Recipie for love

Take one fresh and tender kiss
Add one stolen night of bliss
One girl, One boy
Some grief, Some joy
Memories are made of this,
Of simple moments just like this.
Don't forget one small moonbeam
Blend in lightly with a dream
Your lips and mine
Two gentle sips of wine
Memories are made of this,
Of surreal moments just like this.

Add to this the scent of warm skin
With the passions that run withinAnd for the final garnish
Just take his hand and make a wish
Coz memories are made of this,
Of silent moments just like this.

Tales of the super siblings

Disclaimer: This post has the tendency to sound like a testimonial / super buttering attempt for my bro.

The school bus is zipping along on its way. All the kids are jumping and shouting. As the bus stops at one stop, one of the kids jumps out. He tells his friends to hold the bus till he reaches home. A fierce glare in the bus driver’s directions tells him to do just as he says. He zooms at super speed and reaches home. Racing to the balcony, he waves to his friends and asks them to wait for one more minute. He goes to her baby cot. She’s sleeping….”MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM…she’s sleeping again…why is she always sleeeeeeping?” Undaunted, he picks her up gently and takes her out to the balcony. Showing her off to his friends, he waves her hand to them and finally the bus is free to go on. This is my earliest memory of my bro.

When most kids are not too happy about sharing their parents with a sibling, my bro realized the potential coolness of being the only kid on the block with a baby sibling- especially a sister. This automatically elevated me to baby-icon status. How he loved to flaunt his baby sister in front of all his only-child friends.

As I grew up, the novelty wore off, but the love didn’t. Another fond memory of mine is of the time we were visiting Matheran. I had brand new shoes - the kiddie ones that made those squeaking sounds. I was old enough to walk now so had insisted that I would walk and not be carried around. But after walking a few steps, I noticed that that the red dust was spoiling my new shoes. So I promptly did the most logical thing in this situation. I started howling at full volume. My dad and bro rushed to my rescue and managed to find out the reason for my impromptu tantrum. With a smile, my dad brushed off the dust and hoisted me onto his shoulders. But my howling continued. Why u ask? Didn’t I say I wanted to WALK? For those of you who have heard a toddler crying his guts out that too at close range, will know that anything and everything is done to quiet the lil punk down. So my dad promptly put me down. I shut up, blinked and confirmed that my feet were on the ground AND that my shoes were clean again. And off I marched again. Five feet later, we were back to square one – me with dusty shoes and howling again. The shoes were re-cleaned and the walking re-resumed. This cycle continued 2-3 more times. Then my dad exhausted his patience limit and hoisted me on his shoulders without further ado. Having become sufficiently immune to my dramatic sobs, he managed to ignore them successfully. But my bro couldn’t. So he took over from Dad. And he brushed and shushed me every five minutes for the rest of our walk that day - without complaint. Whenever I’m exceptionally mad at him for something, I remember this incident and cannot love him more.

Of course, we had our fair share of fights and squabbles. We invented and perfected a method of bashing each other without leaving a bruise mark. But then one day, my bro grew up. And the fighting stopped. And that’s when we started to come closer as siblings. He took me swimming with him…I attempted to learn but was too chicken. He took me around on his cycle – to and from school, etc. and he would quietly and non-intrusively ask about school etc. He became my 9 p.m. alarm, when he would poke his floppy-haired hair into my room and remind me that Home Improvement (a TV show) was about to start. We bonded over comedies and legal dramas. And Vicky’s gymco. After being a chubby kid till high school, he started going to the gym – Vicky’s Gymco. After a couple of weeks, we noticed that he had started lifting everything around the house in a bid to flex his biceps/triceps/quadriceps. His fav seemed to be the chairs….so whenever a chair was not where it was supposed to be, it was probably in my bro’s iron grip. The cycling, swimming and gymming paid off and soon he was flaunting his film-star toned calves in front of me. He used to do a hilarious spoof on Malaika Arora in her MTV style check days…the way she would sit with her legs crossed to give the best view of her sexy legs.

We played different roles in each other’s lives…he was always the older brother and I was his baby sister. But his sense of protectiveness was never suffocating. He gave me enough freedom to do my thing but would not hesitate to reprimand me if I messed up. He was my milestone in everything from studies to responsibilities…my minimum targets always ended up being bro’s achievement + 1. My first set of play friends were his friends…. His choices influenced mine…not coz they were enforced but coz they were good choices. We had a gap of 5 years between us but it was always a positive thing coz by the time I reached where he had been, he was able to give me the low-downs on how tackle that phase of life. His constant desire for perfection would drive me mad sometimes (he made me edit a testimonial twice before finally accepting it)…but it seeped into me too and now I’m just as demanding when I see that potential in the opposite person.

We aren’t exactly your typical filmy siblings who are the best of friends. But we do have a deep bond that surpasses everything. Our roots and our history have shaped us into the people we are today. Even today when we live such different life styles, our basic values still remain the same. Today, he’s my mentor, my guide, my inspiration, my investment advisor (free for me – discounted charges for my friends) and of my course- my big brother…forever watchful, forever concerned about me, always there to catch me if I fall…but never shadowing my day in the sun. My brother, my hero, my super sibling.

