Dec 22, 2017

2017 is over, so soon?

I love being a homemaker. One of the reasons is that it offers a wide variety of activities that appeal to me. No two days are alike on this job. One day I might be a cleaning diva, the next day I could be a nurse, on the third day I can wow my family with baked goodies... the list is endless. 

The only problem with this is, unlike a day job where the milestones are marked with pay raises, promotions, certificates and congratulatory parties, homemaking is a mostly thankless and featureless career. When I look back, it all seems like an endless corridor of cooking, cleaning and other mundane tasks that I have traversed with my apron firmly tied on.

So this year I've decided to sit down and list the things that I have learned and accomplished in the past 12 months. I don't want to remember years just for the memorable trips we took or tragedies in the family and friends circles.

Here is my list:

Gardening: Grew my first ivy gourds or kovakkai in pots and devised a pandal using plastic netting between our well and shed. The yield wasn't spectacular, but the vine is still alive and that is a huge accomplishment for me! 


I also improvised a trellis for purple long beans and had a bountiful crop. We planted more fruit trees this year. So in addition to the jackfruit, tamarind and coconut trees we had when we bought the plot, we now have cashew, sapodilla, guava, papaya, bell fruit, passion fruit and mulberry. My plan for the next year is to nourish these properly. The pineapple that I had got to grow from the top of a store-brought fruit has finally decided to put forth a fruit after two years of merely taking up space in our backyard. Talk about bonuses!

I also managed a couple of elephant yams and finally succeeded in getting a kanthari (bird's eye chilli) to grow from seed. DH and I planted around 26 banana and plantain rhizomes in May and got help in maintaining them. They are flourishing. And here I was thinking that I barely did anything in the garden due to health issues in the latter part of the year!

This year is notable for my discovery of a miraculous addition to my gardening - cocopeat! We have clayey soil that becomes quite hard in summer months. I was looking for a way to loosen it up and happened on this product at an agro store. I've used it for all the new plantings this year and it has worked wonders. Later, my hunch was confirmed by an agricultural expert's YouTube video recommendation for loosening and aerating clayey soil!



Craft: Learned and made three crochet amigurumi. Made my first macrame pieces.


I am also learning polymer claying. My first pieces are very rudimentary and I am still learning the various techniques.

And of course there was that needlework project that is now framed and hanging right at our entrance so that the maker can boast to her heart's content...


I managed to BuJo through the year and have decided that I don't need any other planner ever again. But the recommended BuJo journals are very prohibitively pricey (Leuchtturm 1917 - Rs.3000 for a notebook!!!) and the dotted notebook I got from Amazon shed pages so badly that I was left pasting back the pages more than I was writing in it. Other replacements had pages that ghosted and even bled.

So I bought a package of cream-colored A4 premium bond paper from my favorite stationery shop and learned kettle-stitch binding from YouTube. My first attempt at trimming the pages after binding turned out like a rat chewed up its edges. Ani now uses that as a sketch book. I bound two more and got them trimmed and covered by a professional binder. Then I added elastic closures and colorful endpapers on my own... 


Here they are: my new BuJo and Craft BuJo for 2018. Hope to learn how to do the covers by myself next year. The paper quality is the best! I can even paint in them if I want to. I thumb my nose at you, expensive stationery manufacturers!!!

Cooking and baking: Baked Tres leches, Red velvet, Devil's food and Caramel cakes. Learned how to make Swiss meringue buttercream icing - think I will never go back to plain ol' buttercream unless I need an eggless cake and icing. I tried my hand at icing flowers too! Here was my best effort of the year made for the "baby" in our family who complains if I don't write his name in icing on the top of the cake! (Yep, that's my DH)


In addition to baking I tried my hand at Unniyappam (turned out soft and yummy in spite of my skipping the step of letting the batter rest awhile after mixing), Kumbilappam during the jackfruit season and a savory, tangy Bhakarwadi that was a huge hit. I tried pickling tender mangoes, but got the proportions of masala all wrong so that instead of being soft and mushy, they turned out hard as bullets and too salty after the requisite 6 months in a closed jar. Ah, some you lose!

Home: Painted a whole room and learned quite a few valuable lessons in the process. Then I read this (highly recommended) book...


