Winter's Irony!!!

Word verification

I just can't stop smiling! Look what just happened to me. I was posting a comment on a blog and the word verification...sardi!

:D

2008: My Bests ands Worsts ( II )

Best Songs I heard in 2008:

1. Teri Orhe (Singh is Kingh)
2. I kissed a girl (Katy Perry)
3. Shake It (Metro Station)
4. Pehli Nazar (Atif Aslam-Race)
5. Viva La Vida (Coldplay)


Worst ‘kinda-songs’ I ‘kinda-heard’ in 2008:

1. Bhootni ke (Singh is King)

"Ek Tera Bhai, Hai Zyappa, Ho Bada Shadaye, Hai Zyaappa,
Ek Teri Behna, Hai Zyaappa, Bhainge Naina, Hai Zyaappa,
O Piyo Piyakkad, Hai Zyaappa, O Maayi Fakkad, Hai Zyaappa,
O Chaachu Langda, Hai Zyaappa, Aye Paave Bhangra, Hai Zyaappa,
Kehn De Tennu, Hai Zyaappa, Oye Door Pitte Mooh, Hai Zyaappa..

O Nach Da Sab To Aage Aage, Scent Laga Ke, Sehra Saja Ke
O Nach Da Sab To Aage Aage, Scent Laga Ke, Sehra Saja Ke
Uthe Bhaade Da Suit Boot Neeche,

Tennu Ghodi Kinhe Chadaya, Bhootni Ke,
Tennu Dulha Kinhe Banaya, Bhootni Ke,
Bhootni Ke, Bhootni Ke,
Ho Tennu Ghodi Kinhe Chadaya, Bhootni Ke,
Tennu Dulha Kinhe Banaya, Oye Bhootni Ke,

Zyaappa, Zyaappa, Zyaappa, Zyaappa, Zyaappa…"

2. No Competition! At ALL!

2008: My Bests ands Worsts ( I )

Best Things I ate in 2008:

1.Tawa Chicken at Kukoo’s Den
2.Tripple Chocolate Brownie from Masoom’s
3.Beef Burger with Thick Cut French Fries at Gunsmoke
4.Stuffed Chicken Breast at Salt & Pepper
5.Al-Karim ka Bun-Makhan-Shaami

Best Books I read in 2008:

1.A Case of Exploding Mangoes by M. Hanif
2.The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan
3.The Adventures of Amir Hamza by Musharraf Farooqi (still just halfway through)
4.White Mughals by William Dalrymple
5.Blasphemy by Tehmina Durrani

Best TV Shows I watched in 2008:

1. Grey’s Anatomy Season 2
2. Heroes Season 2
3. Weeds Season 1
4. Grey’s Anatomy Season 3
5. Weeds Season 4

Worst Indian Movies I saw in 2008:

1. Tashan
2. Drona
3. Yuvvraaj
4. Karzzz
5. Krazzy 4

Worst Hollywood Movies I saw in 2008:

1. The Love Guru
2. Sex and the City
3. Disaster Movie
4. 10,000 BC
5. What Happens in Vegas

(contd...)

Have you Ever…?

By Saad Javed

Have you ever gone up the rain?

Leaving behind,

The vows, the woes, the pain?

Have you ever climbed,

The crystal ladder of gentle droplets?

Have you cried

In the cryptic rain

And ever let the gems so dear

Take over the trail of tears?

Have you ever felt

The mutinous soul in you,

Turning tango, getting all wet?

Ever jumped barefoot,

In the mound of grass,

Freshly mown and moist,

Have you ever been in love,

With the rain?

Have you ever gone up the rain?

Poets' Corner, Us (The News)

There is always...

I got this really interesting text message today (courtesy Haris). It was probably the only sms I've received in [i]months[/i] that I read and I smiled and I read again and guess what! It wasn't one of those Faraz jokes.

There is always...

-A little truth behind every 'just kidding'...
-A little curiosity behind every 'just wondering'...
-A little knowledge behind every 'I don't know'...
and...
-A little emotion behind every 'I don't care'...

It just felt like a satisfying ending line of an Amy Tan novel. Like a fullstop...a smiling one!
:)

The Whole Blah Damn Thing

Silas: Yeah! Sure! Death is no big deal! Coz life is just blah, blah, blah?

