panaecea

A Series Of Soul Bytes Just For You

March 9, 2024

Shopaholic….Who ? No Not Me!

Where would you go on a shopping spree?

Post Corona I have become an avid online shopper. It saves money, time and energy. It took time for me to realise that the price tags of renowned shops include establishment cost too. However, chances are you may be duped into getting something unworthy while shopping online.

But I was never a market surfer. I had my chosen shops, pre-Corina, where bargaining was a criminal offence. Usually, it was Nalli for Sarees and the Emporia for myriad things, like dhoop, agarbatti, authentic silks or just window browsing. I love this part of CP. And the Coffee Shop. Last I shopped some souvenirs from Nagaland Emporium for my NRI nephew. It is privately owned and the counter girls told me to spread the word for their part of the country overseas. I did.

Emporia are government owned outlets showcasing the art and artefacts of different states of the country. These are the shops astronomically expensive just to fleece the tourists and the aristocrats. But you get to see the arts and crafts of the natives in one place ! That’s feast to the eye!!

The newbies go to Khan Market where a dress worth ₹700/- is sold at ₹7000/-, where the celebs frequent and where everything from food to furnishings are overly hyped. And the shoppers during peak time think the roads are their own and park vehicles anywhere they feel like. The raees – Barbarians! Tax evaders! Those who refer to the aam junta ( common people) as cattle class!

It’s also fashionable to shop in Dubai, Sri Lanka, I guess, just for the sake of flaunting. Once we had neighbours who had migrated from the South-east Asia. The wife landed at the airport loaded with gold. Am not a jewellery person. Imagine paying for air fuel, hotel stay and the works returning with gold biscuits hidden in secret compartments of the attache and getting caught at the customs! No baba that’s too much risky, as the indigenous exclamation goes 😔! Off my limits.

I remember once B-I-L got textiles from some foreign locale which had Made In India tag cleverly camouflaged!!

Our country has so much to offer! When I see the shiny green and black cardamoms and peppercorns, crisp bay leaves, fragrant cinnamon sticks, dark and rich cloves beatifically beckoning at me I want to run away to the backwaters for these fragrance full spices! Kerala is famous for these!

When I yearn for mishti doi, taal shaansh, nolen gurer rassogollahs I rush to Shree Annapurna at Yusuf Sarai. Ideally, I should be at my birth place where exotic sweets are produced by Ganguram and Sons and others.

Can you beat it after spending my entire life in Delhi I haven’t once been to the iconic Chandni Chowk ( the old part of the walled city) to have the mouth watering street foods. It’s criminal!

Once in the suburbs of Kolkata I was looking for an out of production cassette – non filmy Hindi songs. A sole shopkeeper had one but refused to part as it was his prized personal possession. Who says Bengalis know business ?

Same with some of the shops in CP. Not the flashy ones but the obscure, small, under the staircases and loaded with CDs and cassettes of rare ragas and rarest raagis. The old owners an authority on the subject. However, most of them have downed the shutters because the gen next does not believe in continuing, looks for greener pastures elsewhere and quick money or simply does not understand the value of what they used to sell. Pure joy!!

For books, of course, College Street or locally known boi para or the book alley (does it ring a bell?), in Kolkata, where the primitive tramline lays supine on the tarmac. You get rarest of rare gems here. My cousin used to squander away his entire salary over an out of print edition! For old English vinyles it’s Mumbai. They just sell it on the roadside near the sea. Unimaginable!!

One of my colleagues gave me a list of the best and original food vendors in the city to explore. It’s on my to-do list.

Every part of the country is replete with some miraculous finds. You just have to sniff your way through. But the spree and sprint are missing now. It’s convenience and comfort. Yet, I miss the peculiar smells associated with certain joints. The sensuous reminders of ancient visits. Perhaps, someday I will wander through those boulevards once again.

Who knows my wanderlust takes me where?

Presently, I am looking for cleaner air, uncontaminated water and quieter space. Alas! You cannot shop for them even at exorbitant rates. These were God’s gifts to us for free but as usual, anything for free is not valued enough. So we callously misplaced them.

Let me now see which shop sells the appropriate technology to restore them.

Do you have the address?

I shall locate them through GPS for sure 😀😀

A Birthday Bash with colleagues in South Extension. Am, as usual, busy eating!! 😔

Coffee House stands renovated. You can spend hours chatting with a cup of coffee and nobody will tell you to vacate your seat. The ambience is homelier than the side dishes they serve. But who goes for gourmet to CH? It’s just the buzz of conversation across all age groups – that’s the first striking auditory feed as you enter the premise. Everything else comes later. CHs are meant for addas. You cannot buy them, of course!

