Newerways

  “She’s your daughter,” my husband’s acquaintance asked him when I met him for the first time while we waited for our turn at a shop. I giggled at his joke and marveled at his judgment of my age. That was when I was dark-haired. A few years later, my hair started to turn grey.  We often visited a complex together regularly, so regularly that the guard could identify the two of us. The irony struck when my husband had to travel alone. Then the guard asked, “Mummy Ji has not come today.” I laughed at the cruel joke. It is not that I mind going old: I do mind looking old, so aptly said by someone, I thought.   I had the usual concerns as someone in the fourth decade. I was beginning to hide that lock of silver hair so conspicuous on my scalp. It has been a source of pride for all the years spent well. I found myself reminiscing about the hair. I felt great about the comparisons I had. A decade later, I was going ahead with a natural balayage without a penny spent. The...

  Googling for ideas, my search stopped short at the gates of Pinterest. As a conventional netizen, I dared not venture into downloading new apps. There seemed to be no escape, my conventionality succumbed. Finally, there was a P on the red dot symbolizing Pinterest on my app list. I was on the lookout for ideas from paper maiche, but as my search unfolded, there was fashion, cooking, makeup, writing, home interiors, organization, in fact, every kind of organization, management be it time or money and so much more. I forgot the paper maiche and the artwork momentarily and here I was looking for hairstyles to suit my face type, dresses for my body type, makeup, dressing styles for fifty plus and I began to wonder if all this ever mattered in the past five decades. Never, my conscience answered.  Mocktails had found a new place in my recipe list. Forget about Mojito, I was searching for Pina colada, Dalgona Coffee and many more nonalcoholic drinks. Oh! I could be the next entre...

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...

 At 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 Whats App.    This Whats App 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. M...

                                                               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...

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...

         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...