Andy: Look, Silas. Life is just blah, blah, blah. You hope for blah, and sometimes you find it but mostly it's blah...and waiting for blah. And hoping you were right about the blahs you've made. And then! Just when you think you've got the whole blah damn thing figured out and you're surrounded by the ones you've blah-ed, death shows up! And...blah, blah, blah!

Silas: Alright, let's do this.

('Weeds' Season 4, Episode 3: The Whole Blah Damn Thing)

Hum bhool gaye hur baat magar…

Saad Javed

"There are five steps,' he said, reaching for the platter, 'that make all the difference between the art of eating and the act of swallowing.' I watched Mr. Mazhar Udeen Mortaza with indulgent fascination and nodded fervently like the puppy-nerds who always sit on the front benches of the lecture theatre. 'First,' he smiled, 'mental preparation.' He took a deep breath and sighed. 'Next, the pleasure of the eyes.' He worshipped the auburn pieces of chicken standing like a majestic sphinx in a desert of golden red gravy. 'Now for the nose.' He brought his nostrils hazardously close to the hot curry and inhaled. 'Ah,' he smiled wider. I felt like a voyeur spying on a profoundly wild moment. 'Now for the delight of mouth, tongue and palate.' He deftly made a bite-size cone of the chapatti, filled it with the succulent chicken, held it in his mouth and chewed. With eyes closed, he swallowed and resumed. 'The final step is appreciation. Messages from the palate to the brain. Judge. Calculate. Let the food build memories. Mmm.' Eye closed. 'Awful!' He shook his head. Eyes still closed.

'But you cooked it!' I exclaimed with more horror than surprise. He finally opened his eyes. Blood-shot eyes. Full of pain and longing. And tears.

'I invented it, son.'

I was in Brick Lane, the East End of London, often known as Banglatown. I had refuted a once-in-a-lifetime visit to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum only to visit the location of Monica Ali's Booker Short-listed Brick Lane, the heart of London's Bangladeshi community where Salman Rushdie had set parts of his derided novel Satanic Verses; but more importantly the mecca of Anglo-Indian cuisine. Behind the windows adorned with sleazy posters of Zeenat Aman and Rekha and beyond the done-to-death melody of Lata's Inhi logo ne le lia dupatta mera, there were sights, sounds and smells I cherished more than the wax statues of Angelina Jolie or Adolf Hitler: gaudy Rajasthani tablecloths, patchy service, heaped dishes of prawn biryani, aromatic sweet yellow dhansak, sizzling Kashmiri hareesa and luscious palak paneer! Tempting though it all was, I was way too curious about Chicken Tikka Masala; which according to the former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, 'is now the true British National Dish!' So my quest had taken me to Spice Bazaar; the oldest, most revered curry restaurant of London, to meet Mazhar Udeen Mortaza; the restaurateur, proprietor and head-chef himself.

'So you want me to believe that you invented a dish which Britons now eat at least twenty tons a week?' I mocked.

'Well, yes but…'

'And you never got a legal patent, a copyright reserve to it? Or you never claimed your right to it? Or you never cashed…'

'Son, it was not an inspired creation to start with and-'

'Are you freaking kidding me? It's the shining example of Britain's multiculturalism…'

'NO! It was a reckless reply to an ignorant gora's complaint that my chicken tikka was too dry so I whipped a can of Campbell's thirty-pence tomato soup with yogurt and mirchi and provided a mongrel gravy.'

'Still, you say you are the pioneer…'

'No, I am a criminal! My curry tastes horrid but worse, it's not even authentic.'

'You could have your statue put up in Madame Tussauds!'

Silence. And then.

'Yes, I could have that. While the Death Squad was dumping my brother's corpse down the Brahmaputra into the Bay of Bengal. Yes, I could have cashed my chicken while vultures grew fat in my desh. Yes, I could have claimed fame while four hundred thousand women were losing their honour. Yes, I am the founding father of Britain's national bloody dish but I watched helplessly as Dhaka fell to one-fifth of its existing population. You see, young man, I was just a bit pre-occupied thirty-seven years ago.'

For a moment, my inside self and my outside self stopped to match. My compass needle was spinning around and around indicating the wordless direction of nowhere. I don't remember now how much time lapsed before I heard him speak again.

'There are random moments, boy -- tossing a piece of fish in hot oil, ironing the seams of the shirt-collar flat, standing at the hotel window and looking out at the rain -- when I feel a wavelike rush of pain; when I feel my past and my present are diverging like those geometry proofs where the two lines never touch, they just keep growing farther apart and how it'll always be like that. You shouldn't have asked; the old wounds have not healed. And the chicken itself may not be that awful. But it had built memories. Painful memories. Old. But still very painful.'

