When everyone in India is so bored, I thought it is my duty to give you all full on entertainment. But it looks like ‘GoCorona’ was not powerful enough and I am doing only jhadu-pocha-bartan. An ancient wisdom says ‘you can take internet out of Corona, but not Corona out of internet’. So please forgive me if this lady Corona pops up in between.

To avoid getting bored while washing dishes I imagine me to be Katrina Kaif. Today morning, I was happily washing dishes and my husband came there and I gave him a smile just like Katrina does, thinking that I must be looking like her. My husband got scared and touched my forehead to check if I was alright.

Earlier I doubted if people would read my write-ups, but not now. We are bonded so well that we read the same whatsapp messages and facebook shares even the twenty seventh time, just because it came from our friends. At these testing times, we even walk an extra mile and ‘like’ the post lest we may have a feeling of infidelity that we liked the post of others and not of our friends’.

People must be hatching plans how to make best out of these 21 days and many must be wondering how to spend such a long time at home. I have no such confusion. I spend about two hours in bed in the morning listing the pros and cons of getting up early and of course, cons win. All the routine work takes up more than half a day and when I sit with my laptop to contribute to humanity with my wisdom, these mosquitoes start biting me. That reminds me that these mosquitoes like O +ve blood while Corona likes A +ve blood.

Since this lady Corona is repeatedly disturbing my write up, I am renamimg her Cotreena, a mix of Kareena and Katrina so that you remember ‘chikni chameli’ or ‘tandoori murgi’songs whenever I make reference to the communist virus.

When I was studying for my PG entrance exam after internship, one of my uncles who had come to visit us said ‘thank God, my daughter did engineering. Otherwise she too would have been hitting mosquitoes like you’. This had profound effect on me. Soochin Tendulkar said ‘people throw stones at you and you convert them into milestones.’ I got inspired by him and I improved my mosquito hitting capacity and became this legendary mosquito hitter. Though my anti- China sentiments have become all time high right now, I must admit that Chinese- made mosquito swatters are more effective and cheaper compared to Indian made Nippo swatters. After all, I am here to give you wisdom.

There are some positive outcomes of this Cotreena outbreak too. Now I know how to rag my maid as to how exactly she should be doing her job. Imagine, our almirah had to wait for Cotreena outbreak to be dusted. Only thing that bothers me is that she should not refuse to work in my house thinking that she must have come to a different house.

You all learnt how clapping and banging on the plates at the time when Revati nakshatra changed to Ashwini nakshatra on Amavasya created optimal wavelength of vibrations that scared even deadly Cotreena. It is a different thing that it wasn’t Amavasya that day but you heard two Nakshtra names at least. In a few days you will learn how these 21 days of isolation is good for you in astrological point of view. At that point you may learn a few more nakshatra names and a few rashi and graha names too.

You saw some lions roaming on the Russian roads unleashed by Putin, and though it was fake news, you saw lions nevertheless. People tasted cow urine for the first time in life though some of us have tasted it already many times in Panchagavya. Going by the taste, I would be confused if I want to drink cow urine or party with Cotreena.

As I decided to close my clinic last week, a meticulous planner that I am, I carried home four volumes of Rook’s text book of dermatology which was kept as decorative item in my clinic. Till now I have read zero pages, but I am pretty sure I will finish about 4000 pages in the next 20 days. Did you think ‘bullshit’? I heard it. It’s ok. Don’t feel jealous. Even at worst case scenario, if I read it fully, I won’t understand 50% of it and will forget remaining 50%.

For the past many months I had been talking about taking a sabbatical for a few months, whenever I went for evening walks with my husband. My only problem was that you all went ahead reading books, gaining knowledge and minting money. I wanted everyone take sabbaticals so that I don’t feel jealous. I am not all that naïve person as you all assume me to be, you know. I am always brimming with jealousy. But that is not the pressing issue. We all have become paranoid. Now that I got what I wanted, I am suspecting if my husband is a Chinese spy.

