Thursday, 7 June 2007

This ended up being a very pleasant day. I woke up, spoke with F., had a good breakfast of toast and egg. Spent the morning reading and updating my blog. Pishimoni, Pishomoshai and I then got lunch, rice, vegetables, dal, and fish. After lunch I turned on the air conditioning in my parents’ bedroom and fell asleep. I woke up around four thirty and watched the BBC world service news, and the NDTV evening news bulletins. Mum and I went downstairs for a swim in our clubhouse. The clubhouse is possibly the best thing about the Great Eastern Gardens Complex. It’s a single storey structure, painted white with a gym, a pool table, a card and carom lounge, a table tennis room, a squash court, a sauna, and a Jacuzzi. Beyond the clubhouse itself is a roller skating rink, an open air theatre, a children’s play are equipped with a jungle gym, a gigantic chess set, and two swimming pools. The first of the swimming pools is the baby pool that has a bridge going over it, and two water slides, one of which is covered. The second larger swimming pool is meant for those who already know how to swim. I really like spending my evenings in the swimming pool or on those days that it rains, in the gym. After we got back we decided to go out to do some shopping. Mum had to buy some vegetables and fruits and I still had to get a pair of sneakers. The four of us walked till the Kanjurmarg Station road. Here Mum and Pishimoni turned towards the station as an excellent vegetable market is located along this road, while Pishomoshai and I walked on towards the Huma mall. Thankfully the Huma mall did have electricity. The advantage of shopping at Huma mall is that although the mall stocks high end commodities, the stores themselves are generally factory outlets, as a result the products are available at generous discounts. After hunting around a bit we found a shoe store on the second floor, and I got a pair of Nike shoes. I was quite excited about them. Pishomoshai very generously bought me the pair. Later in the evening, after we had gotten back home, and Baba had come back from work as well, we got ready to go out for dinner. Pishomoshai had wanted to take us out for dinner, and I had voted that we go to a restaurant Mum and Baba had been raving about since last summer, Shera. We got into Baba’s car and ploughed our way through very heavy traffic north into the town of Mulund. Shera’s claim to fame is live Ghazal (North Indian classical music) performances. The restaurant had out door seating, as well as an indoors restaurant, and an indoor bar. There were also seating arrangements made on the roof of the restaurant. I noticed that they also had a palmist. We sat in the restaurant and ordered chicken and mutton kebabs as starters. For our main courses we ordered Rogan gosht (North Indian lamb curry) and a paneer dish (Cottage cheese). We had these with naan. The food was quite exquisite. All of us were very full, and came home quite satisfied. I fell asleep very happy.

Tuesday, 5 June 2007

I came home quite tired but I was able to talk to F. After taking a shower and eating my usual breakfast of toasts and egg I fell asleep. Mum woke me up around twelve or so. I had lunch around one thirty, rice, vegetables, lentils, and fish. I then took another nap, waking up at half past four. Mum had to run some errands and I decided to accompany her. We first took an auto rickshaw and went to the Hiranandani Gardens complex as my Mum had some bank work to do. We then caught another auto rickshaw and went over to the neighboring town of Ghatkopar. Mum had to buy a portable music system for her school, so we got off at a electronics chain Vijay Sales. Vijay Sales had purchased an entire apartment building for their store. It was very nice and they had good stuff. We settled on a Phillips system. I had a glance at the laptops kept on display and I got the impression that Indian designs were headed the Japanese route of tiny laptops rather than the American one of building gigantic ones. We went back home after that. I desperately needed to buy running shoes, a belt, and undershirts, so Pishomoshai, Mum and I went out. We walked down Lal Bahadur Shastri Road, the street on which our building is located, to the Huma mall. When my parents moved to Kanjurmarg in 2002 it was a decrepit cinema hall that inevitably put on blue films. But now Huma has become a swanky mall with a very high end cinema hall and fancy stores selling high end products. The transformation reflects the changing profile of Kanjurmarg itself, from a decaying industrial suburb to a high end residential neighborhood. The walk itself was far from pleasant as the sidewalk had turned into a bit of an obstacle course with debris and trees making it quite un-passable. On top of that it was very humid. When we reached Huma, much to our incredulity, we realized that the entire mall was without electricity, another victim of the state’s chronic power shortage. I promptly refused to do any shopping in candle light. By this time Baba had gotten back from his office and we coordinated and met up in front of the mall. We got into his car and decided to try our luck at the Nirmal Lifestyles mall in the neighboring town of Mulund. Fortunately for us there was electricity in Nirmal Lifestyles. We went into Shopper’s Stop, a famous clothing and home goods chain and bought our stuff from there. Baba was still in work mode and it didn’t take too long before a dim witted sales person had gotten him all worked up and demanding that the manager be called. Fortunately Mum was around to defuse the situation. Anyways, that’s the last time I go shopping with Baba on a workday. We got home around ten to a dinner of rotis, vegetables, and chicken. I fell asleep dog tired.