Trivia : Indian Coffee House was established in 1957. One hundred years after the Indian Mutiny and still going STRONG!!

Posted by gc1963 on March 9, 2024 in A SHORT ESSAY, Books, Come To India, Leisure, MUSINGS, Shopping and tagged dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1872.

5 Comments

March 7, 2024

What’s In A Name?

What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?

I don’t have a middle name. Sob! Sob!

But I do have a big name and an equally bigger surname. An oddity in this part of the country because it is usually misspelt and mispronounced.

The Bengali Tradition

Bengalis have a tradition of giving their offsprings uncommon and unpronounceable names. As soon as an infant lands from his/her mother’s womb in a Bengali household the grandparents make it a point to refer to the mythological tomes kept in the boiyer almaari or the quintessential book shelf. Not to chant shlokas to welcome the new born but to find the biggest name possible and better still the one which rhymes with the name (s) of the earlier born(s) [cousins included], howsoever, unintelligible they be. But, my dearies, Bengalis will always find the reference to the context. You just have to ask them. I guess it is a foregone conclusion that the child, on growing up, will not leave the mother’s pallu ever. Hence, no chance of mispronunciation, mockery, millions of questions etc.

The Naming Ceremony And The Anathema

We have, like all Hindus, a naming ceremony 🎑. My paternal grandfather named both us sisters. My elder sister was called Jayashree which is the other name for Goddess Lakshmi or the Goddess of Wealth. All throughout her life, my poor didi had to labour hard, alongside my brother-in-law, to meet the expenses of raising a family. Long time, she suffered from financial insecurity proving how unsuitable her good name was.

Likewise, to rhyme with her name, I was named Geetashree which is more misleading. It is, ahem, another name of Goddess Saraswati, the White Goddess of Knowledge. Incidentally, both Lakshmi and Saraswati are siblings and in constant fight with each other for the number one position. In keeping with the tradition, we siblings too fight like hell, just to prove who is right.

The Great Proclamation Of The Future

My buaji (father’s sister) recounted how I caught hold of money as a baby in my naming ceremony. So my name itself is anathema. In fact, I had to start earning before I could complete my education. For a long time I felt inferior because of lack of degrees and considered myself the black sheep of the family.

Interestingly, my sister is well educated and very knowledgeable. She caught hold of the pen 🖋️, you see, in the naming ceremony. That’s just a part of the ritual where the child is given a choice of things to clutch , like pen, money etc., to give an indication to his/her inclination and choice of profession in later life, which come to think of, is quite a far fetched proclamation that too at infancy.

The Pet Names With Reference To Context

Bengalis also have a fad for pet names. These are either a shortened version of the bigger name or a rhyming version of the older siblings’ names, again cousins included, or just simply weird like Patol which is the Bangla for Pointed Gourd. Just imagine!!

I am called Mithu at home, which is, thankfully a very common pet name. But it is unisexual. Even a boy can have the same pet name. Absurd!!

In so far as rhyming goes, on my maternal side, all we cousins have rhyming pet names. It starts with Laali , Polly, Molly (my maternal cousins – daughters of my mother’s brothers), then Shelly ( my elder sister) and then Nelly – that’s me. In my mama bari, maternal uncles’ house, noone even remembers my other name – Mithu. I have always been called Nelly. As a child I was not happy 😊 with this name. But in my adult years I became quite proud of it as it was so English !!! That’s my colonial DNA shrieking!!!!

The Nomenclature Fiasco

However, growing up far from my birth place I have always had problems with my name. In this part of the country the girls have short names in keeping with their social stature. They are treated as secondary citizens/members of the family – who have to be married off with a big dowry. That’s my personal theory (I am entitled to one – read ahead to grasp) !! So, they cannot deal with big names like mine.

My office colleagues complained so often. It was incomprehensible to them. So as a true blue Bangaali I would open up my gyan ka pitara (the knowledge box) and tell them it’s weighty meaning which actually didn’t impress them the least. So my name got shortened to Geet, Geeta, Geetu, Shree etc.

My original name is mispronounced because in Bengali a is pronounced as o. In the northern part of the land a becomes aa like aah! My Southern friends put an unnecessary h after t and pronounce it likewise – Geethashree!!

Even now, in OPD counters and doctor’s clinics, the assistants will write out on the Card/Prescription/Bills/Receipts – Geeta Shree. The Chatterjee goes missing ! I keep on repeating Chatterjee Chatterjee . They just ignore me. Many times I have to spell the name and surname to them. Once a counter boy asked me irritatedly, ” yeh bhi likhna hai?” ( Do I have to write that too) referring to my surname. So Shree forcibly becomes either my middle or surname.

