Mental Excursions

Chase the contact!   The Covid-19 pandemic will be a painful chapter in the history of this planet. However, besides the other changes in our lives, it has made a noticeable contribution to our vocabulary and revised the meanings of how we understood some words so far. Pandemic (not epidemic!), social distancing, isolation, PPE, sanitiser, lockdown, unlock (Is that even a noun?) ki prakriya (the process of unlocking), oximeter, are some of the words and expressions which have crept into our daily language along with the name of the dreaded virus. One such expression which rings alarm bells is contact tracing . In February this year, before I realised that C-19 had made its presence felt in our country, I knew what contact as well as tracing was. Contact has always been the key to lifestyles, relationships and activities. I can hardly recall an activity in which contact in some form or the other is non-existent or that absolute isolation is the norm. To live a fulfilli...

Men and household chores The pandemic and the resultant lockdowns have made us notice the huge changes on the domestic front. Families who have no live-in help, have been forced to take it upon themselves to do all the household chores in addition to working from home on the jobs they have, because domestic workers have been totally or partially disallowed to come to work. There are hundreds of Whatsapp jokes and memes about men being forced to work at home during the lockdown ever since it was declared on March 24. Yet the fact remains, that given our social structure, the workload on women has risen manifold and very few men actually share the load. Even the stay-at-home women have had to give up the freedom of doing their household work at their own pace as the husband and children have also been at home 24x7, and in most cases demanding attention too. The myth of the superwoman faces the risk of shattering because while feeding the family continues to be the main job, there i...

  Food is a 4-letter F-word And I love using it all the time! Covid or no Covid, isolation or not, the old-fashioned pleasure of sitting relaxed, talking over coffee and cakes, pakoras and samosas with cups of masala chai or enjoying a meal with family or friends seems to have taken a beating. The simple pleasure of eating has become the fulcrum of the tug of war between our lifestyles and the weighing machine. Do you ever stop to reflect that only humans have this wide variety of food items available to them? We are the only species on this terra-firma who can see, make, relish and digest an infinite number of foods and dishes. Not only that, sitting at one spot on this planet, you can enjoy the food from places within the country or around the world. Who stops you from eating Kashmiri roganjosh, Punjabi sarson ka saag, Bihari litti chokha , Tamilian chicken c hettinad, Karnataka’s bisi bele bhaath, Maharashtrian srikhand , Odiya   chaatu rai, Bengali machher jhol, ...

Rules for the day  I make lists of all kinds. Additionally, I make a mental list, categorizing people with or without scientific temper too. But the ‘without’ list is so long that if somebody whom I had thought of as in the ‘with’ list, somehow leans a fraction of a millimetre to the grey area in between, it begins to rattle my trust.   It stupefies me into silence, a feat which very few matters manage to do to my unidirectional brain-tongue coordination. So when a doctor friend told me she kept fast on the four Shravan Mondays, it was with a gargantuan effort that I swallowed my reaction without airing it as I did when my very logical doctor sister-in-law told me she did not take ‘non-vegetarian’ food on Tuesdays. In my life, the days of the week are very much as Snoopy has expressed. So, I reasoned with myself that it was their belief and I had no right to contest that. But that directed my attention to the superstitions we have in India about the days of the week. ...