Sofa sobs

-
I love beautiful homes and really who doesn't? Right through our first home, we have been unhappy with the sofas we have had in our drawing room. The sofa is used to lie down and read books or take an afternoon nap or to take a pre night sleep nap with the tv on. No sofa  can ever fulfill this criteria. So I put  a single bed from the guest bedroom into the living room. The living room got very crowded with it and yet the comfort was missing. The bed was moved to both the side walls of our rectangular shaped living room and then finally kept in the centre of the living room , parallel to the television. This was perfect position but one had to walk around the bed to access any part of the living room or the house, for that matter.

I got smarter as we moved to our second house. I did away with the long sofa and kept only the two chairs. This time I put the mattress on the floor and put lot of cushions on it. Every fortnight I would change the mattress position and the sofas. The television could not be moved because of the electrical and cable tv connection. The room was attractive when tidies up. The curtains became the Fab India ones, light and flowing. Life was good.

In our third house, the sofas remained, as our guests got older and so did our parents. No one wanted the low seating of the mattress. We kept the three seater sofa and the two single seater ones. Plus we had the wooden bed on one wall for the guests which came. By now we were using both our bedrooms as we had two children. 

Comments

  1. RupaMay 8, 2017 at 4:38 AM

    Vivid article about simple things in life that matter

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nange Paon in Navratri

-
When I was working and staying in the hostel, I kind of stopped believing in most festivals and rituals. I thought all this was some weird things which people did, it had no scientific base and why should I follow anyone. In the college hostel, vacations were time to go home and not connected with any festival except Diwali. Sophia College hostel was a cocoon in the heart of South Mumbai. The campus with an old palace building was a quiet oasis with trees and birds, in the mayhem of Mumbai. No festival touched it unless the college celebrated it. The Polytechnic had rock shows and one Dandiya night every year, which it soon stopped having by 1988. Only celebration was the Vegetable Biryani in lunch on Sundays. The Polytechnic hostel did not even believe in pampering the children with food. Memories of bread being there round the clock for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. For them, while the non vegetarians ate eggs for breakfast, the vegetarian had bread. And then when non vegetaria...
Read more

Shraddh period in Hinduism

-
According to the Hindu calendar, this is the shraddh period going on.  For fifteen days in a year, the ancestors are remembered and prayed to. No auspicious events / ceremonies take place in this time. People use the tithi/date of death to invite a Pandit and feed the departed soul. It means you remember the person passed away, give food to the Pandit and the crows. People keep a cooked meal on the terrace. They try to make the favourite food of the departed person. My memories are of my Grandma mixing and crushing all the savouries with her hands and when it was in form of  a paste, my Uncle would go to the terrace and throw the food for the crows. Crows in Hinduism are considered messengers of the departed souls. A lot of people feed Gathiyas to the crows for the full year. If your ancestors are happy, then your life goes well ,is the general belief amongst Hindus. The shraddh period falls exactly between Ganpati and Navratri. One does not buy a house or have...
Read more

Antakshari

-
Today we were playing antakshari at the Holi get together. We did not know any new songs so naturally only the golden melodies were being sung. The whole generation playing antakshari was singing the similar era songs on the alphabets they got. I realised a couple of things. In English language there is no game like Antakshari. How many sentences end with I or The? How can you sing when most songs start with I, The, Once, When and How?I cannot resist explaining the game, we all grow up with, in India. Antakshari means Ant : end , Akshar: alphabet ie last letter of the word. Akshar also means God. It also means God has the last word. Its a game with two teams and we call the teams as  'party'.  We say "Baithey baithey kya karein, karna hai kuchh kaam, shuru karo antakshari , le ka Hari ka naam." Translated from Hindi, We are sitting idle, lets do some work, lets start antakshari, starting with God's name. In Indian games, there is a lot of religion or belief in Go...
Read more