Battling the plastic food-print

I moved cities recently and in my quest to savor my privacy decided to rent a single bedroom flat / apartment just for myself. I managed to find one in a quaint society!? Imagine a residence over-looking landscaped gardens, a promenade lined with palm-trees and chalets in the foremost concrete jungle of the country! A house all to myself meant being in boxers without getting taunted, playing loud music sans the objections, dining in the drawing room without having to clean up right-after, singing in the bathroom (you have no idea how discordant I am!) with utter insouciance amongst other unmentionable things. Whilst I was mooning over this surreal life it completely skipped my mind that the house had no cooking gas connection.

My apartment in itself is a nice compact place to retire at the end of the day but the kitchen is sparsely used for obvious reasons. I usually find myself seated on the huge granite platform in the kitchen during overtly long telephonic conversations with friends, folks or my wife’s lovers (stop gaping, I am married to my job) gazing at the visual-hubbub the society offers (now you know why I am so lost while on the phone) through the huge window that runs the length of the platform and here begins my plastic woes!

Food is always ordered from one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood and almost anything that is delivered, be it bread, pan-cakes, gravy or accompaniments is either wrapped or packed in cheap plastic. In the beginning I paid no heed to this as I was intensely occupied with my new wife (they always demand too much attention in the beginning, don’t they?), but soon the amount of plastic I was surrounded by each time I had a meal was very perceptible and disturbing. I could still not react to it as days passed by in a daze and I had no obverse. But last week, when I was home for supper on most evenings, thanks to a relenting wife who decided to swing with her other lovers for a bit, I had had enough of it. I decided to make amends. So, when I called up a restaurant to order grub I made it a point to ask them if they could pack the stuff in paper or use a metal foil instead of plastic and proceeded with the order only if they acceded. Soon pancakes were wrapped in butter paper, breads came dressed in foils and the gravy glanced at me out of little paper cartons, I was satisfied.

My wife suddenly decided that she was going to make a fleeting visit back home for the weekend and so I was forced to spend long hours with her on Saturday tending to her needs. I woke up Sunday morning, knackered, only find my wife missing again!! (Is she fickle or what?) I was too tired to go out for my morning fix and so called a café to enquire if they could deliver a cuppa home (I had seen them deliver coffee in thermal flasks earlier). “Yessire” on the phone and I was warming up to nice hot coffee brewed to perfection. In fifteen minutes I heard a knock on the door, I knew my stimulant was calling out to me! I reached for the door, a mug in my hand (I know it feels like prison, but what the hell, with the wife gone, freedom was guaranteed) and saw a young boy outside. I hurriedly searched for a flask in his hand but there was no sign of it. I thought he must have come for something else and asked, “Whaaat..?”, when he extended his hand clutching a plastic bag and in a tone that felt like a retort answered, “Your coffee!” I looked at it in abject disgust, squinched my eyes, pouted and enquired as to why he didn’t deliver in a flask to which he replied that they used flasks only for two cups or more. I went “Grrrrrr” in my head, held out a twenty and grabbed the bag.

The boy was gone but the bag lay there clumsily on the tea-poi. Curiously I reached for it and held it in my palms. It felt warm. I put my hand into the bag and reached for another small ball of plastic which was warmer than the bag itself and housed the concoction like a balloon laden with water. I wanted to throw it straight into the dumpster but the thought of the liquid soiling the bin made me averse to that idea. “Perhaps I should flush it down the sink”, I said to myself, and emptied the contents into the mug after carefully puncturing the thin plastic bag. Suddenly, I found myself engulfed in aroma which arrives when very hot water is forced through freshly ground peaberry. “Smells good”, I blurted and instinctively took a tiny sip.

Aaah… caffeine… sip, little-sip, slurp, deep-breath, little-sip, sip, sip, gulp… smile …

Life goes on!

Special Children's Day

As I was growing up, Children’s Day always left an indelible impression on me for it was one day out-of-the-blue that made us feel special without reason, during a time when we always yearned to be loved and pampered, childhood. This Children’s Day a few friends from work and I decided to experience that feeling all over again! We planned a visit to a school for the less privileged and to partake in their festivities.

We were guided by a gentleman from an NGO which has adopted many schools and was celebrating Children’s Day with the kids. We were going to be part of a group that was to conduct some activities planned for kids and mingle with them. The four of us took off late in the afternoon but what awaited us was startling! The school wasn’t actually “a school”, it was more like a loft with a staircase so narrow that it would necessitate an adult to squeeze through the passage, so steep that one had to climb like it were a ladder and so out-of-place that it appeared from no-where in a badly lit, dingy two feet wide alley which also had an open sewer flowing in between. But this wasn’t the startling part! What was startling was that the little six feet by ten feet loft housed close to forty kids, some innocent angels and others, the rambunctious kind, bubbling with exuberance nothing short of what I felt the day we were going to watch Jurassic Park at school! Notwithstanding the claustrophobia, the chaos and the sultry swell, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling away in the company of these kids.

One of the girls also welcomed us in English and I must say it was very impressive. After getting the kids to settle down we decided to kick-start the proceedings. The first game that we were to play with them was ‘Housie’ (also famous as ‘Bingo’). The rules of the game were explained, the stubs distributed to all the kids and game about to begin when one of the volunteers from the NGO suggested that we also play the game with the kids. I thought it was a wonderful idea to be one with the children and gladly accepted my stub!

