon.

And then it was, as one of my daughters’ storybooks puts it, “talk, talk, talk, talk”. With some serious munching and lake-viewing and thoughful-and-interesting gift-giving and not-so-serious banyan-root-swinging in between.

The Internet, as we know, is all about links. Interestingly, at this meet, three of the bloggers (with a shared geography and culture) re-enacted this virtual phenomenon of linking by digging deep into their histories and came up with so many amazing links – people who they all know, common friends and acquaintances. The other two were fascinated witnesses to this linking phenomenon. And we realized that it really is a small world.

Would you not love to link up in reality with your blog-friends, too?

THE BALM OF BOOKS

Things have been rather downbeat lately.

The teachers’ strike has been called off, and we have resumed our classes, but bureaucracy has tied a thick red tape around our salaries and is refusing to release it anytime soon.

The forty days’ strike meant an enormous amount of backlog of syllabus-to-be-completed and tutorial-projects-to-be-corrected which now has to be taken up through hectic lung-busting lectures and tedious hours of red-pen-wielding.

And to top it all, all holidays have been cancelled as we have to ‘compensate’ for the strike period absenteeism. That is fair enough, but it does mean getting up early on holidays, which I absolutely abhor.

So, I definitely need a balm for my overworked brain and going-around-in-circles mind.

And for me, the best balm has always been BOOKS.

Books keep my head out of the water.
Books help me float in the mess of this world.
Books are a place I can go when everything else stresses me out.

Fo a change, this time, I put away my Crime Fiction and my Chick Lit (both are my fave escape-routes), and picked up some serious LITERATURE.

William Golding’s THE SPIRE. Toni Morrison’s TAR BABY.

Both Nobel Prize Winners. But so very different from each other. Golding, a white Brit male, very much in the centre of the world. Morrison, a black American woman, very much a marginalized entity. And they write about diverse worlds and different eras in these books.

But in their insight into and compassion about the human condition, in their moulding of language into a thing of beauty and awe, they are somehow similar.

Nothing uplifts me like good literature. Nothing makes me feel so wide-eyed and thankful and amazed. And I keep on adding to my list of great books.

WHICH BOOK/S LIFT YOU OUT OF THE MUDDLE F THIS WORLD?

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHEN YOU ARE ANSWERING THE PHONE?

I am in college, supervising an M.Com exam. The head-bent students are writing feverishly. In the pin-drop silence, a cellphone rings. Mine. Flushing with embarrassment, I pick it up.
“Hello?” (in a distressed whisper)
“HAA –LLO? MAA-A-A?” (high-pitch, full blast, sing song)
It’s the Copy-kitten, my younger daughter, calling to give me the momentous news that she has returned home from school. As I try to cut her off mid-flow because an examinee wants a supplementary sheet, she asks me:
“Bolo toh aami ki korchhi (can you tell me what am I doing)?”
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” (with gritted teeth, in a hissed-out whisper, and barely concealed impatience).
“Tomakey phone korchhi, sillybilly (I am calling you, sillybilly).”

You just can’t win with kids.