Monthly Archives: May 2013

Enga pona raasa

What a boring song with lines like kanji aari pochu which, by the way, sounds as though it is being recited and not sung and what is it with that sad, melancholic feel oozing out of this song making you too to feel dull? That was the feeling that remained even after a few days of listening to this song.

And then it finally happened today – suddenly the words sung as though in a soft whisper with full of longing and the soft, caressing, minimal music in the background seemed to seamlessly blend together to create a magic, a soothing, melancholic magic sans the feeling of gloominess. And not to forget that interlude with that lovely humming which suddenly has words and humming and chords coming together with the humming and the chords forming a nice backdrop for that non-dramatic-climatic high-pitched enga pona raasa which undergoes beautiful transitions to come back to the initial slow enga pona raasa.

I am now so fully drawn into this song that I just can’t stop listening to it!

Cockroach

The only thing that I hated the most during the time in Singapore.

In the HDB (Housing Development Board) apartments in Singapore, the method of disposing the garbage from your house was to open a door beneath the sink in the kitchen and throw the bag of waste into it. There is a vertical passage that runs through all the floors and every house will have a door to that passage. The garbage from all the houses gets collected in that area and the ground floor has a door to it. The waste is then collected from it by the workers from SembCorp (remember our good old Onyx?).
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Elay Keechan

The catchy tune appealed to me right in the first listening and it was the only song from Kadal that I was initially listening to. One fine day, it so happened that I listened to it in the presence of Sahana and guess what she did, she started dancing to the tune! From then on, there were several days when you would find the mother and the daughter happily listening to this song on a loop with one, all smiles seeing her daughter enjoying herself and secretly harbouring the hope that she too might become a Rahmaniac 😉 and the other, happily smiling and dancing away, innocence and beauty personified.

I miss cooking!

Yes I really do! I have to somehow sacrifice that ‘2-minutes’ of blissful sleep post switching off the alarm in the mornings and try to squeeze in a bit of cooking into my otherwise mundane routine involving just taking bath, having my breakfast and leaving for office.

Back in Singapore, the recent routine was to wake up by 7, see the clock and mutter to self that I should have woken up at least 10 minutes earlier and hurriedly start cutting the vegetables to cook lunch for the husband all the while praying that Sahana shouldn’t wake up in between. But, alas, the always-right Murphy’s law comes into play and exactly on days when I am already way behind schedule, Sahana will wake up crying and my husband will start saying he is already getting late and I, in a state of craziness trying to calm a crying baby and finish off the cooking, will somehow finish the cooking, pack it on time (8 am) or a few minutes behind time and what’s more, even accompany the husband till the end of the road since Sahana’s crying would resume again on seeing her dad leave her and go. That one hour in the morning would be a crazy time. The feeling would be similar to having the deadline of having to catch the bus to office. Oh I miss that feeling too nowadays since I come by car.

Coming back to the topic, I thought I should tell you about my cooking skills, or the lack of it. Before the Singapore stint, I would have hardly cooked for a maximum of 10 days in my entire life! So having to suddenly do full-fledged cooking on my own meant having to eat food that didn’t taste good! But, as the days passed, my cooking slowly improved and I had finally graduated to becoming a decent cook with some dishes even turning out to be really tasty.

But now that I am back in Madras, it has already been two months since I cooked! I don’t know the state in which my cooking skills are now.

Drive away the blues!

A nice, long, fast drive coupled with Rahman’s music is THE best thing that can drive away the blues caused by a severe cold and head ache that refuses to go away even after a week since its onset and made all the more worse due to a disturbed sleep during the night.

I love Madras!

The weekend before last saw me realizing yet again how, to me, there is no place like our home – Madras. I read this article in The Hindu’s Sunday magazine about how comforting it feels when consulting your family doctor and even as I read ‘thanking my stars I live in Chennai’, I felt like joining in saying ‘me too’.

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