'Ome Sweet 'Ome!

Hmmm… :D

Wat a lovely feeling to come back home after six looooong weeks!!! This was more like a home-coming of sorts for me. I came back home to so many things. I will now list them sequentially.

Home-sick:
I felt home-sick after being home. The last time that I felt so badly home-sick that I actually had enough courage to acknowledge it to my parents was Christmas 2006. Man…how the years have gone-by! Seeing your father tuck the sheet around you before you sleep can really bring on the waterfalls. Parents should seriously stop doing that if they don’t want couch-potatoes for children.

Train Journeys:
I’ve mostly ONLY traveled by bus since I was a kid. Living in a place that is so near to the city (and where all your relatives stay in the same area!) kinda ruins any prospect of a train journey. And so I had this eternal longing to always want to travel in a train. The child-like excitement any such planned journey brings forth surely stumps me to this day! I experienced that very same breathless-and-wide-eyed-expression-demanding feeling as I waited on the platform for my train that was to take me to my native place for my brother’s engagement. It was just awesommmmme!

Watching ‘Chotta Bheem’* on POGO with your 3 yr old cousin:
I have this cute cousin of mine who is recently going to go to jail (read as: school). He turns 3 this May 4th. Poor dear! Anyways, there are 7 siblings on my mom’s side and he is the last grandchild in my generation. He can’t pronounce any syllable of any word with the “r” sound though he can phonetically pronounce the alphabet. In Tamil, we call it ‘mazhalai’. Its kinda like a child dialect. He’ll outgrow it very soon. So, like I was saying; he is sooooo cute. He came into my hotel room as soon as I had landed and asked me sweetly:

“Ithu than unga loom** a?” (Is this your loom?)

Awww! I just cudn’t help cuddling him. After the engagement was over, I settled in front of the TV to catch up on some IPL updates and he promptly deposited his cute-self next to me and said he wanted to watch POGO. As I tried to surf to find the channel, he frustratingly took control of the remote and punched in some numbers. Voila! POGO was playing. Kids these days sure are sharper! There was this show running called ‘Chotta Bheem’ and I spent 30 blissful mins watching this cartoon wherein Chotta Bheem reduced a bull, the size of an elephant; which was terrorizing the people of his village; to pulp. The entire 30 mins were punctuated with screams of “Ammadi…Appadi...Achacho”. I just sat there next to that little bundle and enjoyed watching a mindless (BUT on the cute side!) cartoon.

Plain Dosa***:
You know, there’s no joy in eating a dosa EXCEPT in Tamil Nadu (TN). I dunno what it is! I have eaten dosa in many places outside and somehow those made in TN just have this flavour in them that no one else can even THINK of aspiring to acquire. I guess, like my mom says, its something in the air!. : ) Digging into a plate of sada dosai (plain pancakes) with some lip smacking sambhar (lentils curry), thengai chutney (coconut curry) and vengaya chutney (onion curry) does make you feel divine! The proverb, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” is just sooooo false. I say “The way to any human being’s heart is through their stomach” :P

Washing Machine:
Heh...heh...heh... :) This one is just for the sake of the lazy-manifestation of myself. According to me, the greatest invention for eons to come is the washing machine. It's amazing how you can come home with two bags full of unwashed clothes and go back just two days later with clean, fresh, crip washed bundles. There's an almost euphoric feeling to watch the washing machine dish out clean clothes. Ooooooh! When I go to heaven, I sure will remember to thank Alva J. Fisher.

I wanna add more things here, but right now I can only rememebr the top-priority ones. I'll keep updating this as and when I remember. :)


*It’s a mythological character from Indian mythology.
**Room.
***Indian rice pancakes.