When The Building Came Alive

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Kasturi Dhama Apartments — the play area where many evenings came alive. The lights would go out without warning. For a brief second, the entire building would fall silent. Then, from somewhere in Kasturi Dhama Apartments, a chorus would erupt. “Yayyy!” It is difficult to imagine children celebrating a power failure today. But in the Bangalore of the nineties and early 2000s, a power cut did not always feel like an inconvenience. Especially in the late evenings, it felt like permission. Permission to stop whatever we were doing, leave the darkness inside our homes, and step into the building outside. Before Kasturi Dhama became home, we had moved through a few different parts of Bangalore. My family had begun in Srirampuram and Vyalikaval before gradually cementing ourselves in Malleswaram for the next few decades. My earliest memory is of living in a vatara —a Kannada word loosely used for a building or a cluster of homes—on 15th Cross, near Karur Vy...
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Food for thought

It is winter time in Stuttgart,
Better to live on bread and jam tarts,
But come you have from Bangalore,
Where food you have galore!!

An early wake up call,
Takes you to the breakfast hall,
And all you get to see,
Gives enough reasons to flee!!

No reason to think twice,
To eat what you despise,
If you get to be chosy,
Life cannot be any rosy!!

A hurried breakfast and a run,
In the cold and no trace of the sun,
To catch the bus in a few miles,
Can give you no morning smiles!!

As you get ready for lunch,
And absolutely have no hunch,
The food prepared last night,
Will it end up alright?

As you prepare the food to heat,
You realise it is no mean feat,
To eat self prepared food,
Which is not all that good!!

Soon, Dinner time it is,
You don't want to miss,
To try out something new,
So what if you eat a few!!

You learn at last,
That to cook good and fast,
Practice once, twice and thrice,
Before you pay the same price

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