Nostalgia and comfort food (music, movies and more)

I think comfort food has got more to do with nostalgia than with anything else. Comfort foods are almost always traditional to that culture, the food people grew up eating, the ones that are easy to prepare and bring back fond memories of the family kitchen and warmth of a family meal. As much as I love fish, it is funny that my best loved comfort food does not include fish. It is warm steamed rice mixed with boiled eggs, boiled potatoes and clarified butter. A bowl of hearty chicken soup would come second and the ubiquitous "Maggi" (instant noodles) would come a close third. I am deeply indebted to Maggi for saving me from starving on great many evenings when I was a student. I think warm dishes are more common comfort foods than cold ones. It gives me the same feeling as getting home from work on a Friday, taking a long hot shower and getting under warm blankets (with a nice story book). Isn't that a fuzzy feeling?

Just like comfort food, I have comfort music and movies too. Here also nostalgia plays a big role. A sudden encounter with a Kishore Kumar song on YouTube or watching a Felu-da movie would give me a better glimpse of home than talking to an unknown Indian. Those things that we relate our childhood memories to are the ones that give a comforting feeling when we are sad, sick or simply need a break.

This is one of my most favorite songs ever!

Stop me before I volunteer (again)

Introverts have been writing articles after articles in trying to explain why that personality trait is good and that people shouldn't confuse introverts with shy people. In the Jung test too you'd find a number of famous thinkers who are introverts. Arnab being of that group explained to me why you need to be an introvert to be a thinker - "you need to not talk while you think. Simple!"... Yes, I understand. But the thing is while introverts were thinking of stuff, extroverts were actually talking to people and getting thinks done! Hehe, just joking... :D Well, we need both kinds of people (example: Arnab and I) to balance the world, but what I am trying to say here is that life is not easy for extroverts either.

When I was small, I was a branded chatterbox. I talked too much...in school teachers complained that I disrupted the class. My art teacher couldn't think of any ways to make me keep shut while I scribbled on paper. "Keep quiet" was perhaps the most common thing I heard at that time. Followed by that were explanations why talking too much hampers my concentration and as a result my studies. Another big thing was why I always jump up and start fights with the least provocation, why I am always on the front to argue with people, "why you?" was another common thing I was asked. To be very honest, I didn't pay attention to either and made complete use of "through one ear and out the other" when I felt arguments would be a waste of energy.

Now when I think back I find that it is my type A personality that is to be blamed. I can't help it, I am made that way. Once out of the stereotypical role of a student who always patiently sits in class (the chalk-and-talk classes I mean) without asking anything or a young woman who should not be heard, I started to feel more comfortable in the big world as now I can be "myself". There are so many things to be done in the world and we have so little time that I don't want to waste that by not being proactive. Be it claiming to fix a defect or to volunteer for the animal shelter, just count me in! Why I was saying that life is tough for the extroverts? Because they tend to take up a lot of responsibility and then have to handle them all. Also, type A people are bubbling with energy and they don't like damp blankets, but they still have to motivate those damp blankets. Type A people get very upset when things don't work out they way they planned (I do, very much) so that's another reason why they have to stay motivated all along in spite of all these stupid things.

Introverts and type B people are good, they are easy going relaxed people who enjoy things in a slow pace. They are never agitated, they can easily unwind and relax. But I am happy to be a type A. The life I am leading now is giving me every opportunity to be what I always wanted to be - the person that I am! I can meet new people, talk to them and learn cool stuff, look at things from different perspectives, try my hand at new skills, speak my mind (argue if needed), think and provide solutions both at work and home, volunteer for causes I support and just talk non-sense and laugh when I want to for the most silly reasons ever!

I am grateful for what I am... :)

Antiquity

Jerome has said the ultimate thing about antiquity. I don't have anything better than that, nor can I add anything to what he has already said:

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.  I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.  The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?  Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?  Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

[Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=39&fk_files=1881315]

Year 2000 and odd!!! How funny it seems today, but whatever Jerome said is so very true. Arnab got a 1955 Kodak camera last weekend and we were marvelling over it. What would those people who actually used these cameras say about our recent DSLRs? Those people who had telephones without dials and had to ask a telephone operator to connect them to somewhere? Will they look at my BlackBerry Z10 with wide eyes? How funny that we can't even imagine our lives without stuff which were non-existent just a few decades back.

Going to the other end of the scale, how would this very Z10 model look after fifty years? I think teenagers or college students would say, "haha, look at that! You had to actually drag the text and flip it on to the email! Poor millennial people, they had to live with that?" The antiques of today are the cheap trifles of yesterday and the most marveled at new invention of today will become an article, may be cherished but totally unused when tomorrow dawns....

Just a thought... we humans live in our little bubbles of space and time and think how smart we are. Yes, we are smart, but we show off a lot more than what we actually are :)

Teenage

"Half wit poems, stories wild, April letters warm and cold, diaries of a willful child"... this is a line from one of my most favorite poems ever. And the poem is from a very favorite story too. Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" and "Good wives" are not just good reads, but also I would say, kind of a companion for girls. Even though the plot ages for more than two hundred years, I still think of the four sisters and especially Jo as a friend I had from my growing up days. Simple things that girls go through, yearning for nice clothes, wanting to go for a dance, massacres in the kitchen, simple longings, pleasures and pains of growing up, bittersweet incidents of first love and the inevitable heartaches that follow... are all so real in the book and all so similar to what I have gone through that I can't help not loving it!

Just like Jo's trunk where her name was carved on the lid by a boyish hand, my old cupboards and cabinets also contain wild stories (with plots copied from Saradindu's historical novels or any story that was my latest favorite at that time) and totally half wit stories too, not to mention the poems...well, I haven't written too many poems either in my life. I have read some of my old diaries last time when I was at home and how I laughed! In eighth grade we bid farewell to some friends for we would be separated into different sections and that farewell seemed such a sorrowful affair! Now I can't remember when I last saw them but sorry to say I don't miss them at all! Then there was the obvious part of "first love"s... I very well remember which boy in our class liked which girl. That was still the time when as a rule girls hated boys. It was considered bad if you let boys give you gifts and all without telling them that - "you know what? We don't like this." The boys kept on saying how much they love the girls and how they will suffer if those girls don't love them back. Those "boys and girls" are almost all on my Facebook but they are all happily married to different people, some even have kids of their own!

Oh how I love my teenage days! Yes I know I have done quite a lot of foolish stuff at that time but those were the days when my personality slowly started to take on its own course. I threw tantrums, I fell for cricketers (well, I was too tomboyish anyway) and movie stars and that was the time when friends started to play a big role in my life. It is not bad that we argue with parents and take sides with friends. That is the first step we take outside the walls of our families. Friends are the first people of that outside world.

Teenage days are the stepping stones of life. Things may not work smoothly, but that's how life teaches us new things. Every phase of life is so important that missing out on one would leave a gap in the experiences of life. I so cherish my foolish teenage days...and I am so happy that those memories make me smile :)