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Here it is again, Ugadi, our Telugu New Year's Day:
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Here it is again, Ugadi, our Telugu New Year's Day:
Here is Telugu New Year
Bitter, sweet, and sour
Neem, aaam and guud
Like life is kind and good
We wish you well forever!
Our Telugu New Year comes about the same time as Holi...the spring festival of the North India. Not that there was any remarkable spring at our seaside village, Muthukur, nestling along the Coromandel Coast...it was at best a fleeting affair. I talk in the past tense because Muthukur has now become the springboard of the famous port town (Krishnapatnam). And the last time I visited it with my wife and son four years back, it was unrecognizable...the unending stream of iron-ore-laden trucks blinded the dusty town...it is no longer a village...development, the current buzzword, swallowed it line, hook and sinker.
But, yes, on the Ugadi Day, our neem trees were in full bloom with li'l li'l bunches of snow-white flowers. Neem was the only antidote for our diseases...an anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-amoebic and anti-everything bad. All sorts of poxes, small, large, black, white, chicken, and measles used to invade our villages periodically, keeping our population within manageable limits. I recall a time during which small pox (of the black variety) invaded Muthukur, and the entire village got evacuated for all of a month. Those who could, including our family, fled overnight. Neem leaves were the only known palliative for all these poxes. Bunches of them were kept by the pillow of the victim, for what they were worth, and the patient fanned with them, fearfully.
And about every fortnight other times, we had this ritual in our household...neem leaves, sprinkled with water, were ground into a paste on our flat stone mortar by a heavy cylindrical stone pestle. And the resulting paste was rolled into green pills and pushed down our grimacing throats. It was the only known cure for killing all pests residing happily in our alimentary canal from top to bottom. But I suppose they killed indiscriminately. I am told that there are good bacteria and bad bacteria within us, like good cholesterol and the bad variety. All that they did was to keep us all thin and strong...we had no obesity in the entire village.
Aaam, the mango, is our favorite food additive. My friend Krishna Mohan's wife complained that she has to serve him mango pickle (aavakaaya) with rice and ghee every meal. And once a year, during April, when our mango trees yield their fresh bounty of raw fruit, she has to undergo the ritual of preparing enough mango pickle to last the whole year. She said that the evening before the appointed day she would announce that she wouldn't enter their kitchen on the D-day and her hubby had to provide her breakfast, lunch and dinner. She would get up early in the morning and clean up the huge porcelain jars that held the pickle, visit the flourishing roadside market, buy umpteen kilos of mangoes, have them cut up into four pieces each by the mango-cutter sitting by the mango shop as a parasite, fetch them home, clean them with water, dry them to their bones, spread them on a white dhoti to absorb any vestigial moisture (which is inimical to the pickle...which otherwise would grow fungus in two days), visit the provision store to buy pure mustard oil and red-hot chilli powder and salt, bring them home, mix the mango pieces with expertly chosen combos of the ingredients so thoroughly that it takes hours, feed the resulting mixture into the dry jars, and take rest at 2 PM for the rest of the day.
Guud (sugarcane molasses) was a favorite sweetener in our village. A mixture of guud, rice, and other delicacies, boiled into a Pongal was our staple side dish on festive occasions. Guud was also our sugar substitute in coffee for unwelcome guests. Anakapalli, the town fifty miles south of our university town, Vizagh, has a flourishing guud wholesale market over centuries. We used to get our guud from this town even at KGP, five hundred miles away. There is this Anakapalli Merchants Association which runs a Linga Murthy College there...Linga Murthy was my super-rich classmate. I had got an appointment letter for a Lecturer post at the AMAL College there in 1965 and was about to join. And the next day, I also got this letter asking me to join as an Associate Lecturer at IIT KGP. And I somehow preferred the latter...changing my entire lifeline overnight...an instance of the Road Taken rather than the 'Road Not Taken' of Robert Frost.
Coming back to our Ugadi festival, it started with mom preparing an auspicious mixture of cut pieces of tender mangoes, flowers of a neem tree, and guud in water; and pushing it down our tender throats. The guud tried to kill the bitter taste of neem and the mango pieces added punch to the sour-loving Telugu tongues. Nothing could be eaten, by law and custom, before imbibing this odd concoction.
Sometime in the late 1980s, Kapeel, the Punjabi (Multani) student in the third year M Sc of our department, staying in Patel Hall, suddenly appeared at 7 AM one morning, driving down on his pushbike an unknown freshman engineer, Vijaya Kumar, to our Qrs C1-97 at IIT KGP. I was worried that the kid was ill...my medico-wife used to get patients from the halls occasionally. But it turned out that Vijaya Kunar was from the Telugu heartland and he had refused to take his breakfast that day before he had his Ugadi Pacchadi (the aam-neem-guud concoction pictured above)...it happened to be our Ugadi day at KGP in Bengal. And the only Telugu family Kapeel knew was ours.
My wife had not yet made the dish...I had bought mangoes and guud from the Tech Market the evening before and was preparing to pluck a few flowers off the neem tree in our backyard. So Vijaya Kumar and his driver, Kapeel, had to wait an hour before they had their Ugadi Pacchadi, followed by a sumptuous idli-dosa breakfast made by my wife.
Kapeel was always well-dressed. Not that the rest of us were unkempt, but the rural environs of our humid KGP campus promoted a casual wear...just take a look at the dress and headgear of our currently famous KGPian...the Neta of BAM (Broom Aadmi Party). Kapeel's shirt was right, belt was right, pants were right, socks were right and so were his shoes shining all the time. I asked him about it and he said that his father insisted that he ought to be well-dressed as a matter of self-respect. He continued his get-up even when he went to Princeton, and apparently, his colleagues in research labs there thought he was a millionaire.
On the other hand, there is this hilarious account of Saswat being caught as an uncouth alien in a business-recruitment meeting at Columbia where everyone else was suited and booted to the hilt:
...Further, to add to this
awkward start, I was completely under-dressed, it seemed to me, for this
event. I was wearing an old half sweater (with a slight tear) that my
father had worn through the 1970s and handed down to me and which I
loved to wear out of emotional attachment to it, and an old jeans and an
old shirt. I must have turned red immediately after realizing how out
of place I was! But leaving was not an option I was ready to take - did
not want to feel like a complete loser. I decided to put on a confident
look and sat down in a corner of the room, hoping that no one noticed my
plate full of food and my inappropriate attire...
Happy Ugadi!
Posted by Ishani
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