Cat antics

Caring for a pet is a full time job. Caring for two is well...when you forget that you even exist. They capture your existence... especially if they are cats. As they say - "dogs have owners, cats have staff". There is an endless cycle of feeding (canned and dry food separately), cleaning litter boxes, cuddling with them, playing and breaking their fights and guerrilla attacks from behind the couch or suddenly from above. You learn to sleep with one cat walking on your hair or sleep through sudden nips on your big toe. You stop fretting about brushing your black jacket before going to a fancy dinner (as they all have layers of cat hair) and definitely believe that "everything tastes better with cat hair in it".  You learn to live in their reign.

It's a wonderful (cat's) life

Kitty parents know what cat antics are. All cats have strong individuality but even then there are some idiosyncrasies common to the felines. The funniest one I think is scratching and pulling down toilet paper rolls. Someone aptly called it a kitty treadmill. I don't know how all of them found out that this particular thing in a human household can be so fantastic! I am sure they set and break kitty records on how fast they can pull a roll down. 

Hide and seek

Stringy things or feathers attached to wands are another plaything they love. My friend's furry boy and girl (Vinny and Kitty) were raving over one such "bird". Vinny being a teenager was jumping probably three feet high and showing amazing back flips! We bought the same wand for Mota and May and Mota has started hunting that "bird" now too. May would just bat at it and leave it, but Mota pounces on it like a little hunter and doesn't let go! I can spend hours and watch them at their hunting... 

Peanut Butter is a catnip fan. I mean most cats are, but PB is the GREATEST catnip fan I have seen so far. We gave him many different catnip toys - a slug shaped one, a cigar like one and a turtle-shaped one were his most favorites. He went crazy over them and chewed and played and kicked and rolled over until the catnip came out. Then he licked that and went to sleep. 

"I'll let mommy read. I better take a nap."

That's one mamma's boy :)

Sometimes, just like little babies, they are scared of random stuff. We had always thought that May is a tough girl but then, as Arnab was cleaning the garage, he had to bring our telescope inside (with the tripod and all) in the hall. God knows what May is thinking it to be, but she is so scared even to look at the three-legged monster. I admit that it is big, well HUGE compared to May, but it is after all just a telescope. It doesn't move around, nor does it make any noise like the dryer and I can never imagine that anyone ever chased May around with a huge telescope in hand!! Whatever it is, she is just plain scared. Yesterday when I came home and Mota came to greet me, May didn't. I asked Mota "where's your sister" and I heard May replying in a squeaky voice from underneath the dining table. She clearly meant, "Mom, I'm here. I can't go over there, the monster is standing there." The hungry little girl ran up to the telescope and then promptly turned back totally ignoring her food dish that Arnab was taking upstairs! Later when I was carrying her upstairs, she kept on tightly hugging me just like a human baby as we passed the telescope!

Latest score of Telescope vs. May is :

Telescope - 2

May - 0

PS: For a good read on cat antics, click here.

Second chance

A friend gifted me a flowering plant on my birthday which was two and a half months back. It was one of those bright yellow flowering pots wrapped in a bright paper and sold at super markets. I had it on my work desk. When all the flowers died, people who sit around me at work had the idea that I would throw it in the bin and so they were interested to see me snipping the dead buds and browning leaves off and watering the plant which had no flowers. I regularly kept it on a west facing window sill (on those days the Sun decided to rise in Seattle) and after coming back from the Thanksgiving weekend here's what I see.

New tiny buds getting ready to bloom.

I gave the plant a second chance and helped it to stay healthy. So it repaid me by blooming once more.

I think everyone deserves a second chance. From relationships to pets to criminals. There is nothing that you cannot do with patience and compassion. I am not saying that you need to let a criminal go scot-free. No, definitely not. Nor would keeping him in a prison without actually helping him be any good. But patiently trying to change him, bringing in him new hope and compassion would definitely do some good. Exemplary punishments are needed in cases, but we will still need to back track and see what events lead to a person bringing in hate and cruelty so that we can stop more people getting into that vicious cycle.

More and more people are losing patience nowadays. As a result, relationships are suffering. People want instant solutions to problems, but forget that in the human world things don't move that fast (and should not, either). If something doesn't work, people walk out of relationships without even thinking of a second chance. Broken homes lead to broken hearts, which is worse because most of the insecurity is faced by kids. I am not saying that people should not divorce. When things just can't be fixed or the relationship has become abusive, then definitely people have to break up. My point is, give it a second chance. If that doesn't work, then think of other solutions.

