Relishing kalla katta ice-gola dripping with tangy memories

Today for the second time in February I had kalla katta ice-gola. I don't know how to translate the name 'kalla katta ice-gola' but roughly ice-gola refers to crushed ice and kalla katta is the flavour into which the crushed ice is dipped. The word 'kalla' in Hindi is the colour black and 'katta' refers to the sour taste. Now, to the post.

Kalla katta is an integral part of my formative years. A man selling ice-golas would be stationed outside our colony and every time I came home from school, I would want to buy some ice-golas but was always refused by my mother. She felt that the water used for making the ice was not hygienic. Of course, all mothers feel that way and we children felt that hygiene or not, ice-golas were tasty and delicious. Every time we passed by the man selling those golas, our mouths would water and immediately we would crave for one or two coloured golas. By the time the man crushed the ice using a dilapidated machine and moulded the crushed ice, we would get impatient and while he fizzed out coloured syrup from tall bottles on to the ice, we would stretch out our hands, one hand with the money and the other for the ice gola! One ice-gola cost about 10 paise. Though it seems a paltry amount today, those days it was some money.

Ice-golas remained frozen in my memory and I never did think that I would be able to taste the same ice-gola all over again. I did. Our Institute conducts festivals during which many food stalls are put up and one such stall was BOMBAY ICE-GOLA. Initially I was wondering whether I should give it a try. Usually when a memory is intact and perfect, one doesn't want to distort it by revisiting the same and get disappointed. Right? Ah, I just wanted that ice-gola and the same flavour that I knew back then -- Kalla katta. The 10 paise ice gola was 30 rupees now! Any price to revisit memories, right. Apprehensively, I muttered, "Kalla katta" and immediately the man started his antics of preparing the ice-gola. The moment I tasted the gola, I became the Susan who was five years old and relished her ice-golas. I sucked memories and also split some nostalgia on my clothes in the process. I forced my husband also to buy one for himself. He did. He preferred to get an elite flavour - pista badam and strawberry flavoured ice-gola. Somehow his ice-gola did not appeal to me. It was too synthetic and modern unlike the raw and tangy kalla katta. Both of us sucked our golas all the way from the stall to our house.

Well, did I tell you my tongue and lips were a tinge of blackish pink after having finished the ice-gola? For some time I was twenty odd years younger, looking up the mirror now and then and happy that the colour was still there - natural lipstick, we used to say.

Memories are beautiful especially food ones. After all in memories calories and health don't matter, only memories matter.

What are your favourite food memories? Tell me . . .

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Baring it all

Yesterday I sat up and read five parts of intimate chronicles of a blogger whose blog I follow intermittently. As she bared her soul and life, I was pulled into the vortex of her life. She is a brilliant writer and I couldn't but help feel immense pain reading what she had written. For a long time, the contents of her posts continued to colour my thinking and I wept quite freely for her, for the world, for pain, for everything that seemed unfair. You know how it is when you start crying. You remember every single thing that made you cry and the tears become copious almost as if you're crying for everything that has passed and everything that is to come. One question that kept arising as I was crying was, "Why?" I know that the question seems quite absurd and meaningless but still my heart pained for that promising young woman who is an epitome of everything postmodern and intelligent.

An afterthought that niggled me after the entire reading-the-posts-and-crying was, "How did she bare it all?" "How on earth did she have the courage to record her life in a public domain?" Perhaps she felt the aching need to record her experience as a repository. Her words still ring in my head and if I start to think about her powerful narrative, I would start pouring bucketful of tears. I refrain to think that the pain she wrote about is something real and visceral, not a story of some distant character with whom one can share a dispassionate relationship that is removed from reality; A pain that one can read about and forget knowing that it is the fanciful creative process of someone who is a story-teller. It is another thing that people do shed tears for fictional characters. Even I do. I did it quite occasionally then and very frequently now. I guess as you grow older you are prone to cry a lot. I recollect an incident from my research days. When I was living with transgenders for purpose of my research, I once accompanied them (Pandiammal, Mahalakshmi and Shailaja) to a funeral where they were called to mourn professionally. Professional mourning was one of their means of earning money. The way Pandiammal cried and beat her chest completely baffled me. After the entire ceremony was over, I asked her, "How did you cry so well?" To which she replied, "When I cry, I think of all that we have undergone . . . I think of my mother . . . my family . . . my village and my home. By becoming a transgender, I have lost everything - my name, my family . . . That's what makes me cry like this." True that. When we cry, we don't cry for something that just happened, we have a cluster of incidents that come to our mind. We don't cry for that particular character in the film, we cry for someone whom we know in the same situation, we cry for us remembering ourselves in that same situation. Tears are projections of our collective memories.