... learned to repair a leaky toilet by myself (cost 20 rupees) and emboldened by the feat, went on to replace the lights on the gate post by myself (no manual required). This is in addition to the valve-changing, picture-hanging etc that I usually do. 

I also managed to give our living room a makeover this month, but more on that in another post!

Books: I managed to stick to my resolution of listing all the books I read this year and writing a short precis of each. So far, the number is 131 - therefore I have managed to bring down the average number of books that I read from 15 to around 10 a month. Definite improvement, I would say! I will share my favorites of the year in another post.

Please don't think I am boasting about the number of books that I manage to read because anyone who knows me can tell you that reading is almost as essential to me as breathing. And please don't imagine that all my reading is either high literature or philosophical reading - those are certainly there, but I love reading potboilers, well-researched romances, memoirs, travelogs, good whodunits, thrillers and humor. I am looking forward to reducing this number even more because this year the power of the left lens of my specs went from -10.00 to -10.25 dioptre, not a good thing at my age!

Writing has not been very good this year: I managed a measly 12 blog posts not including this one. Didn't do any creative writing this year. And I didn't miss it much either...hmm, that is food for thought...

Towards the end of the year, I managed to help out a friend by copy-editing his wife's doctoral thesis. It led to my now getting two paying clients for my copy-editing and rewriting services!

All in all, it has been a good year for domestic activities at Karthi! I am so grateful for the new things I've learned this year. But my greatest thanks goes to DH who works hard and manages our finances so well that I have the leisure to be a homemaker. I cannot thank him enough for that.   

Do you look back at each year? Do the years appear distinct or do they telescope into each other and become a jumbled mess?  How do you chronicle the year's events? Do comment in the form below...

Wish you all a very merry Xmas and a Happy New Year! Signing off for 2017!

Nov 30, 2017

Hampi 3

The sky is overcast. The rain drizzles, intensifies and drops off never to stop completely. Cyclone Ockhi is knocking at our doors, felling trees and flipping umbrellas. The power comes and goes.

But I am an Aquarian and am nothing if not contrary. 😀 After filling my water tank till it overflowed - will last us for two days - then charging emergency lights, making sure we have candles and charging the power bank, I am now settled with a hot cuppa. Now let me take you to sunny Hampi where we had left off seeing the grandeur of the past that has been preserved in their half-damaged glory.

We took the long route across the bridge to Anegundi, on the northern side of the Tungabhadra. It's no wonder that Hampi and the surrounding area is famous among rock-climbing and hiking enthusiasts. The place is simply littered with rocks of all shapes and sizes, as though some ancient giant kids had played with them and left them scattered all over the landscape (Why didn't their Mom insist on tidying up their toys?). In fact, the legend goes that this was the land of the Vanaras and Sugreeva, Hanuman and their friends are responsible for the giant stacks of stones.



But at least the humans who came afterwards have made good use of the space left amid the rocks...


In fact the place, if tidied up of the rocks, would look like yesteryear Kerala - with paddy, plantain and sugarcane fields interspersed with tall coconut trees. 

And some little extras thrown in Hampi style:


DH and the kids braved the steep climb up the Anjanadri to visit the Hanuman temple - which they told me was exactly 575 steps high. I wandered around the base of hill and cooled myself off with water and juice. 

The pictures they brought back looked interesting, but not enough to tempt me...


From the top...


The boys hadn't cooled off or regained their energy by the time we reached Sanapur lake and saw the coracles...


But by then we were too famished to attempt any more adventures, so we went to the largely undeveloped (read no tarred roads) "hippie area" to find a restaurant. On the way was another magnificent reminder of the great empire...


Remnants of a bridge across the mighty Tungabhadra... The river has been tamed for quite a while now. And it is she who is responsible for the greenery that greets your eyes everywhere. The locals told me that even in the worst of summers, the dam provides them with enough water for their needs. Once numbered among the natural protectors of Hampi from the northern marauders, the river still bestows her riches in the land she flows through...

After a bumpy ride, we reached the restaurant. (If you are a non-vegetarian, you have to cross the river to get anything to eat. No one cooks meat or fish South of the river. There are only vegetarian restaurants in Hampi.) We were greeted by a clowder of cats (yup, that is what a group of cats is called, I checked!) having their lunch...


