A fun way to gain viewership for your blog

 I came across Adite's post during one of the innumerable hours spent browsing  the net where she  invites writers and bloggers to participate in the Liebster Blog Award Challenge.. It is an interesting way to get acquainted with the creative spaces of others, and encourage others to do the same with yours. The result is more blog visibility and readership

 It is like the ripple effect. Adite for example has nominated my blog and tagged my blog along with the blog of ten others.  Now it is my turn to write 11 little known facts about myself, answer 11 questions which Adite has set for her nominees,  and frame 11 questions for the 11 bloggers  out there who would like me to nominate them and provide links to their blogs. Please leave your blog address in the comments box. To keep the ball rolling, you will have to do the same thing that I am about to do now. So read on

Here are hopefully  11 interesting, little known  about myself:

1.  I am currently living in Béziers, a name my father finds difficult to remember and even harder to pronounce.  "Where the hell is Béziers," my French friends ask me. "Is it on the map of France?" They are just being ultra-metropolitan because Béziers is a biggish town in the South of France, near the Spanish border. A few kilometers away from the Mediterranean sea , it is  one of the oldest towns in France. I frankly hated it when I came here one year ago. But it has grown on me and now that summer is round the corner I often scooter down to one of the attractions of the town;  the neuf écluses or the nine water gates built in a staircase pattern. It's incredible to see water gushing down from one level to another, filling up basins, and defying the laws of gravity hitching up boats step by step  to a level of 21.5 m,  within a distance of about 300 m. Once the boats are lifted up in this manner, they can cross the river Orb and rejoin the Canal Du Midi

2. I lived the first nine years of my life in Berhampore, another biggish, historical town in the north of West Bengal. A two film-hall town filled with winding alleys leading to the Ganges, black-faced monkeys jumping from one mossy terrace to another, and temple spires etched against the skyline. Berhampore to Béziers has indeed been a long journey.

3. Having spent most of my adult life in Pondicherry, a coastal town in South India where the climate can be described as hot, hotter and hottest, I fantasized about settling down in a colder place, Kashmir, the Nilgiris, the Himalayas. Now that I have tasted the cold how I can say without any doubt I opt for heat.

4. I have this unclassical look, short hair, eternally trouser clad even when I was in India. But my taste in music belies my looks. I am a fan of Indian classical vocal music. It pierces through all the layers of my being and appeals to the most vulnerable and quiet part of myself. My companion sometimes tries to imitate Indian vocalists and ends up sounding like a goat trying to clear its throat. 

courtesey Nate's Cartoons

5. I love bati chocchori which is a Bengali speciality; shrimps cooked with potatoes and ridge gourd in mustard oil, and magur macher jhol; a kind of watery catfish curry cooked with plantain and aubergines. My mother inevitably made it for me when I was down with a stomach upset.

6. I am a word freak. Just like some people like collecting stamps, shells, post-cards, I like collecting words. When I come across a new word I feel like a child opening the wrapper of a toffee to see what is inside.

7. I have a son. Now that is not very novel, though there are not many like Gandhari who can boast of being the mother of a hundred sons! But for me one son is enough. He is a source of happiness and worry and heartache and mystery. I don't know how I manage bringing him up but I do. Of course much of the credit goes to him too.

8. I am very bad at numbers. I can remember the line of a poem or a dialogue, hum the melody of a song after having heard it once. However I cannot remember my son's and my friend's and my own mobile number even though I have seen them a hundred times. I had this maths teacher, a sweetie, who still remembers me. You can guess why.

9. When I was a child I had this habit of picking my nose for which I was teased unmercifully by my classmates. I don't blame them. It's an unsavoury habit! But not that uncommon. I have seen people doing it when they think they are not being watched.

10. My mother was the first woman from our family to go out and work. I have a black and white group photo of hers from the 1950s taken with her office colleagues. You see a young, frail, sari-clad woman with owlish glasses and a long thick braid, flanked on either side by rows of unsmiling men. She was also the first woman to be recruited in that office.

11. The bulbous white domes of mosques, the delicate minaret spires rising against the sky is to me   visual poetry. How difficult it is to achieve this balance between mass and delicacy.

The next step is to answer the 11 questions.

1. What’s your favourite time to write or do creative work? And why? 
My favourite time to write is the morning, because that's when my mind is uncluttered and my batteries are recharged. However I can write all throughout the day if I get into the mood, and of course if I have the time.


2. What’s the first thing that crossed your mind when you woke up this morning? 
I wish I could sleep some more.

3. What’s the one thing that drives you batshit crazy? 
When I am in front of a situation over which I have no control. It keeps happening more and more with my teenager son.

