[jyotirmoy]

Since I started this thread so let me end it.
I had been successful this time, moonlit night in Old Fort.....
Had sent away my car so a chilly ride in an autorickshaw as no taxis could be had....
left side of my face frozen in the cold wind.... a few restoring gulps at home and then a tumbler of steaming hot Rasam and a crisp papad at Sagar ratna.... followed by Uttapam.... Dosas..... back home & Satyajit Ray's Pikoo followed by Bappaditya's Devaki. Its Friday already.

[gautam]

Jyotida,

You have become not just a godfather to all the monkeys visiting NDH, but a legend in your own lifetime, to use a most satisfying cliche. What is Indian English without cliches, before we shuflle off this mortal coil? (Wonder where newspaper editor got hold off that, and where it originates?) [Now that bit about monkeys, do we collectively disbar ourselves for a lifetime, on account of latent racism??]

As such, you cannot end a thread so easily! THe story is too barebones. What all happened during all your time with Yash, a play by play account, over by over, is needed. At your leisure, of course. At least a day by day recap. Did she not get to taste Delhi bhature? Inquiring minds want to know! What did you feed her for dinner at your home, bengali style? Did she forever get cured of her fascination with things bengali as a result? May we see photographs of her stricken countenance? Is she hiding because she has an elephant's trunk and a pot belly? We like that in our friends!

You may be an old fossil in spite of all your electronics expertise, but what's the use of having a modern daughter if she can't click off a bazillion digital snapshots with ease, and she an events manager?

[jyotirmoy]

This should have been Yash's thread so I will leave the rest to her. They had already filled up all their camera memory sticks in Delhi so photos will be attached I am sure. Finally a 80 GB hard disc had to be arranged... thanks to Shashank.

[iwanttogoback]

Quote

before we shuflle off this mortal coil?

care of wikepedia:

Mortal coil is a poetic term that means the troubles of daily life and the strife and suffering of the world. It is used in the sense of a burden to be carried or abandoned, most famously in the phrase "shuffle[d] off this mortal coil" from Shakespeare's Hamlet. (For more context of the phrase, see To be, or not to be.)


[edit] Derivation
Derived from 16th Century English, "coil" refers to tumults or troubles. Used idiomatically, the phrase means "the bustle and turmoil of this mortal life." [1] "Coil" has an unusual etymological history. It was coined repeatedly; at one time people used it as a verb to mean "to cull," "to thrash," "to lay in rings or spirals," "to turn," "to mound hay" and "to stir." As a noun it has meant "a selection," "a spiral," "the breech of a gun," "a mound of hay", "a pen for hens", and "noisy disturbance, fuss, ado."[2] It is in this last sense, which became popular in the 16th century, that Shakespeare used the word.

In fact, "mortal coil"—along with "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," "to sleep, perchance to dream" and "ay, there’s the rub"—is part of Hamlet’s famous "To be or not to be" speech. "Coil" is no longer used as a synonym for "disturbance."

[gautam]

Thanks, IW: I trust you have read [or can imagine] the earnest obituaries written in small-town English newspapers of decades past that invariably included this phrase and would leave me doubled up with laughter, as many naughty and interesting conjectures flashed through my mind, foils to the lugubrious earnestness of the authors.

[iwanttogoback]

don't you just get some absolute gems in those notices?

[gautam]

I wanted to make sure I was not mistakenly giving the impression that I was making fun of the editors themselves. Rather, the quaintness of phrasing and a certain plaintive quality in the small and simple lives described in these notices made my younger and naughty self amused. Now, I treasure the uncontrived earnestness, perhaps the honesty, of these simpler people ["upcountry" as we termed them, sitting in Calcutta!], especially when compared to the pseudo-intellectual airs of my own Bengal as well as to the hip, wicked slickness insinuating itself into every aspect of life in India.

I remember one such gentleman, approaching retirement, not a writer, but cut from the same cloth, sent on a study program, [a cockamamie enrichment idea] along with several much younger colleagues to a famous university on the east coast. "Fish out of water" does not begin to do justice to the poor man, ensconced in a graduate university dormitory with  bathrooms shared by both sexes. Horrors, the designs were such that each set of bathrooms included a separate shower isolated by a swinging door, ditto a bath, a toilet, and a set of sinks all set within a larger enclosed place, such that multiple use could occur. Thus a couple could be enjoying/starting  a hot bath with attendant shenanigans, while poor Xji might have been taking a shower or about to [worse, needing to, desperately!!!!!] use the [sole] toilet in that suite of rooms. Imagine!

And for a pure vegetarian from Patna, life in the University dining hall [where even the cream of mushroom soup was made from suspect stock] was pure torture. For the first few days, the man was on a fast, until the professors handed him over to me, for "care and feeding, thereof" for the duration of the semester. Poor guy! I immediately took him to an Indian restaurant where he inhaled a vegetarian thali and sat back with a sigh of pure joy! After that, he appointed himself my Father in Absentia, especially because of various points in common. Then I discovered his wife had packed an entire suitcase full of savories/namkeen and pedas for emergency rations, for exactly these sorts of situations. He had been carefully subsisting on these, not knowing how much to consume, because he had  5 months ahead of him! Oh boy, the cultural abysssssssss we needed to negotiate carefully to get this poor gentleman to survive. You can't begin to change someone at age 60! But this was the older, simpler India. He immediately wanted to share, no, give me all his precious hoard of food. Not just that, from the very next day, get this, the person who has not a clue about a single thing in America, NO real/intelligible ENGLISH, manages to track down the Indian student society all by his little self [why did he not do that before, when he was starving??], personally goes around to all the Indian and Bengali eligible females, and starts matchmaking for me!!

Xji feels, being unmarried at my age is unhealthy emotionally [very true] and by golly, he, is going to take up the cudgels for his adopted son, who saved him from starvation, sneaked in a rice cooker into his dorm room, fixed up matters so that he could make rice and curds and pickle every day for lunch. Get him married off, least he can do. So off he goes, hunting down every Chatterjee, Banerjee, and more besides.

I am teased out of my mind by everyone I meet on campus, the girls included! I beg Xji that i have no intention of ever marrying any of these ultra modern harridans and slowly bring him down to earth, telling him to find me a good village girl from India. I tell you, all this is so earnest, so touching, that a person so at sea in a foreign land should at once turn around and try to take on his "assigned" cultural role, his duty. That India is blinking out forever, the one that earnestly gave key to its watch.

[iwanttogoback]

Quote

I wanted to make sure I was not mistakenly giving the impression that I was making fun of the editors themselves. Rather, the quaintness of phrasing and a certain plaintive quality in the small and simple lives described in these notices made my younger and naughty self amused

gautam

i did not for a minute think that you were making fun of anybody, just that you enjoyed some of the verses.

and thankyou for that wonderful story.