Amma Jokes!

I know I can talk about her forever! But didn't want to bore you all with her praise all over again. Anyways everyone knows that she was a great woman. A few days ago someone I do not know well, messaged me on Social Media and said "I want to live like your mother. I want my son to work for the community like your mother"; Once a friend saw my mother's photo in the purse of an autorickshaw driver. When asked the man replied, "She is like my mother"; One random woman approached my father and asked about my mothers' history saying, She is going to make her child talk about my mother in an elocution competition in school on the topic "Leaders I want to emulate"; Sorry, there I go again. Just randomly I start praising her again. I will stop here. Instead, I thought I will take this opportunity to talk about her naivety. Our 'amma jokes' in the family! And believe me, these are real and nothing is made up. 

As soon as she finished her MBBS, she joined work in a hospital near her house in Tambaram, Chennai. When they gave her the first month's salary, she took it back to the medical superintendent and told them to keep the salary, thinking that they have given her a lot of money and what will the hospital do if they gave her so much money. And that first salary was apparently Rs.800/-

Once amma went with appa in the car, with appa driving. When Amma's best friend G called her mobile. Amma replied, "G, I can't talk to you now, I have to concentrate on the road"! Okay, my dad is a bad driver. But my mom seriously thought she drove the vehicle every time she is inside one. 

Once appa was reversing the car, with amma for support saying "Varalam pa (Come come)"; Till the car hit a pole and believe me, amma genuinely said "Idichiruchu pa (It has hit something)". 

Amma never knew anything about any politics, and often had fought with me saying, "You are lying, people cannot be that bad". Sadly, she was put into a church committee for the simple reason that they had just created a quota for women and there were only so many people eligible and amma happened to be one. So in the first committee meeting, they started discussing and it became a debate/argument and she started crying and stood up and could not sit down it seems. So they walked her back home and conducted all the other meetings without her. 

Once she went out with her friend N, and N sent her back in her car with her new driver. The driver did not know amma's place. Sadly neither did amma knew the route to her own house (after living 25 years in the same town). So the driver and amma decided to ask someone, and they asked a policeman the route to the house. The policeman saw my mom and saluted her (Most of the town would have been her patient at some point). Now it became embarrassing to ask the policeman the route to her own house. So she just exchanged pleasantries and moved on. So amma finally made the driver get out of the vehicle and ask the route to her house so that the people on the road don't see her asking the way to her own house. 

There are so many. Amma jokes were a routine in the family. We laughed at her naivety and she laughed with us! She somehow protected the purity of her childhood from getting polluted by the darkness of the world. Perhaps therein lies the reason for being loved!  

I will leave you with her famous smile and a few more of my blogs on her. 

To read more about her please go through my other blogs on her

https://samszammy.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-life-so-beautifully-lived.html

https://samszammy.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-women-i-growing-fond-of-by-day.html

https://samszammy.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-last-week-had-been-time-of-intense.html

https://samszammy.blogspot.com/2015/07/my-last-night-with-mother.html

https://samszammy.blogspot.com/2017/07/that-day-as-it-panned-out.html

The writer's dilemma!

I love words! Sometimes, I read and re-read and read again a few sentences and they sound so nice and beautiful. Like Illayaraja and his violin interludes; Rahman and the overtures. Philip Yancey, Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Dominque Lapierre, and Larry Collins,  Harsha Bhogle, NS, DB, and a lot more great people whose play around with words have had me attracted to the English language. 

No, I'm not a language connoisseur. Or a grammar Nazi! I just love the stories, the thoughts, put together like a bunch of flowers tied together on a thread. Single flowers do have the charm! But when put together, it sometimes is otherworldly. 

Did any of you guess my dilemma? I'm sure some of you would have. 

The dilemma of wanting to write, but don't really know what to! Thought block, is a word often thrown around I presume; But do writers also go through the phase where they can't think of anything to write? It sometimes feels terrible when the whole world around is chucking out so many books and here you are struggling to put together a blog. Just a 500-word blog! 

Many times I open my blog, start typing profusely and delete them all. They don't make sense. They just don't. I simply close the computer down and go back to the big bad world of small sentences, Twitter.  

I remember a pleasant October evening in Delhi when the mind just flowed stories. I wrote and wrote and wrote that day. Many of which are still in my drafts folder, but why don't such days happen often? More often than not these days I type and delete and type and delete. The mind just feels blank. Like a bubble wrap, it just bursts out air. 

So back to the dilemma. Should I just sit and push and put pen to paper, and call whatever comes out, a blog, or just wait, patiently and earnestly, that someday, some day, the thought block will be removed and the thoughts will flow like water gushing out of the opened dam. 