4. Describe briefly any one unforgettable moment in your life.
Waking up early in the morning in my apartment and making two cups of tea one for myself and another for my lover who would be coming in a couple of minutes. The coolness of the morning, the feeling of being in my own space, the delightful sense of waiting for the person who had transformed my life will always remain fresh in my heart.

5. Which is your must-do dream vacation?
It keeps changing all the time. At the moment it's the Orient, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia...

6. Fill this blank: At age 10 you dreamt of “being _____ when I grow up.” 
At age 10 I dreamt of being a vet.


7. If you could travel back in time which “period” would you visit? 
I think I would perhaps go back to the time of the Chola dynasty (9th century-13th century) in South India. They were builders of magnificent temples and patrons of literature, architecture, fine arts. I would not mind being invisible and flitting from a dance performance to a musical soirée to a meeting of poets and writers and have a peek into the queens' quarters.

8. If you could transform yourself into a celebrity for one day, who would you pick?
I would be Gangubai Hangal, a musical legend descending from a lineage of courtesans. She had a unique voice, deep and powerful and sang with such poise and mastery that she transported you into her universe. I would like to sing like her even it is for one day

9. Complete this sentence. Fun is ________
Fun is improvising on the spot what I want to do and having the means and energy to put it into effect.


10. If you could change any one of your (bad) habits what would that be? (You’re not allowed to say you don’t have any bad habits!!)
I would like to be more decisive. My indecisiveness drives everyone , including myself, crazy.

11. Tell us something that excites you about your current project. 
My current project or my companion's and my current project is shifting to Bamako next year. Imagine going to Africa and being plunged in the whirlpool of African culture.  It's an incredible chance for a middle class Indian girl like myself. It's again going to be hot, hotter, hottest.

Courtesy: Critical thinking website

And finally here are my questions for you. 

 1. What are you passionate about?

2. How much do you enjoy your own company?

3. What was your favourite childhood read?

4.What is your reaction to unexpected changes in your life?

5. Do you believe in life after death or extra-terrestrials?

6. If you could be an animal what animal would you be and why?

7. When you are feeling low what brings a smile to your face?

8. How much time do you spend in the morning in front of your mirror before you feel ready to step out.

9. What sort of music do you like listening to?

10. Do you believe in destiny or in free will?

11. At the moment what kind of writing are you into?

                                                  

 Now it's your turn.

I need to find 11 bloggers. If you are interested leave your name and your blog address either in linked in or in the comments box below using the anonymous option since that's the easiest way  do it.  Your name will appear in this post with links to your blogs.

List of Bloggers

Welcome Shilpi to the Liebster blog award. Here's the link to your website: http://whenyoucomeundone.blogspot.in. Looking forward to reading your answers and questions. 

The Maid Saga

I had always been warned by NRIs and westerners about the lack of maids in Europe or America or any of the "first world countries."  And I who must have seen my nanny who also doubled as maid , in the next fifteen minutes after I opened my eyes to gaze upon the world, and who has since then  watched a procession of maids, old  and young, tall and short, thin and fat,  pass through my life,  did find this rather worrisome. It's been a year now that I have shifted to the South of France and am confronted with a maidless universe.  There are maids or house help available over here too but not for the middle class. It's either the privilege of the rich, or families in difficulty with numerous children who get aid from the government.  However I found that I was quite comfortable in this maidless world and the reason behind this is because I had at last earned my freedom from maids . In fact it was not I who managed  my maids but they who managed me. I have always had problems with superior-subordinate relationships and moreover I am not the mistress of the house material.  And they much cleverer in the ways of the world than I am and used to gauging the characters of their future employers soon sensed this,  and probably passed on the word along the grapevines for all future recruits. But here I am extrapolating.

Recently I had a bad case of flu and bronchitis along with my son. Both of us were bed-ridden with our taste buds which had gone on strike faced with the onslaught of fever and antibiotics. I could see the house growing dirtier day by day, unfolded clothes, dirty dishes, dust gathering in corners and I was just too weak to do anything about it. And while I longed for simple, home cooked meals to coax back my appetite all my companion could manage was food heated out of boxes and tins. Though I was grateful for his efforts, I found myself thinking fondly of those days when household chores were taken care of and reviving the bitter-sweet memories of my experiences with women who had been so much a part of my life. 

