jayantiblogshere

English Vinglish is India’s answer to Shirley Valentine.    It is a must watch movie for every woman. Young and old, single and married. Every woman who goes to watch this movie may do well if she takes her man along. You never know, with some luck he may be able to relate to it. A touching and sensitive movie of a homemaker running a small home business of   making sweets( laddoos) and a seemingly happy family of Husband , two children and a mother in law. Sashi, the protagonist of the movie comes across as this selfless, naïve and innocent and ignorant woman that we all so easily associate mothers with. Beneath this stereotype of being the selfless homemaker lies this human being, whose emotional   needs are repressed and taken for granted   in the daily grind of serving her husband, a teenage daughter , a son and a mother in law. A solo travel to New York to arrange her niece’s wedding before her family comes over, her complete mess up   at a ...

  Chottu runs Bhavana general stores ,which is situated   round the corner from where we live. It is a decent sized grocery and general shop that sells everything that one would need to run a day to day   household   from milk to mosquito repellants all under one roof. Chottu’s uncles and relatives run many   grocery shops all around the city. When Chottu’s uncle invested in Bhavana general stores, the only customers around the place were construction workers who had pitched their tents and lived on the daily wages building out the apartments and houses in the vacant plots around the area. This could have been around 10 years back. Ours is a locality that has seen abundance of construction and new development in the last 3-4 years thanks to being close to the IT hub. The business model was simple. Staples like rice, wheat flour, oil and pulses were available in as little quantities as was required for two square meals a day till the next daily w...

Manjunath ( Photpgraph withheld to retain confidentiality) grew up and graduated from Hindupur near Anantapur.   His father owned   some land there that they cultivated . Ever since his father fell ill, they have leased out the land and live out of the income. Inspired by his grandfather’s words, Manjunath set out to Bangalore the city of prosperity and growth, 150 kms away from his home   to find a corporate   job. While at home he attended   V R Reddy’s spoken English classes where he learnt among other things practical life skills such as confidence building, how to answer interview questions , spoken English, the art of networking and making contact with high officials and such things.   After many failed attempts to get through an interview in the BPO companies in big bad Bangalore, despite all that education from Reddy Sir’s tutorials, Manjunath’s finances started dwindling.   Proud young man that he is, he could not take any ...

PUDCHYA VARSHI LAUKAR YAA ! Come early next year … Ganapathy Bappa has not been generous this year.   Not atleast to us Bangaloreans. What is supposed to be a thanksgiving celebration after a good monsoon, hardly feels so this year. This year’s Ganapathy festival marks the beginning of a year long drought as the monsoon spell normally ends with the Ganapathy visarjan.   This year, the newspapers were abuzz with pleas from corporators and the government requesting people to buy eco friendly Ganapathy and immerse them in artificial tanks and not pollute the water bodies.     Here is the total count of Ganapathy idols at our apartment complex that were kept for visarjan. Not bad - about 50% of people have heeded to the call and have chosen to buy an unpainted clay version of the elephant god rather than go with the painted version.   In the south; ok atleast in my family we always got home a clay Ganapathy.   Those we...

Coconut tree climber Bangalore is never short of coconut trees. C oconut trees were everywhere before the concrete jungle took over. In apartments like ours where   a few lucky trees survived the axe when the builders started construction are today a welcome respite to the little greenery left in urban spaces. The coconut trees are not maintenance free. They need sprucing up.   The coconut produce is big business . It is normally leased out to the person who also climbs up to fell the produce and trim up the tree.                       He was at work this morning and so I gave my swimming practice a miss. The coconut tree climber. Muniyappa climbs coconut trees. He fells the coconut, cut the dry leaves off the branches and makes a living out of the per tree wages and by taking a portion of the produce that he plucks. His is a dangerous job.    It is not just about the dange...

This wholesome breakfast of puttu pazham on a lazy Saturday morning   has some history to it.   This puttu maker was one more of my impulsive buys somewhere near wayanad on a long drive from Bangalore.   Made out of two simple coconut shells, this is the medium that steamed puttu for a long time until the stainless steel kozha was invented.  I had no intention of actually making puttu out of them. I only wanted it to be ornamental piece in my drawing room or my kitchen. For months it has been lying around unused.   Today I decided to use it for what it was originally crafted for.     And wow , what was otherwise called kozha puttu did come out just as well if not in teh same shape  it would have in a stainless steel funnel. With a small hole on one corner of the coconut shell it fits wells into the steam rising out of the cooker. A 5 to 8 minutes of   steaming    and a quick, filling and healthy breakfa...

More famously known by its abbreviated form MTR is synonymous with the garden city and it old world charms.  A 100 meters from the Lalbagh botanical park, it is certainly not the fine dining place you would take an ‘unindianized’ visitor to. Or so I thought.  My brunch today was with a dozen or so fellow walkers from USA, Germany, France & Romania at MTR  after an amazing ‘Green Heritage walk’ just across the road at the Lalbagh botanical gardens.     More about the walk in yet another blog, for the heritage and history of MTR is itself worth a blog. There were no forks and knives, just the spoons and some paper napkins since the visiting were not used to 'hand wash'.  The fanfare served for the brunch was MTR’s signature dish – the Rava idli, a Masala Dosa and a Plain Dosa with generous helpings of ghee.  This was preceded by a Bangalore grape juice and followed by the Chandrahara a sweet from Karnataka and summed up b...

I am not the one given to splurging and impulsive buying.  But today was an exception. I saw this grandfather’s clock and fell in love with it. Like Laila (Katrina Kaif) would have said in ZNMD ‘Mujhe afsos karna nahi aata’, I went back, said to myself WTH and paid for this one.   Grandfather clock gets delivered tomorrow. I have now begun to wonder if my lovely little cuckoo clock will feel intimidated and neglected with the arrival of this Big ben of B-102. I just realized that he will be competing with her to chime in every half hour. Now; that was not a sceanrio I thought about when I gave in to my temptations this evening at the antique exhibition. The cuckoo clock came into my life on a similar surge of temptation about six years ago. I was on this solo - soul searching trip to Europe with a bunch of strangers that I never cared to befriend.  It was a  warm summer afternoon at   Munich’s central ...

'Aiyo shiva shiva !!! HALEEM ...aa . Non-veg theriyuma,   Aattu kaal soup' ... shrieked out amma, when I called her from Hyderabad airport to let her know I was packing some Pista house haleem for dinner. It came ot me as a surprise that Haleem by itself could be a familiar recollection in a Tam bram household. Atleast I had not heard of it before.   ‘ No, not really this is the vegetarian version ,’ I pleaded over the phone, cautiously adding that I had it yesterday for dinner and it was delicious. She sounded upset over her wayward daughter going astray eating non-vegetarian food   and god alone knows what else and would not have any of it at home. She said there was no way she would take a chance and declared the war against Haleem.   Vegetarian or otherwise. Not expecting such a ferocious reaction, I had already lugged three packed boxes of vegetarian Haleem in my checked in baggage with the hope that I would convert my folks at home...

Boarded the metro at Baiyappanahalli   this afternoon. As the train approached the station, was pleasantly surprised to discover that the driver on duty was a young   (and pretty) woman. Made a mental note to Google it up. A google search on ‘Namma Metro drivers’ and here is what it threw up. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-10-18/bangalore/30296422_1_metro-rail-bangalore-metro-delhi-metro   Picture courtesy – Hindustan times http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos-news/Photos-India/BangaloreMetro/Article4-759464.aspx Turns out that there are atleast two of them ( Priyanka and Rashmi) if not more. Way to Go …Namma Metro.   There are lessons to learn in diversity and inclusivity for us in the corporates to emulate.