For the lifelong love of learning...

... how to cook.

There is a Bengali story by Syed Mujtaba Ali, where one of the characters mention that if you are not interested in trying food from a different country, then you are not open to learn about a new culture/religion. It is true that your home food would always be your go-to comfort food, but the more you open yourself to world cuisine, not only would your tastebuds thank you, but your horizon would increase.

Even though I have started cooking French food, and a little bit East Asian
food, major cuisine areas like Mexican or Italian were still only limited to restaurant eating. Blue Apron has changed that for me (and Arnab, naturally).

I knew of Blue Apron for a few months before I decided to give them a try. We take fish, chicken, and vegetarian food from them and for the last month it feels like in our kitchen, we have traveled the entire world! I had no idea that pasta can taste so amazing, nor than African peanut sauce is a heavenly thing. I did not know that it would be possible to eat Thai food for lunch and Italian food for dinner the same day! We have reduced eating out by a lot, and the best part is that no food is wasted.


They send us the ingredients, carefully portioned out. So if I need a tablespoon of sake, I won't have to buy one full bottle. Similarly, if I had to find that myself, I wouldn't even know where to get the African spice blend. I did not know what a Meyer lemon is, or what kind of fish is Barramundi! But now, thanks to Blue Apron, I have cooked them and ate them. There is another great thing that happened. We are happily eating salads and our vegetable intake has increased a lot! I used to hate romaine lettuce, but with the unusual salad dressings I am making, even romaine is tasting great! I think the main thing is so much variety, it is not letting us get bored.

When the output is great, naturally the interest level also soar. Especially because I love cooking. A kitchen with beautiful prep bowls, a recipe holder, and wooden spoons have been my dream from a long time. It gives me good vibes, if that is a way to explain it. There is a great joy in cooking, making food from scratch, and then looking at the finished product with pride. And when that is food that I have not even seen or heard of before, like say, cannelloni pasta, then it is even better!

Blue Apron is named so because chefs wear blue aprons when they learn to cook. I bought this apron from the site so that it reminds me every time I cook, that I am always learning something new, and to keep my mind open, to stay humble, and to learn from my mistakes.

Let the girls grow free

Indian parents have different parenting style for boys and girls. As they rightly mention in the 2016 movie Pink, girls have peculiar standards to adhere to, where the length of their skirt, or the time they come home defines their character. So does having guy friends, or free mixing. Recently, I read a news article about a college in India which has made me wonder how we are trying to bring up our girls.

Indian colleges have come to news many times for following stereotypical gender roles. At IIT Kharagpur, one of my friends was told to not go out wearing shorts. Boys were not allowed to come even to the reception area of girls' hostels. In our college, we have never been able to go to the boys' mess, even for working on projects together. That is why, I didn't get a chance to work on our load runner and step climber robots as they were being built at the boys' mess. These are still lower on the rank of weirdness. One of my friends from a different part of India said that in the college shuttle, boys and girls were kept segregated. In the recent news I found that even in college canteens (cafeterias) boys and girls are told to sit apart. No touching, hugging your classmates are allowed and basically any kind of interaction between the two genders is being discouraged.

This is not normal.

In the human world, one has to invariably come in contact with people, and in most cases they would not belong to your gender. People need to be taught to mix freely with everyone so that "the other gender" is not looked as an alien being, and interaction with them becomes normal. As I changed from an all girls' school to a co-ed school around my teenage years, I saw this difference very well. Those girls who grew up with boys had no inhibition talking about periods or other girl topics with the boys. The boys also were a lot more understanding and now I find the majority of them to be much more accommodative and supportive of their spouses. That is because they have been exposed to girls as their playmates, classmates, friends, from a very early age.

In our society, when a girl is in her late-teens or early twenties, she is considered "good" if she does not have a boyfriend. Having a boyfriend still indicates she is too modernized. Having multiple boyfriends means she had questionable character. Parents still feel proud to say, "my daughter is pretty shy around boys." I feel that is a problem they should try to fix rather than being proud about it. If your daughter is shy around half the world population, that is a very serious concern. How would she interact with her colleagues later? Or her future male manager?

