Wednesday, September 17, 2008
...Patchwork...
It's not Kafka, Wordsworth or Ghazali who's inspiring me these days. It's Patchwork Pottery.
Of course, like my pen, my needle is that of an amateur.
Here's something I made for my grandmother's morning tea. She likes it so much, they've reserved this tea cozy (and the tea pot) as an item on display and not to be used. I don't know if I should be happy about that.
Here's something I made from the Al-Karam fabrics.
And here's my favorite... something I made for my sister.
Of course, like my pen, my needle is that of an amateur.
Here's something I made for my grandmother's morning tea. She likes it so much, they've reserved this tea cozy (and the tea pot) as an item on display and not to be used. I don't know if I should be happy about that.
Here's something I made from the Al-Karam fabrics.
And here's my favorite... something I made for my sister.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
... Kicking Needle...
While my pen seems to be reposing somewhere, my needle wants to come to life. Fabric shopping, unearthing my grandmother's sewing machine (exactly as old as I am, she apparently bought it two days before I was born), exploring the over-priced and boring lace stores of the capital, I am doing what I always wanted to do with my free time (well, other than writing another novel): CRAFTS:
I wasn't too thrilled with these Al Karam nursery prints:
So, I went out and got more, that made sense.
I wasn't too thrilled with these Al Karam nursery prints:
So, I went out and got more, that made sense.
And the rest is still a mystery ...
Friday, April 25, 2008
Relax?
The concepts of wait and faith are incongruous, like an oxymoron that somehow has to coexist in nature. I can deal with that, by struggling or pretending. What I cannot deal with anymore is the casual, almost cruel adage: “If you just relax, it will happen.”
For years, I tried to find solace in that.
All I had to do was relax, and it will happen, whatever I want? Sounds unfair but not impossible. But these wise words have something behind them, a simplicity you find in religious scruples too, that makes them more adhere-able than man-made, aureate philosophies.
This event in life has made me question that relax-and-it-will-happen sermon. If I relax, it may never happen. If I don’t relax, it may still never happen. Now, I feel violated and humiliated when someone asks me to relax. If I could go into the future and see the outcome of my struggle, my suffering, I may consider relaxing. At the moment, that luxury is not available to me and so, I choose not to relax.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
... Lasagna in the microwave...
I know, I know... it doesn't turn out anything close to what a real lasagna, baked in a conventional oven tastes like. But when you're in a situation where all you have is a microwave, not even a stove, can you get lasagna?
I sure did. It doesn't involve white sauce, which makes it a little healthier too.
This blog is NOT an online cookbook, but I am going to cut myself some slack this time around.
So...
Ingredients:
Serves 2-3
Serves 2-3
Uncooked Lasagna : 200 g
Water: 4 glasses
Salt: 1/2 tsp
Oil: 1/2 tsp
K&N chicken tikka chunks: smallest pack
Spaghetti sauce: Use sparingly
Cheese slices (mozzarella): 5-6
Cheese slices (cheddar): 5-6
Water: 4 glasses
Salt: 1/2 tsp
Oil: 1/2 tsp
K&N chicken tikka chunks: smallest pack
Spaghetti sauce: Use sparingly
Cheese slices (mozzarella): 5-6
Cheese slices (cheddar): 5-6
What to do:
- Fill the LARGEST bowl you have with water, enough to fit 3-4 glasses of water. Make sure water doesn't spill over.
- Add salt and oil.
- Microwave for 15 minutes, or until you can see the water boiling.
- Add lasagna strips. Break them in half if they won't fit.
- Microwave for 15-18 minutes.
- Drain lasagna and wash under cold, running water. Leave to drain.
- Spread K&N's chicken chunks out on a plate.
- Microwave for 3-4 minutes, on the defrost mode.
- Layer a deep Pyrex pan with lasagna strips (3-4).
- Spread spaghetti sauce on top.
- Break chunks into crumbs and sprinkle.
- Continue layering like this.
- Top with Lasagna strips and cheese slices, cut into strips too.
- Sprinkle ground black pepper/ground red pepper/paprika/oregano (optional)
- Microwave for 4 minutes... and you have it!
And yes, these are original images.
Monday, January 14, 2008
... It is 4:05 pm...
