WHY WOMEN DRESS-UP

I was writing a kite-flying post for my other blog, Past Continuous, where I mentioned the manja - the sharp paste containing powdered glass that is coated onto kite-strings to give bite and edge to cut the strings of competing kites.
In Bengali, when a girl dresses up in all her finery, people (especially older male relations) often comment in jest, "khub manja merechhis toh!" (You've put on a lot of manja).
Presumably, it means that adornment (dress, make-up, et al) is like a weapon with which the woman arms herself (like the kite's weapon is the glass-edged string). If life is a battle of sexes, then it is only logical to step out armed with a suitable weapon.
For whom, though? To cut other kites, or females, out of the competition? And, is there an underlying assumption that women are like playthings in the hands of men, and they can pull us along like kites? Ahem, ahem!!
But the manja is a double-edged thing. It can cut other kite-strings...and also cut the palms of the inexpert string-puller. So, men beware!!! If you persist with making inoffensive but double-meaning comments to prettily-dressed members of the opposite gender, remember that your palms may get badly slashed, especially across the heartline.

IZZ ALL WELL?

I am not a film critic.

I am a teacher, with a decade's experience in dealing with students who just want to 'pass'. Rare is the student who loves the subject passionately, but when I do find such gems, the whole teaching-learning process gets transformed into a vital and uplifting exchange.

I was a student, who got 'good marks' in all subjects but always wanted to study 'only English Literature' since I was six-seven years old. I had to face a lot of flak when I abandoned science altogether after my I.C.S.E and chose a 'pure arts' option. At least, my Maa and Baba never questioned my choice. Thank God I was a girl, the pressure to conform is much more for boys (as in the Spouse's case - he spent two unhappy years studying science for his plus-two before coming back to his passion - Literature).

I am a mother, and I deeply, desperately want my daughters to study any subject they really really like and do some work that they enjoy. I am scared of the pressure to perform they will inevitably face and the comparisons that will challenge their individualities, and the race for money-car-club-jet-status that can so easily trip their free souls.

So, when I saw 3 Idiots, I kept feeling, "Yes! This is exactly how I feel. This is exactly what I always wanted to say about our quote-by-rote, madam-please-give-us-notes, madam-please-tell-us-the-IMP-questions, madam-will-this-help-me-to-get-35%, education system.

Thank you, Rajkumar Hirani, Aamir Khan and Vidhu Vinod Chopra, for showing us who the idiots really are.

SHOW ME THE WINTER

So, it's already mid-December here in Mumbai, and the shops are selling green tinsel Christmas trees and red Santa caps and rich dark plum cakes.

The colourful woollies newly-knitted by my mother are waiting eagerly in the cupboard. Where they are in the competitive company of a stack of other colourful woollies, all knitted by my mother down the years. Enough to warm the cockles of an army, if they felt any cold.

My elder daughter, Lil Cat, has taken out her monogrammed navy-blue school cardigan and has worn it to school for a couple of days, just because it is DECEMBER. Defeated by the clamminess and the sweatiness, she's keeping it off for now.

Her sister, the Copy Kitten, threw a tantrum and managed to get me to buy her a similar-but-smaller monogrammed school cardigan. Which is lying pristine, waiting to be inaugurated.

Our maid has gifted them two lovely bright batik scarves, and even these are hanging forlorn in the cupboard.

And the superpowers and the wannabe-superpowers and the movers and shakers have all hot-footed over to Copenhagen, interfacing and OD-ing on Global Warming and Carbon Footprints, and the Kyoto Protocol, some trying to slip in sly measures, some trying to pull a fast one, some trying to bully the weaker ones, all for their own short-term advantage. I mean, in the long term, it is like cutting off the branch on which we all are sitting, is it not?

And here in muggy Mumbai, we - all the small fry - are still waiting for winter to turn up.

COPY-KITTEN @ CINEMAS

The Copy-Kitten's first experience at the movies proved to be rather traumatic.
For me.
The movie was the tear-jerking TAARE ZAMEEN PAR, the moment was the heart-wrenching 'Maa' song when the little boy is about to be separated from his mother and admitted to the hostel. The Copy-Kitten, who was around two years, woke up from her sleep, sensed the tears in the air and decided to join in at full volume.
I missed most of the rest of the movie, pacing outside the auditorium with my daughter on one shoulder, wishing for a hostel.

Now that the Copy-Kitten is nearly four, I tried again. A few weeks back, we went to see the rom-com AJAB PREM KI GAZAB KAHANI, and the Copy-Kitten behaved impeccably. She sipped her soft-drink (do they spike it with sedatives? I am NOT complaining.), munched her pop-corn, fell asleep before the interval, and woke up at the end to ask, "Maa, Jenny aar Prem ki biye korechhey?" (Maa, did Jenny and Prem get married?). Although the question was asked in a voice loud enough for the rest of the audience to turn and stare at us, I cannot deny that she had arrived straight at the heart of the matter.

And today we watched PAA at the theatre, and again the Copy-Kitten enjoyed herself. Piping up questions in a Dolby-Surround Sound kind of voice and scattering popcorn under her seat and over the silently-suffering gentleman in front of her. But she cried when Auro died. Along with me, the spouse, my elder daughter, my maid, and the rest of the audience. I cannot deny that she has her heart in the right place.

MOTHER COURAGE

The past week everybody was busy about the first anniversary of the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai. While we remembered those hours which defy ordinary epithets, life went on - before, during, after.

This is about one such ordinary life. Almost every day, while going to college fairly early in the morning, I see a mother escorting her daughter, dressed in her blue-checked uniform, to the school bus. The daughter suffers from cerebral palsy and does not have much control over her limbs. Usually the mother half-pulls, half-carries her, but if they are running late, then the mother has to carry the daughter in her lap, cradling her lolling head on one shoulder, schoolbag slung on the other.

The mother is painfully thin and gaunt, the child is almost a teenager. It is quite a long walk from their chawl (slum) to the Highway, where the bus for that special school comes. I have never seen her lose her temper, even when she is half-running to catch the bus, even when the child is throwing a tantrum.

A daily walk of unsung courage that humbles me every time I witness it.

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.