Twenty- five Seven

Shaggy dog tale #FlavoursomeTuesday

November 15, 2017
Before you start yawning at the the prospect of going through a long winded story, let me assure you that this is a shaggy dog story of a completely different kind .

Firstly, it is not very long winded.

Secondly, it is not very funny. At least to me.

So let’s start at the beginning.

I grew up in post-Independent India as the daughter of a Naval Officer. This part is essential to the story because those were the days when we had limited choices of ready-to eat food and remember cartons of weevil ridden, soggy Mohun’s cornflakes, crumbly biscuits and hard, bitter cheese with fond affection. That too, these goodies were available locally and sporadically. So when a person was posted on ship, he had access to duty free imported food items and this meant a much better quality of biscuits and cheeses at home.

One day daddy brought home a blue and white tin of biscuits. No ordinary biscuits these but assorted biscuits by Jacobs. A huge tin that had 13 kg of biscuit!!

So we looked at the tin with something akin to awe. My brother and I immediately wanted to get our greedy hands on those yummy munchies but mummy didn’t want to just ‘waste’ them on us.

“We’ll open them next week, ” she told us when the cousins were scheduled for a visit. She kept the tin away.

Tantalisingly within our reach and vision.

It was hard passing the tin on the trolley without salivating at the thought of the butter cream biscuits, the sticky jammy ones, the delicately sugared ones, the plain butter ones and of course the different shaped ones with coloured Royal icing . We just couldn’t wait.

It seems that we weren’t the only ones resisting temptation. One evening when we came home , Moti,our Pomeranian came to the door with a sheepish grin and a shifty look. He looked embarrassed by the glinting grains of sugar mingled with biscuit crumbs and blotches of pink and blue on his snout.

You guessed right. He had gobbled his way through the tin, seizing his chance at being all alone at home. Quickly, my brother and I rushed to the tin , hoping to find some uneaten ones.

Luckily there were still about 3 kg left and we were about to eat them when mummy stopped us saying that they were unfit for human consumption.

“These biscuits have gone to the dogs , ” she snapped. ” He may as well eat the rest.”

Now is this the way a cookie crumbles?

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I’d like to invite you to join Shilpa and me in a new weekly venture . In case you haven’t noticed , we’ve been sharing stories , memories and anecdotes about food every Tuesday on our blogs.

We’d love to hear your stories as well!

So do join in and share your posts on social media with the hashtag #FlavoursomeTuesday.

The rules are very simple :
1. Just post a story/photo related to a food memory
2. Share it with the hashtag #FlavoursomeTuesday.
3. Link it up to either Shilpa’s or my blog on that theme. Visit our blogs, share them and please leave comments.
Looking forward to seeing you at our table.

I’d like to thank our first guest this week, Alana. Thanks for sharing your story. You can read it here .
The Sassoon Dog and the Dock Art Project

November 12, 2017

Dogs peeing on the road are a common sight. So I wasn’t in the least surprised to see a larger than life wire installation of the Sassoon Dog lifting up his leg and peeing on the wall. That sure brought a smile to my face. The only one actually in a show that frankly left me bemused and disappointed.

Growing up, Sassoon Dock was an important part of my life. I passed it twice a day on my way to and from school . Even though it wasn’t a long stretch of road , I would hold my breath for a good two minutes as the bus rattled past .

Sassoon Dock was one of places where fishing boats brought their catch and the area around was full of little process houses where the catch was cleaned , processed and despatched to different parts of the world.

Of late there have been attempts at gentrifying the place and rumours of rejuvenating the dock to create a vibrant waterfront like the Piers of San Francisco!

So when Daughter No.1 alerted me about the Sasoon Dock Art show all the way from New Jersey, I had to check it out for myself. Since it was a Sunday Hubby Dear and I set out pretty late in the morning . Actually it was noon when we reached Sasoon Dock.

The sun was high up in the sky and the smell of fish was still very strong. It still looked very much like a fishing dock, filled with fishy activity. And when the signage to the show suddenly stopped, I wondered if we had come to the right place.

Across from the art show venue was a small shrine under the banyan tree.

Having no idea where the Valet was going to park the car, we parked a little while away right next to a open air barber shop. At least here we were sure of finding it when we returned.

We were tagged before we entered, having given our names to the organisers at the desk.

We entered a large hall with a warm light filtering through the high ceilinged room that had patches of ochre visible through the interesting installation of words of Hanif Kureshi evoking smells and sights superimposed on a fishing net ?

But by this time I had lost sight of Hubby Dear who was looking for his own favourite pee spot and entered the next hall which looked surprisingly like Mumbai’s messy buildings with washing hanging in your face

I walked through this messy installation and came into a courtyard

That continued the theme that was so aptly captured by another peeing dog . This time it was a life sized Sassoon Dog who lifted his leg up to the words :

To piss| to make a mess of :

“It’s all around us

That which we learn to un-see”

#TheSasoonDog

I was more bewildered by the next room which had bottles and stuff hanging in my face .

This was truly an Art for All event and the place was full of people one would never see at an art show . No perfumed ladies or fashionable gents but literally ordinary, everyday people who were as fascinated by the art as I was . Sadly, by this time I was completely disoriented and was more worried about losing Hubby Dear than appreciating the art .

I made my way through the hanging bottles only to find myself confronting a mirror! The other visitors who were equally startled, laughed in embarrassment and I retraced my steps to the entrance way.

Once outside, much like Alice, I found an arrow on the floor directing me to yet another room that said it was the last fisherman in Bombay

Again in a room shrouded in darkness , I couldn’t understand what to make of the installations beautiful as they were. This art show was way too cerebral for me and went completely over my head. May be an art tour is essential to truly appreciate this show.

The photograph room was interesting but with so much empty wall space that I felt there were exhibits still to be put up . Were they?

All in all, this was extremely disappointing showing . It is billed as 30 International artists for 50 days and promises to have Singapore Weekend (17-19 November )and a French Weekend ( 25-26 November) with curated art tours, films and workshops.

There are music concerts scheduled and a Koli festival from mid December. Find out more about it here.

Perhaps it will be a fun event after all

But for me, this was a rather damp squib.
The Wish Tree #ThursdayTreeLove

November 9, 2017

It is almost a year to the day that I saw this wonderful wishing tree in the UC Davis Campus in California. I had gone to visit a nephew who is doing his undergraduate program there. UC Davis is a famous agricultural college and obviously has beautiful trees in the Arboretum which actually looks like a painting.

But the most beautiful tree I saw was this wishing tree.

This was a tradition started by Yoko Ono, the widow of the celebrated Beatle John Lennon.

Every now and then a student/staffer takes down the wishes to make place for new ones.

Isn’t that a lovely tradition?

Linking up with Parul’s initiative #ThursdayTreeLove-27where bloggers are invited to share their photos of trees every second and fourth Thursday in the month.