It is 4:05 p.m.: There are men of all ages, walking towards their local mosque, discussing events of the day, politics, inflation, or illnesses. The prayer begins and there is that usual scuttling of people as they make lines to join other worshippers. All of this is normal, of course. and everyone is functioning mechanically, in a fashion we are used to in our automated times.
At 4:07 p.m., all is not normal inside the building. A spine-tearing noise emanates from inside the mosque, turning human lives into a mass of rubble, limbs and cries. Half an hour later, this becomes the breaking news item on television. Location, casualties, sights and sounds surrounding the event are all taken care of by reporters. The presentation on television ends with that clichéd comment: “According to the local police, this is the sixth suicide bombing in our city since…”
Another day, another city: a five-star hotel expecting foreign visitors makes the headline. The alleged suicide bomber only manages to kill himself and one guard. The government vows to identify those responsible for this “heinous act”.
Yet another day, another city: there is heaviness in two homes that were strangers to each other until one explosion and two deaths joined them in an individual mourning. One belongs to an innocent passerby, and the other to a suicide bomber, a victim of indoctrination. And lets remember, all of this is happening in a city that has not seen war in the last thirty years.
This is nothing but a few very common myriads of human reduction. Not only is this not brand new information for you, these are anecdotes we have exhausted our nervous systems over to the point that we don’t feel inclined to ask a highly fundamental question: who did this and why?
We are breathing this very second in a modernized, restructured amphitheatre, where an unknown master of puppets decides who will be the audience, and who will be the prey in the cage. Far-fetched as it may sound, each one of us is vulnerable enough to play either role.
We are breathing this very second in a modernized, restructured amphitheatre, where an unknown master of puppets decides who will be the audience, and who will be the prey in the cage. Far-fetched as it may sound, each one of us is vulnerable enough to play either role.
I suppose I must love this country, but it is a country where the term ‘enemy’ has become vague and fluid because of stratification of beliefs and confusion of loyalties. For some of us, the enemy is ruling the country; for another, the enemy is a foreign ideology; for yet another, the enemy is anyone who has more food on his table than him. Provided with the right environment, the right propaganda and tools of psychological influence and persuasion, any of these people will ripen to become carriers of grenades, and the headline of the newspaper you will hold tomorrow morning, with your cup of tea.
Pardon me for carving out such a simplistic view of things that are beyond normalcy and sanity but as we stand in the line of fire, it is imperative to review our own roles as enablers of this hysteria of deaths.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Monday, January 07, 2008
... Worth of Metal...
Inspired by a true story.
.
.
.
.
You will not find any of them speaking about his underworld life with such hushed whispers as long as he is breathing. But just wait till he dies and those whispers will reach your ears: the whispers you hear when one aspect of a person’s life, however dormant it was during his breathing hours, is casually associated with the end of his time. Those whispers, that is all you’ll hear about him afterwards. It is as if all that remains of him is his name, that one aspect and then, of course, his death. So he smoked? Hence the fatal cancer. So she wasn’t careful with fire? Hence the burn to death. So he rode a motorbike?
But that is the thing.
He did not just ride a motorbike. He approached that machine with deference, learnt to ride it with devotion and gradually rose to make it his hinds, his wings, his slave. He lived through it and to whatever extent poetic aesthetics justify his death through that motorbike, deaths are seldom clean or quiet. With a faded, red baseball cap on his head and nineteen breezy years on his back, he died early morning or so was estimated by the surgeon since his body was discovered later that night, next to a broken pavement, and a broken motorbike.
Years after his death, friends and relatives still talk about that one aspect of his life that led to his death, but not in front of his mother. Mothers seem to have a biological resolve to view their offspring in a bubble not shared by others.
Especially mothers of teen-aged offspring.
Or a teen-aged, dead offspring.
Her bubble remains filled with myriads, like a rainbow, from his first step, multiple spankings, never-ending flu, to matters no writer can fathom to know. The son’s motorbike does not figure so distinctly in her bubble, at least not as graphically as it does for others.
Thirteen years after his last morning, his mother visited a marketplace, far from the place her son was born at, grew up at, or disappeared from. The boy behind the counter recognized her. Unlike others who still condemnably discuss that one aspect in whispers, this boy remembered him with half-forgotten, half-remembered awe. With that unguarded awe, he speaks to her.
