meeka surgery

it's been some time i've written...just as we'd gotten used to enjoying c!'s parents here and they'd settled down to a comfortable routine, a really awful freak accident screwed all that...

last thursday early morn, meenaka fell n broke her femur above her left knee. so many thoughts race thru my head just now...unable to think n write coherently...she's just being wheeled into ot, even as i write, for a surgery to fix the fracture which will involve nuts n screws.

with her history of high bp n diabetes, the ortho surgeon here suggested we fly her back to delhi, where c!'s doctor sister would have comprehensive medical support standing by just in case things became precarious. so she flew to delhi on saturday in a stretcher right thru (which is another long story).

the bad part was her sugar wouldn't come down n so no operation. mercifully with a change in medication, it came down yesterday and she can be operated upon. everyone's quite tense esp appa, for whom meenaka is his lifeline...we're all now hoping n praying that the op will be successful and that her post-op will be smooth n that she recovers soon...and you pls pray too...

heartbeat - how to kill a gameshow!

...i wouldn't be suprised if you haven't watched "heartbeat" on starOne. my intial excitement has quickly faded to despair...they've killed it - the channel, the young turk eepee's and their infinite wisdom thought they'd get em life-giving trp's by getting celebs to play the game. so what if the game and its drama lay in hard-core quizzers playing against their own heartbeat...

so you get mostly thakela celebs, whom the world couldn't care less for...pile the viewers with long monotonous reminders of rules (like they're dumb), kill the natural pace of the game by re-editing and have enough time for just 2 qns in 22min of programme time ...and worse, stretch one player over 2-3 episodes...phew! finito!!

if this combo wasn't bad enough, starOne has been bumped off to the dim n distant uhf band, so you either don't get it at all or if you do, its all grainy and without audio.

the only heartening thing in this whole short-lived saga, is that we (the tech crew) had a blast lighting it and at the end of the day it remains a very differently lit show on indian tv today.

amen!

meeka n appa come home to stay!

meeka aka meenaka and appa with c! (or is it the other way round?) a few summers ago...this was at the sample flat then...and now they're back, like they were last summer to escape the torrid delhi heat n power/water cuts.

its so good to have them stay with us...a sobering effect on our otherwise wayward erratic lifestyle...kind of gets us into a sane routine. her dad all of 84 and mum 76...lucky girl to have her parents around and lucky me too!! yum sambar, rasam, kutt, curry, aplam, dosa, idli...meeka is such a treat to watch in the kitchen...nothing ever gets thrown away, tasty leftovers turned into even tastier snacks, some skins leave seeds are dried for days then ground to make a face pack or other...

appa - ramaseshan tatha, came to delhi from madurai in 1945! worked as the librarian in the lok sabha all his life post-independence. imagine a family album with b/w pics of him with nehru, mountbatten, dr radhakrishna et al! so many stories...recorded a few on cam...meenaka was 16 when she married him and came to delhi from kerala, where she grew up with tiger cubs!!

as kattar as my mum, he opposed the idea of us marrying...but that's another story for another day.

jupiter thrills!

saw jupiter thru our telescope for the first time tonight...no not as clear as this image above, but just seeing two dull-grey bands along the centre was enough to send me soaring.

right next to the full moon, it held its own...

Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, the Moon and Venus). It has been known since prehistoric times as a bright "wandering star". But in 1610 when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky he discovered Jupiter's four large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (now known as the Galilean moons) and recorded their motions back and forth around Jupiter. This was the first discovery of a center of motion not apparently centered on the Earth. It was a major point in favor of Copernicus's heliocentric theory of the motions of the planets (along with other new evidence from his telescope: the phases of Venus and the mountains on the Moon). Galileo's outspoken support of the Copernican theory got him in trouble with the Inquisition.

called some building boys too...more gasps...the beginings of the sai baba astronomy club?? err constellations ko hindi mein kya boltey?! heehee! big bear...marathi mein hum log sapt rishi boltey...haaan!

crash zoom!

"like the moment when the brakes lock
and you slide towards the big truck
you stretch the frozen moments with your fear..."

sang Pink Floyd in Final Cut and it was such a lucid album, i would visualise each song in my head early in my walkman days. didn't think one day, rather night, i'd be sliding sideways in an auto on the highway (mercifully not into a truck!)

so, we're in this auto back from hemu's place, hurtling unsteadyily down the western express highway. our auto guy had just missed slamming us into a tata sumo at the vakola junction and we had just finished screaming at him about his wavering ways. no, not that he was drunk, just a lil unsure n inexperienced it seemed.

at the santacruz airport signal, i see these guys on a m'bike turn into our path to go to parla stn. by now i know we're gonna crash into them. we must've been doing at least 50kmph. not a word emerges from our lips. my eyes locked in...watch us crash into the 2 of them on this blue 100cc bike and see the horizon turn and feel us veering onto my right. thump! my head hits the road n c! over me. we're sliding now on our side but that i do not see. black!

must've been a few seconds but it seemed like a long black leader... fade in, don't know if my eyes were opened but my sight came back. knew we were sideways on the road. get up, lift c! up, climb over n hop out. help c! climb up and out...my head's like a pile driver ramming it...i hobble to where the bikers are standing...motion a thumbs up, they reply with a thumbs up. c! meanwhile is giving the rick driver a piece of her mind...a lot of people have gathered by now...seeing we're, ok flag down another rick, i pull c! away, my head still pounding. and back on the road again...

bruised right knee with one surfacial cut and c! too bruised knee same place. rattled nerves calmed slowly by the breeze and a cautious driver. just thanked the gods above and whoeever else watching over us tonight. so what were your thoughts while we crashed?, asked c!...nada, i replied. blank - i was just looking...looked just like those road race games one played, save for that momentary fade to black!

yaay!

for weeks now, i've been struggling to get my laptop and my desktop to talk to each other...no big deal, just that one's a pc and the other an ibook! chewed several friend's ka brains, crawled the net, called the comp guy and finally it works...phew! never imagined it was so complicated, tho' now on hindsight, it seems pretty simple - you enable appletalk protocol on the pc, make appletalk active on the mac, assign ip addresses of one on the other, connect a cross-cable in the lan card slots and voila!...

yipee, so now i can download songs onto my pc, import them into my itunes on the laptop and transfer the whole load into the ipod!!

science da kamaal papaey! - as vineet would say!

travelling rainbows

watched (for the third time!) this absolutely beautiful n moving animation film - "printed rainbow" by geeta rao. a spanking new 35mm print in dolby surround, at that! now that she's won the national award at miff ...and her film's in competition at cannes and annesey (the oscars of animation)...way to go...just so happy for her.

its the kind of film, the talent and the person she is, you wish the sky for...

"don't get me wrong huh"

i've read about it, heard about it...never experienced it. but its for real - these goans don't want us indians, just that they won't tell it to you on your face. they'll ignore you, make you pay up for the entire stay on their resort (altho the norm is one day tariff in advance). so i sit this tony guy down on our last morning there in this really nicely laid-out desolate beach resort in south goa.

"arrey you know how these indians are no...bloody nuisance they are, get drunk, create a scene, don't pay their bills...and one chap, you know man, got drunk and started firing his gun in the air. i mean it could hurt the foreign guests no. then there was a big splash in the papers the next day. che don't want all this mess."

so i say to him then, that you either learn not to generalise or then just say sorry we don't want indians. "no, not like that, don't get me wrong, i am telling you all this very openly because you said you are also a goan"!!!!

when will they ever learn
o when will they ever learn??!!

while checking out, i learn that "tony sir has said it is ok not to pay the food bill". i scribble a thank you note and leave beaming broadly!! heehee!!