5 Life Lessons My Mother Taught Me (and Some Of Which Backfired)

With Mum and older sis

1. Bur keh thei a thil sa thun dawnin a bur tih lum phawt tur (Preheat a glass jar before pouring something hot into it). This came about one evening when I'd been heating pork fats and pouring the liquid into a glass jar which began to crack, spilling away the precious fat. Mum then gave me this piece of advice which I've never forgotten. She was like that, full of common sense and practical wisdom. I don't think she knew everything but in crunch situations, somehow she always had the knack of coming up with a practical solution to the problem.

2. Rizai sin lam zawng bik neih loh tur (Don't use just one side of a quilt or blanket, as the case might be) This one came when I once complained I needed a new quilt because the edge of one side was badly torn and dirty. She got me to bring it to her and on inspecting it, tut tutted disapprovingly. "Do you always use it just this side up?" she asked. "Yes Mum." "Well, you shouldn't do that. Use both sides, otherwise you'll quickly wear out the one side you use." Right, this one taught me to be adaptable and has stood me in good stead in several other things in life.

3. Mipa hnathawk bulah nula an thu mai mai ngai lo (Young ladies shouldn't sit around doing nothing beside working men) In an all-female family of four sisters and a widowed mother, we often needed male help around the house and usually took on hired hands. Sometimes they would be guys we knew well - neighbourhood guys who'd come over after dinner and watch TV or just drop in for some timepass. We liked those days when they'd be working on some very hard manual work and we'd hang around talking to them. That's when Mum would drop her admonitory stinker. The catch was we never did quite understand what exactly she meant. Don't distract working men or if you want to talk to working men, give them a hand. We assumed she meant the first and would quickly go looking for something productive to do elsewhere.

4. Mi mawl biak loh tur. An hminga koh zel tur (Address people by their names. It's rude just talking to people blankly) This was something Mum drilled into us right from the time we were little kids. She insisted it was impolite and rude asking people questions or just blurting out things point blank. Instead we were to always say, "Pu Biak, khawnge i kal dawn?" or "Ni Tlan, thingpui i duh em?" Mum drummed this into us so thoroughly that much later in life, there were often times when I'd meet acquaintances whose names I couldn't remember and end up passing by without a word or avoiding eye contact altogether. I've now learnt to let go of Mum's lesson in certain situations and acknowledge people with a word or a nod or a smile without actually remembering their names.

5. Aia upa zah tur (Respect your elders) Again a lesson I learned so well I sometimes have trouble with the flip side of it - respecting my juniors. Sigh, how terribly complicated life is.

The Day Police Came to Get Me

Last week it was. The day started lazily enough with no indication of what lay in store. Wednesdays are my off-days at work but I was supposed to attend this get-together at 1 to meet an online overseas acquaintance who was in town. As four of us were speeding along, 45 minutes late, to the other side of town in a cab, my phone rang. It was my sister at home. She said worriedly, "Three policemen have just come in and want to see you." I went, "Who, me? What for?" She said she didn't know, they wouldn't say. Just that the OC at Bawngkawn Police Station had sent them to pick me up. My heart did flip flops as I racked my beanos on why they could possibly want me. Had someone made a complaint about something I said? Something I'd done years and years ago? Something I ate? Case of mistaken identity? I told my sister to give them my cell phone number and say I was tied up at the moment but would report at the station at 3. Ok, they reportedly said after confirming with their boss, 3 pm.

Unfortunately, the meet was still underway at 3 and no one seemed to realise time was tick tocking away. Amazing how some people can talk, by the way. Finally, my phone rang again. One of the men in khaki, in fact, the big boss man the OC himself. It seemed urgent and then it struck me that it must have something to do with a parcel I'd sent by speed post the previous day. "Is this about my parcel?" "Yes, ma'am, can you tell us the contents of the parcel?" "Um items of clothing, a book..." "That's all?" "I think so, magic jelly..." The officer, who had a very nice courteous tone of speaking, chuckled, "Magic jelly?" "Yes sir, ohhhh wait, I also put in a lighter in the shape of a pistol." "Ahhhh, a lighter shaped like a pistol?" "Yes sir, a gas lighter." "Well ma'am, can you come to the main post office so we can open it in your presence?" Silly me went, "Oh, why don't you just open it now? It's not anything dangerous, really." "Ma'am, we really would like to have you around when we do that. We'll wait for you in the speed post section." "Alright, I'll try to be there around 3.30."

