Carpentry, by the looks of it, is in my blood. My father, and my grandfather before him, all devoted chunks of spare time to wood. I remember chisels and hammers lying around the house from as far as I can remember. And let’s not forget all the sawdust. For someone with my respiratory system (smoke and dust are kryptonite to me), that’s not the easiest thing to forget.
After nearly a fortnight in Cuttack, I am on board the Konark Express heading back Mumbaiwards. Home was sweet and all but I could use a bit more of the monsoon. The train will pull up at Dadar station late at night.
I have leafed through a couple of magazines and am now forced to look beyond the confines of my top berth. A tiny baby civilisation of sorts has sprouted up down there. It started, methinks, after we passed Secunderabad. Mostly Andhra Pradeshis. Their leader, however is Oriya (the unmistakable tilak mark from Jagannath Puri on his forehead).
I am an Oriya. Which is another way of saying that I hail from the south-eastern Indian state of Orissa. You might remember it from news footage of 1999 when a super cyclone killed thousands there. Lately it has jumped in and out of news because of a six-year-old marathon runner, a sicko (with whom I share my second name) who raped a German tourist, and a regular starvation death story that is never far from the surface.
Long ago, when I small, tiny, miniscule, microscopic (you get the idea), I used to tuck a twig in the back of my shirt and climb some place high (two or three stairs for example) and cry, “Wha wha whaaah wha wha wha!” holding the twig aloft.
Much later, I figured it was actually, “By the power of Grayskull!” I watched He-Man on Sundays and thought about it for the rest of the week. That was the time when there was little else on TV by way of kiddie entertainment. So I was really nice to read this piece by Sam Anderson on Slate.
This seems like yesterday, but is actually what my life was like a year ago. I dug this up from my old blog. Typos intact. Sweet memories 
By the time I woke up yesterday, the day, as I know it, was long gone. Seems most in the apartment woke up rather enthu. A quick confused SMS conference and six found themselves stuffed in an auto which was obviously made for the driver alone. Plus, he cribbed. The usual!
Hmmm… Let’s see. I got a comment on the previous to previous post from a certain someone I knew in Chennai. I deleted it because it was off-topic. He commented however, as an employee of a dotcom that features and encourages creative writing. He was wondering if their site could have a parallel version of mypajama.com running on their servers. I had my reasons so I said no (I mailed him back because he was decent in his comment and had requested for a reply.) and forgot about it.