I never thought
the day would come, when I would say, that I have developed a strong proclivity
for washing utensils. Our womenfolk are so lucky to be dabbling away at this
chore for generations!
If this were the
opening lines of a speech, I am sure a few awkward moments of silence would
have precipitated upon its completion. But even if this is to be read, as it is
being now, I am pretty sure, it has already equipped our snowflake millenials with
enough munition to start firing away judgements and abuses. To wit, I can see
from a mile away, epithets in varying degrees of calumny such as “What a
misogynist” or “Bloody male chauvinist”, or more patronizing pontifications
such as “I feel sorry for the poor boy, it boils down to his upbringing” or “He
needs to be put in his place” all in the process of being rolled up into one
big wrecking ball, that is soon to be despatched my way.
I should have
possibly thought twice before standing precariously close to a powder keg with
an alighted matchstick twirling around my fingers. In a country like ours, where
proliferation of social media has brazenly amplified, the polarization of opinions,
misconstrual of even those comments spoken with tongue firmly in cheek, and the
goading of pugnacious spirits of my fellow compatriots to take offence at the drop
of hat, I ought to have been more careful before aberrating from my usual
scrivening of non-controversial themes. Considering the intolerant times we
live in, we live in perpetual danger of angling towards some controversy of
sorts, which precariously waits to be dished up and served in mouthfuls.
But I will do my
best at explaining fully what I really want to convey and then people can
re-think and re-judge.
In late June, my wife and self returned back to Hyderabad from Chennai, where we were locked down
in my parent’s home since March. It was a conscious decision we took, weighing
the pros and cons of the perilous flight journey when the COVID-19 caseload in
India was just beginning to spiral out of control. The pro was simple, single
and straightforward – We missed the solitude of our own home, which
was waiting empty in Hyderabad, where we were miles away from the nearest
kith or kin. We could wake up when we wanted, roam around in more ‘comfortable’
clothing (otherwise considered unbecoming for a quasi-orthodox family) and have
our much desired privacy without the fear of prying eyes or
furtive ears. This incontestably was the sole incentive that drew us back to
our loveable alien city.
The arguments
notched up against the cons side of the ledger were more – We would certainly miss the
comfort of our familial company, the quality time we spent breaking bread
together, memorable dinner table banter with a skilled deipnosophist in the
form of myself calling the shots, games that we used to play such as Rummy,
Scrabble or Mastermind which weren’t touched for years, and newly cultivated
fitness fads that had become part of our daily routine in the lockdown
period. To boot, it was one of those rare stretch of weeks where I paid very
little from my pocket for running the household, which facilitated a tidy
accumulation of reserves in my bank account and most importantly, despite our
best intentions to partake in the household chores, we didn’t break much of a
sweat as we had ample help around the house – My father, my brother and I took
the onus of procuring all essentials for the house, I helped with the laundry, whereas
my wife and mother managed the household chores of cooking, utensil washing,
sweeping and floor mopping (since we deemed it too risky to avail the services
of our housemaid) with a bit of help from everyone chipping in from time to
time. In short it was a rather comfortable setup, but deep down I knew all
these fancy perks would come to an end sometime sooner than later. Which is why
when the government announced the resumption of flight services, despite the
huge risk of travel, I flirted with a major gamble, and booked a flight to get
back to the environs of my Hyderabad home. My decision was eventually
vindicated as thankfully neither my wife nor I contracted this debilitating
virus.
Now having made
ourselves at home, a difficult decision had to be made – how do we split the
household management? We were pretty used to having the cook and maid help take
a huge weight off the management of the household chores. The apportioning had
to be equal and impartial. I, of course offered to take the ownership of
groceries procurement/shopping and laundry management, as I am the more outdoorsy person, but I knew that simply wouldn’t cut enough mustard. My wife being a stickler for cleanliness, wasn’t too keen on handing over
the reins to me in the floor sweeping and mopping departments, knowing jolly
well that I would do an awful job at it. Considering that I was anyways neck
deep in capacity planning work, if capacity is what I plan, she was good enough
to take on bulk of the heavylifting, leaving me to gleefully lap up the less strainful of the lot. Well with the addition of one little thing, which I almost forgot - Washing Utensils. Little did I know, what I signed up
for!
Washing utensils
is a simple skill really that just needs a delicate pair of hands, and some
finesse in your fingers. You first bathe the piece of chinaware with running
water, then daub it with a bit of washing soap, and then massage its predominantly
steely structure for a few seconds, and then again bathe it in water before you
drop it off into a basket. Repeat this ritual over and over till you finish all
the utensils.
I must admit, the
initial days of this task wore me out, as I had no prior experience in this endeavor. Thanks to the flexibility of my schedule
I could always pencil in a 45 minute slot between 10 PM and Midnight, but my
approach to this hour of drear was marked with an air of significant lassitude.
The repulsive sight of overflowing vessels plonked up the sink gave me the
daily dosage of nocturnal blues.
My start in this
undertaking was not very successful either. Neither would, my timeliness or my
adeptness at wielding the culinary weapons, have qualified as a hissing and
byword. If I were to describe my initial performance with an arresting one-liner,
‘Making a mockery of the crockery’ would be a fitting critique! Within the
first week, I broke the handle of a tea pot and two plastic spoons, while giving
them an intense scrub. During the second week, too much of soap application
caused the cooker to slip from hands and break on its head. During the course
of the third week, I shattered my wife’s prized glass soup bowl, nearly causing
her a fit of apoplexy. In short, within one month, there were a handful of
mutilated goods that had been defenestrated, and my wife said she regretted
ever having asked for my favor and I was nearly forbidden from entering the
kitchen, during the witching hour of the sink!