I don't understand how girls and boys who have led segregated lives manage to work on their marriages. Again, having an arranged marriage means you are an obedient child, where you have put full trust in your parents. I have a coworker, who very proudly said that he didn't even see his wife before the day of his engagement. Another girl saw her future husband at the airport on the day of her engagement. I asked her if she would be able to back out of the match had she disliked that guy. She said no, because she was utterly terrified of disobeying her father. These people get married, have kids, and mostly stay married forever because the girls know they have to compromise. Gender roles are strictly observed, and these days the girls do both household work and outside work.

Parents need to understand that controlling your kids lives by archaic rules are actually devastating. You are not letting them grow properly. If a girl always have to worry about what the society would say, then she is wasting her energy in trying to fit in, rather than trying to be herself. Mixing with boys is a necessary thing, and the earlier the exposure happens, the better. Let them know that boys don't come from Mars, they are just regular human beings with emotions. I have seen many cases where boys behave in utterly funny ways - from my friends in junior high, to my friends at work. They still don't know the right way to load a dishwasher, the toilet seat stays up, tables are wiped wrong, and they laugh at our sense of fashion. But that is the fun part of sharing this world with them. They are intermingled in our lives as fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, neighbors, teammates, or colleagues. The more we mingle with them normally, the more they would also learn about us, our feelings and our emotions. That way we would be able to create an interdependence where both genders can be empowered.

My "first born"

On Valentine's Day as people are celebrating their love in innumerable ways starting from fancy dinners, romantic getaways, or simply red roses and chocolates, I also want to celebrate my love that needs no language, no words of love, and not even the commonalities of a species. It is the special bond I have with my "first born".

With Mota in early 2010

Lightning, or as we call him, Mota is our first pet. Even though May is the eldest one, Mota is our first born as we adopted him first. A big boy, weighing around 14 lbs at almost three years of age, he was still quite shy. But it didn't take him much long to become a mama's boy. Within weeks he was snuggling with me, and I still remember the day when he first put his head on my lap and slept.

Over the last seven years he moved with us from our apartment to this house, has adapted to sharing his home and parents with his two sisters and has grown into a handsome orange and white cat. Whoever sees him, the first thing they say is "wow, he's handsome!" A social eater, he has the personality of a gentleman. He just retires upstairs if there are guests, if he comes downstairs then he watches people for a while before greeting them with a friendly head bump.

With me, he has a special bond. He just loves me beyond words. The gentle purring and kneading on my belly shows that he considers me his mom (cat-mom actually). Every night he would come to me, sniff my nose and then curl up with his head on my tummy. I never knew that this bond is so deep until last week when he suddenly fell sick. What at first seemed to be UTI was actually a case of urinary tract blockage because of tiny stones, like sand, in his kidneys. Even though it is very common in male cats his age, and is completely curable, to see him suffer and meow loudly terrified Arnab and me. On the car ride from his local vet's clinic to the pet hospital, I just kept my hand on his back to make sure he was breathing. The pain, as the vet told us was excruciating, but as the pain killer kicked in, his breathing became a little easy. They admitted him to the hospital within minutes of us bringing him there and the doctors immediately started doing the tests. For the next three days all we could think was of him.

Snuggles help him recover fast

This was the first time in our lives with Mota not at home. Even though he is calm and doesn't run around all day, the house felt different without his gentle presence. I am notorious for being a heavy sleeper, and up till last week, neither sickness, nor heartbreak, not even exam results have been known to disrupt my sleep, but with Mota at the hospital, I kept waking up every few hours and Arnab and I took turns to call the hospital to enquire about him even at night or early morning hours.