 

People say that happy atmosphere nurtures creativity. The exact opposite happens with me. My creative juices start flowing when I pull my hair out with frustration.

Why frustration you may ask if you just came out of the cave after 6 months of vipassana or if you have a maid at home.

First of all, my question is, why that guy ate a bat? Hasn’t he heard about masala dosa or pani puri? And if he wanted to eat some exotic stuff, he could have made Pathrode , golibaje or something. At the most he could have eaten a rat. Or at least boiled that bat?

There is also a conspiracy theory that an intern got drunk after reading virology text book with classifications of viruses and antivirals, spilled the virus inadvertently due to hangover, and now the whole world is learning the classifications of viruses and antiviral drugs. Better to stick to the former theory because it has some drama in it. Boys have become depressed after watching doll-like Chinese girls eating bats and octopuses.

Life has come to a grounding halt. Especially, after my maid stopped coming. Initially I was like Uttara Kumara of Mahabharata. I bragged and bragged my tongue out how much my house and utensils looked cleaner after she stopped coming. But nowadays I am thinking ‘kabhi kabhi mere dil me khayal ata hai ki tum hoti to aisa hota, tum hoti to vaisa hota’.

Initially I took out four thick volumes of ‘Rook’s text book of dermatoloy’. Now I am planning to write a book called ‘Cook’s text book of Karmatology’ which is based on Karma siddhanta where it will explain you the concept of ‘maaDidduNNo maharaaya’ or ‘eat whatever you have made’. Since it is an advanced text book meant for PG students, it also says that you should not only eat what you have cooked but also wash all the utensils you have filled in the sink.

They have reported increasing divorce rates due to lock downs. In my house my husband is working so much from home that he is working 48 hours per day. At this rate I am worried what if the university may want to divorce him from the job lest they may have to double his salary.

But situation between me and my husband is pretty fine. We have agreed that we like each other quite a lot and decided to be brother and sister in our next lives. That way we can admire each other from far and will have minimal expectations from each other like appreciating each other’s children in whatsapp posts . I, being the believer between us, have secretly started praying to God that I want to be the brother, and that my sister should be straight, and should get married to a man.

The Google classrooms for my children are crushing my otherwise-strong-spirit, more than corona. They have classes, mock tests, true tests, submissions etc, everything is fine. But why should they have hangout interactive sessions? What do we do in such sessions other than scratching our heads and digging our noses? Seriously, if they trouble me more, I will end up finding a solution for this Covid pandemic so that these sessions stop.

Meawhile mother earth is partying because all her kids are out playing; ducks in Venice, civet cat in God’s own country, Dolphins in God knows where. She has found a medicine called Covid for her rogue son called human. She hopes that the medicine works but you never know with rogue sons because every story need not have a happy ending, right?

As a true follower of Swami Nityananda, I put the situation in perspective for you.

“Earth thinks that Corona is the hydroxychloroquine to the corona named human, while human thinks that hydroxychloroquine is the Swamy Nityananda for corona.”

Now it is all clear I hope.

 

COVID CORRELATIONS

As we are grappling with the changes caused by the new normal, I am watching a kaleidoscopic view of people’s behavior from my ‘narrow mind’.

People are behaving differently to the situation like a litmus paper changing hues depending upon whether they are feeling acerbic or caustic. If you are wondering how I remembered the litmus paper after celebrating silver jubilee of formal annulment my relationship with the subject called chemistry, let me tell you that I have re-established my camaraderie even with my estranged friends like physics, mathematics and social studies. Ask me the direction of magnetic field if the current is moving in a certain direction, how the French revolution brought about revolution in Europe and thereby other countries or how the resources are classified. But, this is just the beginning. I have this whole academic year ahead and I don’t know where and how I could fill all the contents of 10th standard curriculum in my mind which is only interested in knowing what kind of luxuries celebrities have in their houses, who is dating whose ex girlfriend or how does Aishwarya Rai wipe her running nose.