First of all there was the process of hiring house help. I always began in all seriousness by conducting an interview, laying down conditions amongst which the trial period was one, "You will work for  two weeks at the end of which we will see if I am happy with your work and if you are happy working here, before hiring you for good." However not once has it happened that a maid has stepped into my house and stepped out after a two week trial period. Why? Perhaps because I always felt so overwhelmed and  guilty by the fact that somebody was cleaning my house and cooking for me  for an entire month,  at the price I would pay if I ate out in a chic restaurant with friends, that I was willing to overlook all shortcomings. Or simply because they were on their best behaviour till they felt that they had now carved out a niche for themselves from where it would be difficult to oust them. And once they were inside the house they soon saw that I  did not have shelves with identical spice filled bottles, that I often failed to replenish things in time even after I had been reminded,  so either there was no milk in the fridge or the sugar bottle with a crust of sugar around its rim stayed empty for a week, or the most essential element rice was absent when it was time to cook. It also so happened that when they came to work instead of staying put and seeing that  the work got done,  I scooted out of the house on the pretext of some work or other , or shut myself up in my room behind a computer until they had finished and I had the house to myself again. None of these things you will agree makes for a competent householder. And since they saw incompetency it was perhaps only natural that they were influenced.

DOLCE MALATI

I must say that I have had one or two rare gems whom I would  call collaborators rather than  maids  . There was Malati, a pretty, intelligent, vivacious, warm-hearted young woman who looked after the house, the kitchen, shopped, cooked, fed my son while I was free to concentrate on my work and bring in  money.  My son loved her and his love was reciprocated. She was the one who gave him cold lemon juice in hiding when he got back from school though according the the rules of the house cold water was a no, no, bought him candy floss and oily bhajis and water pistols while I was busy taking classes or answering the phone.  She stayed with us for a long time. We had our ups and downs of course because she had a strong character and was given to sulking when she wanted to manifest her discontent. At these times she would move around the house her face as dark as a thundercloud and I would make myself as small as I could or stay out of the house as long as I could. But since my office was separated from the house by just a screen  this was hard, and I could feel the waves of her discontent lap at my feet. Beuh! that was hard!

Malati also had a string of suitors  and the temperature  of the ambience of our house could be guaged by the success and failures of her adventures. I had a student, an Australian whose wife had left him for another and whose wounded heart was soothed by the charms of our nubile Malati. She too flirted with him shamelessly,  smiling at him demurely when she served us a cup of tea during the short break, going out of the house to do shopping just when he   was on his way out from the classes. Unfortunately my student got a phone call from his wife asking him to come back and off he went leaving the disconsolate Malati on our hands. It took a month for things to get back to normal. Finally she set her sight on a shy, strapping carpenter who had  come to our house to make some chairs. The chairs which should have been made in a week got made in three at the end of which he was hooked..The last time I went to see her I had to squeeze past the king size bed which occupied most of the room space and in the middle of which her new born baby lay sleeping besides her contented mother. Malati proudly showed me her baby and the bed which was a present from her carpenter husband.

INCREDIBLE KASTURI

The one who trained me though for life in France was Kasturi. This was years after Malati, much water had passed under the bridge and I thought I had become more mature, more experienced in my dealings with the world.  I had shifted into a new flat and had spread the word that I was looking for a maid. One had worked for a few days then stopped without letting me know why, others had come, said that they will surely  come the next day and then done the disappearing act. I was seriously starting to doubt my credentials as an employer and think about how I could improve my image with out being a total walk over when Kasturi appeared at my doorstep. My son had left for school and I was fighting my daily battle with  a line of red ants which had insinuated themselves under the dhurrie foraging for crumbs when the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see Sindhu, the cook cum driver cum man for all tasks, from the flat downstairs accompanied by  a broad, short, overweight woman, rivulets of sweat running down her neck, swathed in a bluish-green sari.
¨Yes?"¨I asked?"
Madam you were looking for a servant. Here is Kasturi,  very good woman.
"Well I said I am looking for someone to clean the house and cook."
"Very good cook, can make Bengali food .She used to work in the apartment in front of your house. They are Bengalis. But they have gone away to Calcutta so she is looking for work. And madam she is very honest and kind . You can go out to work and leave the house in her charge."
 "How do you know that?"
"She used to work  for my madam but then she fell ill and stopped working so madam took someone else. You can ask her when she comes back day after tomorrow from Orissa".  
If Kasturi had hired him to promote her she had done a good job. He had found all my weak points;  a maid who can cook mooger dal (golden gram seasoned with ginger and green chillies and sprinkled with fresh coriander),  poshto (ground poppy seeds mixed with mustard oil and chopped onions and green chillies) and macher jhol (fish curry) , and to whom I could leave the house and go out. However I looked at her doubtfully, she seemed rather grumpy and I found it hard to imagine her bending down and passing the broom under the bed, or lifting the dhurrie and getting rid of the ants hidden below it.  But my need for help was stronger than my qualms and when she agreed to the price I proposed I put forth the famous trial period condition and asked her to come from the following day.