When I read that blogger's long rendering of her life and health, I cried for everyone who suffered ill health, for the talents that remain dormant because of the illness, of the dreams that have to be truncated, of the dependence that causes pain to the free-spirit and most of all I also cried because I knew many like her. I felt helpless that I couldn't do anything to ease her pain.

I didn't comment on any of her posts. What could I have possibly written, "Get well soon" or "I'll pray for you" or "I wish that a miracle happens."

She is a stranger to me but pain isn't strange. Any human capable of compassion and empathy can feel pain and that is what I felt and cried for.

I really wish that her ailments leave her and that she continues in her path of life renewed and rejenuvated and write sassy stuff without any pain.

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The uncommon truth about common sense!

While one may complain about common sense being uncommon (For the ignorant, this is a saying by Voltaire!) Well, everyone I have known or presently know has uttered something about common sense in atleast one of their conversations with me. Needless to say, I commonly use the term ‘common sense’ in my daily interaction with my spouse (mainly). Casually glancing through the entry ‘common sense’ in Key Concepts in Social and Cultural Anthropology by Nigel Rapportand Joanna Overing, I discovered that common sense is not something that is done in an impulse. For example, if someone picks up the paper lying on the floor and throws the same into a dustbin then she is not acting with an impulse to keep the surrounding clean and tidy; rather the individual is responding to the situation through a certain conditioning that has been processed within her. Blame it on the genes! To a causal onlooker it might seem that the individual is responding to A particular situation of filth and that common sense is used to clean that filth. No. The person has been conditioned and moulded by her social and cultural setup. Did I get your attention? Well, of course, I just did. So, if a person just passed by the same paper without even giving a second look and acting as if that’s pretty normal, then he is acting the way his social conditions force him to.

It is interesting to connect an individual’s social and cultural setup to commonsense. If Indians talk loudly and gesticulate a lot, blame it on their cultural setup. How can someone from the east behave like one from the west? Next time you want to utter the sentence, “ Doesn't she have any common sense?” you are actually referring to the entire genealogy of a person – father, mother, grandfather, cousin, et al. This baffled me as I always assumed that common sense is an impulse that arises when there is a particular situation. The book also says how contexts many vary but there are certain things that are common to all cultures – certain ethics and codes of conduct. But when I say culture, I am also aware that in India there are many cultures which criss-cross the country but inspite of the diversity, when one steps outside the country one has to go by the tag 'Indian' which is a very cumbersome responsibility to bear. My friend Charan has recently written a post on that Indianism or Indianisms rather which you can read here.

The background for common sense is developed and created right for the time one is a baby. Everyday significantly adds up the existing sets of constructs and actions. While examples of common sense appear quite natural and new, it is nevertheless an amalgamation of the lived, observed and unconscious experience of the mind.

Well, did you say that she doesn't have the common sense to switch off the lights when she leaves a room – blame her cultural background!

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Hurry. Grab. Avail. Discount.

The lingo of advertising has always fascinated me. Even trash can be marketed so very well by using magic words that enchant and attract the customer. More than the usual ads, the discount and sale time ads always thrill me. I receive a couple of newsletters from online shops and almost every time the words 'discount, grab, avail and hurry' are used quite often and unsparingly. No matter how many times one sees those words, they never fail to make you stop for one second and make you think of the wonderful products that might be yours. I was just wondering about those single words and how they might be used in our life.

Hurry

You have only one life. Hurry with positive thoughts and inspiring words. Don't stop. Hurry to make your life filled with goodness and compassion.

Grab

Grab any opportunity that can make you come alive. Life gives you many options - art, walks, stars, laughter, working with your hands and many such.

Avail

Avail every possibility to be of service to others. Smile and make people around you smile.

Discount

This one is tricky. Let me see. Keep away from everything/every one who try to discount your real value.

So, hurry. grab. avail. and discount.

What do you think? You can add your own suggestions to the words in the comments' section :)

The Migrant Syndrome

The word ‘migrant’ mostly refers to a state where an individual is away from home for purpose of work and employment. Sometimes there are other border issues, which is not my focus of attention in this post. Thus a migrant is in a state of ‘unhome’ where he/she is away from the comfort and familiarity of the home and hearth. Of late, the word ‘migrant’ has been sporadically colouring newspapers and news in general. If an individual is away from his/her home does it also mean that there is a greater sense of recklessness and wanton abandon? We have also heard of the clichéd phrase, “home away from home” and so I would presume that the migrant leaves his/her natal home in search of greener pastures and adopts the new place as his/her home. When one adopts the new city/town as his/her home, then he/she is liable to behave in the new place as he/she would do in his/her natal or native place. But in many cases this does not seem to be the norm.