The memories of these topics are so remote that when I read these, I wonder if it was in this life or the last one I read them. Only litmus test for the doubt is that I am a non believer of re-birth.

Nowadays people are drinking too much of giloy ka kadha and have grown so confident that I had a first-hand experience of it recently. My husband sprained his back and the pain was so severe that I had to go to a medical store to buy a muscle relaxant for him. Like any posh educated lady I put on a mask, a pair of glasses and carried a hand sanitizer and stood one meter behind the man who was buying some medicine. Within a minute three people got into the gap between us like filling a gap in a rangoli with colours. I told them that I had come earlier and they agreed to stand behind me and pushed me forward. Luckily the person in front of me has not filed a lawsuit against me for touching him inappropriately. The people behind me stuck to me like M seal making it almost watertight. They kept shouting while making sure that they removed their masks whenever they did, so that others could see their beautiful noses and mouths and all the subtle expressions which is most important during these testing times.

Meanwhile there are cases of covid being reported from our neighborhood too. Nowadays I seem to show almost all symptoms of covid. Moreover I feel irritated by the amount of work I have to do everyday due to the absence of my maid whom I have mentioned disparagingly in each of my earlier posts.

A few days ago, a woman went overboard with cleaning of her face with dettol and consulted me via telemedicine. I gave her the prescription in which I wrote ‘contact irritant dermatitis’ as my impression. Promptly, she asked me ‘should I contact an irritant dermatologist?’ since she didn’t understand that the ‘impression’ meant diagnosis. Thinking about my recent state of mind I told her ‘no, you don’t have to consult any other irritant dermatologist. I am sufficiently irritant.'

It is not just me.

Even a layman has learnt the meanings of words like quarantine, pandemic, covidiots, corona warriors, flattening the curve, hydroxychlroquine and sadly a word called nepotism.

People have decided never to buy Chinese goods and are sitting scratching their heads while surfing through phones and laptops made in China.

All 10th and 12th standard results are out making all of us, the oldies, hang our heads in shame thinking about the marks we got compared to the present day toppers.

Vikas Dubey was given fast justice reducing the work load of judges who applied stringent rules regarding Covid precautions in the courts while allowing governments to force doctors to work in most hazardous conditions.

Baba Ramdev showed his yogic prowess by putting his foot in his mouth by announcing that his preparation coronil cured 100% of the patients.

People are baking as if their lives depended on it. I never liked cakes (except the Christmas cake baked in a particular bakery in Karkala) and had never attempted baking. I must admire the all pervading effect of corona virus. It made possible all the things which I thought were impossible - stopping people from visiting malls, making people think if they should reduce the frequency of hitting doctors (because doctors could be potential covid carriers), bringing the world into stand still and making me bake a cake!

There is only one thing I am not sure now at the moment, whom to vote next time. Looking at handsome Sachin Pilot, I am praying God that he joins BJP so that a hardcore BJP person like me may not do a blasphemous act of voting for congress.

As the mango season nears,there is a perfect stage being set for good amount of tamasha to be unfolded in the lush green campus of BHU. Every house or blocks of two or four houses have a couple of mango trees. The waiting starts when flowers bloom in March. Street urchins start pelting stones and start eating raw mangoes causing characteristic contact dermatitis around mouth. The scorching heat of summer has only one good promise that coming days are fruitful literally. Lo behold..You find mangoes as sweet as honey start dropping in your back yard. People become alert now. The ones who never witnessed what a mundane 5 am looks like start waking up at 4 am to collect the bounty mother tree decided to drop in the respective backyards lest the amateur 'chors' make them disappear like professional magicians.
Real problem starts when the tree has spread its branches across all four houses of the block. The house people in whose garden the actual tree trunk is located, believe that the tree belongs to them while rest of the houses contradict this theory. In the facade of 'love thy neighbor' dictum there is equal distribution of treasure.
In the fertile lands of Ganges, there are always more mangoes than one can consume and people start distributing them. Some people try to settle scores by not giving them or giving the sour or too soft ones to their frenemies. Some confirm their kanjoosi by offering just two - three mangoes. The same kanjoos ones and the lazy ones stop preparing sabzi for the rotis for being obviously kanjoos or lazy or both, and start using mango as their side dish for next two months.
No wonder aam is not aam, but maharaja of fruits.

