amazing toys for an enchanted childhood

No blogs for sometime now. Need to collect myself before I actually start writing again. The title is the name of a store I passed by today. More on that but may be later.

Kulfi ar Bel-malaaa.....

I live these days in Orlando as some of you have already figured. Last September in California was the last time when a friend of a friend asked me how do I like Orlando, what do I do with all my time here. And I had replied- Its there and its green. This pretty much summarizes the city except the tiny fact that Jack Kerouac lived here for some time and wrote The Dharma Burns.

Well, Dharma does burn. And more so in India. But this post was going to be about the Ice-cream vendor in our neighborhood whom I have never seen in all these sixteen months and only heard. Just the chimes of the vending cart and nothing else, and without the friends here hearing the same notes for years, I could totally be sure that its nothing but a figment of my imagination.

I am sure all of us have something that connects the cities that we have lived in with us. The disembodied chime of an ice-cream vendor in Orlando connects me to the Kulfi-wala of my summer evenings as a kid back in the then Calcutta. Now I have forgotten how the Kulfis used to taste and only remember the smell of fresh Jasmine garlands kept on the ice over the Kulfis. The fragrance would linger even long after he had walked past our house, Vishal, Bittu and Pradip's house, Shachin-da's Shop and was gone for the night.

Colors

I am sitting in the middle of a few bricks called textbooks and a hundred pointless papers, and trying to write one to survive Fall 2009 in the United States of America.

A stack of Orhan P. sits on my desk making me wish longingly to be able to write like him. His titles are all about colors: Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book, My name is Red and The Other Colors. And Istanbul is a strange mix of grey and blue.

Suddenly I am missing hurtling in an auto-rickshaw to Sush's place, taking a stroll on their terrace with a cup of tea in hand and watching the neighbor's rabbit playing on the roof across.

Thou must not age!

Bijan-da's Scooter

The undersigned among all the friends of a certain Susmita Basak have had the rare opportunity and glory of being a pillion-rider of her old man Mr. Bijan Basak. I had put my hopes on the fact that Mr. Basak definitely did not look the killer type. Surprises- before I knew what was happening, I was asked to hop on without a ruddy helmet and we scooted at full speed through a milling crowd so typical to W C Bonerjee St into a more typical crowd of Maniktala and past.

I must add here that in North Calcutta, around those parts pedestrians and riders think equally strongly that the right of way belongs to them. Its like those continuum of micro-agents in people's minds- when I am a pedestrian, I would say that right of way belongs to pedestrians and then a complete role-and-opinion reversal as a rider.

However, through this kind of a traffic nightmare we went doggedly phut-phuting taking strange turns at the very last moment and I held on to the stepney tyre for dear life. I was sometimes getting thrown against the said tyre and realized later that the small of my back after all was a delicate part of my body.

After grabbing bhujia and some tea at Sayak's place, our fateful destination, to pep myself up, I politely refused a second leg of ride and took the bus home that night.

Orient-Occident

The west is sadly negligent about a few delicate nuances of life in the east.. For example, abhimaan- which literally translates into self-respect- means a lot more than that. Its that feeling which stays even when you have heard the word 'sorry' for a thousand times and are still trying to rationalize the entire sequence in your poor muddled brain. My friends here would call that getting hurt.. but sadly its more than that... Just like potol.

Potol is a veggie absolutely typical to the Indian subcontinent and hence has no other name.. So most would not know what I am talking about when I keep on raving about it. Which is such a loss!

Ganjika ar Anushongik

which means .. grass and related matters.

Of late we have realized that we have a nice bunch of neighbors who are too keen to dispense some "sugar" for our benefits and are quite generous about the special weed, too. This has pretty much stopped a very close friend of mine from walking out on her husband on every imaginable and imagined "drop of a hat" because then she would have to wait on the not-so-safe-anymore staircase and hope that she was being terribly missed.

The last time we thought she had walked out, the undersigned went to close the door after her ( I know, I am bad) and realize that she didn't even step out of the house and was lurking somewhere in the foyer. Never heard of this funny side of pot.

atho blogging katha..

Finally, joined the blogging community at a time when I totally should focus on writing something specific and technical.... ranging from term papers on one end of the spectrum to doctoral thesis on the other.. and I generally don't do stuff which I should do... and take great pains about making it obvious.. So, that explains..