One of these days, I am going to get into real trouble with her

Woke up sharp at 5 am, blithe as a lark and went about my early morning routine. Vitals measured and noted down, classical music put on in my study, logged previous day’s 64 point updates, wrote in my journal, made my first cappuccino and settled down in my chair. Suddenly, I heard Sharmila screaming from our bedroom upstairs:

“Rajib, are you around?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I think the dishwasher is beeping. Need to call the mechanic. Can you switch it off?”.
“Okay”.

Hmmm…. now what do I do? I started wondering. You see, that high pitched beeping noises were not coming from the dishwasher. (admittedly, I was impressed with her confidence without doing any debugging).

It was actually me, on my new learning spree. So, about a month back, I took it upon myself to learn Morse code! I know, I know, in these days of GenAI, I could not have picked up anything more anachronistic. After a month of learning my dots and dashes, I got myself a Morse code machine. And that is where I was trying to spell out different words. Not sure what is so dishwasher-y about it.

Anyways, I went back to practicing after connecting the audio output to my headphones.

Eventually, her coffee was ready and she came down. I was hoping she would have forgotten the incident.

“What happened to the dishwasher?”

My burgeoning hopes were summarily … err… “dash”ed!!

I took her to my study and showed her my Morse code machine.

Have you ever noticed how people driven to exasperation involuntarily put their arms on their hips with their palm folded around the wrists? A visage like that was the last recollection I have before I heard her say “You are a quirky man”.

Helplessly, I sat there grinning to myself with no re-Morse whatsoever! I am going to keep learning this…

So there.

Ha! (that would be dot-dot-dot-dot dot-dash to you)

Category: Humor, Musings | 2 Comments

19 September 2025

This wakes me up better than coffee

Being a bit of a creature of habit, I refuse to consider myself awake till I have had that first sip of cappuccino that I make pretty much right after leaving bed. This morning, I had one of those light bulb moments when I realized that there is something more forceful in waking me up.

And that happened when I sank into the sofa and took my first, tentative sip of the cappuccino to probe into its temperature and taste. Because it was in that eye-closed, much anticipated moment that I realized the milk had gone bad 🙁

That meant getting up, dressing up, walking up to Publix in this crisp, cool morning and getting some fresh milk.

That, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, jolted me out of my stupor like nothing has. Or ever will!!

Category: Coffee, Humor | LEAVE A COMMENT

12 September 2025

Pardon my French!

I was talking to this executive the other day who I had just met for the first time. In an animated moment while expounding his background, he said “Pardon my French” and then proceeded to utter some English invectives. I think he proceeded to ramble on further to justify his position… but my mind had drifted away somewhere else..

My mind endeavored in exploring questions of far reaching import. For example…

Why do we say “Pardon my French” and immediately follow through with words that are clearly English?

In fact, I reckoned as I was packing up my thoughts to come back to the present moment, if you ever said “Pardon my French” and actually used French words after that, given my French, I would have absolutely no idea whether to extend you that sought after pardon at all!!

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4 September 2025

That was a close shave

“You know what I figured while shaving today?” I asked her as I emerged from our hotel bathroom in St. Lucia.

“No.” she said, betraying absolutely no attempts to conceal her disinterest.

“Well, if you start from the day we got married…,” I continued.

That must have piqued some level of interest in her since she turned back and looked quizzically at me with that familiar “Now, what?” look.

“Exactly 30 years, 30 months and 30 days later…”

I was losing her quickly . All that math made her countenance turn decidedly unquizzical – if that is the word I am going for.

“… will be your birthday this year!” I finished triumphantly. Smug in my belief that I had delivered a mic drop moment.

She looked at me. Disbelief writ large over her.

“THAT’s what you think of while shaving?”

This was not going in a way I had anticipated. Truth be told, I do not have the faintest idea what others think of when they are shaving. For me, numbers, equations and geometrical figures come to life while shaving. There is nothing strange about that, right?

“You are a strange man”.

I was wrong.

In my defense, she knew me very well 30 years, 30 months etc etc ago. So, there!

Category: Humor, My Family, Vacations | LEAVE A COMMENT

27 August 2025

Admittedly, I did do that

My lack of culinary skills is only exceeded by my pointed unwillingness to learn them. This, regrettably, sometimes gets me in a bit of a spot. There is that age old story which Sharmila regales in telling anybody who cares to listen about how I had once spectacularly stumbled while trying to do something, that to the even untrained eye should appear as something one ought to be able to do with those aforementioned eyes wide shut.

I lay the blame squarely at my engineering background’s feet. When I see instructions urging something to be heated at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, my math leaning brain computes it (with some sense of smugness, I might add) thusly: 800 degrees and 5 minutes should pretty much do the job. Something about product of two quantities and all that drivel.

If memory serves me right, I was tasked with the seemingly innocuous job of boiling a few eggs. Where memory did not serve me right is that while it recognized the eggs themselves being an integral part of the process, it certainly missed the step that calls for putting water first.

What can I say? Results were unequivocal. Fairly black and white, if you get the drift. There were some unwelcome explosions, some fumes involved immediately. And a whole lot more of fuming for the rest of the day.

So, every time Sharmila tells that story now, I sheepishly grin. The agreement all around is generally that of me being incapable of simple stuff.

You can only imagine my glee when I spotted something in a coffee shop this week that destroyed the myth of simplicity in boiling an egg. There is a whole book written on it!! Even got my friend to take a picture of me with it.

P.S. While writing this, it dawned on me that I never opened the book to leaf thru the pages. So, please, do not expect any better egg boiling from me in the near future!!