Monday, 4 June 2007

The highlight of the day was my friend Anirudh’s ‘goodbye dinner.’ Anirudh is one of my closest friends. I had known him since middle school. Although quite brilliant as a school student and an outstanding swimmer of national repute, Anirudh had struggled throughout college, and beyond. Now however he was leaving for Holland. He had had a successful stint with Shell as a consultant, and was now moving to the Hague to continue working for them. He had called all his close friends for dinner at a restaurant, China Garden, in Bandra. The funny thing about this get together was that although each of Anirudh’s friends was very close to him, none really knew the other all that well. I myself knew Devatanu well because of our friendship in school but no one besides him. It took a bit to figure out the logistics for the evening since Bandra’s a good forty five minutes away from where my parents live now. We finally figured that I would get Milind to drive me there, after he had driven Mum back from her school, and before he would have to pick up Baba from his office in Worli. Since the dinner was scheduled at nine, and both Anirudh and Devatanu would not be at home till at least six, I decided to kill time with my cousin Reshmi at her place, in Pali Hill, Bandra. I got to their apartment at five, Reshmi’s brother Deep had to take off for a football match but her mother Tultul, who I call Tultul Mashi, was at home. Tultul Mashi teaches history at Bombay’s prestigious Cathedral High School. The three of us, Reshmi, Tultul Mashi, and I had a great time lounging around in Reshmi’s bedroom gossiping over crackers and tuna. Around seven I took off for Anirudh’s place promising to call Reshmi to try and meet up with her and her friends in a bar called Zenzi. I walked over to Anirudh’s apartment, I got to meet his mother, a film maker and distributor, and his father, a pilot for Royal Thai Air, and also, after a very long time, his sister Devshree who works as a copywriter. Anirudh and I hung around for a bit at his apartment before taking off in his father’s Peugot 309 for China Gate.
Anirudh, it appeared, had a very eclectic collection of close friends. Jimit was a photographer, Shruti was a medical student headed for Chicago for her residency, Lavanya was a math major in college but I was a little unsure if she did anything at all, Devatanu was of course into management, and I am a historian. We had a three hour dinner session. For drinks I had Kingfisher beer, for starters we had steamed wontons, I also had tom yum soup, as entrees we had hakka noodles, chicken fried rice, lamb, and a chicken dish, and for dessert we had ice cream with fried noodles. Since it was past midnight I decided not to call Reshmi. That, of course, did not mean that the night was over for me. Anirudh and I went over to Jimit’s place to hang out. He lives in Santa Cruz, a suburb north of Bandra. We went to his office and I got some rum and coke. Jimit has obviously been doing well as a freelance photographer, his office looked quite cushy. Quite incredibly we talked, and youtubed the whole night away. By the time we got back to Anirudh’s apartment it was five forty five. I had decided to spend the night there, but since it was morning already I decided to take off and beat the office rush. I caught an auto rickshaw and went home catching a glimpse of the rising sun while speeding up the Eastern Express Highway.