A few of my colleagues in Office would ask me why I didn’t use the Bengali version of the surname – Chattopadhyay. The British eased it for us by renaming it as Chatterjee (Mukhopadhyay became Mukherjee and Bandyopadhyay became Bannerjee). Imagine if I had to use my full name 😜😜

To add more insult, if a North Indian comes to know my pet name, the immediate reaction will be ,”Oh! We or such and such had a parrot named Mithu.”

Mithu is a sweet name – probably a cull-out from mishti meaning sweets which the Bengalis are so famous and fond of. My paternal uncle used to call me Mithai which means sweetmeat.

So with a profusion of names, it’s a blessing that I do not have a middle name which may have added more to confusion.

I hope you are not bored with all that history, geography, etymology, ethnology etc.

If not, thank you for patiently reading through my loooong post

In case you are just browsing thanks for your footfall.

But if out of the blue you happen to enjoy the post do like, comment, share and subscribe.

Au Revoir

Posted by gc1963 on March 7, 2024 in A PROTEST A LAMENT, DOWN MEMORY LANE, Entertainment, FAMILIAL BOND, Funny and Weird, HUMOUR, Storytelling and tagged dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1871.

5 Comments

March 7, 2024

Oh! Life Is Learning

What is the last thing you learned?

Entire life is a classroom ! Where you keep on mugging up your lessons. Though rote learning does not always help in exams if the paper is full of tricky questions.

Then how do we remember what we learnt? By being happy about it. Once you consider your lessons not a burden but an opportunity to move forward you have learnt your lesson for a lifetime. In our school days, therefore, we had to learn by heart.

But I guess every learning has to begin with a process of unlearning. Way into my second innings I am yet to learn to:

Unwind

Slow down

Take life easy

Stand and stare

Stop and mull over

Forgive myself

Not worry about the nots

Take myself lightly

Remember this is the last leg of the journey

Enjoy every moment of it

Be aware of my is-ness

Not snore through meditation

Avoid cluttering

In short, take a chill pill 💊

Well the list is long and can be stretched longer.

Not digressing any further from the prompt the last thing I learnt was to bake without oven without egg.

Well, I had very cool plans for post retirement. (None of them have materialised so far.) One of them was to join a baking class as I either over or under baked till now. But then reality struck hard. Yeah you guessed right – the moolah factor! At length, I resorted to my last resort – the Institute of the Impoverished – You Tube!

And lo!

Day before yesterday I baked my first fruit cake, very close to perfection, without flour on the gas stove sans eggs.

Now the next step will be bread 🍞😀.

This is what I learnt last but there’s more to come. So it is not the last learning of life. It cannot be coz, going back from where I begun, till our last breath we are learners learning to unlearn even our last achievement and from our colossal mistakes throughout life.

Howzzzzattt????

Posted by gc1963 on March 7, 2024 in HOW WELL DID I DO THIS YEAR, Learning, Leisure, OPINION, Talking About Food and tagged dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1870.

7 Comments

March 4, 2024

The Chosen Misfit

You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

I guess my autobiography will not make history with its opening lines but it will definitely be honest and straight from the heart.

It shall begin thus :

“On a cold day in the month of December, six decades back, an overweight baby was born who had to be taken to the OT soon after because she had a hole inside her mouth which needed to be immediately patched up.

The surgeon was not too happy with the situation as he did not wish to apply his scalpel on that tiny, obscure being as she had just landed on this big, bad world and lay secure in her mother’s warm embrace..

But there was no other option except to operate which he did after whispering a prayer to God Almighty. He was an expert in his field. The surgery turned out to be a success. He was relieved.

When the baby was handed back again to her beautiful mother she smiled heaving a sigh of relief too. The baby’s father had an interest in astrology. His predictions usually came true. He had predicted that his younger daughter, born after seven years of his first born, was fated to bring back the lost glory of the family with a historical lineage.

The baby girl had to grow up with this unwanted weight on her no longer so strong shoulders that she had come to this world with a purpose till it became embedded in her psyche. As a child she would be electrified by the prophecy.

It was years later that she realised how resentful it was to burden a child with such heavy responsibility when she was supposed to enjoy her childhood. Nobody told her that they were there for her. Nobody told her to enjoy life as it blossoms. Nobody told her not to worry about future.

Instead somewhere in the baby girl’s mind it was deliberately instilled that she was to achieve what her parents could not. She was to be brave in the face of adversity. She was divine blessing to an impoverished family who could not forget their ancestral heritage and erstwhile status. The load was thereby transferred and thus life unfolded with a mystic cadence gliding slowly towards a destination unknown….”