Summer Dreams

Summer is here…with the usual complaints and bothers of too much heat, too much sweat, too much of traffic, too much of everything….as I sit in my AC office and think bout the summer outside, its not the present summer that comes to my mind…it’s the summers of the past that weave their magic over my memories….I see the kids today going off to their fancy hobby classes and summer camps and what not….and all I can think of is…do they really need such an elaborate plan to pass their “vacation”? Here’s how we did it in the good old days….


Summer…its vacation time!!!! No school….no teachers…no homework!!!!

Summer merry-making was kicked off by the traditional gathering of all the cousins who were in the kids category at my granny’s place. Why her place? Simple…my granny is the best cook in the world….fish, chicken, snacks, lunch, dinner, snack-sized nibbles…u name it she cooked it….not to mention mangoes!!! SLURPPPPP!!! Mango-the fruit, mango milkshake, mango ice-cream, mango kulfi, mango juice, the traditional aamras, mango lassi…u get the gist…:)

After the gathering was completed, there was an inventory done of all the possible weapons/potential weapons in the house…there was no mention of dolls coz I was seriously outnumbered in the girls-guys ratio by 1: infinity….its a good thing those happened to be my tomboy years…I happily joined in all the battle strategies and general bashing sessions that we had….my personal fav was battleship….where we accumulated all the pillows and cushion-type things in the house and made an impenetrable fortress. The poor landlubber team (we were very particular about our land-water-sea-ocean concepts) had to then fight a gory battle with us sea folk for winning our battleship. Our weaponry comprised of a unique union of mythology & technology. We had everything from slingshots (a la Eklavya), dart guns (70s-80s movie ishtyle), gadhas (remember Hanuman’s club?), sophisticated machine guns(Rambo inspired), bow-n-arrows ( Ramayana, Mahabharata and all other Ramanand Sagar creations) and so on…and if all else failed the pillows that formed our battleship also doubled up as weapons.

After running around the house and the building compound while screaming war cries at the top of our lungs for the entire morning, we would finally listen to our granny's feeble protests of “don’t create a ruckus” and would take the 2nd break from our mighty battles. The 1st break was when the gola-wala would hit the streets…he was a peculiar creature who would come to our street corner every day around noon with his cart. He had a little tinkling bell that heralded his arrival from afar. As soon as those chimes reached our ears, we would drop everything and run off to our respective homes for money and bowls to get the golas + extra syrup in…onlookers probably saw only a blur of human flesh as we completed the route from playground to home to gola-cart in supersonic speeds. The fact that our 2nd play break would coincide with lunch hour was just a coincidence and had no relevance whatsoever with our hunger pangs. After filling our tummies with the earlier mentioned delicacies, we would resume our games – only now we would play serious, intellectual (read: non scream-able) games. We did this to enhance our creativity and intelligence. The fact that if we played any game that involved speaking in volumes above a certain decibel level would evoke a slow and painful death from the disapproving glares of the oldies in the building. So we played carom, scrabble, Scotland Yard, Business, etc… (Jus tawt if I should include that in my appraisal data…under the creativity/ business/analysis skills section :-) ).

After this display of tremendous patience and self-control till bout 4 in the evening we would unleash the primate inside us and revert back to the screaming games. We had an informal rota for this…every day one kid would have to be the one who goes to everyone else’s house to ask “Aunty, can so-and-so come out and play?” Of course no one could afford to risk their life everyday hence the rota… (Kinda similar to the support rota we have now ;-) ). And the games would begin again…gully-cricket, marbles, some alien kind of football, night badminton, kho-kho, hide-n-seek (this was super fun if sum new kid was the seeker…our idea of hiding was goin to sum1’s house and hogging on snacks or playing some other game while the poor kid “seeked” heaven n earth for us).


Finally at dinner time, we would return to our homes, tired and sweatier than sweat itself…there were no concepts of fancy deodorants then….if we reeked, we simply bathed and went out again…it didn’t matter then dat we bathed like 3-4 times a day (1- the official start-of-the-day morning bath, 2- the post morning ruckus pre-lunch bath, 3- the post evening havoc pre-dinner bath and 4- the last just before bed bath). After dinner, we would head out again for a round of badminton or stay in and have card tournaments…jus coz we were kids doesn’t mean we didn’t take our games seriously…we meticulously kept scores of everything and often had arguments over the scores that were longer than the game itself. This was where the leader came into picture. The leader was the one who had the most influence over the kids. Even as kids we had a keen sense of politics and voted a leader every often who would give the final decision when matters couldn’t be sorted even by fists, blows and kiddie-level abuses. Not once did our playground squabbles ever reach the ears of our parents. We were probably the best example of a fully functional democratic unit.

When we finally did hit the bed to supposedly sleep, we didn’t give in to sleep just yet. This was when we talked bout the lil things that mattered…since we were cousins, we talked bout our respective parents, our schools, our friends, our latest toys, what was the coolest thing we learnt last and so on. We weren’t a joint family per say…but we were definitely connected.


As I look back sometimes on those days gone by…and remember the friends, the food, the games, the times, the top scores, the talks….I’m filled with a deep sense of nostalgia about those wonderful summers…..and the lines of a song from the movie Grease come to mind….

“Summer dreams…ripped at the seams
But oh….oh those summer nights”