Life As I Know It

Last night I fell asleep only to be woken up around 4am by Marley who muttered some gibberish and promptly went back to sleep. If it were only that! He woke up 5 minutes later shook me and said some bizarre things. Now, I am not the best sleeper in town, I really need to push myself to sleep to get a good night’s sleep. Now that I had been woken up, going back to sleep wasn’t an easy task. I went on HotStar, started weighing the pros and cons of watching Dil Bechara. Then went on Prime and noticed Shkauntala Devi had released. I started watching it. I hail from Karnataka and was raised in Mysore and as a Mysorean we were all very aware of who Shakuntala Devi was. It was at the University of Mysore that her talents were discovered. My mother, while we were growing up had introduced us to simple techniques to do basic math, these were inspired by SD. My brother and I were also introduced to Vedic mathematics at a young age. At home we have a whole set of math books by SD – Puz...

It has been almost 5 years since I last baked a proper batch of cookies or cake.  It took a lockdown and a birthday to get me to set aside my mental block with baking and get started again. 5 years ago unbeknownst to me I set out to bake cookies in a convection oven that was on its last leg. I wanted to bake for my friends and cousin. My friend had come down from Bangalore and my cousin was visiting, it was Dassera time I wanted to make something sweet and nice. Since it was festival time and my friends parents don’t eat egg I had prepped the dough to make eggless cookies which meant plenty of butter. As it happened the cookies went in and came out black and crisp and I blamed myself for the longest time, until it was discovered that the machine was at fault. For whatever reasons after that, I just didn’t bother to bake again… ever. The pandemic has made me realise a few things about me: 1.       I can do whatever I set my mind to do. 2.   ...

Sima Taparia - The Matchmaker Indian matchmaking seems like the perfect segue to explain my absence and presence on this blog. I had last posted here on 25 th December, 2017. I could no longer write the way I was writing earlier because I felt that the good out of me was being sucked out by the people around me. I wanted to write but couldn’t write, my friend Lulu couldn’t write because she wasn’t sure if she’d stick to it once she started. That’s how Bob and Lulu was born. We decided that, that blog would be our escape; our alter egos that people weren’t aware of were highlighted there. The blog was in parts revenge and mostly our way of telling people, “ In your face!” If you read some of my posts here between 2015 to 2017 you’ll realise that there was a lot of anger and sadness in those posts and I did not want to make my safe place on the internet a diary of sad stories.   Where did all the anger and sadness come from? Simple – My relatives and society. I learnt ...

Marley and I love food and we enjoy cooking. Growing up, my mother never asked either my brother or me to help her in the kitchen except of course to wipe the washed vessels dry. This I guess played a huge role in my interest in cooking as an adult. My mother has always treated chores as life skills; be it making our bed on waking up, drying the bathroom completely after use or instead of putting our vessels in the sink, just make a habit of at least washing our own plates after a meal. She hasn’t differentiated between my brother and me when it came to chores or cooking. We learnt the basics when we were ready to leave the nest and she later helped fill in our respective recipe books gradually with recipes of things we are fond of. Marley and his brother are also no strangers in the kitchen and both make really good ginger tea. Like most of my readers I have spammed Marley and his brother with my post links every time they go up. For the purposes of this blog let’s call...