The game started off with royal applause and advanced with happy pandemonium, the children hooray-ing when they could strike-off numbers on their stubs and others boo-ing when their stubs didn’t have the number announced. I was doing pretty well myself and my colleagues were awed too! In the middle of this happy commotion my eyes glanced a cherubic girl of seven, may be eight! We were almost half way through the game and everyone seemed to be animated but she was sitting dejected and uninterested and the reason wasn’t too difficult to discern. She had barely struck out any number on her stub and was feeling let down by the lack of serendipity. With every passing number she let out a muted sigh and her demeanor turned graver.

Immediately, I squatted by her side and showed her my stub on which all the numbers but two were already struck out! I quickly grabbed her stub, gave her mine and whispered, “now, you have only two to go!!” She looked back at me, smiled for the first time, her eyes reflecting a magical glint. Almost like she were injected with a potent dose of insta-pep, she was now happily swaying, hurriedly comparing stubs with other children, tugging at my trouser tightly before each number was called, making vivified pleas for the numbers she wanted and cat-calling when the numbers didn’t match with those on her stub. I couldn’t contain my excitement too. As the game progressed we rooted together for the two numbers on her stub.

Soon the game was over, the two numbers were never called, another kid claimed victory but the outcome of the game was meaningless for I knew that the little girl had already won. She was enlivened and raring to play the next game and that was a moment of revelation to me. I realized that these less than fortunate kids need not your material favors or protracted munificence, all they need is hope, a hope that strongly conveys to them that are also part of the race, the race in which winning doesn’t matter but running most-definitely does… the race of life!

PS: To those outside India, November 14th, the birth anniversary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, is celebrated as “Children’s Day” in India to honor his sempiternal fondness for children

The Chocolate Theory

A connoisseur of chocolate you are, not a single moment can you stop craving for more, your taste-buds revel in the company of a dark brown portion of uncontrollable gustation, your tongue scrounges for sweet joy as it mops the cocoa smeared succulent lips like a mower taking care of pastoral copses. The more you have the more you want and whilst you are in this cycle of chocolate induced passion, the lord, almighty himself, pleased by your devotion to the umber beans, grants you a blessing you could never find a parallel to. Without supplication, he proclaims, “You shall have the tastiest chocolate of the world, in all its flavors and forms, a perennial supply of the wooden-ambrosia you always long for”. And like how all divine forms add a little after-clause, God continues “But you shant touch a morsel of anything edible solid or liquid, lest chocolate may never taste the same again”. You are not happy, but are rendered ecstatic...

We are surrounded by others like us, people, our lives often affected by how we barter our thoughts and feelings with them. Then there are some who are special, a few to whom we openly express our fondness and those who have confided in us the special status they accord to us, the best friend, the true love, pater-mater, the favorite sibling… We yearn to be pampered by our special people, to be treated with that extra dose of affection, to be approached with an ever accepting smile, to be there for us all the time, to be treated like how the connoisseur, your loved one, treats his chocolate, you…….

You thank the almighty for the boon and start feasting on chocolate. You cannot contain your ravenous appetite as you lick your fingers digging into more. Day turns to night and you sleep so satiated that the air around you reminds you of chocolate dust. The next morning you wake up, your breath lingering with the aroma of your indulgence and you lazily head for a cup of coffee, the concoction which kicks every single day of yours off and as your lips reach for the porcelain containing your daily dose of caffeine, you are reminded of the lord’s words. In an instant you throw the coffee away, cursing yourself. The day proceeds and you do the same thing with your buttered breads, your hot noodle- wonton soup and your spicy lentil rice. You still take to a little chocolate every now and then to suppress your hunger. But soon the angst and helplessness that follows every meal devoid of anything you relish is insurmountable and you give in.

“My loved ones don’t love me anymore”, you say to yourself, exasperated, “My closest chum chose to shop without me, my sweetheart didn’t return my calls, my folks want it their way at home and the sibling turns sour for he cannot share my chore”, acerbic dejection writ all over your face. “All the people I expected to be mine forever have deserted me”, you qualm, “The connoisseur doesn’t like his chocolate no more”, you conclude.

You know your love for chocolate hasn’t waned one bit. However you cannot survive on chocolate alone. You eat your meals, still, you lust after chocolate and would relish it like how you did previously but your temptation now is sifted through a sieve of reality. Why not subject yourself to the same sieve when dealing with your loved ones. Just because they are not at their alacritous best all the time and just because they don’t find the space to accommodate every whim of yours all the time doesn’t mean their love for you has diluted one bit. Just like how your desire for chocolate is intact even when you are devouring something else, your loved ones always have a special corner for you in their hearts despite their occasional indifference. And most importantly when the aftermath of one such unpleasant incident wants to make you turn bitter, think about how hell will break loose if God kept his promise and made chocolate taste sour forever. Not only will you never be able to appreciate it but it will also deprive the entire humanity of the magic of chocolate, just like how your meaningless acrimony towards your loved ones will not only strain your relationship with them but will also change forever the world's outlook towards you.