My earliest memories of Reader's Digest date back to the time I was in kindergarten. Contrary to what you may have concluded, I was not a child prodigy, able to read the magazine from cover to cover at the ripe old age of 3. Rather, I used to find in the magazine's pages, a pretty convenient place to write "check" marks with a red pen, finally giving "scores" at the end of each article with flourish, just like Sandhya miss in my LKG class did in my notebooks. Of course, as soon my parents discovered this new hobby, it died a premature death.
Reader's Digest(RD) has been a part of my household for as long as I remember. Dad started subscribing to it from the time he started working, much to my mom's delight. It meant that she would not have to give up reading RD (which my grandfather used to subscribe to) after marriage. Little wonder then, when sis and me came into existence, this family interest got passed on to us too.
Starting around age 7, I was able to read the simpler page fillers and the simpler jokes in the various features like "Life is like that", "Laughter the best medicine" and so on. As I grew older, I started reading pretty much the entire magazine. I also had fun reading interesting old RD article collections (which mom had patiently clipped out and bound) as well as the collections published by RD itself (I still have fond memories of a book of short stories which had stories like "Lamb to the slaughter", "The selfish giant" and "The wedding gift").
Irrespective of the number of transfers my dad went through, RD subscriptions always followed. When a new issue of RD arrived, there would be a tussle as to who would read it first. Mom was soon relegated to late mornings and noon as the only time when she could get her hands on it (when the rest of us were at work/school). Sis and me would fight over it when we got back from school - soon, a reading schedule was brought into existence to restore peace in the household. Dad of course, could choose anytime he wanted (ah, the perks of being head of household :-)).
During exam time, while cable TV connection got disconnected at friends' and cousins' houses, it stayed untouched in my house. Instead, mom would hide new issues of RD! Of course, we subscribed to other magazines too but somehow RD had a special pride of place.
To my dismay, around the time I was finishing my undergraduate education, I started noticing a deterioration in the quality of the RD articles. But hey, it was by no means poor quality and besides, it was still The Reader's Digest!
Once I got to the US, RD was sporadically subscribed to by roomies. But it was no longer a constant, unchanging part of my life. Then, a couple of years ago, my manager gifted me a with subscription to RD. Yippee!
I started receiving RD regularly and continued subscribing to it. Good or bad, RD was a source of comfort, a sign of being at "home" - home being defined by as a place always having the latest issue of RD. Of course, I enjoyed reading it too. And so it has been since then.
Last week, I got into a fever of house-cleaning. I found that, true to my hoarding tendencies, I had stored *every* issue of RD I had ever got from the time I started subscription. In a way, I guess this was a legacy from my childhood days when RD magazines alone were not thrown away easily (you really did not think that I would miss an opportunity to squarely place the hoarding blame elsewhere, did you).
Anyway, hardening my heart, I gathered them all into a big plastic bag, to be taken to the dumpster. Then, I felt bad. Nice magazines - why throw them away? Maybe I could donate them to someone who wanted them. The local library seemed like a bad option. Google to the rescue! I discovered that apparently there were places to give away stuff. Then it struck me, Craigslist!
Late on Friday night, I placed an ad on Craigslist - "Free old issues of Reader's Digest magazine", it proclaimed - with little hope of response. My main aim was to assuage my guilty conscience by proving to myself that I had tried *not* throwing those magazines away.
To my pleasant surprise, within the next 10 minutes, I had a response from a lady saying that she wanted to pick them up the very next day. Before morning came, I had two more positive responses. The next day noon, the lady stopped by my house and picked up the RDs. Resolutely shaking off my last bit of possessiveness I handed over the bag of old RDs to her, just managing to not add in a choked voice, "Please take good care of them".
Vive la Reader's Digest!
By,
Archana B.
(http://archana.blogspot.com)
Monday, April 28, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Peeping Tom, not I
During a recent trip to Sikkim, I fell ill halfway through a trek and descended to a village called Tsokha with a friend while the rest of our group went on. My friend and I spent three days in Tsokha whilst waiting for the others to return. Tsokha is a village that exists only for the purpose of adventure tourism - located at a height of 9000-10,000 ft, it is one of the halts on the popular Dzongri – Goecha La treks. All Tsokha has is a few houses, a camp-site, three shacks that call themselves ‘cafes’ and sell trinkets and snacks to trekkers, a lot of itinerant trekkers – most of them firangs, and a small monastery.
In Tsokha, we rented a room from a villager; it was big enough for us to empty our backpacks and spread out our stuff untidily rather than do the daily drill of unpack sleeping bag – sleep – wake up – unpack new set of clothes – pack used clothes – pack sleeping bag. As I was unwell, one of our porters had descended with us and he ensured that we had a pampered existence. He would bring us tea at 7:30 a.m. and breakfast at 8:30 a.m. After breakfast, my friend would go off on a long hike while I lazily strolled around Tsokha – visiting the monastery, sitting at the chai shops and chatting endlessly with total strangers etc. My friend would return around one, and we would have lunch together and chat a bit. Each day, by 2 in the afternoon, a mist would roll in accompanied by a sharp, biting wind that encouraged all but the most adventurous to stay in – either in tents or in their rooms. By half past two, we would be huddled in our sleeping bags in the rooms. Once more, we would depend on our porter to brave the cold and bring us evening tea as well as dinner.
