Zillionbig goes for his roots……..

I had a time when I was called by my nickname “aana”, vernacular for an Elephant. I was plump, and overweight would have sounded a blatant understatement. I spent most of my awake minutes in the kitchen, to an utter displeasure of my ARMYMAN father. I would gossip to my mother about neighborhood aunties and she would share some of her trademark recipes with me. In the pretense, I would sample half of all the Papads, fried fish or upperi(dry vegetable dish) my mother roiled and my mother being a mother, would wholeheartedly support me in continuing the sampling act. My Fitness freak father would pass by and from his brood expression I would hint his level of exasperation. Those were my prepubescent days, those good ol days of fun and frolic.

I cared two hoots about my appearance. As long as the neighborhood “chechis”( young women) called me CUTE and brought me toffees , it didn’t bother me much. I was a ladies’ man even then. I would push myself into the private and confidential rooms of neighborhood CHECHIS and explore myself of the many treasure that waited for me to be stumbled. I remember once asking a chichi (she was in 11th or 12th) about a flowery plastic pack with words ‘Carefree sanitary Pads’, and she blushing and telling me that it was some medicine.
Then comes an age when I abruptly turned into a skin-and-bone. My Elephant like body stature lasted only till I was of about 10 years and as soon as I plunked into adolescence, there was so much of changes happening in me that I transformed myself into a lean-tall-young-lad as if overnight. I still don’t know what went through my body but I was totally changed. I gained almost 2 feet in height in as many years and from a boy of 50 kgs and 4.5 feet, I became a lad of 6 feet, albeit with the same weight. One could easily demonstrate anatomy lessons to medical students with my body, instead of a skeleton and I was again derided; but this time around for an exact opposite grounds.

My always-thriving hunger diminished to a level when I would hardly eat anything to the utter annoyance of my father. He would bellow at me to eat and instruct mom to prepare anything and everything that I liked. I remember; I would argue with him and he would force me to have dinner. Me, for that matter my entire family couldn’t figure-out where my hunger disappeared at such short notice. I was taken to a physician and she advised my worried dad that everything was normal and such changes do occur when boys abruptly turn to men. I remember being asked to take digestive syrups and multi-vitamin capsules so that my worried family could see me as my old-fat-self. As I write this I realize how much my family loved me and cared about my health. And how much I have hurt my poor Dad so far, Sorry DAD!!!!

I was lean and trim throughout my early adult life until I started working. After my professional education, my first employers happened to be THE TAJ GROUP OF HOTELS and that’s when the foodie self emerged itself out of me . We had a week of Induction training at Taj Residency hotel in Bangalore and were arranged to stay in the hotel. Et voila, that was my first ever FIVE STAR HOTEL STAY and the food, the luxurious restaurants, coffee shops enthralled me by no mean description. I was this man who had zilch etiquettes and table manners and had to go through several-a-struggle to look fitting into an ambiance of opulence. That’s when it occurred to me that a fork is to be held on the left hand and a knife on the right. The first time I saw a soup spoon, I thought it was some manufacturing defect and almost called the steward for a replacement. What embarrassment it would have been otherwise.

Out of one week, we spent a day of training in the BAR and got a chance to appreciate and discover several names of Wine, whiskey, cognacs, which primarily sounded like greek-latin . I learned that to serve a whisky in wine goblet (as shown in bollywood movies) is as ludicrous as serving jalebis with sambar . It was eureka moments to learn that Champagne is a place in France and not the name of the person who first got drunk on it.

The next phase was the arrival of the leading lady of my life. My wife has this thing about experimenting everything that she comes across on the TV cookery shows and I was made a guinea pig many a times. Our first months after marriage were spent eating out every single day as my wife couldn’t even make a proper cuppa tea. It was after several months that she finally presented before a hungry me, my first meal of wife-made rice and sambar. More about that later……

Ciao all.

