Buffet survival tips

I went to a buffet yesterday. For lunch. As any kind reader would know by now, for me, an eat all you can buffet is the red signal to morph into the Empress of Blandings and put the snout to the feeding trough, aka the plate with no demurring in the face of gasps of awe and shock at the amount I pack away with absolutely minimal effort.  Yesterday was lunch at the Aromas of China, a restaurant whose name I take in hushed reverent tones. So vast, so ample and so overwhelming is the spread of its Sunday buffet lunch that two trips to replenish plate at said counter donot suffice. And no, I am not telling you how many trips I took, but suffice to say that had I put the trips back to back, I would have done my cardio workout for a day.

Like any serious buffet eater, I had done my preparations well in advance. I had sharpened my hunger by staying semi starved since the morning. Well two halka phulka idlis and sambar is nothing to a paratha breakfaster like me. I had politely declined all tempting nibbles at the birthday party in attended before carting my carcass off to said buffet. I had worn jeans with a substantial proportion of its weave comprising a mix of denim and lycra and reinforce buttons, not likely to pop off and hit my fellow diners in the eye when I finally rose from the table and stretched langurously. I also wore sturdy comfortable shoes, ideal for walking to and fro between table and buffet counter without need to mince around apologetically and accidentally trip and spill food on premises.

Nonetheless, yesterday was a Sunday. And Sunday brings to the fore Very Aggressive Buffet Eaters. These include soft faced elderly aunties, with talcum powder in the folds of their neck and their faces wreathed over in creases who elbow you out of the line by pretending to “just check” the dishes on offer.  Or the ditherers and datherers who stand gawping at each individual dish for an hour before fishing out their personal weighing scales and calorie charts before deciding exactly how much they gently and reverentially place on their plates. Of course, such folk have no business even being at a buffet and holding up the line for rest of us hard-eating folk.

Here are tips to get through a buffet to your hearts (and stomach’s) content:

Donot even venture near the soup counter. That is trick designed by the restaurant to get your stomach half full and ensure you dont pack away as much as you could in normal circumstances.

Wear clothes that camouflage spills and food droppings so you can eat at ease and not have to worry about bits of food on your lap and gravy stains down your dront.

Develop the art of the accidental elbow nudge and plate prod, to get the slow pokes in front to speed it up. Also develop the hide of a rhino if you are to succeed in this strategy.

Eat sparely for the rest of the day to ensure you can eat your money’s worth and more.

Do be OCD about going in line. I would have grown roots had I done that yesterday. Skip around to unpopulated counters and take whats available. Come back for what you think you missed later.

Always, always keep that little space for dessert or you end up eating a great meal till the point the buttons on your shirt and trousers are popping off and all you can remember of it is that you were too stuffed to have dessert.

If you have small children at the table make them useful by sending them to the buffet to fill your plate with specific items if you’re too embarassed to keep going back for the one hundredth time.

Happy buffet-ing.

Michael Jackson is dead….

…and so is a part of me. How do I even begin to explain the phenomenon that was Michael Jackson to my son? Of course, there are parts of this said phenomenon I would prefer not to have to explain to my son, but since the man is recently dead, I will gloss over them like the elephant in the room, as mentioned by Randy Pausch.

The fact remains that Michael Jackson was the music I grew up to. The Way You Make Me Feel was the official love ballad for my generation, raunchy, aggressive, and full of great dancing and MJ, us with the one shouldered oversized tees, hair scrunched up into untidy messy high on head ponytails, legwarmers (for God alone knows what in the heat of Mumbai and no dance classes), the then to be spouse perfected moonwalking and breakdancing for the express purpose of impressing the squealing girls and did a mean headspin and backflip in his time.

I knew the words backwards to Thriller, Billie Jean, Black & White, I Just Cant Stop Loving You, Man in the Mirror. Dammit I worshipped the man. He was the ultimate in coolth to me. Of course, like the rest of my generation I watched on in shock and disbelief as he changed from a cute black boy to something I still dont know what yet. I watched his courtroom appearances with sunken nose and lipsticked and eyemakeupped eunuch persona and tried to reconcile it with the face of the oh so fabulous dancer who had me sitting on the edge of my seat whenever his songs played on television.