Sunday, June 3. 2007

I woke up with a fearful cold. I had a sore throat and a runny nose. My ears were blocked and my head felt heavy. I suspected it was the shuttling between the extreme outdoor heat and the intensely cool air conditioned interiors that had led to this. I went online as usual but F. and I had an appalling connection to deal with. I later counted sixteen interruptions during our conversation. Fortunately the rest of the day was not as frustrating. We enjoyed an excellent breakfast of Dosas (a South Indian dish, rice bread stuffed with potatoes and eaten with a coconut based sauce) and at around half past eleven one of my closest friends Devatanu arrived. I had known Deva from our days at the Arya Vidya Mandir School (the name translates into a very dramatic Aryan Temple of Knowledge). Deva nowadays works as a team leader for a software development firm based in Bombay. He recently married his girlfriend Seema, she works at the HDFC back. It was very nice seeing Deva and Seema again. Deva is quite generously built and loves his food but we all really enjoyed the lunch Mum had made. She made a Parsee meal of rice, masala bread, vegetables and dhansak (a combination of lamb and vegetables). After Deva and Seema left I was able to take a quick power nap before getting ready for the evening. Pishomoshai had gotten tickets for us for a play performed by Rajit Kapur, quite a well known actor, and written by Girish Karnad, a well known playwrite. It was in English, called Flowers. I personally knew the lighting designer, Arghya Lahiri, he was my senior in school and in college. The play was being performed at the National Center for the Performing Arts complex, in the Tata Experimental Theatre Hall, in the city. It was a cool hour and a half drive away. Fortunately the roads weren’t too crowded and we didn’t have too much of a problem getting there. While entering I actually bumped into Arghya, it was nice talking to him again, I hadn’t seen him in years. The Experimental is a tiny theatre hall, designed to engage the audience with the play itself. Unfortunately, barring Arghya’s lighting there wasn’t too much to be impressed by when it came to performance itself. I felt Rajit Kapur was a little too subdued in his performance, and the play dragged in parts. It was a monologue about a priest who fell in love with a courtesan. Ironically the most dramatic moment of the evening however occurred after the performance. During the show a cellular phone had gone off and at the end of the play after receiving a substantial applause Rajit Kapur went on a terrific rant about cell phones and how disrespectful they were. Personally I thought Kapur was a bit obnoxious. I got annoyed by the phone too but I don’t think anyone in the audience had paid two hundred rupees to be lectured by Kapur in a holier than thou tone. We had an uneventful drive back and enjoyed an excellent dinner. Mum whipped up some Phane Bhat (over boiled rice with lentils, boiled egg, and rarefied butter). I fell asleep dog tired.

