The Daily Post : Perfection

In response to daily post’s prompt : Perfection

When I think about perfection, my cooking comes to mind. Over the years I’ve tried cooking, baking, I’ve followed recipes from all kinds of cookbooks, Italian, French, American, Australian, Indian and Bengali. I have a large collection, I bought most of them and also some are gifts from friends and family.

There is one thing I noticed about myself, I do not go for perfection but I’m happy if it comes out all right in taste and look. I remember one time I spent a lot of time baking cookies, mostly for my kids, who were great lovers of cookies, they’d leave their regular meals for cookies.

Once my brother visited us from Halifax with his kids. I served him and his family with tea and my home made cookies, he looked at them, there was a variety of them. He  asked, “Where did you buy these?”

I told him, “I baked them.”

He was genuinely surprised, he pointed them to his wife and said, “Ranu baked these.”

I knew then he was impressed. I wouldn’t say they were the best, but they were tasty.

When I have dinner parties, there are times when out of six items one of them turns out not so good. I feel embarrassed but the guests are very generous, they’d say, “No it’s perfect.”

I wasn’t able to do a perfect job in my cooking, something or the other always went wrong. I sometimes wonder is there a perfect cook?

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The Daily Post, Prompt: Open

In response to daily post’s one- word prompt : Open

I have observed elections held in many countries,there is one thing quite disturbing among the candidates is open hostility they show against each other. To me it sounds childish, if a candidate is not doing so well in winning over the population, they seem to try and start a smear campaign against the candidate who is doing better than them.

These candidates are supposedly adults with a sound mind, why would they use this kind of tactics? Aren’t they setting a wrong example for the young people or do they not care?

It’s if I don’t get you I will by exposing one of the members of your family. Some day I hope to get elected a candidate would not be allowed to  show open hostility towards another candidate.

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The Daily Post Prompt: Natural

In response to daily posts one-word prompt :Natural

Today I’m tempted to write a post comparing fake and genuine. Fake is artificial and Genuine is natural.

Many years ago in the Kolkata movie industry, actors used to fake their voices to make it more appealing for the audience. They thought their natural voices were not interesting enough which is why their movies were not box office hits.

The first actor who thought it was wrong was Uttam Kumar Mukherjee. He explained that it was not the artificial voice or fake acting that was important for a movie to do well, it was how the actor presents himself. With this in mind he made movies in which he did not try to fake his voice but spoke naturally.

His understanding was as a common individual we do not change our voice to sound impressive, we speak like an ordinary person. Uttam spoke naturally and soon everyone realized how irritating an artificial voice sounds.

He made several movies and was considered the best actor in his generation.

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The Daily Post Prompt, prompt : Understanding

I response to daily post’s prompt : Understanding

The synonyms of understanding are quite a few, they are Grasp, Knowledge, Compassion,Sympathy, Kindness,Belief and many others.

For some reason I thought of William Shakespeare’s quote: “Be not afraid of greatness, some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”

I’m only interested to talk about one particular person. his name was Muhammad Iqbal. His father Nur Muhammad dreamed of a bird with colorful feathers flying in the sky, while the crowd watching it wanted to get the bird, it miraculously landed on Nur Muhammad, being a religious person his interpretation of the dream was, he’d be blessed with a son, who would achieve greatness.

When the son was born, he named him, Iqbal which literally means,’Fortune or Glory.’

Iqbal fulfilled the dream of his parents. He studied hard and eventually climbed the ladder of success. He was a Poet and Philosopher.

I was fortunate to know and read about Iqbal  in the online courses offered by Khurram Ali Shafique, who has written the biography and other books on Iqbal.There are a lot of things I’ve learned from this online course. In our latest lesson we were learning about Self.

According to Iqbal the Self has two sides, ‘the Efficient and the Appreciative.’  The Efficient Self is concerned with and is partially formed by the physical world, it discloses itself as a series of specific and consequently numerous states. Which in simple words, means,  Our day to day life of work,rest, eat, play or watch TV.

The Appreciative Self is the deepest self. We can only be aware of it when we are in profound meditation when the Efficient Self is temporarily inactive.