And I would think back to the I Want You Back of the Jackson 5 and wondered what had been so terrible in his childhood lost that he never ever could grow up. I watched the documentaries done on him, recoiled in horror as I heard stories of how he had been slavedriven to perform professionally at the age of five. It was heartbreaking to hear him speak in his whispery fragile voice, and say that opposite the recording studio there was a fairground with a carousel and all he wanted to do was to ride the Ferris Wheel and the Carousel and he wouldnt be allowed to. And he had to practise practise practise. He was a child. Five years old. Thats how old my son is. I watched clips of his Neverland mansion, his taking of the Peter Pan personality he had created for himself to the ultimate extreme. I read the stories of the child abuse, the sleepovers, the manic spending, the bizaree appearances at the trial, and even to an untrained non clinical mind the inferences were obvious, the man was trying desperately to get back his childhood. At times I even felt terrible for him. Haunted, an object of ridicule in his later years, a subject of jokes and wondered about the children he had chosen to have borne for him, and wondered what type of a gilded cage they were growing up in. The fabulous music he made in his hey day was forgotten. Newer singers and musicians came on the scene. But the phenomenon that was MJ could never ever be replicated.

Perhaps it is appropriate I am in black today. Of course, you and I know that I am in black every other day, but today it seems particularly appropriate. A part of my youth has died forever, and I am in mourning. Keep his private life aside. That is none of my business, except as a voyeuristic fan. For the music he gave us, I bow to him on bended knee.

“Why not just tell people I’m an alien from Mars. Tell them I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight. They’ll believe anything you say, because you’re a reporter. But if I, Michael Jackson, were to say, ‘I’m an alien from Mars and I eat live chickens and do a voodoo dance at midnight,’ people would say, ‘Oh, man, that Michael Jackson is nuts. He’s cracked up. You can’t believe a damn word that comes out of his mouth.’”

—Michael Jackson

The King of Pop is dead. And an era is officially over.

The monsoon is here.

The monsoon to me is somewhat like the bad boy of romance novels. You dread his arrival with all the classic symptoms, palpitations, sweats, churning stomach and even accelerated heartbeat, but once he’s around, you just get swept completely off your feet, and enjoy the ride.

The build up to the monsoon this year was rather non dramatic. After the incredibly cruel summer had roasted us all to a crisp, the last few days saw random indeterminate clouds gathering on the horizon and drizzling a bit occasionally, and I kept fleeing into the rooms and shutting the huge french windows petrified of getting any random drop of water finding its way into my newly Lasiked eyes. Last evening we pulled our cane chiks down from the balconies, shifted the huge comfuy sofas in and moved the balcony furnitue to safer spots, and arranged the plants in the perimeter of said balconies to prevent them from toppling over and falling with the gale force winds that blast through the floors we are at. We dug out our umbrellas and raincoats and windcheaters and kept safety kits in both the cars. We also in our hearts prayed that we wouldnt be stuck in a 26/7 situation ever again. Once is enough for me, thank you very much. This year we are also out of the old residence which inevitably had the walls leaking puddles on our floors, creepy things crawling up our drainpipes and the exiting the ground floor requiring a swim with underwater snorkelling equipment to reach the first floor landing.

Monsoons were always a riot. My lenses perpetually fell off, fogged over or worse, managed to dislodge themselves in heavy showers and travel to distant corners of the eye leaving me hapless and hunting for the nearest open eye doctor who could then coerce the damn thing back to where the Good Lord intended it to be. Yup, it was not always possible to be soigne and such like in the monsoons. Not with rain getting into your ears and such like.

I am currently wearing sunglasses thanks to the surgery. The sunglasses I have been hiding behind are so double wrapped around the eyes that even a mote of dust would be hardpressed to find their way into an opening and land into the eyes. Yes, you guessed right. These are pair of sunglasses bought back in the times when  Iwould rather wear bikers helmets for protection from said dust motes whizzing into them lenses and making me do the wriggle shake blink tear dance and hunt for safe non windy place to remove said lenses, rinse and redeposit in the eye or give up all efforts to be sauve and nonbespectacled and shove on them glasses and be at peace. And of course, the monsoons had another issue. That of contact lenses getting fogged up and blurry. You see, I am from the age of the dinosaurs, and started out wearing semi soft contact lenses and despite the best efforts of doctors and eye stores to convince me to switch to soft lenses, never quite managed to overcome the squeamishness in pit of stomach whenever said lens was to be plucked off the eyeball and sconsequently stuck to the tried and tested semi soft version.