June 1st and 2nd

June 1st and 2nd
A pleasant combination of events prevented this blog being updated over the last couple of days. I have decided to combine the entries for Friday and Saturday to make it easier for my readers. After speaking to Franny on Friday I left with my parents. I was going to spend the night with my cousins, Reshmi and Deep. I reached their place after our driver Milind had dropped off Baba at his office and Mum at her school. It was really hot, and very humid. Reshmi and Deep have both been goofing off this summer on top of this their parents were away. Their father was working in Singapore, and their mother was visiting her parents in Kolkata. Reshmi, Deep, and I made plans to go over to the Infinity Mall in the suburb of Andheri to watch Pirates of the Caribbean III. We caught an auto-rickshaw, a three wheeler motorized taxi. Unfortunately, auto-rickshaws tend to be quite small, and both Reshmi and Deep are rather generously built. So it was quite a struggle to fit in, particularly for a half hour ride on a very hot and humid morning. We met up with Resmi’s friend Sanjana at the mall. Sanaja’s headed to Boston this Fall as well. We liked the film, I grabbed a softie during the intermission, but felt that the film had just too many twists and as a result dragged a little towards the end. Poor Deep couldn’t join us for lunch, our cousin Ria was coming in from the neighboring city of Pune, and had to be received at Dadar station in the middle of Bombay city. Deep had to rush off to meet her. Meanwhile Reshmi, Sanjana, and I went over to the food court to get some lunch. I had chole bature (lentils with bread). We then strolled over to the mall bookstore, a chain called Landmark. While browsing through the books there we met our cousins Aniruddha and Rohini. Aniruddha is preparing to move to the U.S., he’s going to enroll in the University of Pennsylvania in the Fall. His sister Rohini is still in school. Their mother, my aunt, Dola Mashi was there as well, and it was nice meeting her again. After that Reshmi and I headed back to Bandra.
The action in Bandra was quite intense. We heard from Deep on our way back, he claimed that he had been able to receive Ria, and that after depositing her luggage at their apartment, Deep and Ria were at a café, Café Coffee Day, at Carter Road in Bandra. So Reshmi and I joined them there. It was very nice meeting Ria again, I was seeing her after at least three years, though I had had a lot chats with her online. After spending some time at Café Coffee Day we went back to Reshmi and Deep’s place and relaxed for a little bit. We left the house around seven in the evening. We first took autos to Mocha, a hookah chain on Hill Road, the most important shopping/hangout area in Bandra. Unfortunately Mocha was filled with customers, and the smoke was a little too much for both Ria and me. So instead, we walked over to Bandstand. Bandstand, like Carter Road is a long stretch along the coastline. It was a lovely promenade to walk on. At the end of Bandstand, the stretch becomes a peninsula jutting out into the sea, this, is called Land’s End. We walked up and down the promenade, sweating like nothing on earth. Finally around nine thirty we walked over to a restaurant called Kobe, they serve excellent sizzlers. I ordered a mix grill and enjoyed it thoroughly. On our way back we picked up a copy of The Da Vinci Code to watch. When we got back home we had quite a blast, pulling each others legs’ and finished watching the movie only by three thirty in the morning. I feel asleep then dead tired.
I woke up the earliest the next morning. I had to speak to Franny at seven thirty, so I also had to wake up Reshmi so that I could use her computer. The connection was really slow and I had to wait a solid half hour to download Skype. I actually had enough time to take a shower and freshen up in the meantime. Fortunately F was still online and I was able to talk to her. While everyone else was sleeping I got Reshmi and Deep’s maid to fix me a breakfast of toast, omlette, and sausages. Everyone, particularly Reshmi, woke up in a grumpy mood. I was able to get people to move out only around eleven thirty, and even then Deep refused to go out saying that it was too hot. Reshmi, Ria and I went over to Mocha, which fortunately was a lot less crowded. I ate a balti chicken crustini. I suspect balti stands for Baltistan, somewhere in north-west India, or maybe Pakistan, my sense of geography is a little limited. We then picked up some gelato ice cream from Cater road and then came home. I was amazed that by this time I had wiped out a cool one thousand four hundred rupees.
Baba picked me up around five thirty and we made it back home soon after. I went out again accompanying Mum and Pishomoshai to the Nirmal Lifestyles mall. It was jam packed with people. Shopright, the grocery store was particularly crowded. I was glad to get done. I was beginning to feel really tired and looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

