Friday 30 July 2010

Sound Slumber

The weather in London these days is cloudy but one has to switch on AC when he or she goes to bed. The other day while I was walking to the Business Centre, Sonja Assenheimer, Guest Relations Supervisor, Mandarin Oriental Hotel - London greeted me saying 'good morning' as usual . But when she asked me if I had slept well, I took it in the negative sense presuming that she had noticed something indicating a sleepless night on my face . It was when I read the article " Suite dreams" by Bob Greene in the International Herald Tribune that I realized that her question was quite natural . A Suite in a hotel is a luxury accommodation comprising a bedroom plus a living room and some times kitchen depending upon the type of the suite. It is pronounced as Sweet and therefore it goes hand in hand with the word dreams and the reader can will have no problem in understanding what the writer means in both ways . Such a group of words spelt or pronounced the same but have different meaning is called homonym.
What Bob Greene tries to pinpoint in his article is that whereas at one time a business traveller checking into a hotel was seeking various types of pomp and pleasures, " now a days the universal craving that hotels seek to satisfy is a night of true deep shuteye with no distractions". He adds that in 2008, 56 Million sleeping prescriptions were written and that doctors say they are dealing with 80 separate sleep disorders . The writer believes that something seems to have gone wrong and concludes that " what we need in these nerve jaggling times is a night of sound slumber".
Years ago during my college days, one of my friends had easily discovered how somnolent I was and wrote in my autograph " Sound sleep is the cheapest pleasure one can afford, so sleep Mohamed go on sleeping." Once when I wrote one of my close friends that my main business was sleeping, he said his wife burst into laughter.
Here in London what my room mate Dr. Ibrahim and myself do when we wake up from sleep is to check the time shown in the clock beside our beds to see whether we have had a jet lag as we know that our body clock will be out of sychronisation and the body takes time to adjust itself to the new time zones.

By the father

Tuesday 20 July 2010

FOSTALGIA

Fostalgia , as the annual gathering of Frook College Alumni Association is called, sounds and speaks like nostalgia or yearning for the past.. Fostalgia brings a multitude of sweet and sour memories in its train. More than 38 years have elapsed since I left Farook College after spending 5 years in the same campus. Still Time has failed to erase such memories from my mind since we had an emotional attachment to this institution from which thousands of students have graduated and are now working in different parts of the world. As Peter Kujawinski wrote "with great ferocity I have protected the memory of that time, so that in quite moments I can unwrap it and inhale its scent". When I recall those days I feel like smelling  a jasime flower and  I am endowed with " serene and blessed mood" as Wordswoth had put it.

The mess hall door of Iqbal hostel where I had stayed used to be closed a few minutes prior to meal timings. The hostel inmates flocked before the door and once the door was open they ran like pigeons running after food grains thrown before them. They were searching for the plates containing more rice or bowls having more mutton or chicken curry. The plates were of the same size and the quantity was the same. But due to human error it was possible that some plates or bowls have slightly larger quantities of food. They had no option to ask for another plate or some more curry as the quantity was limited like ration system. I was most probably the last person to dine and they interpreted it as a gesture of good will, discipline, patience so on and so forth where as the truth was that I had discovered that the curry remaining at the bottom of the pot would be thick and more delicious than what was served in the beginning. .

The hostel day was a memorable occasion. It was more or less like a wedding function except that  there were no bride, bridegroom or female invitees. Each inmate could invite his friends from other hostels. The hostel was decorated with colour paper and garlands . Students welcomed their guest from the gate and escorted them to their seat arranged in the courtyard of the hostel.

The teashop close to the college run by Athamakka was known among students as Atoms Hotel . The most favourite item in the tea shop menu was 'Sami' or beef so named after the Samis ( Brahmins )who lived in the nearby vegetarian hostel. It was reported that though they were supposed to shun meat they were stealthily eating beef from there. Thus beef came to be known as Sami. The beef served in his shop had a special appetizing flavour.

During the evenings, we used to walk to the nearby town of Ramanattukara . While walking, the breeze blowing from somewhere refreshed our minds and soothed our souls. It narrated the stories of our kith and kins living in the distant districts . Our chit-chat centered on our families and our thoughts revolved around our parents. The rose flowers in the gardens in front of some houses beside the road smiled at us as if they were telling us not to worry about them. In the evenings we went to the Chaliyar river shore and sat there to share our joys and grievances . The black waters of the river polluted by a factory which dumped its waste to it and its foul smell suffocated us . We were sorry that we had to  remain passive spectators to it. I don’t know whether there were environmental workers those days to defend the nature.



By the father



Wednesday 7 July 2010

A New Start...continued

I love travelling , be it by bus, car ,train or air. I never miss an opportunity to visit places. My main hobby during the journey is to watch the world outside through window and observe lives of different people. For this reason I prefer travelling by train to other mode of transport . Every big railway station has a slum attached to it. Small houses resembling match boxes packed together, children running around , women cooking , old people sleeping in their varanda , people watching television huddled together in their unimaginably small visiting rooms , neighbours shouting one another etc .Everyone is busy with his or her own life , enjoying it to the full extent and playing their role in this world with full vigour .

My friend came five minutes before the train started moving . Now you can imagine the stress. I had been there waiting. But my pain was not over yet . Now she gave me a ticket in which my name was spelt wrong to the extent that it was literally not mine. Now I had to convince the ticket checker . Railway rules had become a little strict recently and some ticket checkers are really arrogant these days . I started thinkng of my options.