The new place is treated with callousness and a sense of foreign which cannot be like one’s home or even nearer to it. There comes a sense of freedom and independence which borders on the promiscuous and the unethical. Probably this is one reason why the migrants are seen with a certain disdain by some political parties. This attitude of the migrant also came about in many episodes in the recent past. I would like to highlight some incidents in Goa where the word ‘migrant’ has raised its ugly hood quite often in the recent past. There have been several crimes (read rape, molestation, kidnapping, murder) where the main suspects are perceived to be migrants who commit a crime and then escape. That a local person cannot commit a heinous crime in his/her own place is collective opinion of the police as well as the general public. But my question is, ‘Is the police trying to nail the migrant as a soft target thereby completely negating the hand of any others in the crime?’ No matter what crime takes place, the first comment is that “The hand of migrants is suspected.” I cannot tell whether the statement is a general one or a carefully investigated one.

Are migrants all that dangerous? Or are migrants of a particular class seen as dangerous? But the same migrants also belong somewhere. It would be interesting to observe their behavior in places where they have been born and brought up. There they aren't migrants or unhomed people. In their native place, they don’t have the tag of criminals or law-breakers. Is there something which goes wrong when one leaves the safe confines and familiarity of one’s home and family? Is there no sense of accountability in the new place which has willingly given them employment and shelter? After all, the host city/town has embraced their skill and given them a place to earn their livelihood which was unavailable in their home-town or village.

I don’t blame the police or the public in looking at a migrant worker with suspicion. At times, I also cannot stop having a certain feeling of doubt when I see someone who I can identify as a migrant. After the Delhi episode, I cannot but see every foreign looking construction worker/labourer/driver without thinking of the rape. I know that I am over-reacting but the incident has left me quite bitter and scared. I wonder if the same individuals would have done a brutal act if they were at home with members of their kith and kin. And this situation is not in India alone. There have been many such instances in many other parts of the world as well where migrants are not those who seek employment and sustenance alone but also those who cross porous borders and boundaries illegally and are known as refugees who are also in a state of unhome. There have been many studies along these lines but not many to prove that the state of being unhomed also leads to many criminal and wild activities. 

This post was a thinking aloud post. I would like to hear what you have to say on this issue. 

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Whose space is it anyway?

I switch on the light. They respond as if they are ‘caught in the act.’  I wait for them to leave. They wait for me to leave. They are motionless. I don’t see them looking at me but I know that they can sense my presence.

This is MY house, I think but they don’t care. They never cared. Why should they care? They are not like me living in A particular space with marked boundaries. They live wherever they can find an environment that is conducive for food and reproduction. After all, unlike me they don’t need different rooms, utensils, clothes and other stuff. All that they need is filth, wetness and leftover food left carelessly by me in nondescript places.

I am not scared of them. I never was. But the feeling of them on me is quite icky and unpleasant. I would never want them on me even for a second. Of course, I revere my body as I do my space. Whenever I spot them on and off ‘the act,’ I imagine them climbing on my limbs. I cringe. I imagine a bit too much. I have dwelled on this thought of imagining something and actually feeling something. Sometimes, both are the same. Sometimes, the actual is never experienced, so certain things exist only in the imagination. The invaders’ tale is also similar. Whenever I spot the invaders of ‘my space,’ my mind is on a high-alert imagination mode. I stand there transfixed imagining and looking – looking and imagining. The invaders mirror my action. They remain there motionless. I have half a mind to spray that pesticide which is lying unused (I think that pesticides are unhealthy for the air which circulates inside the house thus putting the family in danger!). Then? Do I kill them and feel queasy about the white blood that gushes out? I do neither. I will and cannot bring an uneasiness to my sight and smell. I leave the spot and allow the invaders to continue their (k)nightly rendezvous.

The next day, I google, “Natural and chemical-free way to get rid of roaches.” As always, Google gives me the answers but I’m yet to try them on the invaders of my house and space. In the meanwhile, I thought I would write a post and in the corner of my eye, I can spot a stealthy movement. I know that I’m being watched.

Cockroach problem, dear readers?      

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