Life is easy kya karein

 Actually, things are quite simple, once we stop resisting them. Resistance is all in the mind. In fact, our body too resists when the mind is screaming. Shrinking, feeling tight in the heart, in the gut and jaws. I don't frown but I can feel that urge to pull my hair or rather massage my hair, when I am stressed.   The left ankle is used for kicking the bucket, shutting the bathroom door, pushing the laundry basket away, straightening the Yog mat and some kitchen drawers too. How I hate bending to open drawers and pulling out vessels. The iron vessels which I love the most, I resist the most. Same happens with the people I love, . The Lodge iron pan, which the husband got from a trip to Canada,  long before Lodge was available here and The Dosa Tawa which my cousin gave me to  season it and then gifted it to me. I am sure she saw the love in my eyes for the Tawa. When I was newly married, I could never understand why my Mother-in-law loved steel utensils and Dibbas ...

Sharing my Tirupati Darshan experience on Amavasya.  Udayastanam Darshan: You can be a part of all Pujas from sunrise to sunset. You get to sit and be a part of the Puja closely get to see Balaji. Each Puja lasts for 40 min or so. There are 6-7 such Pujas.  Is this booking online? No.  This booking is done 30 years ago with a donation amount of ₹1 crore by the bhakt donor. Every day only 6 donors are allowed. Your day is fixed once a year when you give the donation. Each donor can go in with total of six people n children under 10 years. So total of 36 people allowed for this Darshan every day. This is booked from years. Now the 30 years is getting over. New Darshan for Udayastanam is for 1 crore donation but for 20 years only. For 1.5 crore it is for Friday Udayastanam as Friday is Vishnu s day.  What kind of people were there for the Darshan? Normal people like you n me . South Indian NRIs from Hyderabad n Bengaluru. They come to India once a year for this Darshan ...

 We had iron buckets in the bathrooms at our home in Jharia. Plastic buckets were not used as they broke easily. We had aluminium buckets which were lighter. We used them to carry water up the staircase from the chamber on the ground floor. Our kitchen had a steel bucket, which was precious. Some people  used an iron rod as a heater for water, and they had one plastic bucket to heat the water. We had a geyser and that too not the instant one. We used to keep the geyser on for a few hours at night, as we were six children bathing at five a.m. before leaving for school. Winters electricity used to go in the night. Some times water was kept in an old aluminium pot on the Chulha, which was dying. Usually the custom was to cool the fire in the Chula at night. We did not keep the fire burning. Everyone and everything was put to rest at night. In our wooden Mandir at home, there was a custom to put our Gods to sleep and wake them up in the morning.  Flowers were removed and Mom'...

 Pratapgad is a fort in the Sahyadris, near Mahabaleshwar, built by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. 'Pratap' is a Hindi word and it means victory, light, power n majestic all rolled into one. Our idea of victory is not to make a pile of skulls or collect Janeu from the killed people and make a bonfire. The fort is not controlled or run by ASI. It is on the top of the hills with dense forests all around even now. It has a bird's eye view of the whole area, the hill tops, the plains, the valley, the villages beneath n the rivers. It has access to three districts of Maharshtra. Shivaji commissioned the fort in 1655. It was ready in 1657. In 1659, Ahmed Shah Abdali sent Afzal Khan with a huge army to kill Shivaji Maharaj.  Then the story some of us  studied in our History books,  Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Afzal Khan had a meeting near Pratapgad and Shivaji killed him with tiger claws. Shivaji Maharaj's army defeated Abdali's army in the Battle of Pratapgad. Garh or G...

 Lonavla, Khandala, Matheran and Mahabaleshwar.... four places where Mumbaikars head for weekends. They are popular and close by. These four places are on the hills of Sahyadri. Alibaug is another preferred place which has a beach and good coastal cuisine. Lonavla and Khandala are twin towns and sound like sisters too. For years, I used to think Matheran and Mahabaleshwar are also twin towns. I never knew they are in totally different directions. When I was younger, Foreign trips meant Singapore and Bangkok. Later European trips meant London, Paris or Switzerland. No one differentiated between cities and countries. Some countries like Switzerland was more famous than its cities. And when one thought of London, England did not come into the picture. Like Paris was an entity in itself. There was no  difference between Bangkok, Hong Kong or Singapore. Manila and Malaysia were places you learnt to mark on a map during your Geography class. Life was lost between Grasslands, Steppes...

 All the idea of men and romance came from the books I read from the school library. Nancy Drew, Famous Five, The Scarlett Pimpernel, Pride and Prejudice, Black Beauty, D. H. Laurence etc. I used to love the books by Daphne Du Maurier. The setting for love was always European. Further in Mumbai, I started reading Mills and Boon, after eleventh grade. All men and women fought. Man was always tall, dark and piercing eyes. The Man always spoke less. He always had a huge house called some Windermere or Aberdeen or some such British name. All houses had huge gardens, view of the sea or on banks of a lake. There were beautiful flowers in the garden. There was a distance between the hero and heroine. I referred to the lead characters like that, courtesy Bollywood. The girl was always alone or in need or in some dire circumstances . But her spirit was intact.The Man was always a man and never a boy.  The fights and the sarcasm between the boy n the girl was the best part about reading...