The elements of Appreciative Self is different from that of  Efficient Self. While the Efficient Self is serial time as in clock time. The elements of Appreciative Self is pure duration, it’s duration is a ceaseless continuous flow in which all things live and move and have their being. As human beings perfect their Ego-hood , they get rid of what limits them; which is serial time and gain a measure of eternity.

It has taken me a while to comprehend the difference between our two Selves. I think I now understand.

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The Daily Post : Simplicity

In response to daily post’s one-word prompt : Simplicity

This prompt i.e., “Simplicity,” comes at a time when I wonder if this word has any value. All my life I have tried to be who I am, I lead a very simple life, I say very little and most of the time I’m very quiet, I never try to present myself as a know it all.

One of my friends’ once said, “Sabeth you’ll never have any enemies, you are so quiet.”

I smiled and said, “You are wrong, Prasad, but I do.”

He looked at me and said, ” I do not believe it how could you, you never say a word?”

I told him what I discovered from a classmate of mine when she decided to come with me to the library. After complaining about a fellow classmate, she told me she thought I was a very proud person, what gave her the idea, because I was so quiet.

Prasad was surprised how someone could come to this  conclusion.

Guess what I found out, maybe I’d write it later.

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The Daily Post :Mountain

In response to daily post.s one-word prompt: Mountain

The word mountain makes me think of piles of work I need to do, I’ve been putting it off till later, unfortunately I find myself losing sleep over this unfinished job that I keep thinking about.

The problem lies in my big old basement, every time I look at it I wonder,where did all these things come from, I certainly didn’t hoard them, who’s the culprit, well there is one, she doesn’t let go off anything and believe me some of them are not worth a dime, but they are there taking my much needed space.

I’ve warned a few times I won’t look at them but put them in the garbage bags for next week’s collection. It hasn’t sunk in yet for she thinks it’s an  empty threat. I have planned to get the lawn care people to look in and take them out.What irritates me is  I have to pay someone to get rid of them.

If I had done it last year, it would have been lot simpler all I had to do was to call the city and make an appointment to pick up my bulk garbage. I didn’t do it, this year the councillors of the city decided in a meeting  the city will no longer pick up bulk garbage and each resident has to take care of their own.

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The Daily Post: Connected

In response to the daily post’s one-word prompt: Connected

I grew up away from all our cousins,uncles,aunts,grandparents. In other words, we were completely unaware of having any relatives. It wasn’t too bad we were growing up with our parents and siblings. I never felt I was missing something.

When we moved to a new city, I started hearing my classmates talking about their, aunts, uncles, grandparents, I began to think do I have the kind of relatives they have, if so where are they, who are they, are they nice like my classmates’ relatives?

One day after school I sat with my mom and asked her, “Mom do I have uncles, aunts,cousins and grandparents.?

Mom, smiled, looked at me and said, “Sure you also have them.”

“But I haven’t seen them, why don’t they visit us?”

My mom realized to satisfy my curiosity she’ll have to explain my why question.

She told me, “we live far away, it’s very expensive to travel that far.”

Her answer made me feel better, thinking I can tell my classmates, I have a whole bunch of cousins,uncles, aunts, just like them only they live far away, it’s expensive to travel, so we are unable to see them.

Then the day came my dad said, “we’d go to Bangladesh for our summer holidays.”

I was so excited, I couldn’t wait to go and see my cousins,aunts and uncles. I noticed my older sister wasn’t that enthused, she made her famous grouchy face.

The day of our journey, she showed all kinds of attitude, she wanted to stay behind, my dad didn’t allow that. I remember each time my dad would get some food for us, my sister had her angry face, she’d refuse to eat. Dad got frustrated and said, “Why did you come, if you’re going to behave like this?”

Of course she did say she didn’t want to go, and dad refused, she didn’t have enough nerve to tell him, she did say she did not want to go. My father would then give her a long lecture, how he was spending so much money to give us education in the best schools in the city, hoping we’d learn how to treat our elders. My sister was wise enough to stay off  this subject.

Finally we landed in Dhaka Airport, our uncles came to get us, Boy, was I excited. I thought inwardly, now I’d have a chance to talk about my relatives, when I go back to school.

