Vallahi antha miya miya ya dactoor......(By Allah you are the best... doctor)

-
Arab students are usually frank in their behavior. On the other day, I insisted one to keep his mobile switched off. He said that his mother would be upset to see him unavailable as she would try. I love to see it as frankness.  If they love you, they will find a way to say it. Most of them are quite verbal about it. I often hear them talking pleasing things to me. But I never take it seriously and prefer to see it as flattery expecting a favor from my side soon. But here is a strange way a student of mine chose to do it. 

Despite instruction to submit  assignments in A4 sheet, this medical student did it in a book with a prong snap buttoned leather flap. Maybe, he was afraid of falling something off . As this semester is to be over, obviously busy clearing all the works in pending on my desk. I was thumbing through the pages to double check if I haven’t marked this one yet or not. My fingers and eyes could only marvel at this piece of poetry… a white rose dried and flattened by getting sandwiched between pages. Roses are not rare presents to us. I don’t accept them for I know they are plucked from university rose garden and sometimes warn them not to do it again.


Then, you may wonder why this one matters. Yes… it is a white rose and we don’t have white ones recently. It is from a fairly good student at this fag end of the semester. So I guess he meant it by every possible way for I can’t see any reason to be it the other way around. Strangely enough, he hasn't t turned up yet to take the book back… 2013 bids farewell with a pleasant note. With prayers and all the best wishes… Happy  Xmas and Happy New Year.

Comments

  1. ErichMarch 4, 2014 at 6:03 AM

    I have to confess that I pick at least one rose from the university's gardens every week. I started with one but am now on to two. I have a little statue of The Buddha (who I think is the best exemplar of humanity ever - you will disagree for understandable reasons) in my bedroom, and I put the roses next to it. I don't have a vase so I improvise and use an empty can.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Earth in Her Hands

-
Image
  The Earth in Her Hands is a book by Jennifer Jewell that covers 75 extraordinary women in the world of plants . It tells us stories of womenfolk who put their life into plants, or the plants chose them to live their life with. Like most exciting things happening in my life, I stumbled upon this title recently while researching a related project online. It was love at first sight, and I got addicted to it while listening to the book on Audible, waiting outside our university dental clinic for my wife to have an appointment. Thanks, Dr. Abdul Qadar, for a three-hour long session on an emergency basis before he leaves for his home for the annual vacation. Each woman has a unique plant journey to relate to, which will take us for a ride through the ever-exciting botanical world. They are cherry-picked from various fields like botany, garden nursery, floral design, garden, photography landscape architecture, farming, seed banks, herbalism, and food justice. The common thread all these
Read more

A Breakfast with Elements at the Heights of Habla

-
Image
        There was a time when I lived in a sleepy, cold town all alone, having the luxury of a lovely friend, a small car, and a camera. We roamed around the places, exploring things no mortals we knew ever dared to. Once, he came up with a plan to watch the sunrise and had breakfast sitting on the top of a huge boulder, crowning the edge of a mountainous height and cutting steep slope that people feared to peep down. The mountain peak known as Habla is one of the peaks on the Aseer Mountain range, which is part of the Sarawat Mountains, running parallel to the Red Sea’s eastern coastline, extending the Hijaz Mountain range to the Southern borders of Saudi Arabia.                                               Part of the plan was to start way earlier so that we could watch the sunrise, and December was never kind to the people of this part of the world. Being so precarious and knowing much more about what was happening around me, I said no without sounding blunt. Still, I had to follow
Read more

Mandi: From Pen to Plate in 11 Frames

-
Image
Mandi (مندي) is a special steak and rice dish, a staple at special occasions such as Eid, parties, and wedding feasts among Arabs. Originating in Hadhramouth, Yemen, it soon made inroads into the entire Arabian peninsula, Sub-Saharan Africa, and recently the Southeast Asian countries too, mostly on account of its oil-free and exotic style of cooking. In short, the fat from suspended meat drips onto the rice being cooked underneath. The meat gets exquisitely tender, which is probably why the name "mandi" (from nada ندى meaning 'dew' or 'snowflakes') was chosen. Mutton (preferably lamb), chicken, and camel are the usual meats prepared this way.  Let us start with a three-month-old lamb raised nibbling on tender blades of subtropical desert grass and shrubs, often roaming free on vast stretches of the mountainous landscape. At the peak of summer, these lambs even dig up the land and eat the roots of plants underneath. A pit is dug about four feet d
Read more