This boy mentions some of the things from her bubble, what an unusual sense of humor her son had, how sensitive he was about his family, how good he was with numbers. And how good he was the motorbike. It is not like she had never heard anyone say that, but certainly not with this candidness. A secret, unknowable nudge inside her forces her to probe a little more.
With the motion of his hand, and that age-old fascination, the boy says, “he could slide with his bike under a moving trailer and come out.”
No one had ever told her that.
That one aspect.
That one piece of information, one that would make her bubble swell and pant, unable to break or contain. All the years she spent in an unspeakable loathing of an imagined person who she believed had killed her son suddenly forms into interchangeable specters, from the unrecognizable image of her son at this death, to hazy images of his black motorbike.
Human beings with metal inside meet sensational endings, perhaps that is why there is metal there to begin with. Some clatter, movement, some damage. The rest of the creation is programmed to watch and remember them with a secret admiration, an element of fear and overt condemnation.
But these philosophies can never be a part of her bubble, a re-opened, wound. The only metal she could come to seeing, of his, would be the clamor of the metal around him that slid him to his last breath.
She is alive. Her bubble is kicking.
That one aspect resonates in there.
That one aspect.
I wish I could celebrate something else about that life.
You will not find any of them speaking about his underworld life with such hushed whispers as long as he is breathing. But just wait till he dies and those whispers will reach your ears: the whispers you hear when one aspect of a person’s life, however dormant it was during his breathing hours, is casually associated with the end of his time. Those whispers, that is all you’ll hear about him afterwards. It is as if all that remains of him is his name, that one aspect and then, of course, his death. So he smoked? Hence the fatal cancer. So she wasn’t careful with fire? Hence the burn to death. So he rode a motorbike?
But that is the thing.
He did not just ride a motorbike. He approached that machine with deference, learnt to ride it with devotion and gradually rose to make it his hinds, his wings, his slave. He lived through it and to whatever extent poetic aesthetics justify his death through that motorbike, deaths are seldom clean or quiet. With a faded, red baseball cap on his head and nineteen breezy years on his back, he died early morning or so was estimated by the surgeon since his body was discovered later that night, next to a broken pavement, and a broken motorbike.
Years after his death, friends and relatives still talk about that one aspect of his life that led to his death, but not in front of his mother. Mothers seem to have a biological resolve to view their offspring in a bubble not shared by others.
Especially mothers of teen-aged offspring.
Or a teen-aged, dead offspring.
Her bubble remains filled with myriads, like a rainbow, from his first step, multiple spankings, never-ending flu, to matters no writer can fathom to know. The son’s motorbike does not figure so distinctly in her bubble, at least not as graphically as it does for others.
Thirteen years after his last morning, his mother visited a marketplace, far from the place her son was born at, grew up at, or disappeared from. The boy behind the counter recognized her. Unlike others who still condemnably discuss that one aspect in whispers, this boy remembered him with half-forgotten, half-remembered awe. With that unguarded awe, he speaks to her.
This boy mentions some of the things from her bubble, what an unusual sense of humor her son had, how sensitive he was about his family, how good he was with numbers. And how good he was the motorbike. It is not like she had never heard anyone say that, but certainly not with this candidness. A secret, unknowable nudge inside her forces her to probe a little more.
With the motion of his hand, and that age-old fascination, the boy says, “he could slide with his bike under a moving trailer and come out.”
No one had ever told her that.
That one aspect.
That one piece of information, one that would make her bubble swell and pant, unable to break or contain. All the years she spent in an unspeakable loathing of an imagined person who she believed had killed her son suddenly forms into interchangeable specters, from the unrecognizable image of her son at this death, to hazy images of his black motorbike.
Human beings with metal inside meet sensational endings, perhaps that is why there is metal there to begin with. Some clatter, movement, some damage. The rest of the creation is programmed to watch and remember them with a secret admiration, an element of fear and overt condemnation.
But these philosophies can never be a part of her bubble, a re-opened, wound. The only metal she could come to seeing, of his, would be the clamor of the metal around him that slid him to his last breath.
She is alive. Her bubble is kicking.
That one aspect resonates in there.
That one aspect.
I wish I could celebrate something else about that life.
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