It all started out fine. Kasturi came as convened at 9 o'clock sharp in the morning. She was less grumpy and indeed knew to cook delicious Bengali food. The woman she had worked for previously must have revealed to her all the little tricks that gives Bengali cooking its distinctive flavour. She knew in which dish to use mustard oil, when to season vegetables with the famous panch phoron, or five spices filling the apartment with scents of my childhood, roast moong dal till it turned golden and cook it with the head of a rohu fish. As I had guessed bending down to sweep under the bed was not her forte but what was a little dust under the bed compared to such culinary wonders. So I started spending some time each day cleaning nooks and corners and all the other places which Kasturi consciously or unconsciously overlooked, and I was quite happy to do so. However such perfection did not last for long. After a month or so the nine o'clock clause seemed to have completely slipped from her mind and no amount of wheedling or scolding could make her come back to it. She came at ten, half past ten, eleven and when I got furious she placated me by saying, ¨Madam, don't worry. Lunch will be ready by half past twelve.¨ Since that was after all the most important I could not say much. So, I gave up a losing battle and handed her an extra key so that I would not be housebound because of her.

However the days I stayed home working on my computer I was continuously disturbed by the doorbell. There was her two year old granddaughter who came with her daughter to greet her beloved grandmother, the fisher-woman who squatted at the doorstep and assailed our senses with the stench of fish and prawns, the vegetable-woman who used to hawking her wares had forgotten that any other pitch of voice exists. Kasturi chatted, haggled and bought vegetables and fish for my house as well as hers. She could have walked down the two flights of stairs to do so but  it was obviously too much trouble.  It seemed churlish to refuse her the company of her granddaughter for a couple of minutes and though I resented being invaded by vendors, it did save me trips to the market. It's just a wonder that she got any work done! However there were days when she came earlier than usual, the doorbell was silent, she made some mouth watering delicacy, served me a cup of tea spiced with ginger and cardamom, and all was forgotten and forgiven.

Then began the famous leaves; accidents, deaths, illnesses, marriages, births, not all hers of course but of her entire network of family, friends, neighbours and accquaintances. Two days, half a week, one week, one and a half,  sometimes interrupted by a phone call with  kasturi's feeble voice floating down the line informing me that she has just got back from the hospital,  and making me feel guilty for all the unkind thoughts I had been harbouring against her. Her husband ringing my bell at eight in the morning with the news that Kasturi has gone to bring back her alcoholic brother from Cuddalore where he was last spotted two days ago. Kasturi coming back with some lugubrious tale about how the  neighbour's son, or the neigbour's neighbour's son had died in an accident, and so she had gone to attend the funeral. Perhaps some of these stories were false but how to check and anyway the statistics of road accidents in India is seventeen per hour.  As a result though I started saying my prayers before taking out my scooter and driving down the road at a snail's pace. However I could never get an answer as to why it was always she who was involved in disaster management, and not any other member of her family.

Meanwhile my son had got hooked to her cooking and asked me to make such and such a dish when she was absent. So in addition to cleaning I started going into the kitchen when she was there and noting down recipes and cooking them for him. And gradually I found that I was managing to cook and clean and work.Of course I was  more laid back about dust and dishes waiting to be cleaned. Many meals were take aways. My sister and father invited me for lunch or dinner and Kasturi appeared intermittently to give me a few glorious days of carefreeness. I could have replaced her with another maid but by the time the situation got impossible I was seriously thinking about moving to France and did not have the time or energy to invest into another attempt. So finally when I asked her to quit, she did without arguing because she too realized that she had gone overboard.

When I arrived in France the change thus was only minor. Kasturi had trained me well. The vacuum cleaner, dish washer, canned food , no sweating while standing beside the gas were a bonus.!And since I was not working I had the time. With time the novelty has worn off  I do wish at times that I didn't have to take care of all the details which makes a household function. I am grateful to those women who made my life easier. When I  think of their lives fraught with difficulties and penury;  alcoholic and sometimes violent husbands, children to look after and a constant battle to make ends meet I wonder how they come to work with smiles on their faces and have the energy to argue, gossip and banter. They truly are a race apart, the backbone of Indian households! By freeing myself of them, I have learnt to appreciate them even more.