Happiness is just around!

Once upon a time there was a small kid. He lived in a nice small home. In those ancient times, pharamceutical companies used to make really nice calendars and gave them to his father. He had one in his room and it had many cute paintings with little gems of wisdom. One of them showed many smiling flowers (not the ones I have pasted here) and announced"Happiness is just around!"

Unfortunately, the little kid was was too little back then to get the message. Even more unluckily, pharmaceutical companies stopped making such calendars as he grew up.

But today the kid read a piece of news and he knew what they meant when they said "Happiness is just around".

Here's the news.

Happiness is contagious, study says:

"...a new study proposes that happiness is transmitted through social networks, almost like a germ is spread through personal contact. The research was recently published in BMJ, a British medical journal.
'We’ve known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized,' said Daniel Gilbert, author of “Stumbling on Happiness” and a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
Their primary finding: People who are surrounded by happy people are more likely to be happy themselves..."


So you see, the little boy is making sure he is surrounded by happy people. And if not, then he will try spread the germ to those who are not.

The rose is a rose, And was always a rose!

The seedlings I bought today from the nursery were shockingly expensive but I just couldn't resist. The very fashionably named New Age Herborium had this wonderful sly little catalogue that presented a variety of attractive flowers. I ended up buying young plants of dahlia (for their dazzling colours), petunia (the small trumpets), verbena (the purple-top confetti) and finally, five wonderful, already blooming healthy stems of rose (because the rose is a rose!).

I hope my little adopted kiddies would survive the winter chill, especially the roses (sorry for the bias, O flowers of inferior species!). I have my fingers crossed; let's see if my roses live up to all the hoopla their ancestors have garnered over the years from poets and lovers...

~verses; Parveen Shakir

The lost winter cantata

Is there a way, I can count,
the cost,
of what I lost,
Is there someone, who'd sing,
the lost winter cantata,
whose sonata I hear inside me,
whose lyrics I know by heart,
whose themes stir my soul,
but the romance of it,
I lost,
to the wicked noise of
bullets,
bombs,
recession,
and
now...
the tidings of war!

~SJ
(The moon came so close tonight and still couldn't light up our lives...)

Eid Haiku

My Eid yesterday
fit neatly, gently within
the TV schedule

~(My apologies if I've breached 5-7-5 syllable rule.)

Alone

At the horizon, earth and sky suddenly reach a truce. There is a sudden transformation that engulfs our lane as soon as the muezzins start delivering the Maghrib ki azaan. The kids who had been playing so fervently in the street kind of vanish into thin air; they get 'called in' one by one. I noticed today, the first ones called were full of resentment.

But they needn't have been. As lively as those little kids have been, as much as you love a party; it has to end at some point of the day. Because today, I learnt, nothing ever happened after they left anyway. Things just ended in a slow motion. Like an autumn leaf falling through the air.

So you see, it isn't so bad to go first. To head towards the home. It's much better than being last, when you'd be left. Standing there.

Alone.

If you’re short of trouble, take a goat...

I have a feeling about goats. They are invariably mischievous and they have an individual character and intelligence and that makes me uncomfortable around them. I go near them and they pause to stare with their huge vacant eyes and bleat sneeringly. And they well, they are ungrateful creatures. They eat [i]all day long[/i] and bleat throughout the night. So much for the things they associate with animals;( [i]reliable, many full of love, true in their affections, predictable in their actions, grateful and loyal[/i])!

God honest, this one has been giving me mean 'grins'.

Perhaps he knows I don't have an affectionate admiration for mutton. Anyway, Eid-ul-Adha Mubarak!

Psychology, anyone?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more terrifying events that threatened or caused grave physical harm. It is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma; which may involve someone's actual death, a threat to the patient's or someone else's life, serious physical injury, or threat to physical or psychological integrity, overwhelming psychological defenses.

There has to be a Post-Exam Laziness Disorder. Nothing else explains my mental state. I have recently had an exposure to one or more terrifying events and my psychological integrity has been damaged. And in another month, the overwhelming trauma is returning with greater force. And I have a feeling 80% of the final exam will be based on the one lecture I missed and the one chapter I didn’t read. That;s what has been happening to me lately.

And I certainly don't like it like that!