We stayed with our Dad’s brother for a few days, then we were on the train going to Cheora in Bangladesh, it’s a village where my maternal grandparents lived. Our aunts were excited to see us all. One of my aunts’ fried some prawns for dinner, was it ever good. I then discovered gur it’s jaggery. Here is a wikipedia image below. I cannot explain how delicious it was, it’s a block of sugar made from cane. It tasted heavenly, mom used it to make desserts of different kind.

We were having a great time, but one day my cousin Lily wanted me and my younger sister to jump in the pond for fun, we stayed at the shallow end, suddenly my cousin wanted us to go a little deeper because the water was cleaner. I stayed back but my sister was adventurous, she and Lily kept moving deeper, then the worst happened my sister was drowning none of the adults were there, luckily mom had just come, she jumped to rescue my sister, she did but word went all over in the village that my sister had drowned. My dad was very angry, he told us we were not allowed to go to the pond anymore.

After that episode we spent our time roaming around in Grandpa’s favorite fruit garden. Two months passed in a flash, we went back. Boy did I ever have tons of stories to tell my classmates about all my relatives. How we enjoyed getting connected with them for the first time!

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The Daily Post: Playful

In response to the daily post’s one -word prompt: Playful

There were many a time when my playful joke did not sit well with my friends. They think I’m sarcastic when I’m really joking. I guess my childhood is responsible for that, I sort of try to imitate my Dad, not thinking that my father wasn’t joking when he’d call me and say, “Ma take this food for your mother.”

I thought my Dad was being nice, but oh no mom pointed out this was his way of saying the food is not worth eating.

I recall saying things to my friend, which in my mind is a joke, the reply from them is, “Can’t you hear the sarcasm in your voice?”

I once said something to one of my students, meaning it to be funny, he gave me a look and then blurted out, “Not funny Miss.”

It’s a lot safer to tell the felines, “Hey Fatso you are eating too much!” It’s Gabriel who hears that quite often, but he continues chomping down his and Raphael’s food.

Imagine if I said that to a human by mistake, they’d never see me again. This is the difference between humans and felines in our case, we only have those two gremlins in our house.

When I was little, my brothers used to call me mootki, i.e fatso in English. Once my dad heard it, he warned my brothers, if they called me mootki again he’d take them to task. I was never fat, so it really did not bother me.

Playful jokes can be hurtful as my mom would say, they hurt ones self confidence.

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Daily Prompt: CHAOS, the daily post

Today’s daily post one-word prompt is: Chaos

The world as I see it is experiencing chaos in different ways. There is a terrible fire raging in ‘Fort MCMurray,’ in the province of Alberta, Canada. Thousands of people are homeless and are staying in temporary shelters. Lot of people have lost their homes due to this tragedy.

We Canadians are trying our best by donating money, and some people are also donating clothes. This fire has cost the insurance companies more than several billion dollars. This particular fire is weather related, the place is dry and the temperature is high. We all are praying for rain which can be very helpful.

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Daily Prompt: Lucky Star

Today is your lucky day. You get three wishes, granted to you by the Daily Post. What are your three wishes and why?

I once read a quote by someone, “If wishes were horses beggars would ride on them.” If I think of beggars, their wish most certainly would be food, shelter and clothes. These  three things are not easy for them  to achieve. Hence they go from door to door in search of food, clothes and sometimes shelter if they are really lucky.

Since I do not fall in the above category, I wonder what I’d wish for since The Daily Post is so generous. My three wishes are : 1. Interesting prompts, 2. Writing exercises, 3. Availability of images.

Interesting Prompts: motivates us to write longer posts that will draw more readers.

Writing Exercises: It is something I picked up from Lilly Ferrin’s , five sentence fiction. It works well for me. I get more readers.

Availability of images: when I started blogging, every time I wrote a post ,there were a lot of images by Wikipedia relating to the subject which made my work much easier. We don’t get them anymore, it’s not easy to get images to fit the subject I write about, some of them do not allow me to copy their images.

These are my three wishes, I’d be glad if my three wishes can be fulfilled.

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