We are lucky to have workplaces that let us take days off because he was in the hospital. On last Friday, we were ready to bring him home. When we got him back, he was lethargic to say the least. He had a cone on to prevent him from licking his belly, and that made him wobbly. He would just plop down next to me and sleep. If I got up, he would awaken immediately. And then I saw he was actually holding my PJs while sleeping. That's when I thought that the whole biological relationship thing is so overrated. There is just one thing called love, and that doesn't care about what you say, what gifts you give, or what relationship you have with a being. True love has no expectations, it is that feeling which makes you feel good when the other person/being is just there with you. That is why for the whole of Saturday Mota didn't leave my side. He would lay his head on my lap and fall asleep.

Arnab and I spent two more sleep deprived nights as we had to wake up to feed him (he can't eat on his own with the cone on) and to give him medicines. We are also monitoring his water intake o that the same problem does not recur. It is tough. He is confined to the master bedroom now, also using the master bath, and our room is smelling like a cat shelter! We don't seem to mind, I guess that is what labor of love is all about.
To have a soul that loves me so deeply that he can feel completely safe when I am there elevates me to a position of being loved. It is a great feeling, especially because there is no expectation. To be loved by someone this deeply are those moments in life that makes me feel good to be a human being.

PS: The house is again feeling like home, as all five of us are here once more!

Story of writing stories

I don't remember from when I started to think of stories in my mind. The first one I remember is probably from when I was around five years old. It was a story about a violet fairy. I don't remember anything else, but I think it was that time when I really loved fairies. I also loved to think of how a little fairy can choose one color and get everything in that color. Then there was a phase when I loved to imagine stories about my stuffed animals. All of them are still a huge favorite of mine. I simply LOVE them! They lived somewhere far off in little toy towns (heavily inspired by Enid Blyton's Noddy) and I still remember where they studied, what language they spoke, the name of their town, who was whose sibling, everything in details. My mom just told me yesterday that she found a card given to me on my seventh birthday by all my stuffed animal buddies.

From around fifth grade, I became a book worm and started to read a LOT! People who love to write are those ones who invariably love to read. It is the love of reading that slowly sends us on the track of trying our hand at creating something new. In my pre-teen years I was also slowly getting exposed to science fictions, adventure stories, and my all time favorite detective stories. That is when I got a little bold and started to write adventure stories. Sometimes those would be in the outer space, whereas at others it maybe in the ocean or on a deserted island. My problem is that my mind is way ahead of my hand, that is I can think of many ideas, but then I can't really string them together as a story. Either I put too much details, or I jump from one incident to another without a proper pace. The same thing continued in my early teenage when I fell under the influence of Saradindu Bandopadhyay and his historical fictions. They are the most romantic stories I have ever read (probably the most romantic ones in the history of Bengali language) and when the heart starts to blossom in early teenage, my dreams were full of Arjunbarma, Chitrak, Bigrahapala, those brave princes and the bold and beautiful princesses - Vidyunmala, Sumitra, and the like. Even today I am still under that spell. I read some of my old half written stories while I was in Calcutta earlier this year, and I found that all the historical stories I ever attempted (all unfinished) were so heavily influenced by Saradindu that it probably falls under the category of plagiarism. In my defense, I would use Apu's idea from Pather Panchali and say that who has ever been able to light a torch by sticking it in the ashes? You need fire to light a fire. Saradindu definitely has imbibed in me an urge to create. How I would do that, I have no clue though!

There is another person who has showed us that you need to be responsible and thorough when you are writing. That person is Satyajit Ray. I spend so much time thinking about details, that I have lost my mood for writing often. Firstly, the names of the characters need to be figured out. Unless that is done, I can't think of how the characters would be. Then, where they live have to be thought and imagined. If they work, or study, then their ages must be calculated properly. Details about their jobs, or ranks have to be researched. I can't just call someone a Commander-in-chief without knowing what ranks his battalion has. I can't write a conversation between two law students if I don't know anything about the subject. Characters have to look real, and incidents have to be correct. It isn't easy. The most difficult sort of story is a detective one. It has to make sense, the clarification must sort all the points, and it must be realistic. For example, if a person murders someone, there has to be a pressing reason for it. You can't just say something vague like "oh that's because she hated him." You need to reveal enough details for the reader to be interested in the plot, but not give away the main things which would make the detective come and use his/her mind. With science fiction and detective stories, you have to be very detail oriented and clear all the points of the story. I have read some really bad detective stories and bad science fictions too, which have showed me what not to do.