P.S: I have just about 50 pages left of the book that i was supposed to come with a review. My next post shall be that, Inshallah.

Me, Myself and Musings

The other day, I was reading the “Quotation of the day” widget on my blog, which quotes Agatha Christie-“Lucky is a man if he has had a happy childhood”. How true, isn’t it?

I didn’t have an happy childhood. I don’t know if I can call myself an unlucky man, but I am indeed unlucky to have lost my mother when really small. Who can realize more the fact that there is no one in this world like your mother, than a motherless child himself. That is one thing I have and will always miss for rest of my life. Motherhood for me is more of a ‘read-somewhere’ or a ‘heard-from-someone’ thing rather than something which I had experienced firsthand.

Throughout childhood and even now, hardly anyone around me knows that I didn’t have a mother. I was this boy, who had too much pride to let anyone know his sorrows and garner sympathy in return. Whatever memories I have of my mother are extremely fond and well cherished. She was an extremely beautiful woman, a poet at heart and an avid reader. Only much later that I learned of her disease and depression with which she lived, while showing a happy face before us. I wouldn’t like to mention how she died out of similar pride that I still harbor, that I mentioned before.

I didn’t have a happy childhood because it was mostly spent watching my parents fight. I have distressing memories of my mother crying after a brawl with father and sometimes father locking us inside a room to stop us from coming in between him and his target (my mother).

Yet, I don’t hate my father, for the reason that he immediately took the part of mother, soon after her death. He did all he could to aid us, to cope with a motherless upbringing we grew in. he married again and we had a stepmom. And yet again we were lucky that unlike what’s portrayed in movies and television, she turned out to be a truly loving lady. She would get up very early to cook us breakfast and packed lunch, ready us for school, sometimes hand feed us when we decided to throw some extra tantrums etc. She tried to give us everything she thought a mother gives to her child, but being an extremely sensitive child, I still secretly longed for my mother. I felt the love she showed wasn’t the kind, a natural mother bestowed upon her kids.Later, she had a child of her own and my sensitivity found reasons to further prove my beliefs by comparing her behaviors with her own child.

Now, when I think about her, I realize that I owe her much more than a mere thanks. She really needn’t had to care for us, the way she did. I love and appreciate her for that.
As I said earlier I don’t hate my father, but I don’t love him the way I should. I cannot stop myself from believing that my mother was his responsibility and if he would have really tried from his heart, he could have saved her life. He should have prevented her from falling victim to manic depression. How? I don’t know.

But the images of him, taking care of me when I was critically ill, visiting my room late at night to check if I was sleeping comfortably and covering me with a bed spread to shield the cold, worrying about my college admissions, the role he played during my marriage and the lovely grandfather he is to my child-makes me show a happy face, albeit with a tad bit of resentment.

Blogging

Now, having kind of settled into the blogging world, I find it to be much similar to a black hole of cyber space.

The enormous thoughts and ideas that it sucks into its behemoth gravitational centre is astonishing. The more a person spends time here, the more he is deluded. I find ideas and thoughts echoing all across, but also these ideas and thoughts have precedents.

Having read several blogs, I find the true expression of the self, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Several blogs have memoirs, origination from some level of unconscious, but turning into perceptible subjects once written, helping the writer know himself better. I feel I too need to write memoirs and identify the true nature of my existence.

I remember, my childhood was spent speculating how it would be to be grown-up. In fact I was so obsessed with growing up that I don’t remember much from the age of 10- 15. When I think about it now, I feel it was this enormous desire to be taken seriously. I wanted to be treated as a mature, grownup man by anyone I knew. I guess every child wants to be treated as an adult.

I wonder if I really took time to enjoy my childhood and growing up. A large part of it was spent worrying about exam results and performance in the unit tests. I wish I was given another chance at growing up, and to feel the real essence of childhood and stages of growth into that forbidden realm called “Adulthood”.