I believe instead of the opening lines I have outlined the prologue of my autobiography.

Let me know whether it tickles your curiosity to read more…

If yes, I shall really give serious consideration to the idea…the tome in the making.

🙂 🙂

The little day dreamer was born in this hospital – the then PG Hospital in Kolkata.

Pics from Google

Posted by gc1963 on March 4, 2024 in Celebrations, DOWN MEMORY LANE, FAMILIAL BOND, I ME & MYSELF, INTRODUCTORY, MUSINGS, OF HUMAN QUEST, Storytelling and tagged dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1867.

10 Comments

March 4, 2024

Facing Failure

Daily writing prompt

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?

View all responses

In the previous two months I watched two films which had one common denominator – Vikrant Massey as the protagonist. Vikrant Massey is a promising movie and web series actor. Thematically, both the movies deal with a common subject – facing failure.

A brief of both the movies :

Death In The Gunj

Shutu is a gentle and sensitive boy. Inspite of being a brilliant student he fails his exam and is thrown out of the hostel. Shutu does not know how to handle his failure. He runs away to Macluskieganj, a small Anglo-Indian town in Jharkhand, to his aunt’s place instead of returning to his mother in Kolkata. He is different from his cousins and their friends who take advantage of his soft and kind nature making him the butt of their insensitive pranks.

Out of the entire family, he is only close to his cousin’s small daughter, Tani. The others are callously indifferent towards him using him either as an errand boy or an odd jobber. It is his aunt who comes to know about his failure from Shutu’s mother’s letter. She questions and even accuses him of not going back to her but does not want to know what made him come to her place instead of returning home.

Shutu’s father has just passed away whom he misses dearly. While at his aunt’s house he gets attracted towards Mimi with whom his cousin Nandu’s friend Vikram is having an extra marital affair. Mimi is Nandu’s wife’s friend. But when Vikram’s wife arrives he ignores Mimi. She, on the rebound, exploits Shutu’s innocence and embroils him in a physical relationship. However, the simple Shutu thinks Mimi is in love with him.

This is a coming of age movie wherein the protagonist is desperately looking for emotional anchor after bereavement of his father and perhaps consequent academic failure. As usual, the world around him is too engrossed in selfish aggression and meaningless competition wherein the softer sensibilities of a growing boy is of least significance till it leads to a bloody implosion.

Directed by the talented actress Konkona Sen Sharma, the film has an ensemble of stars but it is the stellar performance of Vikrant Massey as Shutu that steals the heart. Death In The Gunj is a thought provoking film which points a finger at the degeneration of familial bonds which in actuality should be a source of support, protection, comfort, understanding and care. The film mocks the extant concept of defeatism and male machoism which is flimsily personified by physical dominance over the ones who are seen as weak. However, sensitiveness, softness, gentleness and kindness, which are in today’s crooked, survival-of-the-fittest generation, taken as symptoms of weakness and foolishness in hu-man-s, are the qualities most needed to make this world better, livable and sustainable.

12th Fail

This movie is a biopic of currently serving IPS (Indian Police Service) Officer, Manoj Kumar Sharma, who hails from a remote village of the dacoit infested Chambal. Belonging to very, very humble background, Manoj, by sheer dint of hard work, single mindedness, inner conviction and honesty qualifies Union Public Service Commission (UPSC in short), (on his fourth attempt), one of the toughest of competitive exams in India, to join the Services. Based on the book named after him and written by his best friend and a pillar of support in his struggle, the film is a sleeper hit. Critically acclaimed as the story of real India, it is a hope raiser for millions of this country, who do not get a chance to be enrolled in country’s elite English medium educational institutions like IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institute of Management), not because of lack of merit but because of lack of financial strength and fluency in English, yet nurture a passion to serve the country without any axe of their own to grind. These are the students from the grassroots who know and face the problems day in and day out which prevent them from passing the most important and difficult School Level Board Exam – the 12th Class – the first rung of the ladder.

Interestingly, in the movie, the name of the protagonist has not been altered. Manoj (Vikrant Massey) passes all his school exams by cheating which is surprisingly allowed by the Village School Hierarchy. The school is run by the local MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) who calls it the jamee jamai vyavastha or the “well established order.” However, it is bad luck that in his 12th class exam, cheating is stopped by the newly appointed Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP), Dushyant Singh. Although, Singh is transferred a year later because of not fitting into the scheme of things, he leaves an indellible impression on Manoj’s young mind who wants to become like him. Singh’s only advice to him is to leave cheating if he wants to become like him in life. Manoj takes this as his guru mantra and embarks on a tortuous journey to achieve his goal – to be a part of the system to become its change agent.

