22 October 2013

The stars in our life go round and round..

Lit a fire and sat with Nikita outside as she quizzed me on her newly acquired knowledge of stars, colors of stars and the moon.
Forty years back, my dad used to sit out in the open sky in his “easy chair” (a cross between a lounge chair and a hammock) and I used to sit by him and ask him a million questions about the clear sky above.
I remember being very dissatisfied with his answer to my question “How many total stars are there”? – “Uncountable. There is no end”. I reckoned this being his tactic to shut me up. I had decided to grow up and someday actually count up all the stars!!
That never happened!!

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19 October 2013

Good looking potato

Most of you who know me, also know very well that grocery shopping is clearly not one of my core competencies. I have rarely done it and I am totally clueless about the aisle layouts. Once in a blue moon, Sharmila will hand me a list of things to pick up. Typically, once in the store, I will look at the top of the list and then roam around the store looking for that item, listlessly 🙂 Eventually, I will give up, call her up and then ask for instructions. She will remotely guide me to the aisle, I will find the item and then tell her “I have got it from here” before dropping the call.
Then I will see the next item on the list, again walk around the whole store completely confused where to find the item, call her back again…. and so on … till I have made as many calls as there are items on the list. It is the same story every single time.
So, these days, she tries to be very explicit in her instructions when she absolutely needs me to go to the grocery store.
This is the text message I got from her when I was out running an errand this morning.
The good news is, following her directions, I landed up in the potato section. Except there were lots and lots of potatoes. And I had no idea in God’s green earth when to deem a potato “good looking”. Frankly, they all looked rather unseemly to me 🙂
As you must have guessed, a phone call ensued… 🙂 🙂

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31 August 2013

Her final word…

Nikita and I climbed to the top of the Stone Mountain this morning. After climbed back down, we sat down in the shade, took out our food from the backpack and rested for a while. Trying to gauge her future interest in climbing up a few more neighboring mountains, I asked “What do you think?”. Pat came her reply – “When I grow up, I am pretty sure I will not be a mountaineer” 🙂