This year, hopefully, life will be good. Hopefully, I will sail through the monsoon without any flood rescue boats being pressed into service. Seriously though, I see the thick black clouds rolling up at top speed over the creek our building looks out on, and then come wham into our balconies, making us feel like we’ve migrated to a hillstation of sorts. The wind howls through little slivers of space between window frame joints, making us leap in fright at sudden unimaginably terrifying sounds like random footsteps coming from the floor above. A bedraggled raven sitting on the balcony in search of temporary shelter from the rain, cawing his lungs out for no other reason but to irritate me, gets swotted away. Chai gets made by the tumbler full, and gulped down with parathas and pakoras and all such things that go straight to the hips and settle comfortably there, nudging and poking existing cellulite and pushing at the skin to make new space. Bhuttas are cooked on open charcoal sigris and smeared with lime, salt and chilli powder and eaten at pavement stops on grey windy days.  Groundnuts are brought home and washed (double washed mind you, to get all the dirt off), boiled with salt and then happily occupy much of a chilly wet evening, when going out is not an option and shelling boiled groundnuts and popping them into your mouth is the next best thing to heaven on earth.

I am also a die hard romantic. Come the rains and I half imagine myself to be sweet sixteen again and need to have a walk under single umbrella with love of my life to relive days of youth gone by. Of course, tis a different situation now with one of those beach umbrellas being required to accommodate both of us without us getting any water on ourselves. And secondly, I have officially forgotten the art of walking down pavements and such like in rainy weather without managing to sprain an ankle or topple over and impact the concrete by causing cracks in the road surface.

I hope to get a few hours of peace, to be able to put on Naina Devi’s thumris, sit in my balcony with a sappy Mills and Boon, gorge on chai pakoras and think back to a time in my life when the monsoon was romantic and fun and full of all the corny cliches that Bollywood is made off, save the dancing around trees in the rain bit. But give me an old log cabin in the mountains and a storm and George Clooney anyday. Sigh. Let me get to that balcony. Tis the best I will get.

Am back…

And seeing the world with renewed eyes. Eyes that arent yet as clear as I would have liked, seeing as I am shaking them up ever so often by sneezing violently, enough to scramble my brains into an omlette. Yes, yes, yes, trust me to have the fantastically bad timing to go into a serious nose blocked, snot producing, hacking cough type, ribcage rattling sneeze-o-fest kind of a cold just when I dont have to shake them eyes too much.

Please forgive me for not replying to all comments right now, I have an hour granted to me to sit at the computer by the stern browed man I married, who is right behind me, clicking my time. And undoubtedly reading over my shoulder.

The eyes are still not used to being open the first thing in the morning and being able to see the world and by reflex action the hand starts patting the sidetable for spectacles, and of course, since am on dark glasses continuous wear these days I have the substitute.

The birthday yesterday was a tame affair. AND NO ONE BOUGHT ME CAKE. *This typed with smirking backward glance at the man who is timing me and definitely reading over my shoulder, and being all stern faced and impassive while doing so.*

I am the officially designated cake buyer in the house, the one whose lot it comes to run out and pick up a cake for who so ever happens to turn a year older,  and I was not considered worthy of a cake to cut on my birthday. Let me sniffle away in a corner. Let me talk in great detail about Dutch truffle and the good things it always does to my libido. And why since no Dutch Truffle was ingested the first day of the current year of my life, there will be no libido for said year.

Guess who is so getting his head bitten off all of today. Never mind that two lovely bags were proferred as peace offerings to the birthday girl on the warpath. You see they were not giftwrapped. More on that later.

Didnt help that I was running a fever so for most part of the day was closeted in the bedroom like Mrs Rochester, with the same wild unwashed hair and the same feral anger towards people who spoke in high voices in the house. 

