Category: Nostalgia

Nostalgia – 8. The Ring.

In my blog post yesterday, I had included a video clip of an interview with Kevin O’Leary of The Shark Tank fame. In that interview, towards the end, O’Leary justified the student continuing to study to get his Engineering degree and he adds that getting the Engineers’ Ring is a much desired thing among Engineers.

This one statement took me back to 1966 when I had to work in an Engineering Firm in Mumbai during my summer vacation as an intern for eight weeks as part of the requirement for my MBA degree.

In that firm, I was attached to an Engineer as my mentor who had a ring on his finger about which I was curious but, considering his formidable position and my own need to be on his good books to get a favourable report about my internship, I had kept quiet till the very last day of my internship.

The last day finally arrived and during my exit interview he asked me if I had any questions and I asked him about the ring. He smiled and explained that it was a ring that he had acquired in the USA having qualified as an Engineer there. I thought it was weird as I had not heard anything similar anywhere else but, kept the information to myself.

This interview led me to an explanation in the Wikipedia which finally explained the phenomenon.

Small Pleasures.

A few days ago, one of the crossword puzzles that I was solving had this clue – “Tea and ——-“.

It took me a while to figure out the solution as I tried English habits like scones, sandwiches etc before I struck gold and made it “Tea and Biscuits”

This one little event that morning took me on a long nostalgia trip to my field selling days when, customers would insist on getting tea and biscuits for me. It was not unusual for me to end up having perhaps around eight to ten cups of tea and around twenty biscuits during a day in the field. Youth took care of digestion problems but the memory took me to this particular brand of biscuits that somehow seemed to be the only one on offer everywhere.

It has been many years since I had the pleasure of having tea with Parle G biscuits and so I decided to try that combination again and requested my son Ranjan to get some Parle G biscuits and,  he very generously got half a dozen packets. Since then, I have been revisiting the good old days every afternoon with my tea. Every time I do so, many forgotten memories come rushing back of people and places.

Do you dip biscuits with your tea? If you don’t please try. It is bliss!

Nostalgia 7. The Oldest Thing In My Home.

A post on Facebook asked this question:

This took me back to 1975 and a very dear friend AC, who also happened to have been my boss at that time. He was retiring and moving to Andorra and was simplifying his possessions to suit the accommodation that awaited him in Andorra.

I was a struggling young man with a small family and had very little furniture. AC knew this well as he had visited our home often. He asked me if I could do him a favour by taking some furniture off his hands and offered two massive arm chairs and a quarter century old chest of drawers. A favour? Those were God sent gifts and I grabbed them with both hands and much gratitude.

The two armchairs, as old as the chest of drawers gave up their ghosts long ago but looked somewhat like this one below.

The Chest Of Drawers however continues to go strong and sits comfortably in my bedroom just short of three years to reach its Platinum Jubilee.

What is the oldest thing in your home?

Nostalgia 6. Badge Of Honour.

My regular readers will be aware of one of my physical limitations that has bothered me for a dozen years now. It is called Right Ulnar Palsy and it makes it difficult for me to hold things tightly in my right hand. This caused two problems for me earlier today and the second one is this.

That is me with a stained white t-shirt unable to take a better selfie with my right hand.

The first one was what caused the yellow stains in the first place. I was eating mangoes as dessert for lunch. Since our cook was off on holiday today, our char cut the mangoes. Had the cook been there, she would have cut the mangoes without the skin and the stone completely scraped off and I could have simply had the fruit from a bowl using a spoon.

With the mangoes cut differently, I had to eat the mangoes like this:

After seeing the first slice being eaten if you go to 1.40 minutes, you will see how the flesh from the stone is consumed.

My ulnar palsy played up and the stone slipped out of my hand and fell on my t-shirt. That is the stain that you see on the first image.

Why nostalgia?

During my school days, as soon as the mango season started, the first classmate with a stained vest under the uniform shirt was given a badge of honour by the rest of the class. One of course had to deliberately stain the vest to earn this badge! I never did get the badge of honour though as, I could not afford to get the vest stained for fear of punishment from a martinet for a father!

Have you had some mangoes lately? How did you eat them?

Gangubai Kathiawadi.


Kamathipura is Mumbai’s Red Light Area and has been that since time immemorial. If you were born and have lived in Mumbai like I have, there is just no way that you will not come to hear about it. It is also located in such a place that many people pass it while on their way to and from places of work or on other errands.

Despite my association with Mumbai since my birth and having lived there the longest before I put down roots in Pune, I had never heard about Gangubai and this movie forced me to go back in history and read about her.

Seeing the movie, was a mind blowing experience for me for its accuracy with period costumes, vehicles, trains, train compartments etc and I kept going back down memory lane on many occasions.

The story about the Mafia Queen as she was once called, who strove to ensure safety and dignity for the sex workers of Kamathipura is in itself another remarkable lesson in history for me. Seeing her come alive through the excellent acting of Alia Bhat under excellent direction of Sanjay Leela Bhansali is something that I will not forget very soon.

I had not been to a movie since well before the onset of Covid and sitting through this one has been another landmark achievement as it were.

I am grateful to my DIL for having persuaded me to see it and to my son for sharing the experience with both of us.

I urge my Indian readers to see it if they have not already seen it and my overseas readers to see it too as I am advised that it has been released overseas with English sub-titles.

It has been a long time since I reviewed a movie in my blog and it gives me great pleasure to give this a rating of four and a half stars.

Nostalgia 5.

My daughter in love went shopping for vegetables yesterday and saw freshly arrived ground nuts, called peanuts by the Americans, and knowing my weakness for it, bought a pile of it.

I got it steamed in a pressure cooker and sat down to shell them.

That is when nostalgia kicked in taking me back to my childhood when my mother used to ask the four of us siblings to shell the nuts. We used to call that a picnic as, while shelling for storage, we used to keep popping some as we went along. I did not pop any while I shelled because I am still recovering from a tooth extraction but, am looking forward to doing so soon enough from the shelled and refrigerated stock.
Apart from the picnic nostalgia another memory of a late friend kept coming up. That of VB, a dear friend who used to get the snacks for our parties. He used to specially get these boiled groundnuts for me and inevitably say, “Nuts for a nut from a nut!” It has been a long time since I remembered him.
Here is a stock photograph from Alamy showing Indian village children having a picnic like we used to have in our childhood.

How do you like your ground/peanuts?