Many senior animals have been surrendered to shelters or worse still, on the road. Some get saved, while most just die. When you adopt a surrendered animal from a shelter, you are giving a second chance. It is difficult. The senior pet might not romp around the house or look cute as a button. He/she will probably have behavioral issues or would need better health care, but if you have the patience, you will have a faithful companion beside you for a long time and you'll know that at least one life is happy and content because of you.

Don't forget to give yourself second chances too. Everyone makes mistakes, so don't be too hard on yourself for occasionally missing a mark. That's ok. A little forgiveness and an encouraging smile can be magical. Try it out for yourself :)

A Bengali girl in a French kitchen

For the first 23 years of my life at a stretch, my world of food revolved around rice, fish and vegetables cooked in traditional Bengali way. We occasionally ate out and street foods played a very important role during those years. Then came the period of thriving on instant noodles and coffee and eating cheeseburgers everyday for lunch! (The only time in my life when I managed to gain some weight.) Finally after getting married I started to try my hand at cooking various kinds of food.

Learning new things from scratch is a very satisfying feeling, be it a new programming language or a new cuisine. What I believe truly is if you want to learn, there's no end of resources to learn from :) I tried to cook some archaic Bengali food, well, may not be that "archaic" in the real world but definitely to me. That boosted my confidence a lot. As I never cooked anything while still in Calcutta, I never had any idea if I was a good or bad cook. After finding that I love to cook, I started trying my hand at western cooking following some of Martha Stewart's recipes. Watching "Julie and Julia" for probably the 15th time, it dawned on me that I can try to master the art of French cooking too! In the mean time, I went wine tasting with a couple friends and started learning about pairing wine and cheese with different foods.

As I had almost no idea whatsoever with French cuisine, I started learning it very patiently, reading the recipe at first, noting down the ingredients and watching one episode of Julia Child's "The French Cook" from YouTube before getting near the dutch oven :-) Arnab gifted me a copy of "Mastering the art of French Cooking" and a dutch oven for Thanksgiving and I started off with the first baby steps towards cooking bouef bourguignon.

Choosing to cook bouef bourguignon as the first French dish was probably not a "baby step", I could have tried a soup or something simpler, but this was because the movie inspired me to take on this challenge!

Fred Meyer's did a good job of selling pre-packaged "beef for stewing" which was boneless beef already chopped into bite sized chunks. The thick cut bacon was also quite good for my purpose. Cremini mushrooms are always available and I probably emptied the box myself. Buying the wine was a little difficult as I hardly knew how to pronounce the names (I wrote all the options down on my shopping list) and finally got a young Chianti that, according to Julia Child would fit my purpose.
The thing I learned from cooking this stew is, it is not a difficult dish but extremely time consuming. Bengali dishes are far more complicated compared to this, but I don't know of anything that has a two and half to three hours cooking time (not including the preparation). Also, the only seasoning needed for this was salt and pepper. The entire flavor came from the beef being stewed in red wine and beef broth. (Well, a little thyme and a bay leaf was added.) Another great thing was butter. The pearl onions were braised in butter and the mushrooms were sauteed in some more...then they got added to the meat. So there was a LOT of butter!

As the entire thing was stewed in wine, there was a distinctive taste that I have never had in anything so far. The dish is very heavy too and just a little would keep you filled for hours. If you have a dinner roll or even buttered peas with it, it will go a long way!

So that was an "encounter of the third kind" with French cooking and the result? Arnab said he can eat this bouef bourguignon every week.

Many thanks to Julia Child for meticulously jotting down step by step details of this foreign dish for "servantless" people like me, to whoever uploaded the episodes of "The French Chef" on YouTube and also to Nora Ephron for making the movie which opened up a whole new world in front of me (and to Arnab for his encouragement, being the first one to eat the experimental cooking and for being the "Paul Child", taking pictures on his new Windows 8 phone all along!)

Give thanks

I know of many people who do not like the concept of "Mothers' Day", "Valentine's Day", etc. Agreed that those "days" have been commercialized a lot by the card companies, but I still see no harm in setting aside a day to be grateful for a loved one. Yes, it's true that it's your behavior (or relationship) over the entire span of a year that counts, but having a special day means nothing bad to the relationship either. Going by the same argument, we should be praying and thinking of God everyday, why set aside a single day for Puja or Christmas or any festival for that matter?