The party finally split, after a spell of silly group photography, and I didn't tell anyone anything, just that I had to go to the post office. Only the speed post master was there when I arrived. He offered me a seat and said the police and parcel weren't there yet but a CID man was. Whoa - CID?! I was starting to feel terribly silly and uncomfortable. He was very nice and polite too but took down my name and particulars, the recipient of the parcel, etc etc. He said the people at the airport had seen the gun shape under x-ray and called in the police. Double whoa. He asked what size was the lighter and was it bigger than his gun, at which, to my horror, he whipped out from his trouser pocket a small pistol. "Oh, much smaller than that," I assured him hurriedly.

Then the police arrived with the condemned parcel. We ripped it open and I drew out the contents. A couple of chocolate bars fell out. I'd forgotten I'd packed those for a sweet-toothed someone. And then the suspicious item. Everyone began laughing and one policeman asked where I'd got it from and was it very expensive. Another said, "On the airport x-ray monitor it had looked much bigger and completely lifelike. If it'd been made of plastic, it wouldn't have been so suspect but with it being metallic, it was just too much!" I had to restitch the parcel packaging and since the post office didn't have needles or threads, the CID guy kindly said he knew a place just down the corner where I could do the needful and took me to a tailoring shop. After my parcel was neatly stitched up again, I went back to the post office and got it redeposited.

When I got home, my sister was in a tizzy. And in my mortification, I'd completely forgotten to call and let her know what was happening so she'd been just about climbing walls. Needless to say, when I related the whole crazy story, both my sisters thoroughly ticked me off for my idiocy and imbecility. One reminded me of how I'd once had my nailcutter confiscated from my handbag at the airport check-in. Ooops yes, when will I ever learn?

The offending object of suspicion

English as she is goodly writen

Perhaps it's because I teach English and have had a lifetime's fill of grammatical and constructional monstrosities. Or perhaps I'm just plain finicky and nitpicky but I detest people who cannot write correct English. Now speaking is a different matter altogether. Not being a native speaker myself, I fumble and trip over the spoken form all the time. Especially in the absence of daily conversational practice targets. But writing, ah, now that's something we've all had plenty of practice of most of our schoolgoing lives so it irks me no end when people keep doling it out in brokenly cringeworthy fashion.

Needless to say, I adore people who effortlessly and seamlessly write well in English. Of course some people are naturally born with the proverbial silver spoon at the tip of their fingers. They just naturally write well. And without fudging the issue, I know I write well. It's something I enjoy and have slowly got better at as I get older. But the people who unfailingly hit me for a sixer and make me fall madly in love with them are those who mix and manage standard English, formal and informal, and most importantly, colloquialisms with equal dexterity. I think the truest measure of a person's complete grasp of a language is his or her ability to use colloquial expressions with ease. When someone cruises along in formal English but completely misses out on a contemporary idiomatic expression, doh, that just doesn't cut it in my book. It's almost as criminal as the classic "Wanna make franship?" come on. Sic.

The funniest thing is native English speakers themselves are notoriously bad at writing in English. Case in point, all the people you see online, especially in chatrooms, who can't spell, punctuate or formulate their thoughts to save their nuts. Americans are an especially atrocious lot. It makes you wonder what standards grammar teachers keep in the US of A. Sure, originality of thought and self-expression and all that is important but surely not at the expense of making you look like a human grammatical error.

I imagine part of the problem is in the verbal having to be put down in writing. Oral expression is free and informal while writing is cluttered with rules and trip-you-ups. Details of grammar like spelling and punctuation obviously don't matter a dimsum in speaking and there's a lot more stress placed on immediacy of communication than in writing. All of which adds up to the verbal form being so vastly different from the written that fluent speakers flub right, left and centre in just about every aspect of writing.

Indians are reputed to be among the world's best writers of English and I'd have to agree. To some extent. What's definitely an oh no factor for me is the over-formal, pedantic, stilted writing style many swear by. Or maybe it's the only style they know. It just gets me a little claustrophobic after a while. Makes me itch to rip off the suit and neckwear and stuffy shoes and push them headfirst into the linguistic pool.

But then again, like I said, maybe I'm just an over-finicky, nitpicking English teacher.