30 May Wednesday

I woke up to another hot and sunny morning. The consistency of the weather is quite striking. It’s probably the sustained nature of the heat that makes summers in Bombay so harsh, not the temperatures or humidity levels which are generally quite moderate. I had a rushed conversation with F. because I had to leave with my parents today morning. I had plans on spending the morning with my cousins Reshmi and Deep. Pishimoni left for Kolkata. She had to go there to receive the truck carrying Pishomoshai and Pishimoni’s furniture. Pishomoshai left moments before we did to drop her off at the airport. We dropped off Baba at his office, the head office of the Great Eastern Shipping Company Limited, called Ocean House. The office is located in the Worli neighborhood of Central Bombay, about forty five minutes from where my parents live. After dropping him off, our chauffer Milind drove my mother and me to the suburb of Bandra to drop Mum off at her school Peridot Nursery. The car then dropped me off at my cousin Reshmi and Deep’s apartment in the Pali Hill neighborhood of Bandra. Reshmi and Deep are relatives on my maternal side. Reshmi’s maternal grandfather and my maternal grandfather are brothers. They live in the second storey of an apartment building. Reshmi is three years younger to me and she is a doctor preparing to move to Boston this fall to pursue a graduate education. Deep just gave his twelfth grade exams and is busy applying for pretty much everything ranging from pure sciences, engineering, medicine, and even hotel management. Reshmi and I got a chance to have a nice chat as I accompanied her to the Bandra-Kurla complex, a massive business district north of Bandra. She had to pick up some paperwork from the headquarters of State Bank of India, the largest bank in the country. Their head office was very impressive but I wasn’t too pleased when they didn’t let me enter because I was dressed in shorts. On our way back we stopped at Carter Road, a long sweeping road hugging the coastline with a lovely promenade, to buy gelato. We then went to Reshmi and Deep’s apartment for lunch. Mum joined us for fried rice and chicken. We then crashed in Reshmi’s bedroom, turned on the air conditioning and chatted for almost an hour. Mum and I got back around four thirty, just in time to open the door for the maids. In the evening Mum and I went out for our usual swim. While we were swimming a coach was training very young children in the shallow end of the pool. One of the children, all of a sudden jumped into the pool without her life vest on. The poor thing nearly drowned and had to be fished out, it was really shocking!!! Children that young should not be allowed in the pool unless their parents are close by. I came home ravenously hungry and we enjoyed a very good dinner of comfort food – rotis, potol, dal, and fish curry. We were all so sleepy that we passed out immediately without me getting a chance to update this blog which I was able to do only much later so it got posted only today: look below.

29 May Tuesday

This is a late post. We had a quite day. Pishomoshai, Pishimoni, Mum and I went out in the morning to the town of Mulund, a few miles north of where we live. We were on our way to a mall called Nirmal Lifestyles. I had very excitedly taken my camera to take a photograph to put up in this blog. Nirmal Lifestyles is a sprawling commercial complex, mostly open air but with air conditioned stores. Its claim to fame is a massive dome covering almost a quarter of the mall. Inside, visitors can see a model of our solar system complete with the Mir space station, astronauts, and a rocket. This is supposedly the largest dome anywhere in the world. Much to my annoyance there were boards everywhere announcing that photography was prohibited. Probably as a security measure. India has been on a high security status for six months now, level two, something that shouldn’t have lasted for more than three or four days, as a result the security measures have been diluted and stupid things such as a ban on photography in Nirmal Lifestyles continues. We first stopped off at a clothing and home goods chain store, FabIndia. Pishimoni had to return something there. They had some excellent pieces of furniture that I enjoyed looking at. We then strolled over to Crosswords, a bookstore chain. I grabbed a copy of Ramchandra Guha’s latest book. Guha is historian who writes pop history books, his latest offering is a history of post independence India. I was pretty excited about the book but got very disappointed by the first chapter. Guha had gotten India’s partition story quite wrong, his theory was almost two decades old. It is now well known in academia that India was partitioned not because of any divide between Hindus or Muslims that existed from time immemorial or even one created by the British, rather it was the political acrobatics that Jinnah and the Congress were involved in that resulted in partition. Contrary to Guha, Jinnah did not want a separate state, all he was after was a federalist structure that he felt would be a safer bet for Muslims, the Congress refused him. Jinnah gambled and upped the stakes by making a demand for an independent Islamic state hoping that the Congress would back down. Unfortunately for him, the Congress called his bluff. The Congress was quite willing to live with partition if that was the cost they’d have to pay for a centralized India. In came Mountbatten who had no clue of what was going on, all he heard were two groups talking about partition and much to Jinnah’s horror, Mountbatten partitioned India, patted himself on the back, and left for England. Guha desperately needs to Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman. After some time we walked over to an Indian restaurant called Pulses for lunch. I ordered a combo meal of Naan (North Indian bread) and Mutton curry which was served with Raita (a very liquidy yogurt). The food was pretty good. After this excellent lunch we went back home. The other interesting thing I did during the day was to go for a swim. The swimming pool was undergoing repairs all these days and had finally been opened. The chlorine levels were quite unimaginable, but besides that I enjoyed my swim.