But I persisted.
We Bharadwajs belong to a spirited clan. Of what use is a man of grit and
gumption, if he can’t get a grip on a vessel or two! It was a rejuvenated
Nikhil, who squared up at the old grind for round number two, albeit this time,
with a stratagem. I decided to use music as my companion for the duration of
this activity. My idea was that if I were to make a stultifying activity into a
more engaging one, I could use a source of divertissement. There, thankfully exists
a small pedestal atop the chimney right next to the sink, where I can mount my
mobile and also have a good screen view. Having ascertained that it was fit for
purpose, I decided to put it to good use.
So began the
second innings of my utensil washing sojourn. I re-started the activity with
the companionship of my usual playlist which hadn’t undergone much insertions
or outsertions since I transferred my favorite songs from my laptop to a newly
purchased One Plus 6T a couple of years back - A staid medley of world music –
A.R.Rahman Classics, peppy feel-good Kollywood numbers from Harris Jayaraj,
Beatles, New Age Albums such as Voyage and Enya, and Indian Fusion/Rock bands such
as Agam and Local Train etc. Little did I know, this would bridge the vast chasm of memory lost to the recesses of time and form my re-union with long forgotten music which I last heard in my teens
and even before that. I caught up with one of my favorite techno-pop bands Kraftwerk
whose tunes I addictedly played on loop (purely going by my parent’s hearsay)
when I was a toddler and devoured every single album of my favorite bands - Enya
and Massive Attack which we used to listen frequently on long car journeys in
my boyhood. I fossicked for my favorite 90’s songs such as Colonial Cousins,
Vande Mataram, Deva’s Kollywood chart-busting Gaana songs (some of which are
not in Youtube), which stirred up a heady brew of childhood nostalgia. And to
top it all, thanks to the effective inveigling of Youtube Recommendations, which
the fellows working at it seem to be doing a dashed good job of it, paved way
for my bonding with newer genres of music which I socially distanced myself from, despite years of persuasion from friends and cousins! I decided
to give Linkin Park, Metallica, Akon and Eminem a try which never caught my attention
even two decades ago, when it was a rage with my pals, as I had deemed it to
be too philistine for my own liking. My pre-conceived notions finally came to
light now, as listening to them, I realized, there was more to it than what met the
ear (with a slight tweak of the more acceptable phrase). In all honesty, I
enjoyed them and realized that there is a certain meditative cadence about
music, which is soothing to the soul, and acts as a sedative to the fingers
that ply the vessels.
It didn’t stop
with music. It laid a neat segway into other kinds of informative videos on
science, technology, psychology, sport etc. In the four months that have lapsed
since then, I have seen atleast 50 insightful Ted X talks on topics such as
Increasing Productivity, Creative Writing, Sustaining Relationships, Healthy
food habits and lifestyles. I have devoured videos on Artificial Intelligence
and Big Data that has always piqued my interest over the last several years,
but that remained no more than piqued thanks to my purportedly ‘frenzied’ work
life in Pre-COVID times. I have subscribed to several ‘for the most
part unbiased’ Youtube channels such as The Economist, Khan Academy, National
Geographic Channel, Science Insider, Fire of Learning and many other smaller
channels (in both English and Tamil) which have drip fed my thirst for
knowledge in a neat manner on various fields across the spectrum such as
Politics, Science, Geography, History, Literature etc.
The cliché that ‘The
most negative thing about 2020 has been the word positive’ has been employed
ad-nauseum and I feel sickened whenever I hear this line. I don’t know how many
real tangible positives are there that we could take away this year, but surely
there is one according to me, which is the seemingly notional concept of a
temporal slowdown. Short of saying the world has ground to a resounding halt,
it would be undeniable to admit that there seems to be more time in all our
hands. In pre-COVID days, life careened at a dizzying pace, seemingly providing
no time for anything outside of the usual fixtures of quotidian life. But now a
few useful hours have been reimbursed to the 24-hour circadian rhythm. Of late
I have been sleeping for 9 solid hours a day, and have woken up with the
insouciance of a man, who knows there is no need to hurry, gladdened by the knowledge that food is a
stone’s throw away, and comforted by the fact that there are no physical distances to be covered and the
provider of my daily bread - The laptop is at a touching distance. There is
suddenly more time to pursue hobbies such as to read books, to take a few
potshots at writing the premise for my first novel which never got beyond a few
pages or to pick up and polish the short story ideas that have littered my laptop over the years, to do a solid one hour session of Yoga or Walk
or to initiate little virtual connects with close friends and relatives across
the globe. In short there is a profusion of ‘Me Time’. The concept of weekend
has blurred, as all days look pretty much the same (I have time to watch a movie
on the morning of a Tuesday, and if needed I could even clock in a couple of
hours of work on a Sunday) and as a result, the notional feeling of Monday
Blues has also diminished significantly.
To top it all, I
owe a little note of thanks to this wonderful little hobby (having accorded it with a well-deserved promotion from a chore) which has wrought about a thirst for knowledge and
learning. I no longer view vessels with the weariness of a looming ennui,
instead I look upon it as a 45 minute capsule of learning and knowledge enhancement.
Yet another rare benison of a wretched year! So much for a damn virus which research has
proclaimed to be ten thousand times smaller than a grain of salt!
