House of bricks

I don't know why every now and then life has to be such a big bad wolf, huffing and puffing and blowing at my tiny space. Pretty sure I wouldn't have even felt it but for these windows, they are the weakest links, they yield to slightest manipulations. No doubt they are my source to sun shine and fresh air but at times like these they make me feel vulnerable. I am like a little pig now who is petrified and is running around the house in search of that little corner.

Appearances matter

The only thing [I think] that I still possess from when I was in class 7 [more than 25years ago] is a loose page with a recipe of chocolate cake. Says much about my lack of sentimentality or my love for food and its documentation. Otherwise I find it hard to explain why I take these pictures when in the background I can clearly hear "Amma, what are you doing...... I am so hungry.....let me eat!"

Barota with Jerk Chicken

Non-dairy chocolate tart: a sample of what we talk about when we run...... 

There is nothing like a fresh fruit salad to brighten your mood   

Thai soup with flat noodles and fried tofu. Love the net for the awesome recipes that are just a click away.

Long time

This painting actually started last winter vacation. The sketch was made with much care and I was really excited about painting it. The painting, however, got off to a terrible start as I was completely out of touch with doing the acrylic paints with less medium (water), that makes it look more like an oil painting.  I had done a few messy petals and left it at that. There is nothing more dissatisfying than a good sketch spoiled by bad painting.

I had kind of forgotten about it till my good friend asked me last week why haven't I painted for the longest of times. That little nudge got me watching a few youtube videos and the one I really enjoyed was this one. It is really nice because she teaches not only how to paint but also how to fix your mistakes as you go along. I was decided up on doing the pear, as in the video, when I found my half-messed sketch in my crafts kit. I must say, that is one thing really nice about doing the oil painting style with acrylics, they are way more forgiving than water colours. They allow you to cover your tracks when the need arises. I had a brilliant time doing this and am hugely satisfied with the end product ......

Serves us right

Our entry, last year, into the tennis playing group in our neighborhood was a bit like baptism by fire. As neither of us (RRS or I) were as good and unlike in a team game where you could choose to hide in the background when you were a bit off color and pretend to be part of the game without being where the action is,  in tennis our shortcomings stood fully-exposed between double faults and unforced errors. The only thing we were good at then was turning up everyday, our game had no choice but to improve. It has been a fantastic addition to our life style. Apart from being a lot of fun learning to play the game and having a great bunch of people to hang out with, it has just seamlessly fit into our schedule. Largely because the court is a two minute walk from home and it is therefore easy for RRJ to join us once he is done with playing with his friends from the next block.

RRJ of course has his own set of reasons to like the whole tennis thing as:

• he gets to watch us play and take the parental role of nagging and giving expert comments like "why is your service so mokka (= bad)" and then proceed on to giving tips on how we could improve it, like "you need to do regular shadow practice"etc.!
• he is not told off for being late in coming back from play.
• he gets to play some more in the park adjacent to the tennis court.
• he gets to play a few shots at the end of our game in a proper tennis court meant for grown ups.
• and the aspect he perhaps loves the most is that without him needing to argue for it, he gets most of the days off from studying as by the time we are done and reach home, the scheduled study hour has elapsed by and there is only time for the bare essentials like food and sleep. He often hops around the house with that look of disbelief that all this is happening for real. 

Thankfully I am in that phase in life where I am getting the hang of how to observe my parental guilt with some detachment and not follow it up with a session of self-flagellation. Unfortunately though, I am yet to reach that phase when this detachment is sustainable even when exams are in sight. I pause my philosophies and tennis for those days and operate on damage-control mode and go through his notebooks, textbooks and worksheets as if it is my parenting that is due for assessment. My beastly avataar had a lump in her throat, when she read the sentence that RRJ had made in his class notes with 'greatest of ease':

Introduce yourself

The inter-personal dynamics during the interview of a prospective graduate student can be very entertaining. All that we have is 15 minutes to test the suitability of a candidate for higher studies but we, the selection panel committee members, seem to find every way to spend that time other than doing just that.

The panel members being academics come with various shapes and sizes of egos. Some don't like it if the students understands their question and starts proceeding with the solution without any hand holding from them! So, they move the target immediately or force the student into taking an approach which is the 'scenic way' to the destination. You see we love to mentor people, even if they don't need the (tor)mentoring.

"Are you sure?" as a response to a correct step by the interviewee is a sure way of destabilising his/her progress towards the correct solution. I have never understood why one can't just say "okay, proceed" or consider the option of saying nothing at all.

Nothing brings out more the inter-collegial under-currents than the entry of a promising candidate. Some of the panel members see this as an opportunity to take a dig at each other's research interest. "Oh! You want to work XYZ area? Isn't that too old-fashioned?" And then proceed to hog the questioning time. It has rarely worked in their favour but then.........

More often than not of course it is the interviewee who is so out of depth that the whole interview process reduces to a game of taboo in which the panel members provide all the clues to get that one word that they want to hear about a given problem. It can be quite a comic relief.

Strawberry Cake

Was a bit disappointed that strawberries imparted absolutely no colour to the cake and was wondering if the amount of strawberry I used (3/4 cups of pureed fresh strawberries in a 2 and 3/4 cups of flour cake) was too less. But the cake tasted so darned good, and so flavourful! 

Stale questions

I love November as it comes with 'THE END' of  teaching for the semester. While I love the subject that I taught this semester, it being an under-grad course I had a large class to handle and it was hard to keep it together for the whole semester. It is a little weird that over the years one of the aspects I used to rather enjoy in the beginning of my teaching career has slowly  become something I am finding myself disliking more and more every passing year and that is preparing question papers for exams. God, how I used to sit with various books and come up with each question that would be easy to comprehend but would require good understanding for one to be able to answer all parts of it. Yes, each question used to have at least three parts, two of them would test their basic skills but the third/last part would test their intuitive understanding. In effect I would end up giving my undivided attention to the making of any exam paper a minimum of two to three days! And of course since these problems were all self-made they didn't come with their ready solutions. So another good chunk of time used to go for that. And then I would eagerly wait in anticipation for the exam to get over to take a look at the answer books to see if students got it or not. 

