DilliMeriJaan

  Sir Attenborough can’t be in all the wildlife films in the world, so this one has Stephen Fry. The dry humour and crisp tones intact. This film, available on Netflix, is 51 minutes of colour and sheer beauty. The storyline is simple. How do you get yourself a mate? Feathered beauties of tropical rain forests, show you how. And HOW. Technique 1: Pole Dance. The 12-wired Bird of Paradise of New Guinea, sits patiently on his pole, waiting to display his dancing skills to a prospective mate. He is already quite a looker, with unique 12 wire-like filaments emerging from his wings. The moment a female shows some interest, even in passing, he whips his filaments about and does the most impressive pole dance that you will ever see. The female watches in awe and enjoys getting a couple of whacks from the wires – or maybe they are caresses. Technique 2: Team work . Lance Tailed Manakins of South American forests, work in pairs. The ‘wingman’ (pun intended) does a series of vertical ho...

 Imagine a scene out of Ray’s ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’. Only replace the Mirza Ali and Mir Ali with my grandfather and dad or uncle. Weekends were spent avoiding this chess playing group, while Ustad Aamir Khan or Bade Ghulam Ali played in the background. I must be a 100 years old if this is how I grew up. Almost there almost there. But the point I am making is how music in the house I grew up in, was serious business. The world around me may have been in raptures over slithering Sridevi and floundering Rishi Kapoor but no music of theirs was played in our house. If vocal classical was getting a bit much, we could listen to Ustad Vilayat Khan on Sitar. Even here there were mysterious rules. Vilayat Khan was great but not Pandit Ravishankar. Bhimsen Joshi was applauded, Jasraj was not tolerated. I think there were some reservations against Kishori Amonkar but I am beginning to forget the intricacies of our music listening. Rabindra Sangeet was BANNED. Did we want to sing in flat tone...

  Follow greenhumour.com for some sensible stuff I decided to watch Masterchef Australia and discover what the world has been raving about for the past 11 years. To keep up with the times, I started with the latest season. And halfway through, had to stop – I had no more hair left to pull out!  Millions of people go hungry across the world, because 30% food gets wasted and Masterchef showed me how the number is higher in fancy kitchens. Agri-food sector is the highest carbon emitter and if we start cooking the way Masterchefs do, the damage would be higher. And then there is plastic and much much more. Here are cringe-inducing things, that I saw: 1.       Sous Vide - you put stuff into plastic and dunk into a boiler. So along with the slowly poached food, you can get your fill of microplastic. Have you ever heated food inside a plastic container? 2.      Blast chiller – you boil stuff and immediately shove them into blast chiller...

My metro-riding, super ecological conscious husband succumbed to peer pressure once. He joined in the mindlessness of cracker bursting and hasn’t celebrated a single Diwali, ever since, not regretting it. No one on this page bursts crackers, I am certain. But have some of us kept quiet or even gingerly swirled a phuljhadi or two, because its tough to stand up and say NO, especially when its your family? (By the way, Phuljhadi is one of the MOST polluting of crackers that there is…)   That fateful night of lapsed reasoning, was in my in-law’s house. The whole family was bursting crackers and apparently enjoying the toxic air. I remember standing in the balcony, glaring and refusing to participate. Today, my parents in-law have a solar panel installed, lead a very conscious zero waste life and wouldn’t dream of pumping in fumes into their children/grand-childrens’ lungs.  It is easy to dial 100 and complain about a neighbour bursting crackers. But its TOUGH when its your ...

 The first gift we bought for our daughter, when she was a few days old, was a book. It was made of cloth and acted as a pillow, plaything and teether later. When she became old enough to sit and turn rather than eat pages, we were in parental heaven. There were so many Tulika books (https://www.tulikabooks.com/) with splendid Indian art, designed by fancy designers from NID, and told by village people who have kept storytelling alive over bedtimes and their version of fireside chats. My friends, significant other and I spent hours browsing these in shops, ostensibly for daughter. Daughter grew up drawing, singing, playing sports with her dad – skills I do not possess so could only clap on the side.   Reading continued, but our common interest of Tulika now gave way to she reading whatever her friends were and I to whatever Reese Witherspoon/Bill Gates was. Like all daughters, she had to read what her father did so suddenly both were chatting Sci-fi and I had nothing to cont...

Dragonflies have been around for 300 million years, making them one of the oldest winged insects in the world. Their size has decreased over the centuries, apparently with the decrease of oxygen in the atmosphere. They need chemical free water to breed and decent air quality to survive. So get happy if you see dragonflies around you – it’s a fair indication that the air you are breathing is good. The UN is observing the first World Clean Air Day today, looking at that more than 7 million lives are lost per year, due to toxic air. As Antonio Guterres makes heart-felt appeals to governments and industries to clean up their act before we all die, what should you and I do? It is frustrating to wait for coal to be phased out and manufacturing units to reduce carbon intensive production, while poison steadily seeps into us [aargh…the vivid imagery of it]. My friend who uses only Metro, just bought an EV for those non-metro-able rare trips. My father-in-law installed solar. Wh...