Playing Scrabble without you!

Scrabble is the game of words, wisdom and wonders. We learned the game from papa and mummy when we were growing up may be like at 10-12 years old or more. I don't even recall how and since when we know all the rules, but this is one game we never ever forget. Who can forget the difference between Triple Letter Score and Triple Word score, I mean Triple Word Score is like bumper prize at times for the player who gets it and ofcourse "blank" is one of the most important "non-existing letter" you can have. Its a game of words ofcourse but every step of the game is shadowed by numbers. 

I remember there was one winter holiday about 7-8 years back, when we played Scrabble like an addiction, every night, oh what fun it was. The purity and charisma of this game is just so apt for passing time, everytime. 

The last time I played with papa, I lost. This was about 7-8 months ago. We had a quick game. I think he had both Q and Z, he played very well. Cancer never touched his brain and his brilliance.

Papa, when one of your friend/ Colleague visited us from India and saw scrabble, guess what she said. Oh this game, I know Sir taught us this game, looks like you managed to inculcate love for Scrabble in many.  

Papa, we played again after a long time on thanksgiving day with our kids and ofcourse mother. There were 3 teams only, hopefully you played the 4th one in spirits. We thought it could be a good family tradition and an appropriate time to thank you for teaching us one more thing, that enriches and entertains our lives and that of the next generations. 

Morning Walks and peacock feathers

What do you do on a summer vacation or weekend morning?

No school or office, so what  is the need to wake up early. The charm of sleeping on a cozy bed for longer hours is too good perhaps to find out if anything else could possibly be happening in the morning. What could be more important?

I think me and my siblings were doing something certainly more important. We were busy making beautiful memories of the morning time that we spent together. Summer mornings or even weekend mornings were great time to wake up actually extra early like 5:30am and go for a morning walk mostly with our mother. We would all just go to walk from our house to several different places nearby in the campus. A favourite place was a 'forest' close to the school. Though it was full of trees it was perfectly possible to navigate around. So one of the favorite activities and charm in the morning was to navigate in that forest and look for peacock feathers. 

I had the opportunity to see a peacock in Pilani with my family on a fine summer morning walk!

Oh yes, there were peacocks and peahens and we totally coexisted with them.They would be in our gardens, dancing in our garden and all the courtship would follow that dance. They would dare to come closer when we offered food. They would not be even tad bit bothered about destroying our flower beds on a routine basis and we would run after them, if we saw them. They would not fly very easily but managed to get on some lower branches of tree and shout and call each other "Peyoooo, peeyooo..". They would do all of that but seldom leave their feathers, we had such a hard luck finding their feathers.

So the walks, that's where we would find feathers. Not sure, if people who don't live with peacocks know this but peacocks shed feathers in fall just like trees. So summer vaccation and then fall till winter set in we would go for walks in the morning and look for feathers, find feathers and compete as to who got more. Over a period of time we had a lot of feathers. Waking up early for morning walks was a wonderful feeilng by itself to be one with the nature and then added to that the charm of collecting peacock feathers so very rewarding.

What we did with those feathers eventually? When we had collected enough our mother made a peacock on a cloth canvas that decorated our living room for years. A peacock in our own living room with the feathers we contributed from a morning walk! Morning walks, peacock feathers, art and memories sewn together in a common thread!

Summer nights and coolers!

Our childhood was spent in a small dusty town somewhere in the middle of desert. The temperatures  in summer would soar up to 45 or may be even 47C that would be 115-120 Fahrenheit. In peak summer even mornings were warm. If we were to walk in the afternoon, not only it was blistering hot but the slippers would stick to the melting tar on the road. Occasionally we would have sand storms, sometimes outside brown and at times it was so sandy, so dark that we called it black storm (kali aandhi). All this could be reason for power outages and of course at times power outages had no reason or time spans. The heat felt even more as the entire campus would get deserted and all students from schools and colleges would leave for their homes. Empty town was certainly hotter. 

The temperatures would not even drop at night, so it was sort of a challenge to sleep. So that was the interesting part. We would sleep outside in a kind of patio in make shift beds. We made sure that we had sprayed some water on the ground, so it would get cooler locally. Then we would take a bath and sleep right away, while the body heat is still low. The only thing we had to cool us down was a table fan. And sometimes we had to run in the middle of the night to our beds, if it would thunderstorm or rain. Thinking of it now, it must have been all good, because I don't think we have bad feeling about it, anyways. It was just another life style.

Then came in technology in our small town not air conditioners but coolers. Air conditioners were out of question in homes and totally a luxury. The only place that had air conditioners were the computer labs in the institute. To walk on those labs barefoot was heaven. We would go there with mummy and papa who worked there. But coolers, were more affordable. A cooler was a device where you fill in water and a pump would use that water to spray mist filled cool air. 

As time passed and people in our town got more money, more and more coolers were installed. we still did not have any may be till I was 13-14 years or so. Cooler so as to say was a luxury which we did not need to get used to off. But then one day me and my brothers said "As such it is hot, but when we hear cooler sounds at night from the neighbour's home we feel even hotter". That's it! Our daily debates of "To have or not to have cooler" was over. Finally the cooler was brought, one , two , three...we finally had three coolers in house! Sleeping in those coolers is a wonderful memory which can not be recreated by our homes and offices that are centrally air conditioned throughout day and night.