I feel a major difference between a child and an adult is that a child asks questions and an adult simply learns to overlook things.I remember me, exhausting my parents with innumerable “what is this?”, “why is this”, to a point where I was made to understand that asking too many questions wasn’t the right thing. Probably the entry into adulthood was a certain acceptance of things as they are.

Now, being an adult and into the core of my life, I have come to realize that if all questions were to be answered, a whole established system of norms would be turned on its head.

Ciao friends, Let’s keep the child in us ALIVE.

Unofficial autobiography

Having written about my baby in the last post, I was wondering, what if she asked me after few years, “ Papa, you always come up to me and say ‘do this, don’t do this, eat this, don’t be naughty’ and stuff like that. Going by your present self, I am sure you might have been much naughtier than me. Tell me about your childhood. Please Papa” I was wondering if I should tell her about my growing-up coz I am scared, it might have a negative effect on her. It has also made me revisit myself; that part of myself that I haven’t thought of, since a long time. It didn’t matter to me, but here I go, call this the positive effect of blogging or fatherhood, perhaps both.

I was a very calm and quiet child, ditto contrary to my younger but naughtier brother. I have felt that there are several negatives to being calm and quiet, the foremost being, you are taken for granted by everyone on the belief that you could be easily coerced to give-up. I understood this much later, when I thought water was about to reach my neck, or so the juvenile mind told myself. Once the realization sunk in, there was no stopping me; I became a mischievous young lad almost overnight. I fought for my rights, like how those old-about-to-die-any-minute-politicians fight in the parliament, and achieved many a victories.

The brawl between my brother and me over supremacy and power can be easily explained by the metaphor of “Mulayam and Mayawati” san the murderousness. And of course, there were times when Mom had to intervene to stop a murder from happening. It all feels like a bygone era friends, a bygone era.

There are several positives to being the son of an army officer. We almost had a round trip of the country before I was in 7^th standard and when I was in 7^th, my father retired himself out of the army. That was when I was admitted to K.V in Kerala which came as a severe shock to my North-India educated self.

I was ridiculously stupid in my earlier part of childhood. I know stupid isn’t the right word, but my vocabulary doesn’t support me in finding the most apt word to explain myself. Hence the second most apt word.

I was extremely poor in studies ( if I tell any of my present friends no one would believe) and a ridiculous dreamer. I used to score mostly less than 5 in most unit-tests out of any figure, and to get zero marks were as frequent as a snowfall in Antarctica. Having said that, how I managed to reach 7^th without failing once is a miracle by itself.

It all changed when I started my schooling in Kerala. Having studied mostly in North India, I was an illiterate in my local language and as well as in English. I could hardly read English, let alone speak. I could be easily visualized if I tell you my resemblance to Tom Hank’s character in 'Forrest Gump' and 'The Terminal' combined.

Then tragedy struck. I was asked by The English teacher to read a paragraph from the textbook. There I go, struggling to form sentences, having no clue as to how most words sounded when appropriately pronounced. I became a joke and the classroom uniformly chuckled as if they were listening to some standup comedian deliver carefully rehearsed jokes. For the first time it hurt and every cell of my body sniveled in pain and insult.That was when I decided I would change myself.

Walking back home from school, the distance of about two Kilometers stood testimonial to my resolve, my tenacity, that I would make the very people who laughed at me, my admirers. Though I found few admirers, I regained my much deserved self respect and one of the best orators in college.

The realization that I was indeed awful, made me search ways or think ways to improve my position. I became one of the most avid members of the school library and one of the few who read literature.

I remember my first book, The animal farm( George orwell) and how it transformed me from a kale-akshar-bhains-barabar to someone well read and competent in school level English.

It were also the moments when I realized that if Meena, the class topper could top so naturally, me with equal number of limbs and legs and probably grey cells too, could do as well.

P.S:More stuff later, abi to puri picture baaki hain mere dost, and Sorry for sounding emotional in between.

Photo courtesy: Google Images