I didn't mean to start the post with an argument, but these are the things that came to my mind while thinking of Thanksgiving. The turkey day is coming up fast. My first Thanksgiving meal, five years back was a disaster. No one told me that there's gravy to go with the turkey so I had the turkey by itself and was thinking hard why people rave about this horribly bad tasting thing! Then there was a half cooked sweet corn which I would prefer not to think about now :) The best part of that meal was when everyone stood in a circle round the dinner table and said what they are grateful for. I later saw the same thing at my friendship partner's house (that meal there was awesome) and at a cousin's house too. Even though we are grateful for the good things around us all through the year, it is a good practice to pause and reflect on those on the day of Thanksgiving.

We generally get upset or tend to be irritated by simple things. In that way we miss out on the bright side. I know it is difficult to think of the bright side at times, but just give it some thought. If you are stuck on your way to work, it's raining and you are sure that by no means can you be present at the meeting by 9, I know it's really difficult to see the glass half full. But think - this means you have a job, you are attending a meeting means you have been trusted with some responsibilities at the job and if you are stuck in traffic, that means you have a car and are not walking in the rain! This is just a basic example. There are LOTS of stuff to be thankful for.

The most important one is that we are still alive - hale and hearty! For a roof over our heads and a family to share that house with. Unconditional love of our children and pets. Friends to laugh with and a job to sustain us. Coworkers who make the 9-5 time much fun. Time to pursue hobbies and interests, nice places to visit and enjoy... All people around the world can't even dream of some things that we take for granted. So once you realize how fortunate you are, it's time you spend some thought and actions in making the lives of others a little comfortable.

As we get ready to gather around the stuffed turkey, green bean casseroles and pecan pies, I am reminded of a little grace I used to say in nursery school right before eating lunch - "Thank you for the world so sweet, thank you for the food we eat, thank you for the birds that sing, thank you God for everything."

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Indranarayan Ghosh

It's so not like me to forget Bhoot Chaturdashi, but that is EXACTLY what I did. Facebook has already got flooded with Diwali greetings, I see on my calendar that I marked tomorrow is Kali Pujo, but the fact that it would mean today is Bhoot Chaturdashi has completely escaped me. So sad!

I was listening to Christmas Radio on Pandora, but had to pause Elvis midway through his "here comes Santa Claus" and start Lopamudra Mitra's "himer raate oi gaganer deepguli re" on YouTube. I would miss eating 14 shaak but we will make sure that 14 prodip will be lit all around our house (though I am not sure how long they will remain lit in this Seattle drizzle). 

I love lighting "akash prodeep". That's a lamp to be lit on the top of one's house to remember one's ancestors. We can't do it on the top of our roof, so we light it in a red glass bulb and hang it facing the back yard. Well, it's the thought that counts and our ancestors have anyway said প্রবাসে নিয়ম নাস্তি (probashe niyom nasti), meaning you don't have to follow all the rules when you are abroad. So be it!

As I light akash prodeep and put a pointer to my ancestors to look down and pinpoint my house (do they have Google maps?), I can't but think about Indranarayan Ghosh. So here's the toast to my ancestors of the Ghosh family!

For those who are wondering who that is, here is the synopsis.

When Lakshmansena was the king of Bengal, he had five Brahmins and Kayasthas come from North India to his kingdom. The Kayasthas were Ghosh, Bose, Mitra, Dutta, Guha who accompanied the Brahmins Bandopadhyay, Mukhopadhyay, Chattopadhyay, Gangopadhyay, (I forgot the fifth one). I think it was Someshwarghosha who came to Bengal as the first of the Ghosh-s.

Someshwar's descendants spread all over Bengal and the most important branches were Uttarrarhi (North of West Bengal), Dakshinrarhi (South of West Bengal), and Bangaja (East-Central and South Bengal). I know that my family belongs to the Dakshinrarhi Ghosh, but I am not sure how many generations were there between Someshwar and the person we can track our family from - Indranarayan Ghosh.

My roots grew from here :)

I know very little about Indranarayan Ghosh. All I know is he was a zamindar (landlord) near the later district of Hooghly but then relocated to Jessore (now in Bangladesh) because of the tyranny of Portuguese pirates on the Ganges. He was given the land in Jessore by the then Nawab of Bengal, Alibardi Khan. This was circa 1750. Indranarayan went to this village called Bidyanandakati, where there was a river called Bhairav. On the northern side of Bhairav was a place called Mangalkot, where Indranarayan had a mansion. The mansion had four blocks with a quadrangle shaped courtyard in the middle. I know that he had three sons (a trait that is visible in our family in almost every generation so far) and each son and his family owned the North, South and West blocks. The East block had the offices and guest house kind of things. We branch out from Indranarayan's eldest son's family. 