In the evening, the day was saved by two sweethearts of friends coming over out of the blue bearing gifts… yes, I am shallow like that, I love gifts and the unwrapping of. Whats a girl without her girlfriends I ask you? I go into unseemly rhapsodies over stuff that is giftwrapped. I need giftwrapped stuff. Especially on the birthday. I mean its bad enough that I dont get thrown any parties anymore. And folks forget to buy cake for me, with just one symbolic candle, I’m not greedy, I dont want the entire shebang of 38 candles on the damn surface of the cake resulting in one wax bite overload of melted candle. All I ask is for gifts. Wrapped in multiple layers. Of very Shiny Gift wrapping Papers. To add to the anticipation. You know. Whats a birthday present without the wrapping. 

Oh okay. Its time to grow up I think. Should try. Am almost qualifying for that walking stick now. I think I still want the gifts and the cake and the balloons on my 90th birthday. I might still do the shake. Involuntarily though.

Happy budday to me

And a quick update. The LASIK went smashingly. I can open my eyes and see things in detail not patches of interminate origin, I walked out of the operation theatre and saw my husbands face crystal clear for the first time in my life. Am embarassed to say I did hormonal stuff like cry buckets with the nurses daubing my cheeks with gauze and exhorting me to stop the waterworks. More details on the operation later. For all ye who are squeamish, tis nothing, piece of cake. And if you’ve had a child pulled out of you its phtooey stuff. Get it done now. Signing off before my phone gets confiscated.

Me and my spectacles

I was in the second grade when my parents realised I couldnt see too well. I had been complaining that I couldnt read the blackboard clearly, I am told. But unfortunately my reputation as an attention seeker preceded me and the teacher thought this was just another ploy to get myself plum prime position up front in the front benches rather than right at the back, where I was inevitably pushed, being tall for the class (Yes, yes, smirk all ye want, I used to be amongst the tallest in the class until puberty struck me at the ripe old age of nine and put the brakes on my height. I am currently somewhere between midget and five foot nothing.) Returning home from a party someplace, the father started me reading taxi plate numbers to keep me occupied. Voila, I couldnt read them. I squinted and squinted and couldnt read them. I was dragged kicking and screaming to the opthalmologist the very next day and a grim card with – 3 was plonked in front of the mother, who in true Hindi film fashion, covered her ears and shrieked Nahin or maybe, I exaggerate. I of course got a good telling to for all the comic books read and television watched from the tip of my nose. For the next few days I walked about gingerly with the newly acquired spectacles perched at the edge of my nose. I was now, and became officially for the rest of my life, a nerd. It also didnt help that I was round as a ball and hulking. Puberty and determined dieting brought those proportions under control but in my head, I am still the fat specsky girl in the back corner of the class.

I didnt learn swimming because I couldnt see too well around me with the spectacles off. I didnt get to cycle because the only time someone consented to dare bear my weight and teach me, I fell terribly on said friend and crushed her bones to powder and my spectacles to in the process. I hated the trouble of wearing contact lenses, but would do anything for vanity therefore lived in them. My most I hate spectacles moment came when I was wheeled in for my C-sec, handing over my spectacles to my mother for safekeeping. When the child was pulled out and shown to me before being carted off for washing cleaning and measuring I couldnt see him and yelled out for my spectacles, leading to a serial race from op theatre attendant to wardboy to nurse to the mother to ask for them spectacles and as luck would have, or my absent minded mother’s penchant more likely an explanation, she couldnt find or remember where she had kept them safely. Of course, the mewling child was carted off pronto.

Its taken me a long time to work up the courage to get here. I go in for a LASIK tomorrow. Ive been told to come in without eye make up and without deo. Hopefully I will be bathed and fresh and wont knock out the poor surgeon with BO. And hopefully I emerge with eyes that can see without the crutch of them spectacles. Somehow it feels like the date of release from some imprisonment.

And yes, there will be no further blogposts until I get the all okay to sit in front of the computer. Three days I’ve been told. Be good till then.

What would I do…

If it had been me in Shiney Ahuja’s wife’s place. If it had been my husband who had admitted to what he thought was consensual* intercourse with the maid?

Would I stand by my man?

My heart wrings out for Anupam. God bless her and her baby in these times. Learning that your husband is unfaithful is bad enough, but having it up for public consumption, with rape in your own house is the lowest of the low. It is the kind of ego and self esteem shattering blow that one can never ever recover from.

