MellowDrama

In t h e year 1990 I was probably running down the tea gardens outside my house in gay abandon. In the year 1990 a 14 year old boy and his community were forced in to an exile which they have still not managed to come out of. ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots, The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’ is a memoir written by Rahul Pandita, a Kashmiri Pandit and a journalist. The 256 pages of the book and the timeline at the end of the book tell a tale that many of us are familiar with but vaguely. In ‘us’ I refer to people who have known that Kashmir has faced problem (s), thanks to TV and the newspapers and that a certain Pandit community faced exodus years ago.   The memoirs are moving and it is not just in the way they have been written. The stories of brutality, atrocities on men, women and children, episodes and incidents that have been narrated are gut wrenching and heart pulling. There is kindness also but largely there is blood and hunger and loss. This sense of loss th...

The ethnic group of people from the princely Marwar region of Rajasthan is called Marwari. Though the term is used to refer to all the people from Rajasthan or those having roots in Rajasthan, the term specifically refers to the bania or trading community of Rajasthan. You might wonder why instead of writing about food in my column I have shifted my attention towards anthropology. Worry not, this detour will only lead us to the destined land of tastes and slurrrps. As you might have figured  by now, today we are going to discuss Rajasthani cuisine, which has been spread far and wide by the travelling business community, the Marwaris. Dal baati churma is the most common name amongst the dishes ladled out of this desert region that you might already be aware of. Let us take a look at what else is on offer. The Marwari traders used to travel far and wide on the Ganga-Yamuna trade route for business. Not much of their food was influenced by their travels though the people ...

I am back at it. Though on second thoughts I haven't really had to do it uptil now. She would go to the best montessori right across my office was decided the day I started work with the Chandigarh Administration. When the husband got transferred to Kolkata he found a school for her that was willing to take her and was closer to a residential complex that met our 'must-have' list After a year that she has been going to this school, I am looking at others for Netra and I have no qualms at accepting that I am lost. So I am taking my father's advice and putting down things on paper. (I realise that there is an e in paper here) To apprise you of the situation. Netra is 5 years old (OMG I have been a mommy for this long...hmm no option but to grow up now). She currently goes to a school where there are 60 children in her section. (I sent chocolates for her birthday). To top it all there is only 1 teacher for those 60 princesses. Now on to why I am all worked up about ...

I could only go to the Kolkata Book Fair that ended yesterday... well yesterday.  I had made promises to myself and the husband that I will just go and look. I believed in my promise earnestly whereas he gave me the all-knowing smile and the nod of head which when I later ruminated over was meant to convey 'yes, yes we will see'. Anyway, there I was at the book fair sans the husband and the child. I entered the grounds with the stroll of someone who was on no agenda and was free to turn back and go any moment. Instead (and I do not really know how it happened) I spent around four hours bought 12 books of various size, colour, shape and subject. I did not realise when that aimless stroll of mine gained purpose. Maybe it was the need to cover every possible hall and stall or maybe it was the intention of checking out all the offers of the last day. I got drawn in by the books would be an understatement. I should probably say I was under the spell. This does not mean I regr...

The great poet T S Eliot is known to have said, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Though India is largely presumed to be a tea drinking nation, recent studies conducted by the International Coffee Organisation (ICO) in 2012 show that coffee consumption has steadily grown over the years. According to the ICO data, while in 2001 the country consumed about 1.02 million bags of coffee, in 2010 this number touched 1.71 million bags of 60 kg each and in 2011-12 the coffee consumption in our country went up by 3 per cent. India is the world’s sixth biggest exporter of coffee and the growth in coffee consumption in India is even more than the global rate. After all these mind boggling figures let us direct our attention towards the beginning of mankind’s affair with coffee. Legend has it that Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd, noticed the effect of the coffee beans on his goats who ‘danced’ from one shrub to the other after grazing on the cherry-red beans. History inform...

Tea time is observed with great reverence in my household. At fixed hours in the morning, noon and evening I have my tea, preferably in absolute peace and with my favourite sweets or snacks. Delve a little deeper into the history of tea and traditions associated with it, and I promise you will be thrilled to know the varying cultures of tea all over the world. In China they have loved tea since 2000 BCE. Initially this love was cultivated for the great medicinal values of the plant — its leaves were chewed on, and then later on, it was used for its refreshing qualities. Wikipedia informs us that in the early 9th century, Chinese author Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea, which mainly focuses on the cultivation and preparation of tea. For many centuries China was the only tea exporting country in the world but gradually India and Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, began to give it stiff competition as the soil and climate conditions in the two temperate countries met the requirements f...