In this journey, with hardships he also makes friends with larger than life characters like Gauri Bhayya (his mentor), Pandey (writer of his biography), Chhotu (his manfriday) and above all Shraddha who later becomes his life partner. One of reviews of the movie states that if Vikrant Massey does not win the National Award for Best Actor (country’s highest award) for essaying the role of Manoj Kumar Sharma it will be a gross injustice. The movie is available on OTT for those who wish to watch it. Incidentally, after watching the movie on OTT its viewership in the PVR increased. Made with a small budget of INR 20 Million, the movie went on to gross around INR 70 Million. The praise for the movie has been passed on amongst the audience on word of mouth basis till it became a must watch for every movie goer.

Manoj, in one of his interviews, has said that he has not gained personally from this movie in terms of money or material. The only benefit he has got is that it has spread his message to the masses. Manoj and Shraddha have a unique love story. Shraddha renounced jewellery while in tenure in Uttarakhand. On birthdays, therefore, the gift the couple give to each other are love letters!

12th Fail is the ace Film Director, Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s gift to the Hindi speaking have nots of the country, who lag behind in realising their dreams because of countless obstacles which are embedded in the “well established order”.

However, failure can pull you down and it can also imbue you with an indomitable spirit to surge ahead and convert it into super success. 12th Fail passes on this positive vibe which for many may prove as a massive impetus to move forward notwithstanding the hurdles and give failure an unusual boost of “restart” like Gauri Bhayya.

Two movies, based on the same theme, but defining failure in their own way. Counting failures can also be equated to counting the number of lessons learnt , the number of opportunities provided by life to wizen up and the number of times one says no to defeat and presses on.

Even at the fag end of life I am inspired and filled with josh or the spirit to call out :

“Bring it on….I am still alive.”

Posted by gc1963 on March 4, 2024 in A PROTEST A LAMENT, FAMILIAL BOND, FILM REVIEW, FOR A CAUSE, Learning, MUSINGS, OF HUMAN QUEST, OPINION, Spreading Awareness and tagged 12th Fail, bollywood, dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1868, movie-review, MOVIES, vikrant-massey.

3 Comments

March 3, 2024

Facing Failure

In the previous two months I watched two films which had one common denominator – Vikrant Massey as the protagonist. Vikrant Massey is a promising movie and web series actor. Thematically, both the movies deal with a common subject – facing failure.

A brief of both the movies :

Death In The Gunj

Shutu is a gentle and sensitive boy. Inspite of being a brilliant student he fails his exam and is thrown out of the hostel. Shutu does not know how to handle his failure. He runs away to Macluskieganj, a small Anglo-Indian town in Jharkhand, to his aunt’s place instead of returning to his mother in Kolkata. He is different from his cousins and their friends who take advantage of his soft and kind nature making him the butt of their insensitive pranks.

Out of the entire family, he is only close to his cousin’s small daughter, Tani. The others are callously indifferent towards him using him either as an errand boy or an odd jobber. It is his aunt who comes to know about his failure from Shutu’s mother’s letter. She questions and even accuses him of not going back to her but does not want to know what made him come to her place instead of returning home.

Shutu’s father has just passed away whom he misses dearly. While at his aunt’s house he gets attracted towards Mimi with whom his cousin Nandu’s friend Vikram is having an extra marital affair. Mimi is Nandu’s wife’s friend. But when Vikram’s wife arrives he ignores Mimi. She, on the rebound, exploits Shutu’s innocence and embroils him in a physical relationship. However, the simple Shutu thinks Mimi is in love with him.

This is a coming of age movie wherein the protagonist is desperately looking for emotional anchor after bereavement of his father and perhaps consequent academic failure. As usual, the world around him is too engrossed in selfish aggression and meaningless competition wherein the softer sensibilities of a growing boy is of least significance till it leads to a bloody implosion.

Directed by the talented actress Konkona Sen Sharma, the film has an ensemble of stars but it is the stellar performance of Vikrant Massey as Shutu that steals the heart. Death In The Gunj is a thought provoking film which points a finger at the degeneration of familial bonds which in actuality should be a source of support, protection, comfort, understanding and care. The film mocks the extant concept of defeatism and male machoism which is flimsily personified by physical dominance over the ones who are seen as weak. However, sensitiveness, softness, gentleness and kindness, which are in today’s crooked, survival-of-the-fittest generation, taken as symptoms of weakness and foolishness in hu-man-s, are the qualities most needed to make this world better, livable and sustainable.