Stepping up a tech notch

Got myself a new laptop Monday evening. A Compaq C795TU. I don't remember why exactly but I've wanted a Sony Vaio for ages. Problem was they were out of my budget range and I kept hearing that Vaios didn't have anything special about them really anyway. Then I caught sight of those pretty Dell Inspirons in all kinds of colours - red, pink, yellow, spring green, and some even with the most delicately beautiful artwork on them but they too were slightly too expensive for me again. Besides when I looked around in what my favourite Mizo poet who I won't name here aptly calls this "one hoss town," there were just black Dells. Oh well, that left me with this..

Funnily enough I don't enjoy working on a laptop at all. Not yet anyway. The keyboard is so hard and congested, and without the helpful little USB mouse, my poor right hand would be all cramped and arthritic-looking. Also I'm terrified that I'll break the glass screen. So to say nothing of lugging it around, much less balance it on my lap, I'm nervy about using it anywhere but up on my usual safe desktop table!

What's kind of neat though is the dinky little webcam. Not that I thought people used webcams anymore. I once used a webcam when chatting to someone who claimed an ardent interest in getting to know me better and whoosh, it was almost like dipping a live coal in cold water. LMWAO. Perhaps I'll stick a Bandaid over the cam :P

Radio Gaga

Dark rainy day. Took the day off because the kids were supposed to have a blood donation drive at work. I've donated blood thrice before and I'd have done it again but braving slush and mud and hours of being trapped in traffic to give a pint of blood just didn't figure on the agenda today.

When I was growing up, the radio was my best friend. No TVs, computors, cellphones, digicams, ipods and other fancy schmancy gizmos then. The radio was the one source I had of keeping up with the world outside my little world. Dad had just died and Mum was working hard to support her four daughters. The local school we now attended was hugely different from MH and since we'd all jumped two classes, schoolwork was a major headache. Specially the maths. Add to that, growing up pains and adolescent angst.

Shortwave radio was a magical escape from everyday hassles. Every evening after dinner, my sister and I would sit down to homework with the radio tuned to the Ivan and Eric Show on the SLBC. Their light banter sandwiched between music requests and top forty hits had us all agog. Later we discovered Radio Australia, VOA and the good old BBC. I grew particularly attached to the Beeb, never missing the pop music shows especially A Jolly Good Show with the irrepressible Noel Edmonds. Then I discovered Matthew on Music fronted by Brian Matthew who I thought had the most divinely deep voice. Matthew played mostly hard heavy rock (most of it what's known as classic rock today) and left a deep and lasting influence on me. Then there was Glenys Dickson who cheerily hosted Countdown on Radio Australia. There was also this obscure radio station called Super Rock KYOI my sister and I loved but couldn't understand because the dialogue was all in Japanese but they played the most terrific collection of rock classics we ever heard. Years later, after my sister married, she said she was once recollecting those old days with her husband and it turned out he and a friend of his were regular listeners to Super Rock KYOI too and had always thought they were the only ones around to know about it.

Just recently, we've been having FM radio via the local friendly neighbourhood AIR Aizawl, and I've been realising anew what fun radio is. It doesn't demand your complete attention like TV does and you can play it in the background while you do other things. Also I've been discovering that many bands who I cannot stand to watch are actually very listenable. Among them, the late Kurt Cobain and Nickleback. At least, without the distraction of their videos I can now appreciate why they've had had such success. What disappoints me though are the young radio jockeys. I don't know why they feel like they have to put on that very fake, exuberant sounding talk style, and some of the accents are so obviously put on, they make you cringe. Also their knowledge of the music they work with is so abysmally low it's very off putting. Quite clearly, these kids are products of a generation that grew up completely unaware of the joys of radio.

Those schoolgirl days...

Time flies so quickly. Even the Internet which came into my life just a couple of years, or so it seems like, is already strewn with people I've come across and messages and posts I'd put up already half-forgotten and relegated to the back of the cyber cupboard. Some of the people have become very real friends and we have get-togethers on a regular basis despite busy lives and and hectic schedules, one or two so-called friends turned out to be freeloaders, and many have been like the proverbial ships in the night - here today, gone tomorrow, out of sight, out of mind.

The net is such a huge place it's hard to keep track of every place I've been to and left a piece of myself. One of these I recently rediscovered is my old school reunion site. I was at Mount Hermon for just a year and a couple of months but despite my all too brief stay there, it remains one of my brightest memories. Located in beautiful Darjeeling with the Himalayas clearly visible across the distance, it wasn't some over-posh school filled with snooty brats of rich parents as we'd feared at first. In fact, I never really ever knew how upscale anyone's family was because it was such a happy friendly place. Like when you came across members of the staff, academic or otherwise, it was always a casual Hello Mr Jones! Hello Mrs Gardner! That, in the 70s when things in India were still strictly starchily Brit, is a fair indication of the informal atmosphere of the school. And the GHD (Going Home Day) songs in the school hymn book that we'd start singing around the end of the year...