I dont think I would be as strong as she is, standing by her man, despite his alleged confession to what he thought was consensual sex after some advances he made to the maid were not rebuffed. But then I am I. And she is she.

And she seems to be made of sterner stuff than I am.  My stomach turns. The humiliation of it all would have killed me once again after the pain of the infidelity had done the deed.

 

*Consentual changed to consensual. Thanks Ser. I am definitely losing it in my dotage. Or just not doing enough reading any more.

m bk fm d brk

And what a break it was. The child fell ill, and managed to get me an insta forelock of pure grey within three days of continuous high spikes of fever. For more such delightful and deep insights into the cause, the treatment, etc of said fever, details available on karmickids.blogspot. I reserve this blog for the non child part of my life. Which, I must admit, is pretty tiny. Maybe like one tenth of me. Gosh I really need to get out and get me a life. Again. Quick.

Seriously though, I am totally getting on the soap box today about Smsese polluting our language. And the appalling fact that in some place somewhere, I suspect it is the UK but since my memory is not the most accurate at this point having been wrung out like the tepid sponging cloths I worked on for the better part of the last week, I will add a disclaimer and say I think I read it somewhere, that students are allowed to answer examinations in smsese or textese. As the good wikipedia defines it. Suffice to say I fainted on the spot. Many smelly shoes had to be pressed into urgent service, and the masons called it to refit broken flooring.

To me it is heartbreaking. The beauty of a language, with its candences and nuances being chopped mercilessly into the briefest of alphabets meant to signify a word and emoticons coming in to signify feelings. The horror, the horror. Wiser folks than me have had wiser words to write about this new phenomenon.

I read them and nodded sadly. It is true, the English language as I know it, and learnt it and read it is changing in an irrevocable way. I felt rather like Chaucer might have felt had he leafed through Shakespeare’s works a century or so down the line and quivered in horror at the blasphemous spellings that had blighted the flow of sentences. The horror was brought home to me keenly during a recent incident where I found a blog post lifted lock, stock and barrel and transported to another blog. After the brouhaha died down, I received an apology of sorts from the perpetrator, in complete SMS language. Not an apology as much as a claim that the person had read my post once and subconsciously reproduced it in its entirety. Opal Mehta anyone? The letter itself was in smsese for most of it,  abbreviations, full of grammatical errors and total disregard for punctuation or capitalisation. It shook me. In a way that can’t be imagined. It was very obvious that the writer was very, very young. At my best guess over two decades younger than me.

I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that such writing came from someone who had filched my stuff. If anything I know that my greatest failing is the inability to keep a sentence within the mandatory readability requirement of 20 words per sentence. It’s done me in many a times.  And I know that I skimp on the apostrophe in platforms which dont offer me spell check. But at least the words are spelt out. In full.

And I could just see my son, a few years down the line writing in the same intolerable way. He already shows signs of it by insisting that one alphabet comprises a word and one word makes a sentence whenever it comes to writing practice. I can just see him and his friends converting the entire language into emoticons and heiroglyphs. Or maybe I really am a dinosaur. I type out my text messages in full words most of the times. I think it very undignified to break a word into its consonants and terrorise people into guessing and second guessing what you’re trying to say and risk them having misinterpret it.

You know, I could send the spouse a I lv u and risk having him read it as I am leaving you and do the war dance of joy round the block and dig out his little black book of potential replacements for my good self.

I am judgemental. I judge folks who send me smses with abbreviations and complete lack of grammatical sentences as folks who couldnt be bothered to stick to the niceties of language. Or who dont deem me worthy of taking time out to speak politely and coherently with. It is that equivalent. My equivalent of talking slang and peppering one’s speech with gratuitious swear words. Before I get you good folks here in a sweat and ready to dash off steaming angry comments, please to note I mean the husband. He replies to my smses saying K. What K? I asked once, when I’d smsed him asking him to pick up some stuff on the way home. OK, came the reply. Now even OK, which was a bastardisation of Okay, gets shortened. What next, the individual lines of each alphabet get broken up into parts to make even alphabets shorter?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I have one leg dangling in the coffin. Its the way the youth are today. Sms-ese is the lingo du jour. I’d better keep with it to keep with it in a way that no amount of anti wrinkle cream or hair dye could ever help me with.

