Edible Shoots

     As we prepare to bid farewell to 2014, with another Christmas warming our hearts and hearths, I want to share the following reflections with you.      Someone asked me recently how I celebrate Christmas (or I might have brought it up myself). Not sure how or why, but it made me look back at my college days. I fondly remember exchanging gifts with a special person in my life and enjoying a piece of cake in good company. However, this only partially answers the question, at a certain - social - level. At a deeper level, two beautiful stories come to mind, ones that (to me) are inextricably bound up with Christmas.       The first story is "Christmas Day in the Morning" by Pearl S. Buck, which I first read during my school days. The second is "The Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry, which I read while I was at college.And both of these authors are my life favorites ever since.      I keep revisiting them even now. Every Christmas is a call for the

I treat myself to the weekly luxury of going online to indulge my never-ending curiosity. In so doing I recently stumbled upon “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence” by Daniel Goleman. Quite impulsively I clicked the “buy” button, much to my own surprise (as I am naturally thrifty). What’s done is done – but I have no regrets. I have fallen in love with this book and now keep revisiting it. Goleman is mesmerizing with a piercing intellect and a conquering feather touch of intimacy. Daniel Goleman is no stranger to those in the field of education. His revolutionary work on emotional intelligence has made him an ever shining star among both educators and corporate mentors.   Practically all of us have gone online only to realize, many hours later, that we have little concrete to show for the last few hours of clicking. There is simply no end to our unchecked online wanderings as we pursue one pop-up and one link after the other. This is an exceedingly common phenomenon in th

I am not yet able to sort out whether it is a fact or not that every good chef has got his own thump rules. He uses his own gut feeling for proportionate measurement and timing which is indescribable.   It is   a recent realization to me that   there is a measurement in every creation. Everything that god created keep a kind of symmetry in form, acceleration in movement, proportion in its composition, balance in growth, and making. I think we too need to practice it in every efforts. You may wonder what I am talking. Yes I am talking about our time we spend and things we use to make anything. We know how much and how many of most of the things we use as such or the things we use to make something new. But when somebody asks, we just can't seem to give him a correct measurement of time and stuff used. Lately, I made a cake and as it happened to be one, I dared to present it to a friend. He   bombarded me with a lot of questions for which I don’t have any answ

If you want to flatter me by asking how I made it, I am credulously glad to share all what I know about it.But my happiness vanishes as I go ahead with recipe.I just cant say how to do it but show if you are patient enough.

It is almost the end of the spring in Abha – and yet all plants are still in full bloom. The pomegranate commands my love and respect. If you asked me why, my ready answer would be: I don’t know. But the question remains for me to answer for myself so I dig deep to find the reason.            My infatuation with this plant and its flowering plumage has turned six this beautiful spring. We started out as nodding acquaintances, but our relationship has ripened into an inseparable intimacy. She has never let me down. As I walk by the orchard, tended by an elderly Pakistani man, she greets me with all her twigs in a nodding gesture, no matter if I stop by for a chat or not. I stand in awe of her beautiful visual appeal, her richness in nutrition and her wide use in natural healing, all of which have made her name mentioned in almost all the scriptures of the world religions.     Anar  is the Urdu word for pomegranate, and  anarkali   انارکلی    is the word for its blossom. It s

Sorry to say that I am afraid you may feel that I am advertising myself. But I cant resist this request from one of my colleagues. So, this time, please be happy with this guest posting by Erich Beer from South Africa.  Here goes  what he has got to say in his own words... My friend Jabir This guest post is at my request. The topic was unprompted. I first met Jabir during exam invigilation at the end of the first semester. I was recovering from an illness at the time and feeling really weak. I had to sit down several times during the two hours of the invigilation. Jabir and I exchanged a few bits of conversation during the two hours. When we departed he asked me for my email address and gave me his. He said: Remember, my name is Jabir. I emailed him almost straightaway to give him some information he had asked for. However, for me it wasn't primarily about the information - I was hoping I would get to know him better. I instinctively knew there was something very special a

I still can't remember to my god's glory, the poet who wrote the lines in my mother tongue that can be roughly translated as… "Life is a night rain. It would all be over, by the time we get up" ( Jeevitham oru rathri mazha Nam unarumbozhekkumathu chornirikkum) Every rain brings this couplet into my mind but always untagged with the name of the poet. I am still looking for him to kiss the soil under his foot. It rained heavily for two days in Abha and we got an additional day on our spring break. In my six years stay in Abha, I have never seen such a big shower on the top of the city before. I feel like a lazy Sunday morning back home rained overnight. Pouring memories on landscape of mind, leaving me totally wet in nostalgic reminiscence. Splashing muddy water to …we used to tread  on every puddle of water on our way and  back to school. Either side of the road form a kind of makeshift canal for us to build bunds and dams…It drives me crazy as I stroll

You are your words. Make the most of them.            So proclaims the cover jacket of American Heritage Dictionary of English Language (AHD). And it won’t take much time to prove it as we start our journey along. We need words for anything and there is a word for everything. Our task is to avail the exact one at the most demanding times. AHD is the name we can trust for that.       I owned one only recently. Actually, I was persuaded by my colleague Prof. Gulam Hussain Habeeb to buy one and I gain in gratitude as I keep using it. I hold that Bengali writer in high respect for he translated Five Hundred Years of Solitude to Bengali. To tell you what I feel after I began to use it is amazing. I really fell in love with. As I come home exhausted after a long session in the evening, I find it handy and allow myself wander through its pages. I get to know so many things with pictures that I see around for years but no idea about what to call them in English. I have a strong se

If I can still take Aristotle seriously for his “well begun is half done” precept, I don’t have to read anything more for the next six months but to reflect on my New Year pick Teaching Literature by Elaine Showalter. A New Year eve with the words of a brilliant teacher and  a few days we hanged around were life enhancing. I know her from my BA final year. She took us the other day to the wilderness. And now to the labyrinthine world of teaching and teaching literature in higher education in particular. She penned it drawing on her 40 years of teaching around the world and we get it in 176 pages. As I finished reading the book, I felt I should have read it the day I somewhat answered the question: What I want to do with my life?. If I had by any chance, me and my teaching would never have been the same. I think many of my friends read it years back for I read some of them quote her often. Four years ago, one of my close friends joined a university as an assistant profess