Talk about inbreeding!!! Soon we relaxed to the views of the old capital across the river...

 

In the end, at least there was the good view, for neither the food nor the price was satisfactory. 


Nope, HE wasn't laughing, I checked! 😉😉😉 We will bid a fond goodbye to Hampi here!

I don't know if it is an effect of the cyclonic storm, but it has taken me almost two hours to complete this post because the picture uploading was too slow. Already there are reports of 80+ fishermen missing. They went out to sea yesterday evening and haven't returned. Praying for them and their families. 🙏 

Relatives and friends are calling in from time to time to see if we are okay. We are, for now. See you all again next week!

Nov 16, 2017

Yaay! She finished it!!!!

We interrupt the regularly scheduled program to bring you a story of triumph that is likely to get your heart to speed up and your eyes to tear up! 

At the heart of the story is a crafter who loves all craft and hoards supplies, but has a massive case of nonstartitis and procrastination. This May, she overhauled her craft room and in the process, unearthed an Anchor needlework kit that she had bought around... oh just 4 years ago? The autumnal colors had piqued her interest, but the kit had soon been interred in the pile that was in one of her craft cupboards. 



The crafter is inordinately fond of small projects that can be finished in a day or two. She had never been successful with a long haul that would need patient, incremental work day after day. "This time I'm gonna change that," she vowed as she had done several times before. I don't think she believed it herself because somewhere in her mother-in-law's house is a half-finished little doggie that was way more simple to stitch.

Anyway, she brought it down to her writing table and put it in a drawer, adding a pair of scissors to the kit. And as the room painting wound up, she tore open the box, and ignoring the recommended order of completing different colors, started with her favorite color red.


That was it for the first day. She found that it was easier to mark off the areas to be filled by a particular color with a pen so that she knew where to start the next day. She also, not very hopefully, decided to take a picture of each day's progress so that she could look back at it with pride one day - however far in future that would be... perhaps in the company of grandkids?

And then slowly the picture began to grow...



She set a goal of using up a particular length of thread that she was using that day, which took her roughly an hour. She tried to do it five days a week. Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn't. But as a couple of months passed, she found the canvas buckling a bit - no doubt due to uneven thread tension.

Our crafty crafter checked YouTube for a solution because she couldn't put the whole work into an embroidery hoop. After a weekend visit to the local hardware shop for supplies she made this in half an hour! 


Yes, a lap frame! From PVC pipe! And she didn't let her usual process of finding a hundred obstacles in her head to make such a thing stop her. She did all the measuring, sawing and fixing herself! Making snap-on PVC attachments daunted her, so she decided to attach the project to the frame with thread. She also found black cobbler's thread a better option than ordinary sewing thread. Don't ask how she happened to have cobbler's thread in her stash...just take it for granted!


Housework, travel, fatigue and illness interfered with the progress of the project. But she left it in sight on the unused end of the dining table, shrouded in an old towel to keep away the dust. Her eyes fell on it each time she passed through and it even drew her eyes to it when she curled up with a book on the sofa.


Even though she was still taking daily photos, the work left to do often overwhelmed her. In the little places it was difficult to make out where the markings for one color ended. Sometimes the patches in the picture didn't match those on the canvas. Sometimes the colors seemed too garish for her taste - perhaps she would have liked an autumn scene in pastels? She gritted her teeth and went on...


Uh oh! She ran out of dark blue thread for the water! No doubt it was because she was ignoring the instruction to finish each patch of color, snip the thread and then start in the next patch. She just dragged the thread on to the next patch. When she looked at the thread list, she saw that she had completed more than half the colors... That was good! 

Making a note of the shade she would need to finish the dark blue patches, she left them bare and went on with the other colors...


She even became bold enough to use long and short stitch when the kit admonished her to use only long stitches... Take a close look at the light yellow in the sky...


Meanwhile she bought a new skein of the dark blue. But nearing the end she kept finding tiny little patches she had missed out on when using another color. So each day before threading the usual length of thread for the next day, she snipped off little lengths of other colors to fill in those patches.