The English language is evolving I do agree, every language evolves, new words come in, old words get junked. Tiresome words like Flibbertigibbet are just asking to be chucked out on their heads of course, and newer influences come in from languages from around the globe…what the hell, call me a puritan, but while I welcome the influence of new words strengthening the language with the new meaning they bring in, I am horrified at the thought that in my next birth I might received two word love letters or messages or emoticons instead of the pages of undying love I longed for (Disclaimer: Never got any, the spouse was always a man who handed out his words guardedly, and spoke much more than he could be bothered to pen down. The most romantic I ever got was Luv U. K.  This back in 1991. Guess I married the perpetrator of the Sms-ese movement). We did name our child an abbreviation of a popular god too. Although it was more a combination of our names, than the need to shorten the name of said mischievous God. And I am a big one for simple names. You know. I’ve cruelly ruined enough friends’ names through my childhood to have painstakingly examined every potential way a name can be twisted for teasing purposes.

Maybe, in slow and insidious ways I am getting dragged into this movement, despite my reluctance. Maybe I should kick and scream and yell for help in full sentences, with appropriate capitals and punctuation. And maybe no one will understand what I am trying to say.

See these and lust…

 

 

Christian Louboutin Piros 120 Ankle Boots

Christian Louboutin’s gray suede boots. Total kickass girl power. Heel measures approximately 130mm / 5 inches with a 10mm / 0.5 inch hidden platform.

or

Christian Louboutin Josefa 120 black platforms

Black suede peep-toe sandals by Christian Louboutin.  Heel measures 120mm / 5 inches with a 20mm / 1 inch partially concealed platform.

or

Guiseppe Zanotti’s urban chic taupe leather ankle boots. Ideal with really sprayed on skinnies in black or deep indigo. Heel measures approximately 110mm / 4.5 inches with a 20mm / 1 inch concealed platform.

What would you choose?

(Pictures and information on products taken from net-a-porter)

I am a coward

I finally finally dared to take an appointment with an opthalmologist for last  evening. After seven years. Yes, yes, dont ask. The opthalmologist to me is the equivalent of the dentist to most. I am squeamish about them eyes. Also helps that I am half blind and must pat the bedside table blindly for them spectacles every morning before I can greet the day. I love to live in the delusion that no, the eyes are now stable. The power has settled and will not migrate in any such direction and the contact lenses can be continued on indefinitely without needing to be changed. Yes, I am that delusional.

But then strange things began happening. I began squinting at fine print. I began holding items at supermarkets at varying distances in order to figure out costs. I once misread a face cream for being 3 hundred something which when billed turned out to be 800 something. Naturally, I returned home and booked said appointment with eye specialist without further delay.

Like I prefer to deal with doctor’s appointments, I went on my own. Not a good idea. The medieval torture chamber? Blasts of air into your eyes to measure something. Drops to dilate your pupils resulting in a situation when you finally open your eyes all you can see is a fairytale realm you’ve been teleported to with lights shining all around in warm fuzzy glowing balls, and the eye specialist seeming like the dim hazy alien aboard the mothership strapping you down for experiment conducting purpose. You must remember that without them spectacles I am half blind anyway. A face which is not at the tip of my nose is unclear in regular times, with eyes dilated I walked the careful heavy walk of one who couldnt really figure out where her foot was landing. As I entered the building elderly personages flitting in and out of the lobby shrivelled me with stern disapproving stares for daring to be swaying drunk before the sun had even set.

The conclusion of said check up, a stern finger wagging and polite lecture about the ridiculous years of a gap between eye check ups.  The ideal is once a year said the doctor, not once a decade. I squirmed in apology on the chair. The number strangely enough has reduced itself. So here I am squinting through spectacles and contact lenses of a higher power than the one I require. And I left with a song in my heart about the possibility of waking up and not being as blind as a bat with the wonderful new revolutionary technology called Lasik which ofcourse has been around for yonks, but scaredy cat me has been looking every which way but an eye doctor’s clinic to gather the courage to get done.

Am lathering on the sob story to the husband to convince him to fund the process. God willing and the good wishes of you, dear reader, I will find myself at the eye specialist for a record twice in a single year and get said surgery done within the month.

Now if only the image of something attacking my cornea with a light saber can be dismissed easily…