1. I could try convincing the ticket checker , which had the risk of getting caught. Morover , that would put me at the mercy of the ticket checker. I could escape by bribing him , but you never know some checkers become Raja Harishchadra in a minute.
2. I could distract the checker from looking at the name. But considering the fact that I am a terrible actor the chances of getting caught were so high .
3. As usual , wait and see .

But I decided to take the adventurous option. Sometimes I like the risky routes. What's the fun in life if one takes no risks . So when the checker came I pretended taking my ID card from my wallet with difficulty and showed it at a distance . Seeing that I would take time to show my ID he said it is OK. The poor guy fell for it . After all he was a friendly young chap .

So God blessing me with a splendid rain and employing a small trick I entered Chandigarh , hoping that the beautiful city would give me a new start .

By the eldest son

Monday 5 July 2010

Serpentine Lake

While walking along the bank of the Serpentine Lake in the Hyde Park in London early in the morning , it is a soothing experience to watch the different species of birds swimming in the lake. They nest on an island in the middle of the lake full of trees and bushes which provide a safe haven for them to breed and grow up unharmed by human beings as even bathing is not allowed in this lake.
A skein of gees and a badelynge of ducks took me back to more than fifty years when rearing ducks was one of the means of livelyhood in Kerala State. The children in our village loved to watch hundreds of ducks moving from place to place accompanied by their supervisors travelling with them in small woodden boats which can hardly accoommodate more than one person. They were in search of feeding grounds for these birds especially during the rice harvesting season when the famers used to rent their paddy fields for a very short period of time to the duck farm owners against certain number of eggs. They came from the southern districts of Kerala and spoke a slightly different dialect of Malayalam language. The children in our area listened to them with curiosity tinged with a little bit of astonishment. I still remember how children like me to used to wait for these eggs which were cooked by our moms in different syles and how we enjoyed the duck-egg specialities.
Duck eggs were also hatched by the villagers using a setting hen for domestic rather than commercial purposes. . The incubation period was more than three weeks. We used to wait eagerly to see beautiful ducklings emerging from the eggs at the end of the incubation period. When the hen moved with ducklings she looked as if was she was so proud to look after them like their step mother as they were not her own chicks. To look at the ducklings piercing the egg shells with their tender beaks in a hurry to step into this world was an explicable experience denied to the the children of today due to the onslaught of technology which has robbed them of such innocent pleasures and amusments .
Among the birds one can spot in the Serpentine Lake is moorhen which is the Europen version of Kulakkozhi in Kerala where they nest close to ponds which may be the reason why they are called Kulakkozhi which literally means Pondhen. Some of the European moorhen have a read line on the upper part of their beak making it more beautiful than their counterparts in Kerala . They are so light that they can comfortably walk over the thick layer of some water plants enveloping ponds . Its chicks resemble normal chicken except that the former is black in colour and have long legs. As a boy I had enjoyed watching stealthly these chicks moving with their mother who will run and hide as soon as they spot human beings. As a part of childish adventures, once I had chased a moorhen in attempt to catch the bird when it is too tired to fly or run. When I caught her in this way, it laid an immature egg out of fear its shell so soft as a balloon. In those days it had occured to me to steal some moorhen eggs from the nest and incubate them along with the normal eggs using a setting hen to see if the mother hen would recognise the strangers among her children and how she treated them . I had also stollen the chicks of kingfisher from its nest and tried to raise them and was extremely sorry when all of them soon died . Years later exactly in 2000 when we employed a crazy Tamil homenurse to look after our ailing mother during the last few days of her life it was a coincidence the homenurse stole some eggs from the kulakkozhi nest adjacent to the pond in front of our house but I asked her to return the them to the nest . It may be that I wanted to repent for my mischievous activities as a child.
BY THE FATHER

Saturday 3 July 2010

A New Start

I still remember the day I came for admission. It was raining cats and dogs that Jan Shadabdi(train) was leaking. I had to keep my heavy luggage on my lap to prevent it from getting wet. Everyone had to do the same. A chaotic atmosphere in the train. The mother sitting beside me was yelling at her son to keep him away from the window. But he was more interested in soaking himself in the rain. Even though it was trouble, no one complained as the rain came in the midst of the hot summer.

As I am hailing from coastal area I was not used to the extreme type of wather. Even before coming here I was warned about the climate in Chandigarh. So I took it as a welcome sign from God. I had to spend the next three years of my life in this small yet beautiful union territory.

My day was full of uncertainities .But I had faced such situations many times before. First , my train ticket was with Gunjan, from my batch who was supposed to board the train with me from Delhi. But she was late since she had to visit her relative on the way. All I could do was to wait and hope that she arrives on time.Well I had reached the railway station three hours earlier. So I had a lot of time to wait and hope . I have been a type A personality in medical terms in my whole life. You asknow that this type , they say, tends to have a short life span since they are more prone to coronary artery disease because they are more fussy about perfectionism. I don't mean I make things perfect. I just fit in perfectly .So I was there in Delhi railway station waiting and hoping my friend arrives in time with my ticket .As usual I thought about the options before me.

1. I could wait for my friends. This was very easy under the circumstances .
2. I could take another ticket . Why take the risk . But there was not ticket available and I was out of work for some time and I needed to conserve as much money as possible.
3.I could ask my friend to tell me the ticket number and I could download it from the internet . I soon dropped that idea as i was too tired and my luggage was too heavy to carry and search for an internet .

So back to plan one . WAIT AND HOPE .

To be continued .............

By the eldest son