And last week she suddenly realized that she was down to the last color - white! Energized by the finding, she put in unheard-of double sessions for a day or two until day before yesterday, the last white stitch was made and a frantic search for any more bare patches of canvas ensued.... Then our crafter, forgetting her advanced years and the fact that she had only recently recovered from a bout of dengue, executed a few war whoops and danced around the dining table.


It had taken her just 3 days short of six months to complete! 

She asked me not to show you the next picture, but I think it will be good for her perfectionism. As I told her repeatedly, her work is not going to be submitted for a needlework competition to need an immaculate backside...


Readers, she is cringing with embarrassment. You will be happy to know that she was so chuffed by her accomplishment that she went straight to her craft stash and pulled out a quarter-finished project that she has had... oh only since 2006...


She started on the yellow flowers and realized why she had put it away years ago - the motifs are tiny and the stitches proportionately so. It makes her go cross-eyed even in  broad daylight. So she has decided to complete the current bird, and save the rest of the Aida cloth for some other freehand project.

But true to form, she has her sights trained on some drool-worthy counted cross stitch on Amazon since Anchor doesn't make them...


and this...


Happily what with exchange rates and import duties, they are currently out of her budget. So, with a sigh she has dismantled her PVC frame and put it away for the next project. Let us look forward to the framed Perfect Paradise and the two completed birds in their own gilded frames.

The crafter's name has not been mentioned because she wishes to remain anonymous...

Nov 10, 2017

Hampi 2

Why did it take me so long to get from Hampi 1 to 2? On the way I got attacked by a teeny mosquito and got dengue fever. Thus I have attained a hat trick in fevers this year, falling prey to viral fever, chest infection and dengue all in the space of 6 months. I must say from the expert's point of view that the dengue is the worst of all - it is making itself felt even after three weeks in the form of easily tiring, getting headaches when tired and aches and pains all over. I avoid going out as much as I can to stave off fatigue and further infections.

On to happier things:

Here is a bird's eye view of the royal enclosure at Hampi


The palaces built of brick and wood were destroyed and all that are left of them are the stone foundations and whatever was made from stone. And the ornamentation left on those plinths are enough to make us salivate thinking of the palaces as they had been...


Just look at the detail...



The grounds have a huge step-well...

A cute but scary underground passage that leads to a currently roofless chamber... I am still not certain whether Ani was clinging to my hand or I was clinging to his...


 We moved on to the Zenana quarters which had slightly more enduring structures. Like this one...


...presumably an overgrown gazebo for the ladies to relax in if they found the palace too confining!...


... even the "simple" gazebo has detailing like this over the arches...

And then to take your breath away, the elephant stables...


Do note that the domes on top are all in different shapes. If they'd lavished so much care and design diversity on the quarters of their tuskers, what would their palaces have been like...

Another notable structure is the Queen's bath... though I have no idea why it should be so far away from their living quarters...


It's all dry and prosaic now, but we humans have enough imagination to return the poetry to it, don't we?


There was an "underground" Siva temple where the royal family took spiritual retreats from time to time... but the place stank so much of bat guano that Ani refused to go into it, indeed it was a gloomy place...


Didn't I tell you last time that the landscape is dotted with old, unmarked monuments? Here is something that you might miss because they are found on the way side with no markers...


These depressions in stone - no two are alike - served as ready-made plates for the soldiers' daily meals and they stretch off in two rows for 300 meters into the countryside now, who knows how many there originally used to be?


That is all for the royal grandeur of the Vijayanagara empire's capital, but if you think that is all that Hampi is, you would be mistaken. I'll take you around Hampi the next time and you can see for yourself!

Oct 20, 2017

Hampi 1

One of the greatest pleasures that the denizens of Karthi indulge in is envisioning our next long trip. This time we were going somewhere special, a place that had always captured my imagination and that caught my family's attention when the movie Anandam came out. I for one, went into full research mode, reading up on all I could about the Vijayanagara empire's history and even buying a coffee table book off Amazon - Hampi - Discover the Splendours of Vijayanagar by Subhadra Sen Gupta and photographs by Clare Arni. 

