Witty Scribble

“ Donnnnnnnnnnnn’t ……" screamed my mom. Perplexed, I looked at her. Her eyes, fixated on mine, signaled a ‘no’. I was about to sprinkle salt over the home-made potato chips. But, the sudden squeal made the sprinkler fall from the clutches of my hand. “ What are you doing? ” she queried. “ Areeeee, you only asked me to add salt to these chips, didn’t you? ” I reasoned. “ I asked you to add Sendha namak, but this is Table salt. Your full day Vrat would have been nullified had I not come ”.  True. Had she not turned up on time, my day long  tapasya  would have been in vain. Tapasya, since only when you are fasting, you find every cookie & sweet much more appealing. As if mocking at me, the chocolate in the fridge sits comfortably, akin to a queen. But not for long. I pledge to eat it at sharp 12 am.😋 This incident happened around 15 years back. We used to fast, more to savour the delicious ' kotu puris ', luscious ' sabu-dana pakodas ', delectable home...

“It is already getting too hot. It is mid-March and it feels like we are up for a super-hot summer. I am already thinking of monsoons.”, said my mom in a casual conversation. My sister, who was visiting us with her daughter, raised another point. “Monsoons are just as worse with all the potholes on the road and traffic jams all around.”, she has a valid point. The conversation took a different direction and we started discussing what we don’t like about rainy season. I and my father were in complete agreement with my sister about the potholes and traffic jam as we were the most impacted people in the family by these. However, my six-and-a-half-year-old niece who loves to play in the rains and has her own dedicated driver (read her father) has a completely different problem for rainy season. She was busy with her coloring book and without raising her head, she said in her cute voice, “Baarish mein namak nahi nikalta dibbi se” (the salt does not come out of sprinkler in rains). Well...

Afternoons in Northern India, starting from April, are typically hot. People avoid going out of the comfort of homes/offices during the summers. Especially, the Loo (as the wind is called) is very hot & dry and is quite infamous for claiming lives every year. 😭 "So ja hero, subah jaldi uth ke walk par jaana hai", lashed Tewari at me, in our PG in Noida. It was 2010 and we were working for a software firm. We were quite motivated by our forever young and athletic friend 'Ankur' (or Negus as we called him) and hence, we had thought of waking up early for a walk/jog, as mornings provided a soothing experience, effect of which faded away with every passing hour. We wanted to be the 'early birds', taking the advantage of serene weather. Cut back to the present day, Bangalore. Be it morning or evening, dawn or dusk, I always find people strolling/jogging in the society. Such is the beauty of Bangalore climate. You wake up to pleasant mornings, don't s...

  I live in Hyderabad where it is a common thing to purchase bottled water for drinking. My family also follows the same practice and we usually purchase one 20 litre bottle every two days. My wife takes care of ordering the next bottle before previous one is finished. Few days back, she was out of town for a couple of weeks and this herculean responsibility fell on my shoulders. Avoid running taps to save water And as it ought to happen, I forgot to order the water bottle and the kitchen ran out of drinking water. With just 1 litre of bottle left, I told myself that I can manage the night with this one small bottle of water. But I learnt an economics lesson that day. A decline in production or supply may also trigger a rise in demand. That’s exactly what happened. Knowing that I have just a little water left, I felt more thirsty through-out the night, waking up multiple times and consciously gulping small sips so that I don’t completely run out of water. Thankfully, I m...

Aaaaaaa-chiiiii.....came another sneeze, fourth on a trot. Sitting alone in the corner of a bed, in my hostel room, I had been sneezing for quite some time now. It was a hot, harsh and dry afternoon (May end) but I was aloof from the sweltering heat. Even with a blanket on, I was shivering from cold. Luckily, the semester had ended and with practicals remaining, we were on the verge of completing the first year of engineering. I was down with fever, viral to be precise. With a sore throat and a running nose, I secluded myself and held a handkerchief to cover my nose for an important reason: 'contain the spread of infection'. Another day, working on the newly installed machine, the computer , in our house, I seem to download an innocuous looking game file from the Internet. Appearances are deceptive and so was the case with 'the file'. No sooner did the computer scan it for virus than it raised an alarm. The safe looking file was infected and the anti-virus gav...

It was my birthday earlier this month and I received a lot of phone calls from my well-wishers. The phone flashed the names for most of them, thanks to google contacts that we don’t lose the contacts on switching or losing a phone set. Few of my well-wishers though, called from a new cell number and liked playing the old school game of ‘Pehchaan Kaun’. I succeeded in a few attempts, failed miserably for some people(these people need to call me more often) in attempt to identify them by the only input I had : their voice. voice modulation Human voice is generated by action of three body parts: the lungs, the voice box, and the articulators. Let us take a minute to understand their individual functions. The lungs: There role in voice generation is to generate the right amount of air flow and air pressure required to vibrate the vocal cords(also called vocal folds). The Voice Box:  Also called Larynx or vocal cords or vocal folds, it vibrates using the air flow fro...

Yeh jo desh hai tera, swades hai tera, tujhe hai pukara ...The song and the movie are one of my all time favourites. The connection shown between the protagonist and the motherland India is truly very heartwarming. I am overwhelmed and flooded with emotions every time I see the movie (which I do quite often). I can go on writing about it, but I am not a movie critic. Here today, I am writing on a topic that has to do with Swades. It is about the NRIs and the PIOs and the OCIs. What is the difference between NRI, OCI and PIO? It is said that one will find Indians in every country on planet. Almost every middle class family has someone staying abroad, be it Australia, Middle East, the UK or the USA. NRIs are Indians who have been staying abroad for more than 183 days in a financial year or 365 days during a span of 4 consecutive years. NRIs are not subjugated to taxes in India, provided they are taxed in the nation they reside in. NRIs are eligible for voting, can own land a...