Arunima Choudhury

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Doggy Wonder

I was walking down a crowded lane in Pondicherry, avoiding a melee of cycles, motorbikes, rickshaws, maneuvering heaps of sand besides the road dug up here and there presumably for laying water pipes. A handicapped man on a three-wheel scooter zipped past me followed by a dog with a collar round its throat. It weaved its way through cyclists and bikers, dodged rickshaws auto rickshaws, skirted the mounds of sand, leapt over potholes, without breaking stride. I stopped to watch, captivated and full admiration at its incredible dexterity and capacity of adaptation. 

At the same moment an image rose in my mind of well brushed poodles on leashes, docilely following their masters and mistresses on clean sidewalks, peopled by a few disciplined pedestrians.  It goes without saying which dog I thought was happier. 

My always happy friend

I have this friend who is always happy. She maybe in India or France, in Tasmania or Tanzania, she is happy. She will find you  the silver lining to the darkest cloud. Sometimes this maybe exasperating and there have been incidents where such positivity stretched to its limit seemed to me obtuse. But most of the time I find it astonishing and admirable, and me like her other friends have drawn strength from her refusal to bow down to pessimism. I make her sound like a knight in shining armour, don't I? But she is as full of faults as anyone else. She is uncompromising, stubborn, argumentative, independent to the extent of being  insensitive to her close one’s worries, capable of dropping a project without any qualms if it has stopped interesting her, passionate about the weirdest things;  living without eating by simply drawing energy from the sun, or Oponopono, or life after death.   How many times I have seen her have a hearty meal and then expound on the theory of living merely on prana or energy,­­­ with great conviction.

I have heard people saying that her optimism springs from the fact that she does not have to worry about making a living. She has inherited money and can live on the returns of her investment. But this is unfair because she was not always financially comfortable and got by, by being  inventive and intrepid. For example when she was in her early thirties and back from Morocco with a young daughter to support,  she made ends meet by selling sandwiches and coffee  in the wee hours of the morning in front of night clubs. When the party goers came out , hungry and bleary, the restaurants were all closed and they were glad to fall upon a charming lady with sandwiches and hot coffee. And since they were in an expansive mood,  they were also willing to pay a little more for this unexpected luxury.. She did not have a selling license but had managed to befriend the policemen out on their beat . And they were quite happy to stop by, have a cup of hot coffee in the cold winter mornings and chat awhile before moving on. Moreover France in the 80's was not as obsessed with rules as now. Then she moved up the rung and set up a pizzeria in a seaside resort. This too was a whooping success and with her healthy disregard for unnecessary rules,  run without a license. But at one point of time when she thought it had served its purpose, she sold and moved on. I know I would have been tempted to hold on, to set down roots, but she is a light traveller and that too is her force. Today she has inherited a certain sum of money but there are many who have inherited much more, and happiness was not automatically included.

Her disregard for convention is also reflected in the way she dresses. One day she turned up in my house with a faded green bell-bottoms (I wore bell-bottoms when I was 7 years old and that was in the mid-seventies) at the end of which she had stitched a broad frill which fell around her ankles like the petals of a bellflower.  And this in a country where women are dressed from head to toe with the utmost care! “What is this?” I enquired incredulously. “Oh she replied, this was an old pair of trousers and a matching vest . The trousers had become too small and I did not want to throw it away so I cut up the vest and stitched it to the trousers.” Then there was another time in India when she was inspired by a shirt she saw in a designer magazine made out of 20 Rs rice cloth sacks with highly coloured pictures of Gods and Goddesses printed on them, and sold at 600 Rs. She bought and gifted a shirt to her companion who to please her wore it one evening when there was a power failure,  then pushed it at the back of the cupboard in spite of his great love for her . Her next step was to buy a stitching machine, piles of rice cloth bags and launch into home production. She made shirts and sleeveless blouses, gifted them to her family and friends and dressed in a grey frumpy skirt and designer blouses all through summer after which I think the rice cloth bag project was laid to rest. 

I have never travelled with her in India but I am sure she would make a lovely travelling companion, one of those who are unperturbed come what may. If for example the train from Varanasi to Calcutta were 5 hours late, she would exclaim, “How nice. It will give us enough time to explore the station, have dinner and chat with a few people.” If the catering service decided to go on strike and we had to go dinnerless, she would say, “Great, I have been overeating recently and need to rest my stomach. Fasting is always good for the system.”

And it is because of the authenticity of her optimism that I and all her friends are attracted to her, and return to her, in spite of her hardly replying to the mails you write to her , last minute cancellation of plans, eating vegetarian or vegan, or whatever fad she maybe practising at the moment you are invited to her place. But thank God for small mercies, at least she serves us food and does not ask us to fill ourselves with prana.

 Arunima Choudhury