Six months ago we booked tickets on the Hampi Express from Bengaluru leaving on the Durgashtami day. We got confirmed tickets, so were placid seeing the crowds on the platform as our train chugged in. We managed to find our seats and settled down despite there being several people standing around. Confident that the ticket examiner would chase away those without reservations, we went to sleep. When a call of nature woke me up at 2 pm, I reached for my sandals beneath my berth only to find 4 people lying on their sides on the floor between the lower berths. I hurriedly put on my glasses to see that the main corridor too was similarly filled by crouching and curled up humanity. I summoned all the Spartan spirit in my being that I could and lay back in my berth.

That is when I saw a bridge-like construction between the middle berths above me. An inspection revealed that there was a lady curled up into a question mark in the space left on our 9-year-old's berth and a gentleman was lying down on the opposite berth with his torso there, legs spanning the aisle and feet almost on the lady's face. The last vestiges of my Spartan spirit fled around 4 am and I decided to brave the crush to use the toilet, using the night lights and the edges of the upper bunks to navigate, planting my feet as far apart as possible to inflict least damage on the protruding appendages of the people under me. My brain brought back fleeting images of a Kathakali performance in which Duryodhana tries to navigate the illusory ponds in the Indraprastha palace. 

Fortunately there was no one sleeping IN the toilet. On the way to and from the toilet I heard a lot of vituperative language despite my care. Luckily for me the insults were in provincial Kannada and garbled by sleep, so I didn't understand a word!

All that was forgotten on our ride from Hospet to the ruined city of Hampi that was once the capital of a prosperous empire that ruled all of Southern India in its heyday. The gentle morning sun fell on fallen granite pillars and leaning structures that sometimes had markers, but more often seemed to efface themselves to blend in with their background. As we climbed the Hemakuta hill and then made a winding descent, the Virupaksha temple with the Tungabhadra in the background became visible.

All of the monuments of Hampi are situated South of the Tungabhadra spread out among the hills and valleys. The main things not to miss are the Virupaksha temple and the  Hampi bazaar in front of it that stretches to the foot of the Matanga hill, the Krishna temple, the Vitthala temple, the two "minuscule" monolithic Ganapathis, the Narasimha, the Royal enclosure, Zenana quarters and the Queen's bath. From now on, I will let the pictures speak...


The Sasivekalu (mustard seed) Ganesha


This is his brother, Kadlegalu (bengal gram) Ganesha. Don't you love the ancients' sense of humour?


ONE relief sculpture on the LOWER end of ONE pillar of the mandapa in front of Kadlegalu Ganesha. Minimalism was definitely not a designing trend in Vijayanagara!


The Dasavathara carvings at the entrance to the Krishna temple built by the great Krishna Deva Raya himself. My next ambition is to see the Balagopal icon that graced this temple, which is currently in the Government Museum in Chennai.


Ladies, ladies, green is a very unattractive color for your complexion, dontcha think???


The Narasimha. Now this guy has stared down at us from social studies text books for years on end, hasn't he? Along with the ends of his appendages, the Lakshmi Devi in his lap too has vanished, leaving just part of her arm seen near his left armpit.


No, you can't take out this nifty chariot for a junket around the parikrama path. The iconic stone chariot in the Vitthala temple. 


You feel, "Oh, what a beautiful shrine!" Wait...wait...


Now you see its teeny tiny place in the overall structure! Can you help believing the local legend that Lord Vitthala refused to be stationed in such an ornate structure and instead preferred to go back to his original, simpler home? 

 

A daredevil vyali rider!


A gnarled living tree in the  Vitthala temple courtyard seemingly carved out of and growing out of stone!


Can you imagine the number of chisel taps and the measuring and remeasuring it took to produce these perfect geometrical patterns? Such dedication!


At the end of a day of walking around and the architectural overwhelm, there is no better place to relax than the steps at the side of the Matanga hill looking down the Hampi bazaar street to the gopuram of the Virupaksha temple. 

Next time I will take you to the royal glories of Hampi... Ciao!

3 Movie Reviews in 1: Nanpakal..., Romancham, and Pranaya Vilasam

1. Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam (Siesta) Lijo Jose Pellissery's movies are an acquired taste. Each movie is different and probably appeal ...