The last two weeks have been unbelievably romantic. My maid came for fifteen consecutive days! Life went smoothly. I ate food at proper time and slept at ten sharp, managing to even fall asleep within stipulated fifteen minutes of hitting the sack ruling me out of the list of insomniacs. It’s a different thing that I feel uncontrollably sleepy within an hour of trying to make my soon-to-be-a-teenager son learn mathematics. Though I believe that it’s a fool proof way to slip into bliss of slumber, I haven’t been able to use the method consistently perhaps because my brain has weighed the options and processed the information that trying to make my son study is tougher than tossing and turning in the bed trying to count crawling lizards on the walls in the obscurity of night.
Though the fear of maid disappearing on one fine morning without prior notice looms over my head perpetually, it is during this honeymoon period that I am actually able to ignore it. So I make solid plans of productive days ahead where I would wake up early, do yoga and pursue all known and unknown passions of mine. After all I am highly educated and my time is better utilized making some contributions to mankind (not the company, mind you) rather than punishing my body doing paltry jobs like jhaadoo pocha and bartan.
I am greatly inspired and have decided to do things which will take me a few steps closer to an award or two. For once my husband may also show some hint of jealousy when people start recognizing me in the restaurants and malls, clicking selfies with me because autographs are so old fashioned. I must decide which profile is better for selfies.
’Aaj mein upar, aasmaan neeche’ my mobile rang. I changed my ring tone yesterday as per my mood nowadays. Usually it is ‘tujhse naaraaz nahin zindagi’ and I felt that it was kind of not matching with my aura of late and so I changed it to this one. 
‘Auntiji, aaj mummy nahin aa paayengi. Bahut tez bukhar hai’ my maid’s daughter said in single breath and kept quiet till it filtered through ear-brain barrier which has almost become impervious to any bad news. When Mr Steve Harvey said ‘it was my mistake’, even Miss Columbia would not have been as shocked and disappointed as I am now.
My immediate desire is to use all useful expletives to burn off the sudden burst of energy caused by cortisol release. But remembering that my anger has the same effect as pouring water on a rock, asking my son not to use gadgets or asking my daughter to eat without speaking, I decided not to act upon it. No matter what, I can’t change my destiny especially when my goddess in disguise has chosen to fall ill on this particular day. 
I say ‘fine’ and hang up without even asking when she is planning to give a darshan again since I know all very well that she hasn’t decided till now, when she wants to get well.
I am not a superstitious person. I don’t believe in nazar. I didn’t put a big kaala teeka on my kids’ foreheads or soles, didn’t ever do ‘nazar utaro’ ceremony of my kids even if I thought that only my children looked good and all the babies of rest of the world looked really bad. I never said ‘nazar lagi hogi’ when my babies started howling in the midnight without apparent reason, thinking that probably it was some earache or a bad dream. But this is different. I couldn’t stop myself uttering ‘meri nazar mujh par hi lag gayi’, waking up my hibernating husband. He said ‘what happened? You got too many pimples? I think you should go easy on sweets’.
‘No, maid is ill’ I slumped.
You can see now, why my name was not there in Republic Day award announcements.

Life of a clumsy person is bad enough. You are busy and have no aptitude for technology is worse. If your husband gifts you all expensive gadgets on birthdays and anniversaries is an extra problem mounted. And your son who is crazy about gadgets fidgets with them so much that the basic settings on which you operate these gadgets become completely inaccessible in the most desperate and embarrassing situations, say in front of the patients ?! OK... now there is no way I can handle this anymore. My condition is like 'markatasya surapanam' the Subhashitam that explains the condition of a monkey. You get a monkey drunk and it gets bitten by a scorpion and then a demon possesses him and imagine the antics of the monkey. My family has failed to realize this.