Math - Taught as a life skill

I realized since I started teaching contents with math in my lab classes that Math could be a challenging subject for many, uninteresting for others and burden for several. Me personally I  have always enjoyed Math and now I look forward to teaching it as and when I need to. I have come to realize  our love for math was because of how we simply grew with math. When we were little, after school we were primarily either doing random stuff like playing or following directions of our parents, so our unstructured time is basically in oour parents hand that's when my love for math started.

A normal scenario on a summer evening at our home would look like this. We all would be sitting in balcony due to a power outage (very frequent), as we lived in a small town in India. Then papa would say 'tell me the multiplication table of 2, 3,4..'. He would want to hear this from all of us. me , my brothers. Mummy was on the same page. She would tell us the same multiplication table in bengali. They both so encouraged us to be perfectionists in math all the time be it for school or not.

Papa being the genius in math once challenged a colleague to use a calculator to do mutiple digit multiplication of two numbers and won the challenge in a breeze. These stories and many more were a part of our lives. Calculator was not even used till in college and considered a tool for cheating. All calculations were to be done mentally or by working out on paper. 

Another normal incidient which I can think of is also something that is hard to relate in present day, space and time. We would go to buy groceries and the shopkeeper would list everything on a paper and the prices in front of items. So he would use a "calculcator" to ensure a correct total and we were told to make sure that the total was correct by doing it mentally. So we would quickly add (8-10 numbers with decimal) and ensure that everything is ok. This we did everytime we went shopping. Those were the days when items were not scanned, computers were not used and typed reciepts were not generated. 

For us it was hard to think of Math as a subject in school, in all essence we were taught math like it was an essential life skill. Naturally we embraced it as a life skill.

Remembering a favor, small or big!

Papa worked in Trinity College during his first six months in USA in Fall 2001. To go to Trinity college, papa had to take a bus and then train from his sister’s home to college. The bus used to cross many train lines during this period to reach the train station. Papa counted four train lines were when he needed to get down, to go to the station to catch train. 

                                     petehobandraw.blogspot.com

On one chilly Sunday morning, he boarded the bus, knowing the train lines the bus would cross and got down. The bus left. He knew the name of station. Soon he did realize he got down somewhat earlier. So he decided to walk that distance. He was walking by when he saw two neighbours mowing their lawns. So he asked one of them, how can I go to this particular station. One of them did tell him but said the station was 8-10 miles, so what was his plan. He said he had no other choice but to walk, so that was his plan to walk. Sometime you just got to do, what you need to do. That guy asked him to wait, got dressed and asked papa to get in his jeep and drove him to the station. Papa said you came all the way just to drop me. He said its ok, I anyway had some work here later, so I will do it now. 

Papa remembers this incident, not the man to forget any favor, small of big!

Holding my father's hand

In retrospection I am thankful for that day this happened, because I remember that small incident from so well. It was recess time in my elementary school, we were playing on the slide. The big slide had a nail sticking out, which I did not notice. My little finger was cut and it started bleeding. I was probably in 1st grade. It must have been painful. I remember it was the end of the school day, and I started walking towards my home. 

I must have walked a few steps, when I saw papa riding his bicycle and coming to pick me. ‘Papa’ I said, ‘good you came, it hurts so much on this little finger, I got cut during the recess’. ‘Oh..o’ he said ‘we have to get you a tetanus shot for this immediately’. I remember I was so scared of that tetanus shot or any injections.

I did not remember the pain of that shot, however I do remember that he was there for me and I was holding the hand of the strongest man in the world.

Glimpses from Indian independence events

When India became independent, papa was just 6 years old. That was a big moment in India's history is what we know. But what was it like for someone who witnessed it themselves.

Papa doesn’t seem to remember that exact moment but remembers the celebrations, unrest and incidents surrounding that time. Our grandfather was not heavily involved in the freedom movement , mostly his involvement was through a hindu organization Arya Samaj.

Papa remembers people carrying Indian flags going through streets where their home was. He remembers the unrest, following the announcements that muslims had to migrate to Pakistan. He also recalls being told to have red chilly powder always handy, so if they were on roof top and someone called them down or said something, they could throw the red chilly powder on them from top, so people could not get to them.

Papa also recalls that during that time his chachaji (uncle) who was visiting from Delhi found a fan lying on or near railway tracks, it must have belonged to someone who was leaving by train and unable to carry it any further, they had that fan in their house for a long time.  

The most interesting part was Papa remembers Seeing Mahatma Gandhi. He told that in Anaj Mandi (Market), there was has a huge empty space in middle, Mahatma Gandhi came there to address people and he saw Mahatma Gandhi in person. Later he remembers hearing about Mahatma Gandhi’s passing away and the exact spot where he heard that news..

My dad and his cycle!

Do you remember this simple, sturdy piece of metal & tires?

It carried on itself the bondings of life some near some farther.

My dad has always been the very straightforward, the most gentle and yet strongest pillars of my life. I remember us riding around behind his bicycle since we were little. He would take us to different places. Mom would also be riding her cycle, carrying books, groceries and other things back n forth home to office.

Sometimes when I would go to school riding behind him, I remember telling him, go faster the school bell is about to ring. He would say, you should get ready in time, I can go only so much   fast, the quintessential lesson, be ready on time!

 When we grew up we also rode our cycles, 5 of those parked in our garage on the right side under the electricity meter. But till that did not happen, sometime we would be double riding, me and my brothers. My brothers were naughty, specially the younger one. He would say to my dad can I put my legs in the moving wheels of the cycle, can I, can I? My father would say no , never do that. Then one day he did it, oh my god so many tears, so much blood, so much screaming followed that!

We rode on that cycle, like it was the magical vehicle carrying our childhood into adulthood.