Also it being a co-ed school, there were a great many pairing-ups, and often after the seniors (classes 7 to 12-ers) finished dinner, we Junior schoolers would watch happily as these couples would go off in pairs in the quadrangle downstairs. A favourite hangout for these post-dinner, pre-study hour romantic dates was a long fence around the main schoolyard and couples would hang around there which prompted one staff member to coin the term "fencing." If a boy and a girl were seen "fencing", they were acknowledged by everyone to be an item. Obviously, it was a school ahead of its time but my two sisters and I had to leave suddenly because my father became seriously sick and we joined local schools. I continued for a while to keep in touch with old friends but inevitably lost touch with all but one who kept me posted with updates on everything and everyone.

Then around 5 years ago, I came across this site which wasn't strictly an official school site but was run by an oldtimer who'd brought in lots of oldtimers. None of those Facebook/ Orkut old school communities type where you see only the very young and feel completely out of it all. There were many I didn't know, naturally but there were a few I actually remembered. I found that the best way of breaking the ice and getting people to share old memories was in getting them to talk of things like bunking, past escapades and crushes. I made a post on old school crushes which evoked so many memories in the most fun way possible and many decade-old secrets were confessed to and made public for the first time ever! Among them, we found out that Lochan, one of the regulars and most gentlemanly people I've ever had the pleasure to know anywhere, had been the unknowing target of a crush by the prettiest girl in school. Apparently, they were good friends but she'd a boyfriend then and used the runaround method of loading his younger brother with all sorts of eats. He never realised it was all thanks to his brother and never told him about it either until the girl's best friend spilled the secret almost 30 years later and the younger brother finally connected the dots! I had such a hilarious time the other day re-reading all the recollections. I'm ashamed to confess though that I've since lost touch with those renewed acquaintances too. Keeping in touch is so hard...

Yellowed and mildewed - me and sisters

Ouch

"What a swimming! What a butterflying! Michael Phelps is coming number 1!!"

- Doordarshan sports commentator

Sms a friend sent me yesterday :D

Senior Moments

Just home from Sunday School where I realised I'd made a major boo boo last week. I'd been supposed to teach lesson #27 on Salvation but somehow got things mixed up and taught lesson #26 which was also on salvation but slightly differently stressed on Man in need of salvation. When I told my colleagues about it, they said they hadn't noticed but I'm mortified. I've never done anything like this before and for such an important lesson. Argh, my brains are screwed!

A similar thing happened to a woman I was buying vegetables from yesterday. It had been raining heavily and everything was wet and slushy and humid. She's a nice woman and one of my favourite veggie sellers so I bought a half kilo of tomatoes and set down 25 bucks in front of her. Then I picked up something else for 10 bucks which I added to the pile. Then I picked up something else again for 5 bucks and finding I didn't have a fiver to give her, took out a 50 note and took back the 35 bucks I'd laid out.

That's when it hit her. She looked at me blankly and went, "Uhhhh." "It's supposed to be 40 in all so you can give me back 10 rupees," I told her. She went, "Uh, what all did you buy?" I said, "Tomatoes = 25, hmarcha = 10, bekang = 5." She said confusedly, "But you took back the 35." "Yes, so now I'm giving you 50 and you're supposed to give me back 10." She mumbled, "But I'll be losing out if you take away the 35..."

Yarghhhh. I was starting to feel hot under the collar. Nothing I said could blow away the cobwebs in her mind. Luckily, a couple I know well came along looking at her vegetables and broke the impasse. We both explained to the wife our little tango and she told the veg woman it was alright, I'd bought 40 bucks worth of goods and given her 50 so she now had to return me a tenner. Which she did and we parted ways. Finally.

I've often been in that kind of can't work out figures and logic for nuts in my mind mental confusion so she has my sympathies entirely. With me, it usually happens that when I've been away travelling somewhere and getting back to basics at home I get disoriented completely and totally. I can't remember the littlest detail, and figures throw me for a loop as intricate as a figure skating triple axel followed by a double salchow. It's probably because I'm just too physically tired and not rested well enough and my mind shuts down from too much information too suddenly. I'm guessing the woman yesterday too was probably suffering from lack of sufficient sleep and rest since veg dealers get up crazily early on market days.

Ah life.