It was of course a lot of fun and excitement at that point in time and I thoroughly enjoyed doing things that way but now things are different. There are so many things I feel committed to that putting in that kind of time and effort seems a complete waste and therefore have resigned to using, god forbid, ready made questions with ready made solutions. Sacrilege!  

Auto-complete

This article made me try a few half filled searches to check google's auto-complete suggestions. The results are pretty interesting.

 I wonder how much these results is influenced by my geographical location, my personal tastes reflected in the searches I do and of course the collective psyche of google users. But, please note men in pink saree is not my idea of elegant dressing!

On learning hindi

Breakfast table conversation during the summative assessment week.
RRJ: Amma what is the meaning of 'Paltoo'?
Amma: Domestic, why?
RRJ: No….. in the hindi exam we were supposed to make a sentence with it.
Amma: Hmmmm…..
RRJ: Even though I didn't know the meaning, I still managed to write a sentence with it……… Paltoo ki vilom junglee!

Such conversations shake Amma's belief that detachment from RRJ's studies is the way to go. Instead she is wondering if she should to convert into a junglee tiger mom before it is too late.

Way back into Blog

Happened to see 'Music and Lyrics' last week........ my devotion for Hugh Grant, embarrassingly, continues to be  unconditional.  I laughed/smiled/cried through the movie as the situation demanded, did I not say my devotion is unconditional? Can't seem to get this song of the movie out of my mind.

"There's gotta be something for my soul somewhere" is so true. Sometimes it is just a song that hits the right note or a flower whose colours strike you or a good game of tennis or a pen and a hug that you get from your child on your birthday that gets your soul go all wobbly.

Ghoom with a view

We stood together staring into the distance as the fog was a little late in getting its act together.

To summarise

Lunchum at Ente Keralam
Simbly and totally yum yum

Anagram-fun

Did you know Leonardo da Vinci's Indian connection: his name is anagram of vindaloo and rice! I can't figure out though why I found it so funny.....

Handle with care

The only way I am able to understand the world is that by and large most people care, it is just how they show that they care is not necessarily very caring.

Pictures of things and nothings

Summer 2012: when we researched on pasta

Change of variables keeping cucumbers a constant

Grandma's oats cookies with a lot of coconut in them. 

When the parents forgot to buy birthday candle and had to make do with a chopped off regular one. Pink cake, strawberries oozing red, that is me caught with the murder weapon, it was a mad mad day: RRJ's eighth

Korean bachan, made in India: a roll up omlette. The lettuce leaf that is hardly able to breathe under the weight of carrot slices is home grown!

The giant pear we loved to have in Korea

To good times and other times......

One leg at a time

The mint pot that is bursting with activity

The giant bundt cake. When the blood used to be thicker and browner and the candle was not forgotten, another mad mad day, RRJ's seventh

Turn of events

Oh my course......... it was going through such a high in the first month and a half. I was thinking of writing about all the wonderful things in a post that would have run into pages and I would have had more to say. But  unfortunately all of a sudden it seems to be part of a glorious past whose memories are fading fast. We are going through such a low at the moment that can only be described by the fact that number of yawns per class have reached an all time high.  Instead of following the ant walking on a rotating disc while jumping of a tree with the enthusiasm that a dynamics class deserves we have all decided to go through the motions. I mean situations in some of the classes is such that the only reason I am not noticing the students dozing off in the class is because all my energies are focused on keeping myself awake during my own lecture! The good news is India has just hit the winning runs. On that happy note let me wrap up this post.

No presentation? Tough luck...

I guess being asked to make a 3-slide presentation on what-went-wrong is not exactly what a professional cricketer trains for but as a team member it is not so bad to give the man-in-charge the 3 slides he wants. Not sure though how Aussie coach is going to handle the aftermath of such an extreme step, specially being 0-2 down in the series.

At about 5 pm ......

...  all I have and all I know it is this dream of winning a set which keeps me trying on.

What is in a name?

Correcting the quiz papers made me see the 50 possible shades of my name. Luckily I am not prone to a rage attack at the sight of my name misspelled but really- Bhenargee!!

Gen X blood suckers

Damn these mosquitoes! They are everywhere, all the time. This year they seem to have become totally beyond 'all-out' type repellant's reach. The three pronged strategy has been to slather oneself with Odomos (thankfully still works), spend a significant part of the day inside the mosquito net and the last but most effective one is to electrocute them with these made-in-china bat. Satisfaction guaranteed.

Taking the monkey.....

This has to be the best story on restoration of art.

Lime tree

 
With leaves so bitter, and thorns so sharp
as that of a lime tree
One would imagine and have no doubt
it must of course be pest free......

Exam hall tid-bits

A disgruntled colleague (DC) joined our invigilation room gossip session:
DC: There are some people who don't even acknowledge if you smile at them.
We: Oh yes, we are totally aware of this phenomenon. Happens all the time. BTW, who was it today? 
DC: Our own colleague!
We: [not sure if one is supposed to appear surprised] Oh dear! Who ? Who?
[DC points to a general direction where X, Y and Z were standing]
We: [look at the general direction and make a guess] X?
DC: No!
We: Y?
DC: No!
We: Then who?
DC: Z of course.
Is it just a coincidence that X and Y were of our age group and Z of DC's? Or is it that we are our best and worst with our contemporaries?
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Someone in the huzz-buzz of exam lost the all important card!