Unfortunately, this was one trip on which I had forgotten to bring a book to read and I found myself at a loss for things to do to keep myself occupied once we were cooped up in the room. Then, on the second such afternoon, I remembered the number of birds I had seen in the thicket near the common toilet, which was behind the block of rooms we were staying in. It was quite a pretty location for a loo – mountains all around, a valley below, and in the adjacent thicket there were rhododendron bushes, magnolia trees, some bamboo and lots of bushes; the richness of the flora accounting for both a large number of birds that twittered and chirped away the day and an interminable procession of bees/wasps that droned on in a threatening manner and encouraged one to hurry up with one’s business lest they decide to attack.
Luckily, one of the windows of my room faced the thicket and I settled down at the window that afternoon to see whatever birds I could before the mist became too thick. Aah, I thought, the luxury of seeing birds without being exposed to the cold mist and the wind. I saw a magpie or two, and some unidentified small birds. Mostly though, I saw crows flying to and fro in a most frazzled manner, as if searching for something they had lost. I could chart the approach of the mist by looking at the flowers on the magnolia tree nearby. As the first tendrils of the mist crept over the tree, they only served to highlight its vibrancy – bursting-with-life, voluptuous, bright white magnolia flowers contrasted against a background of dull, grayish-white, amorphous mist. Slowly the jealous mist called up reinforcements and grew thicker, fewer and fewer of the lively magnolia flowers were visible; until finally the curdled-with-jealousy thick mist hid them altogether.
At this point I turned away from the window to describe the change in scenery to my friend. I turned back to the window a minute later, only to view the not-so-appealing sight of the ample rear end of some man lowering his trousers. My initial response was irritation with the man for intruding on a scene of such beauty; for a moment I toyed with the idea of scaring him by tapping eerily on the window pane, or of embarrassing him by opening the window and asking him the time.
Then I realized that to any external observer I was the intruder, sitting with my nose pressed against the window-pane, at a window that overlooked the path to the loo - probably one of those weird kinky psychos, the type who get their thrills by trekking 10,000 ft high to secretly observe other people answering the call of nature. Given where I was sitting and what I seemed to be doing, I could hardly accuse the man with his pants down of being uncouth or boorish, so what if he preferred watering the trees to using a man-made facility !
I wondered then whether other people approaching the loo had been embarrassed / shocked into abandoning plan when they saw a face wearing an earnest, keenly observant expression in the window-pane. Did they scuttle back to their rooms to report in shocked tones the weird behaviour being exhibited by the lady (??) in room no. 3 ? In case they did, and you heard about it too, this is the true and accurate version of events – I’m not a despo Peeping Tom, it’s all a simple misunderstanding.
By,
Zenobia D. Driver
In Tsokha, we rented a room from a villager; it was big enough for us to empty our backpacks and spread out our stuff untidily rather than do the daily drill of unpack sleeping bag – sleep – wake up – unpack new set of clothes – pack used clothes – pack sleeping bag. As I was unwell, one of our porters had descended with us and he ensured that we had a pampered existence. He would bring us tea at 7:30 a.m. and breakfast at 8:30 a.m. After breakfast, my friend would go off on a long hike while I lazily strolled around Tsokha – visiting the monastery, sitting at the chai shops and chatting endlessly with total strangers etc. My friend would return around one, and we would have lunch together and chat a bit. Each day, by 2 in the afternoon, a mist would roll in accompanied by a sharp, biting wind that encouraged all but the most adventurous to stay in – either in tents or in their rooms. By half past two, we would be huddled in our sleeping bags in the rooms. Once more, we would depend on our porter to brave the cold and bring us evening tea as well as dinner.
Unfortunately, this was one trip on which I had forgotten to bring a book to read and I found myself at a loss for things to do to keep myself occupied once we were cooped up in the room. Then, on the second such afternoon, I remembered the number of birds I had seen in the thicket near the common toilet, which was behind the block of rooms we were staying in. It was quite a pretty location for a loo – mountains all around, a valley below, and in the adjacent thicket there were rhododendron bushes, magnolia trees, some bamboo and lots of bushes; the richness of the flora accounting for both a large number of birds that twittered and chirped away the day and an interminable procession of bees/wasps that droned on in a threatening manner and encouraged one to hurry up with one’s business lest they decide to attack.
Luckily, one of the windows of my room faced the thicket and I settled down at the window that afternoon to see whatever birds I could before the mist became too thick. Aah, I thought, the luxury of seeing birds without being exposed to the cold mist and the wind. I saw a magpie or two, and some unidentified small birds. Mostly though, I saw crows flying to and fro in a most frazzled manner, as if searching for something they had lost. I could chart the approach of the mist by looking at the flowers on the magnolia tree nearby. As the first tendrils of the mist crept over the tree, they only served to highlight its vibrancy – bursting-with-life, voluptuous, bright white magnolia flowers contrasted against a background of dull, grayish-white, amorphous mist. Slowly the jealous mist called up reinforcements and grew thicker, fewer and fewer of the lively magnolia flowers were visible; until finally the curdled-with-jealousy thick mist hid them altogether.
