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A Quiet Corner: Notes from a Desk at 30,000 Reads

A message to all my readers  When I first began writing down my stories in this quiet space, it was nothing more than an open diary. A place to put memories that needed somewhere to rest, reflections gathered over a lifetime, and thoughts that felt too personal—or perhaps simply too ordinary—to share in conversation. Conventional wisdom often suggests that personal musings rarely accomplish much on the wider internet. There are no frameworks here, no quick advice, and no polished agendas. Just the raw textures of life as I have experienced it: the sudden turns, the quiet routines, the moments of doubt, and the steady work of beginning again. Recently, as a small corner quietly crossed 30,000 reads, I paused to look more closely at the numbers. What moved me was not just the milestone itself, but where those visits were coming from. While some readers join from home here in India, so many of you are reading from entirely different corners of the earth—from Singapore across the seas ...

TRAVAILS OF TRANSACTION

I have been the errand boy for money since many years and going back and forth between the banks for various reasons has been my enterprise. I have seen banks transition from manual to digital, from hand-counted to machine counted, stapled bundles to wrapped bundles of currency notes and handwritten to electronically balanced passbooks. Whatever, I may have left in this transition history is due to Google not being able to access the site as my home internet has a narrow bandwidth verging into being more obsolete than the dial up connection of BSNL. Recently, I drew a wad of notes to deposit in my loan account and as luck would have it the server never obliged. I walked out, back to my home in 41  degrees Celsius, shielded with a face mask and an over sized white apron maintaining my Coronavirus protection and me ready to dehydrate, pining for water. Yet, the next day I walked again to my holy grail at half past seven in the morning to finish my half-baked project. This time the ca...

TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH

  A t no time did I comprehend this old saying could be so exceptionally appropriate for all of us? For a very long time, Queen Mother ruled the roost from the dining table. She would sit there and indiscriminately pursue her instructions, the amount of water I added, the flavor of the ingredients, the position of the pan over the flame, and so on. I barely got a break till I decided to end all this and shifted her throne to the side where she could not see what I was doing.   With a badly bruised ego and the hurt of being deposed, she continued to grumble and fumble and stepped down reluctantly.  Working from home introduced a new cook in our dwelling, my son. All this while he stayed in another city, and we continued to praise his newly found culinary skills through WhatsApp.    This WhatsApp is not a 3D app that shows us the food beautifully presented, while the rest of the kitchen does not matter. I was scandalized when ‘besan ka chila’ was being prepared. ...

LOCKDOWN TO DO LIST

                                                               It was an overwhelming  awareness and we had by now begun to accept the fact that we had to learn to live with the deadly Coronavirus and its aftermath. Every day, in lock down was a nightmare, if not for most but for many. I seemed to have been the chosen one since I did not share the sentiment. To avoid the chaos of multiple pages and a digital document that requires endless scrolling,I wrote my to do list on a sheet of paper and photographed it.I overlooked the method over usefulness.It was to be my guiding mantra to live by peacefully in such unusual and extraordinary times.  A self-employed me had enough at hands than to think of spawning more, I looked callously at all those on social websites that  hungered to learn and teach .On one hand they to...

NETFLIX EFFECT

This is from an addicted fan, cornered for being a rebellion and imitating the many on our idiot box, I had few options but to give up whatever little interest I had in family soap operas. This  flaw forced me to explore beyond my realms, History, Engineering marvels, Discovery, News. That was not binging! I missed the spice, a pinch of salt, spoonful of chilies and black pepper. I hunted with relentless determination inching my toes to the edge. I found my niche. There was an absence of makeup, eyes were fiery red and there were surges of adrenaline and a battle with sedatives. I liked this new taste and flavor of chipotle. It was like a burrito different from our rajma chawal, it was hot. I realized a little late this certainly was madness breeding madness. I switched off those debates and my television forever. My entertainment underwent a colossal hit. Advent of technology had transformed my mother and sister in law into movie buffs which they watched over YouTube and H...

WAXED UP

         DECEMBER 1988                                               I became what I am today. I thought of the precise moment when my father was just about to leave for his official visit to Germany. A telegram informed me of my admission to King George’s Medical College in the Dental Department. I was excited that I had succeeded in the heavily contested premedical entrance test. When all the dust settled, I thought it to be just dentistry. Some of my friends had been admitted to MBBS while I had trailed despite hard work came to me as a second thought. Dentists reminded me of Dr. Jhatka in Lotpot, a Hindi cartoon magazine, which caricatured him struggling with extractions by raising his tools and forgetting the patient needed a local anaesthetic shot. This comparison was deemed an insult to Dr.Jaidka, our family dentist, a soft-spo...

OF ME AND FOOD

  Do you know what nice food is? Nice food is one which is prepared by a Hindu lady with lots of love and affection. All the emotions her thoughts are transferred via that food to you. Now this prepared food should be served to you by a Muslim waiter who serves you with such vanity and delicacy. Then this should be eaten by an Englishman in all style. See how he drapes the napkin on his lap then he picks up the knife and fork and eats in style and relishes every bite in no haste. This is what nice food is. That's a story that my grandfather repeated often about NICE FOOD in our family. Kitchen has always been my domain and seldom have the men of household (my husband and two sons) ever tried to cross that threshold and displace me from my highlands. Despite my fuming and fretting of the domestic and professional overload I have not conceded my grounds. Ever since my children went to Kota after their tenth standard my attempts to make them self-relian...

WHO MOVED MY CHEESE?

                                                                                        The dynamics of change are indeed difficult to apprehend; one has to consider the attitudes of the people who will accept it, how persistent the change will be, and how the people leading the change will behave. As I sat down to document this, a few things happened in the real world. Thomas Cook went down in history as bankrupt.  The media was abuzz with lessons to be learnt from its failures and with its non-conformity to present-day requirements to serve its clients. True, it is well said by Darwin, “it is not the strongest of the species ...