I write for myself. I have probably given people six stories to read in total, and they are not the same people. I am my most severe critic, so if I like something then that is probably the best I have created to my potential. But, so far there has been no story that I've written which I like. When I read them again, I definitely feel like editing them. Either there are too much details, or the conversations sound unreal. There is also a problem about language. Should I write in Bengali, or in English? There is one story I am writing now which is set in early twentieth century Bengal. That one can be easily written in Bengali. But for most of my stories there are conversations in mixed languages, and then it becomes difficult to choose the main language for the story.

Being an ENFJ, I value human relationships a lot. That reflects in my stories. In most cases, the main protagonists are women with strong personalities. They may be love stories, or not, but those characters are very confident in their own abilities and in their lives, even in the face of difficulties. I am also very much mood driven. I started writing a story while I was in Calcutta, but after coming back to Seattle, I just can't think along the same lines, so that story is sitting unfinished. A certain thought would come and hang around for a few days. If I don't write it down fast, I'd lose it. I get to imagine the scenes like watching a movie, and I see them right in front of my eyes, then I write them down. Now, I am focusing more on being disciplined and finishing what I have started to write, unlike what I did in my teens.

We have a very little part of our general human lives that are in our control, but when we are writing stories, then we can plan and do everything that we like. We can live a million lives through our characters, we can experience joys and sorrows spanning over space and time. Writing gives us immense power and empowers us with the joy of Creation.

Short hair - the pleasures and pains

The longest hair I ever had in the entire 32 years of my existence, is shoulder-length. It isn't that I don't like long hair, I do admire it on models, but for some reason it does not suit my personality. Maybe because I never had it, I don't know why, but I don't look like myself if I have anything longer than a short bob. Though there have been times while wearing Indian clothes and thinking how strange they are looking with my asymmetric pixie cut, however, in the long run the days I like my short hair outnumber the days I wish for longer hair by a huge margin.

Why do I have short hair?

From time immemorial my mother used to get my hair cut short. Probably because she has short hair, or maybe because she thought managing long hair on a little girl is difficult. I don't know why, but that is what I always had. I really wanted to have bangs, but I wasn't allowed to get those either.

Why did I keep cutting my hair short?

Around my early teenage, I started becoming quite a rebel. At that time when girls slowly turn into proper girls, I became a tomboy. Getting rid of the girlish traits became necessary and I sacrificed my hair, turned to wearing more boyish clothes and started to have the temperament of a tomcat. (This tomcat part is something my entire extended family agrees with. That is somehow the best description of me as a teenager.)
Later, in my late teens to early twenties, I discovered that there is a couldn't-care-less attitude in tossing my head which I mastered. For that having short hair helps.

When did I really regret having short hair?

On the day of my wedding. I was probably one of the very few Bengali brides who had that short hair. It was impossible to even part my hair from the middle, let alone try a tiny pig-tail. They couldn't think of having an updo, so they added tons of weird wigs. It looked disgusting. The only good thing was the whole contraption got covered by a veil.

How did it feel to have shoulder-length hair?

It felt like "too much hair". While sleeping on my side, hair got in my mouth, hair covered my face. While eating a taco, I once got sour cream on the ends of my hair (very odd feeling).

What was the best thing of having longer hair?

Getting a real updo, with a flower in my hair. I was so shocked at that event in my life!

What has been my favorite haircut so far?

An asymmetric pixie. It has the sleek look of pixie, that emphasizes the facial features. (You can't hide behind your hair). For thick, healthy hair, a good pixie accentuates the hair too, because you can't do anything to your hair that short. The asymmetric part adds a little weirdo effect that goes very well with my personality.

Note: I really love my hair. That is probably the only thing I am concerned about in my looks. I also take good care of my hair, no coloring, no extra treatments, just coconut oil, and shampoo. I also religiously wear a swim cap while swimming :)