I'm waiting for the day the dams will open and perhaps, just write a book, than stopping myself with blogs😉

35 years of grace!

It is dark and eerily quiet. The sound of the blades of the fan cutting through the air is deafening. I switch off the fan and sit on my computer. To reflect and blog my life. The 34 years I had walked on this earth, as yet another human being burdening the planet. 

Where do I start? It has been one hell of a journey.

Life as I used to see it was never easy. For a long period of time at least. It wasn't ever meant to be. A few marks here and there and I could have so easily been a doctor or an IAS officer. A simple medical check-up, a few months earlier could have saved my mom. Little more effort from my side, I could have played for the Tamil Nadu state teams. It just did not happen. 'If only', had always been a phrase in my life for the longest possible time. That is what I thought for a long time. That life had not been fair to me. Or rather, it has not been an easy life. 

But when I reflect on life now, with all the wisdom of the years gone by, life on the contrary, has been ridiculously easy. Blessed will be a better word. 

How can I complain, with all the privileges I'm bestowed with? I wrote all my blessings down here and then deleted them. They are far too many to count and to be honest a little too surreal to show off. God has been incredibly kind!  Grace is the word I use. To describe a life that did not deserve all its goodness. 

Through the last year, when the world went through terrible times, I managed to live and work. To love and was loved. To find new friends and re-established contact with some old ones. What else do I ask for? 

As it has always been, I'm sure the new year is going to be full of dreams and incredible opportunities. Love and more love. Fun and frolic. Some music and writing for sure. Ofcourse the occasional nonsense. And a lot more Grace. 

That is how I have always known lyf!  

The Love will last the world!

A few days back as I went to sleep, this thought kept coming back to my mind again and again. By the end of it all, when the dust settles down and the bones rot, the air will still smell of love. 

When one of my friends told me yesterday, "I'm so proud of you", I got reminded of that thought again.

I had not achieved anything big, was just trying to put together my reading habit again. I was never the voracious reader but never was I a non-reader. Books had always been a part of my life. Till suddenly the social media bug bit me. The world of small sentences and images and videos had spoilt my hunger for books. Suddenly the mind settled for the low-hanging fruits of the twitters and the Facebooks. 

After many failed attempts at resuscitating the dead reading habit, this year I have finally gone back to the days of the youth! Ah, the smell of a new book. I set weekly targets and have achieved most of what was aimed for and it is already the 6th month. The inner human in me was flaunting this achievement to the dear friend. The human need for validation is immense I suppose. I'm proud of you da, she said then!

The brain lit a spark. The human heart aches for is pure unsolicited love not necessarily the pat on the back after a victory or achievement. Knowing me, I would have still flaunted myself for keeping such targets to read books, even if I had been a miserable failure and had not read a single book. And the friend would have still been proud, for there is love beneath that pat on the back. Pride is just the afterthought, an addendum of sorts, to the underlying love! 

Two people in my life have shown me what it means to love. 

The wifey is the epitome of it. For she could muster love through the most difficult of circumstances. When life sucks, when I'm at my worst behavior, through all the non-sense our families threw at her, she could carve out love, earnest, and sincere. 

Then my Mom. Her name spelled love. Dust on my mom's life has settled down. Her bones I'm sure are rotten. Life is so normal, that I sometimes find it difficult to imagine, how it would have been to have her around. Yet, all that remains of her was the love she showered on everyone around. Love pure and love pristine. Memories of the hugs and the kisses. The pats on the backs. The hugs. The smiles. And through it all, the love. 

Love shall last the world! For the human aching for love is real.  

Good bye great man!

"They asked me to buy a cycle for Rs.150/-. I refused; My boss enticed me saying I can get enough bribes to pay it back. I decided not to do it and walked everywhere till I could afford one", said thatha(Grandpa). I was listening intently to his stories. 

I don't know the man well, yet I secretly admired him. He was my dad's uncle. I know my dad had a secret admiration for the man as well. As we laid him down one last time, after that dreaded virus corona had already taken the life out of the body, I decided to let open the secret. 

He came from a very poor family. Lost his father early in life and had to work and discontinue studies during the initial days of engineering to support his family. Yet apparently he was so good with everything he did that his friends and the village elders supported his studies which enabled him to become the man he finally became. 

To become a civil engineer with the government in the early years of Indian independence would have been a blessing. India was buzzing with a lot of activities and he was in charge of building a few dams in my state. He climbed up the ladder quickly and very soon had the reach of the upper echelons of power. Yet, he never misused it. He was so particular that he never even used his official vehicle for anything personal. 