At this point I turned away from the window to describe the change in scenery to my friend. I turned back to the window a minute later, only to view the not-so-appealing sight of the ample rear end of some man lowering his trousers. My initial response was irritation with the man for intruding on a scene of such beauty; for a moment I toyed with the idea of scaring him by tapping eerily on the window pane, or of embarrassing him by opening the window and asking him the time.
Then I realized that to any external observer I was the intruder, sitting with my nose pressed against the window-pane, at a window that overlooked the path to the loo - probably one of those weird kinky psychos, the type who get their thrills by trekking 10,000 ft high to secretly observe other people answering the call of nature. Given where I was sitting and what I seemed to be doing, I could hardly accuse the man with his pants down of being uncouth or boorish, so what if he preferred watering the trees to using a man-made facility !
I wondered then whether other people approaching the loo had been embarrassed / shocked into abandoning plan when they saw a face wearing an earnest, keenly observant expression in the window-pane. Did they scuttle back to their rooms to report in shocked tones the weird behaviour being exhibited by the lady (??) in room no. 3 ? In case they did, and you heard about it too, this is the true and accurate version of events – I’m not a despo Peeping Tom, it’s all a simple misunderstanding.
By,
Zenobia D. Driver
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
About a Monastery
The quaintest Buddhist monastery I have seen is tucked away in a corner of a tiny village called Tsokha in the picturesque state of Sikkim. Tsokha is a village that exists only for the purpose of adventure tourism - located at a height of 9000-10,000 ft, it is one of the halts on the popular Dzongri – Goecha La treks. All Tsokha has is a few houses, a camp-site, three shacks that call themselves ‘cafes’ and sell trinkets and snacks to trekkers, a lot of itinerant trekkers – most of them firangs, and the aforementioned monastery.
The monastery is situated on top of a hillock that is adjacent to a small lake. In order to reach the monastery, one has to walk across the lake on a makeshift bridge made of rickety wooden logs stretched out over blocks of stone placed in the water – this minor adventure adds to the overall charm of the visit.
Tied to the trees bordering the lake, stretching out across and around it, are strings of prayer flags in the usual five colours – yellow, green, red, white, blue; the bright colours a vivid contrast against both the blue-white cotton-cloud sky and the dull green waters of the lake in which they are reflected.
Near the lake is a small meadow that has horses grazing on it. Occasionally a horse strays into the monastery grounds and nibbles on the grass there – the doors to the monastery are closed and barred in order to prevent the horses from entering the building. The only sounds to be heard at the monastery are the gentle tinkle of the bells around the horses’ necks and the fluttering of the prayer flags in the wind. Occasionally one hears the reluctant rumble of the row of rusty prayer wheels along the monastery’s walls as they are rotated by a visitor.
To the right of the monastery is a small path which curves around it, and which if followed, leads one to a hillside covered with trees bearing red rhododendron flowers and white magnolias. Amongst the trees and bushes dart a multitude of birds, chirruping and tweeting softly. The only other sound is the muted roar of a waterfall, visible in the distance on another hill.
While I was there, I did consider taking a few photographs of the monastery and its surroundings, but finally decided against it as no photograph could do justice to the beauty, tranquility and serenity of the place.
By,
Zenobia D. Driver
The monastery is situated on top of a hillock that is adjacent to a small lake. In order to reach the monastery, one has to walk across the lake on a makeshift bridge made of rickety wooden logs stretched out over blocks of stone placed in the water – this minor adventure adds to the overall charm of the visit.
Tied to the trees bordering the lake, stretching out across and around it, are strings of prayer flags in the usual five colours – yellow, green, red, white, blue; the bright colours a vivid contrast against both the blue-white cotton-cloud sky and the dull green waters of the lake in which they are reflected.
Near the lake is a small meadow that has horses grazing on it. Occasionally a horse strays into the monastery grounds and nibbles on the grass there – the doors to the monastery are closed and barred in order to prevent the horses from entering the building. The only sounds to be heard at the monastery are the gentle tinkle of the bells around the horses’ necks and the fluttering of the prayer flags in the wind. Occasionally one hears the reluctant rumble of the row of rusty prayer wheels along the monastery’s walls as they are rotated by a visitor.
To the right of the monastery is a small path which curves around it, and which if followed, leads one to a hillside covered with trees bearing red rhododendron flowers and white magnolias. Amongst the trees and bushes dart a multitude of birds, chirruping and tweeting softly. The only other sound is the muted roar of a waterfall, visible in the distance on another hill.
While I was there, I did consider taking a few photographs of the monastery and its surroundings, but finally decided against it as no photograph could do justice to the beauty, tranquility and serenity of the place.
By,
Zenobia D. Driver
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