I firmly believe that I lived there in one of my earlier births. I can very well picturize myself walking through the 150 acre orchards or by the side of the lake. There were celebrations for Dolyatra (Holi) and Durga puja in the house, with Radha and Krishna being the family deities. Well, Krishna is still our family deity in Calcutta. Kali puja was celebrated in the village temple though. Didn't I walk down there with lamps amidst the faint fog of an autumn evening? Probably! 

Anyway, that's the story...tonight when Mushu's Indian buddy wakes up all my ancestors for a bash, Indranarayan should definitely be the honored chief guest of the party! I love my ancestors!! :D 

Am I really?

As I still look (and behave) like a teenager and fit into decade old clothes quite comfortably, it takes a little effort to realize that I am actually growing up (or getting wiser). These are some points that reminds this quite to my face -

1. I am ENJOYING political discussions. On those evenings of the Presidential debates, we actually were looking forward to those. Arnab and I spend a lot of time discussing these. We have different opinions in most cases but we do talk about these (and love to).

2. I am actually untying my tennis shoes before taking them off and not slipping them on and off with a high chance of breaking the heel.

3. I am keeping a tab on what I eat. No I am not trying to *lose* weight. I am trying to stay healthy. But then , I am not stuffing myself with a bag of chips. A big piece of fish is mostly what is getting in to my stomach as the main meal.

4. Opening bills before greeting cards when the mail arrives. I didn't do it yet, Arnab did. 

5. Liking "old melodies" and "old movies" more than recent ones. Now I understand why those are still called "evergreen".

6. Cleaning up clutter and finishing a big batch of cooking on the weekend is actually making me happy these days. I can't tolerate a bed not being made in the morning or a sink full of not-yet-washed dishes.

Well, I have crossed my silver landmark and am advancing towards completing my third decade. So it is natural that there'll be changes. However, here's a song which I liked to listen to as a child and now like because of the meaning as well....this makes me feel that enjoying life is much more important than just counting the years.

Un, dos, tres

Sad as it is, there are still a lot of shelters that kill animals when those places are over populated. I wonder why people don't get their pets spayed/neutered. They think it is "cruel" to spay/neuter those animals but then is it "humane" enough to have healthy baby animals killed just because the shelters are over populated? Anyway, I don't want to argue in favor of spaying/neutering, there's basically no point AGAINST that!

Eggroll

Nimbus

There are also quite a few shelters who save death row animals by taking surplus animals in from there. I personally know of some people who have offered to foster or even adopt these animals, who would have otherwise been put to death. Seattle Humane Society recently got a whole batch of teeny tiny kittens from some animal shelters in Eastern Washington. A lot of those kittens already went to their forever homes to loving families, but there are still quite a few who are either sick, underweight or very young to be up for adoption. As foster parents, we were asked if we could help. Neither Arnab nor I had any experience with young kittens. Fun to look at, they are a lot of work. Unlike Mota and May who had come to us as respectable adults, little kittens need supervision while they eat, they may not be housetrained (a lot of carpet cleaning is needed) and they have so much energy that it is very probable for them to chew up cords, get into nooks and crannies, slip out from under closed doors and stuff like that. However, we still volunteered and took three kittens in.

Tangy peeking out from under the sink

Eggroll talking to Tangy

They are around 5-6 weeks old, one still wobbles while walking but he/she (we don't know yet) lacks no energy. Eggroll, as the kitty is named, was jumping on to the floor from Arnab's knees and tried to climb up my leg this morning, chewing and clawing at my denim. Nimbus, a black and white kitty is a hearty eater and Tangy, an orange-white tabby (yes, ANOTHER orange cat) is a little shy with people but with Eggroll, she (we think it's a girl) would fight and roll around. They are splashing in their water bowl, falling backwards in their food and scattering the nuggets all around. One also wiped his paws on the wall after using the litter box :) They are fun to have in the house. Though Mota and May are not happy with "unruly little kids" in the house, as they don't have to interact with one another, we are not much bothered.

Tangy, Nimbus and Eggroll will have to stay with us until they are a little older and weigh around 2 lbs. It will be very hard for us to return them to Seattle Humane, but I am sure these cute, tiny, cuddly kitties would soon bask in lots of love and care throughout their lives in their forever homes.