Computer is not exactly my best friend and my son comes to me everyday and displays his newly acquired skills on computer, some graphics, or something like how to make your own search engine, and explains word by word how he did it. He is all excited to tell me all the wonders the binary system has to offer to him and human race in general, and I fail to understand major part of the conversation and just decide to give a bright encouraging smile to my baby who has grown so much that I can't understand his language!

I can never escape from this onslaught of technology and wherever I go I encounter situations where I find myself blankly staring at the person who is releasing technical jargon at the rate of at least twenty per minute which I feel I have heard somewhere and never tried to figure out the exact meaning. I can't act like a fool all the time. I choose to act like an intelligent person and nod my head in a serious manner, and say a happy thanks to the person and run. I run to take a deep breath and to call my husband to tell him the words that I heard, at least a few of them that I can remember, tell him the context and ask him to takeover the matter till it is totally sorted out and handed to me in a platter in the most simple format.

The worst part of the technology is touch screen. Period. Don't even argue with me on this point. I don't know why anyone thought that touchscreen is an advantage. It has set me so backwards that forget about gadgets, I try to open my refrigerator and almirahs by touching them and feel so foolish. I am unable differentiate between the touch screen and non touch-screen machines. Believe me ,it is not a good feeling to find yourself trying to open your table drawer by hovering your hands over the handle. These touchscreen gadgets are very temperamental and moody too. Sometimes you bang your hand on the screen and nothing happens, and on other times you just hold your fingers near the screen trying to figure out which option to choose and voila! the option you were not going choose is already selected and now you are reading an ad for mutual funds.

Always, he learns who is willing to take a chance. Computers are all about trial and error. Everything is in front of you and it is just your ability to decide to click on certain option that defines your aptitude. Playing safe all your life doesn't help here. And being 'she' and not 'he' doesn't help either. We the women who have painstakingly learnt the habit of anticipating problems well in advance while taking care of kids are unable to unlearn. At least I am conditioned to be so. The question of whether to make idli or dosa for tomorrow's breakfast looming large over head makes my brain run away from new problems that may arise just at the click of the mouse.

With technological advancement running like Bolt, and me, bolting away from it, ten years down the line God knows mera kya hoga !!!

Idli, the quintessential South Indian Breakfast.
Idli is a traditional, healthy and nutritious breakfast snack of South India, which has stood the test of time due to its good satiety value and simplicity of preparation. There are references regarding Idlis in literature as old as belonging to 700 CE. Idli is a soft, white, savory cake, which is disk shaped with a thick center and thinner periphery. It is prepared by steam boiling the semisolid batter made by grinding the soaked rice and de husked black lentils,  after fermentation overnight. Now a days, in most of the households, the traditional Idli making container is replaced by a normal pressure cooker with slight modification; that is, by not using the weight valve. There is a tree of stainless steel plates with perforated indentations or molds, in which the fermented batter is poured. The tree holds the plates above the level of boiling water in the pressure cooker. The Idlis need about ten minutes to cook well. They are always served with a dip, which is normally either  coconut chutney or vegetable curry. They have a special characteristic flavor and every South Indian would vouch for its importance in his or her childhood memories.  The advantage of this recipe is manifold. Idli is absolutely oil free, and is a good source of proteins and carbohydrates, which are provided by lentils and rice respectively. It really makes life easier for women to decide on idli as a breakfast menu because half of the procedure is done on previous day. Keeping the Idlis to cook, you can  prepare chutney or curry in the meantime. With a medium size utensil, you can prepare a breakfast for a nuclear family with in a very short time. To make authentic Idlis may seem difficult for the people who learn about this food for the first time, but it is actually very simple. So, Idli, the quintessential breakfast snack of southern India , is a  non spicy, wholesome, oil free snack with very high satiety value which can be prepared at home easily and I recommend it as the ethnic food of my choice that each of you must try at least once.