Mental Excursions

Circus Act: the Art of Multitasking!   Some years ago, when I quit my regular job to freelance, and be an at-home mom, I realized that completing all the chores and tasks on my daily list was taking a long time. It was looking for ways to maximise my productivity in the time available that I found the magic word ‘multi-tasking’. Enamoured by it I made conscious efforts to learn, practice and if not exactly perfect, at least take this skill to a workable level and add to my abilities. Multitasking simply put, is doing more than one task at a time to attain multiple goals. The word first used in 1965 to describe the capabilities of the IBM computer, meant running multiple sets of instructions (programs) on a computer at the same time. Slowly it started to be used for people too. Over the time it became an addiction with me. I made it a habit to do two to three, sometimes more tasks at a time. You could see me follow any random combination simultaneously- cook maybe on t...

Those were the days! Like most others, members in the Whatsapp group of my classmates from school also get into a tizzy merely because it is a Sunday (though most of them have retired), somebody’s birthday, a festival, or they send motivational messages/internet gyan on life , sing praises of their favourite political leaders, with pie charts and graphs try to prove how our country is ahead of or behind other countries, propound on aspects of religion or otherwise, criticise any/all of the above or send forwarded videos. But there is one special feature of this group, so conspicuously absent in all the rest - recalling and remembering the time we were children or in school. Those days are always mentioned wistfully as the good old days because these people perhaps forget that others might remember the bad ones while their own memory gets selective. They dig into their photo albums and post pictures, going nostalgic, remembering things from several decades ago. The strange featu...

It was French Fryday! The second Friday of July yesterday, came and went, I was not even aware that the Americans went on to celebrate the day in honour of everyone’s biggest favourite among all potato dishes – the humble French fry. I say, isn’t this one occasion we too should be celebrating? Who doesn’t love French fries, or potato chips as the British call them? What can be simpler for lifting one’s mood and satiating hunger than potatoes deep fried till crunchy, in hot smoking oil, and dusted with salt? You begin with just one fry, then have another, one more, just one more, a small one, a long one, the crispiest one, and soon you have finished the whole pile! Earlier, the National French Fry Day was fixed for July 13 th , but since last year, it is celebrated on the second Friday of July. The story goes that during World War I, American soldiers went to Belgium, and it was there that they first tasted fried potato. It is further believed that the official language of Belgium a...