Try living in the slow lane

My frustration at the stubborn refusal of the girl who cooks for us to slow down extends to other modern activities too, like the frantic and totally unnecessary traffic snarls. Roads are being widened so that more people can jam them, instead of educating drivers to wait patiently in their lanes. Our obsession with speed — fastest service, shortest route, quickest way — has become a pathological condition today

Traffic snarls are most often due to someone who can't wait his turn but rushes to squeeze his car past the one in front so that he can be the first to rush as the light turns green. Tribune Photo

Ira Pande

THE girl who cooks for me is a lovely cheerful person, who bounces into the house twice a day and ushers in a whoosh of energy with her. The minute she arrives, she switches on all the lights in the kitchen, bangs the pots and pans to ask what she should cook. I dread this question: the same old veggies and the same boring dal-chawal decisions day after day exhaust me. Anyway, we negotiate a meal and she gets down to cooking while I go back to my book or crossword. I can hear her singing tunelessly as she cuts, chops and makes a racket with the pots and pans, and tries to race through the chores by cooking on burners set to full heat, and hurrying up the dal in the pressure cooker by holding the poor cooker under a tap to release the steam so that she can quickly end this job and run to the next one. There are spatters of turmeric and splotches of oil, peels on the floor and masala bottles get mixed up as she replaces the wrong spice in the wrong bottle — we have our moments of confrontation. After she leaves and I get my peaceful home back, I clean up the mess she has left behind her cheery ‘Bye, bye Aunty’ as she flits out.

Slow down, I advise her. Learn to cook slowly on low or medium heat, not everything needs such fierce heat but her reply is, ‘I have two other homes to go to, Aunty, I can’t afford to spend so much time in one.’ How can I argue with that? How shall I explain to her that the joy of slow cooking and the coaxing of flavours as one stirs in the spices is an art she must cultivate? My frustration at her stubborn refusal to slow down extends to other modern activities too. The frantic and totally unnecessary traffic snarls are most often due to someone who can’t wait his turn but rushes to squeeze his car past the one in front so that he can be the first to rush as the light turns from amber to green. Roads are being widened so that more people can jam them, instead of educating drivers to wait patiently in their lanes. Our obsession with speed (fastest service, shortest route, quickest way) has become a pathological condition today. Push, push, push: push the children out of bed to go for tuition, a coaching class, a music or dance lesson — the modern schoolchild is hurtled from one activity to another by a pushy mum or dad, denying that poor child the option of enjoying the carefree time that childhood should always be remembered for.

Boredom? What was that? In our childhood, with no televisions or mobile phones, organised play dates et al, we learnt to discover the world around us. Watching a butterfly flit delicately, discovering a bird’s hidden nest, stealing unripe fruit or just staring idly at the sky to enjoy the stately spectacle of the clouds slowly change their shapes. I am sure that these useless time-pass activities triggered our imagination and enabled us to store in our sensory memory experiences that have become the basis for creative activities later. I may now often forget details of a boring meeting but as long as I live, I will never forget the magical childhood we spent in the hills. The sound of rain on a tin roof, the clatter of footsteps on wooden staircases, the song of the thrush that came each morning to sing outside our bedroom at exactly 7 in the morning to wake us up for the hour-long walk to school. The glens and trees, the wildflowers and interesting shortcuts we took, jumping over drains and swinging from the branches of a tree. ‘Monkeys!’ our parents would shake their heads and say, but they never ordered us to sit inside a safe cocoon and watch the world through a window.

Ah well. I am sure I am romanticising those idyllic days because there are equally unhappy memories too. Spending long, lonely hours at home while our neighbours held raucous card parties (a strict no-no in my Aurangzeb-like father’s regime), no access to filmi music because he declared such music debased one’s taste, no indulgences or treats, a crippling self-denial of any ‘useless’ diversion — all these I remember clearly but strangely, they no longer hurt. I think the human mind has a marvellous capacity to retain happy memories and erase sad experiences. Or, maybe, it is just one’s nature. You’re either blessed with a sunny temperament or are a brooding, dark person.

All this comes to me at a time when I hear of so many young men and women having heart attacks or strokes while not yet 50. The other evening, my son from Rio told me of a college friend of his who was found dead alone in his New York apartment. He was in the prime of his life and yet he succumbed. Lifestyle-related stress and loneliness are the curse of early success: when you want everything, anywhere all at once, you may have to pay a price for it that is not worth the achievement. My heart goes out to those parents and partners, those young children left without a dearly loved parent and want to say: slow down people, try living in the slow lane.