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 ke...

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 i...

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’...

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  a...

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 spec...

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 bu...

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 unive...

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 whi...

         Traditionally, we teachers are allergic to the multitasking from the students' side. But at times we need to take a closer look into what they are really doing. It was my professor, Dr Janaky Sreedharan who ignited my curiosity about this classroom phenomenon in one of digressions that are more interesting than her lectures on literary theory and criticism. I remember her words that " some draw fairly good pictures as they try to listen to a talk or lecture" I often wondered, apparently , some may draw or scribble something while trying to focus but it would hardly turn out to be a fair one. Anyhow, I have never forgotten that piece of insight and kept observing my students ever since.   One of my students is listening with his pen as I was busy giving instruction on reading skill in an ESP classroom.      Having taught around 4000 students  from India, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen for n...

     I regret many times I criticized my mother for the dishes she served.The list of reasons goes like- too hot and spicy,same dish for today also, not ready yet, no sugar, smell fishy or cockroach(our kitchen was cockroach ridden and we didn't have airtight storage or refrigerator on those good old days) and even taste spoiled if reheated.Now I realize the effort that goes into making food and the fact that she did the dishes,washed my cloths and made my bed all alone for not I paid her but out of pure selfless love.My wife is lucky for we started living together after this realization.      Recently I was thinking that no other job but  cooking requires the vigilant service of our all five senses.As we proceed , we need to touch to see the texture and consistency, look to see the color change, wait for the aromatic smell , sharpen our ears for a number of sounds like that of boiling , breaking, whistling,crispy-bake and we need t...

       This is one of the books  I revisit every now and then for it changed the way I live my life today.Despite the fact that it was on our reading list for post graduation,I never found myself reading it in original. It was one of my crazy classmates during my BEd, Yasoda that is what I preferred to call her for it seemed to me she was the wife of Lord Buddha in her earlier birth,made me read it.Here I have got it to let you  take a puff.... “Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’  Which of us was right, boss?”   Nikos Kazantzakis ,  Zorba the Greek “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and *look* fo...

         This beautiful piece  of a moment  was shot by my friend Dr. Ajmal as we were on an outing near Rock Garden, Aseer National Park, in the southern province of Saudi Arabia.The poeple over here still rear flocks of sheep for a living. Before the petrolium based economic boom...it was their sole source of job, income and food.And they wont seem to be in favor of letting their tradition die......       It is one of the oldest professions since the time of Adam and all the prophets,especially of Semitic religions, had been shepherds at least for a while in their life.