Twenty- five Seven

Shopping on a Sunday

December 22, 2013

English: TAKEN DURING WIKIPEDIA TAKES MUMBAI 1 PHOTOWALK (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Today was another free Sunday so I decided to make the most of it at Phoenix Mills. Christmas is celebrated with great commercialism in Mumbai and I love seeing the decorations with snow and reindeers and rosy cheeked Santa Clauses all over the show. With street urchins selling Santa Caps and oddly enough felt reindeer horns even those who don’t want to celebrate Christmas will just have to say Ho Ho ho. There are Christmas Puddings and pre-Christmas lunches, the best in town being the spread laid out by the Yacht Club yesterday afternoon. With turkey and ham and a whole load of goodies, this much awaited club event was a sell out as we discovered when we went to the Club to place an order for some turkey for Christmas. The place was a buzz with satisfied members literally licking their chops as they tottered down the staircase.

Christmas is oddly enough celebrated with great glee in Mumbai – almost as enthusiastically as Diwali. Perhaps it is something to do with the chill in the air and the general feeling of relief that another year is soon coming to a close. I love going out to the shops not necessarily to buy anything but just to see the decorations. The main hall at Palladium was decorated with fairy lights and snow flakes and seemed busier than I’ve seen it for quite a while. I reached there fairly early in the afternoon and the footfalls had just started coming in. By the time I left five hours later there were cars parked all along the ramps of the parking lot! And literally car loads of people were pouring out of the lifts. The central courtyard had some cars and stuff for the children to play on but I felt they looked tacky and quite scary.

The shop I enjoyed visiting the most was the Foodhall on the top floor . This shop which has a lot of gourmet stuff also has a regular grocery section for everyday provisions. But it has a bakery and an Indian sweet sections.It also has a promotional counter where every day new food items are promoted along with a small demonstration and tasting bites. This store will soon go online and will home deliver which is great considering that the worst part of this store is the checkout – it is long and always painful and worse still, if you have frozen food in your cart, it’s bound to melt by the time you get home! So I think I will try the online shopping experience as I’ve been doing these past two months.

Ever since I’ve become housebound and the traffic even more horrendous I’ve been ordering groceries on line. What I find best about this way of shopping is that I can actually keep two or three windows open simulatneously and decide which is the cheaper site to buy from. But the downside is that you get to miss out on the touch and feel experience of shopping – somehow despite all the chaos and mess of the roads and markets, I miss bump and grind experience of Indian shopping ( this is how Mr. Biyani of Foodhall and Pantaloon fame described shopping in his malls often criticised for having narrow aisles and a somewhat tacky feel. However I find shopping online shopping a real boon and have been using localbanya.com and bigbasket.com . Out of the two I prefer localbanya as believe it or not bigbasket had only ONE broom to choose from!
The Power of Hate

December 17, 2013

Love and Hate are two sides of the same coin. Or at least that I was given to believe by the silly adolescent love stories that I indulged in as a teen. Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland who were the reigning queens of romance in those days were full of heroines who “hated” the hero only to fall passionately in love with them before the last chapter.

I often wonder if love and hate are really two sides of the same coin and is it possible to hate someone with as much intensity as you once loved?

There are some people in this world who hate you much more than you possibly dislike/hate them – a feeling so deep rooted that they don’t cross your path lest your shadow falls on them. They are curt over the phone which you just happen to pick up when they want to speak to others in your house/office, they studiously avoid looking at you at functions which they just can’t avoid attending and judiciously avoid meeting you at functions they can avoid with excuses not to attend that are so flimsy that even a baby can see through.

Over the last fifty years, there are many such people who have come into my life and who have exited for reasons best known to them. Of course there are some obvious reasons as to why we stopped talking such as a family fight , differences between parents/siblings/children but there are many other battle lines drawn up by people who take sides. Or people who chose to misunderstand your actions and words, taking slight at the slightest of things, attributing motives that never even existed and generally assuming the mantle of “poor me” versus the “wicked you”.

These are the people I find strangest of all – those who are not actually involved in any confrontation but who choose to support what they assume to be the injured party without making any attempt at genuine arbitration or reconciliation between the warring factions. It is these people who make life even more difficult for the rest of the world who don’t know who’s talking to whom and who should be invited and or ignored.

There is no contention without a difference of opinion and sadly it is the drum which beats first that is heard first. Having got the first sound advantage, the “injured” party digs in his heels and makes sure he rallies enough support to sustain a long silence.I feel sorry for those flies on the wall who take sides because I’ve known time and again that adversaries get together and those who’ve taken sides often fall by the wayside becoming enemies of both.

History has shown that there are no real victors or losers in battle : each side wins some and loses some but the people who lose the most are those flies on the wall.

p.s. I’ve taken this picture off the net.
A lazy Sunday

December 15, 2013

With two stiff pegs of a smooth peaty Ardbeg I had a wonderfully blissful sleep last night and woke up fresh and ready to sieze the day. After a long time I had a Sunday with nothing really much to do. I spent a leisurely morning reading the papers, sipping my frothy coffee and munching away on hot buttered toast when I suddenly had the urge to visit the fish market.

The Municipal market at Grant Road has a fish and meat section which is quite dirty and messy and for many a month I preferred buying my fish through Pesca and the meat from Cafe Ridge. But today I felt the strong pull of the market calling out to me. So I picked up my basket and drove down to the fish market.

And how delightful it was to meet up with my old friends : Kala, the fisherwoman who wanted to swap her second son with my second daughter, Indrayani who is truly the belle of the bazaar with her fabulous skin, sharp features and sharper tongue and whose daughter is a computer engineer and whose grand daughter goes to Manekji Cooper and upmarket English Medium school in Juhu , Rekha who is the only one in the market who sells Sole and Indrayani’s aunt who sits across from her and is famous as the one who chased Pramod Navalkar (a now dead politician) out of the market when he dared ask for a discount. She sells the best lobster tails and I bought a dozen of them, which she cleaned up in a jiffy telling me that they are clean like the Brahmin, you just pull them out of the shell and you’re done!

Indrayani convinced me into buying a Surmai which she sliced into thin slices and I just had to buy some prawn from Kala which I made into a prawn pickle.

I am off now to enjoy the rest of the day with my family !

Shopping on a Sunday

The Power of Hate

A lazy Sunday