When I, as an arrogant young man in my early twenties, wanted to build a small bridge in the remote village of Assam, thinking I know it all and had it all sorted, he gave me a lesson in humility and work ethic I could never forget. He gave me the design I wanted, to the 'T', every line in its place. He was in his 70s then. Retired. This work of mine should have been the last thing in his mind. Yet, he gave his all. The bridge still stands. I proudly claim to the world, I built it. There goes one secret. It was thatha's! 

He had cancer for a year. Yet every time we went to see him, he never flinched. His face was calm and serene. There was never panic. The world around him shouted imperfection; craziness; loud white noise; Yet the man never showed anything on his face. 

After the dreaded virus had come and he knew the end is near, apparently the same calm remained on his face. "I have lived my life, I know where I'm going, let me go peacefully", were his words when the doctors suggested some surgery to help him out. And peacefully he did go! In fact, I have never been part of a more peaceful funeral. It was all so calm. It was all so quiet. The man reflecting life even after death. 

Goodbye, great man Perhaps knowing the destination was your answer to life! 

 

The blue jean and black 'T' shirt!

When you are born in a small town to a Gandhian father, apparels were the last thing in your mind! All we (my brother and I) knew were a bat and a ball and we cared very little about anything else in life. Not even when the first signs of testosterone came into the picture! One fine day my sister got married to this guy from the US and I saw him wear something which I had not seen before. Maybe I had seen it, but not cared much. That memory of him wearing it so casually on the day of his engagement said something about him. 'Cool' is the word. He looked 'cool'. That image registered in my mind! Then after a few years, one man was revolutionising the world with a new product called the iPhone. I knew who Steve Jobs was then but saw him on the television sets for the first time. He wore the same cool thing my sister's husband wore that day. One of my friends had gone to Chennai to do his masters and one day he was coming back and I went to catch up with him and there was 'J', wearing the same cool thing.

Years later, when I sit and type furiously on my computer, blue jean and black T-shirts are just another dress. They are still my favourite though, but they were once a young boy's dream. I may have bigger dreams now, but the dream of looking cool in blue jean and a black T-shirt of the young boy from the small town was part of his folklore. The folklore of life!

Food, bloody food!

I brought back food home from school in the evening! Perhaps I ate from the friend's tiffin box. It was made early in the morning. When my dad found out my tiffin box was full, it was already late in the night. The food smelt bad. Has it started to rot? The dad started giving me the food by his hands. It tasted bad. There was something definitely wrong with that. I resisted. Resisting my dad is stupid. No way he is backing away. He gave me the food and I ate it. Simple! 

He called me aside! You are not throwing food in the waste bin. There is no wastage of food in this house. I heard him well. The dad and his principles. My first lesson on food!

We were moving to a new place. The man guarding our office had a sad smile; His friends are moving. 'Saapiteengala na,(You had food?)' I asked him. 'Illa sir (Not yet)', came the reply. My friend and I were planning to buy the famous Ambur Biriyani for lunch. 'Ungalukku vaangava (Shall we buy for you also?)', we asked him randomly. Okay, sir, he smiled sheepishly. We bought him a biriyani and went on our merry way. I met him again in an hour, perhaps on the last trip transporting office things. 'Saapiteengala na(You had food?)' I asked again! Tamilian way of greeting, you see. He replied in the negative. I was a little taken aback. What happened to the biriyani? Why didn't you eat it, I asked him." I have kept it for my children, for they have not had Ambur biriyani before". 

Biriyani, the very same biriyani I eat every other day was way out of reach of the lower-middle-class security guard. 

Lockdown had just happened. The migrant crisis was hitting the roof. A group of like-minded people were trying to help the migrants by giving them food. Scores of people were made to stand in a queue and food packets were delivered. Everyday many after standing in big queues went back without food. A young boy, in jeans and a T-shirt with nice sneakers came along the side after finishing his first packet and asked, "Sir, aur yek packet hain kya, Mujhe bhuk lagen hain (Is there another packet sir, I'm hungry)"; The image of a bright young man begging for food is still fresh in my mind. 

Then that incident happened! I could never take this out of my system. Never! 'P', who works as a rescue worker and a childhood hero of mine pinged. "Sam, I need someone to be admitted in a hospital; Need doctors opinion" said she! I called my doc brother and together we went to check on this boy. 'D', the boy had not had food for a few days; 'Many', will be a better adjective. For the boy looked sick. Lockdown, parental problems and his own sickness made him dislike food. The photo speaks for itself. Let words not shadow the image.

On the day when the minister of state in parliament proclaimed that even stray dogs in India don't go to bed hungry, I'm learning a lesson. A big one at that. 

Food, bloody food, something which I take for granted is a privilege. Food, that which has given 'the foodie' in me so much joy, is grace. For I don't deserve it.