SCRATCH AND WIN

Although I have always felt that ‘scratch’ sounds rather offensive, I have felt that winning something for free was a splendidly fun thing to happen – a pure slice of luck, based not on any achievement of the receiver, but solely and wholly on the munificence of the giver.

When we were children, it was customary for us to visit our mamabari (mother’s brother’s house) once a week. Usually it would be a Friday or Saturday afternoon, and we would return home in the evening. Walking towards the bus-stop from mamabari, we would inevitably stop at a shop selling soft-drinks and cigarettes. Baba would buy his usual packet, and light up one cigarette from the smouldering coil of coconut-rope hanging beside the shop precisely for this purpose. And we would clamour for our weekly quota of empty calories – I would have my Goldspot which left my tongue all orange and my insides all bubbly and happy, Bhai (brother) would have a bottle of the more substantial Milkose (chilled milky drink) or some mango-flavoured syrup.

Once, the manufacturers of Goldspot announced that under every cap (of the bottles), there would be a picture of some character from Jungle Book (of the Rudyard Kipling-transformed-by-Walt-Disney-variety). If we managed to collect the requisite unhealthily-high number of such caps, we could exchange them for posters and caps and other unnecessary but tempting things.

It seemed a perfect case of scratch-and-win, or rather, poke-and-win. I would grab my Goldspot, ask the shop-keeper to hand over the cap, poke out the rubber lining from under it, and…become the proud possessor of a tiny, crinkly-edged picture of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, Ra and their other jungle-pals.

But my once-weekly quota made for a very slowly growing collection. To add to my impatience, my brother flatly refused to switch over to Goldspot to aid the growth of my cap-collection. Finally, after quite a few weeks of solitary cap-collecting, the shop-keeper came to my rescue. On hearing about my plight, he reached down, and from the debris at his feet handed me a whole bagful of soft drink bottle caps, which included a very large number of Goldspot caps as well.

I was overjoyed at my sudden bounty and spent a blissful hour or so poking out an entire jungle-full of pictures from under the caps. In fact, so pleased was I with my dozens of Sher Khans and suchlike that I totally refused to part with them for the sake of a piddly poster or two. And so, the means themselves became an end for me, and I kept my plastic menagerie for a long long time, fingering their crinkly circular smoothness and smelling their faint orangey tang.

Alas, Goldspot has long breathed its last (being a victim of global business politics – its owner, Parle Agro, sold the brand to the cola-giant Coca Cola Company, whose orange brand Fanta gradually pushed Goldspot into obscurity and annihilation). But the scratch-and-win freebies are flourishing, the latest, in my case, being a blog-tag awarded to me by Double Dolphin.

I quote: ..."the rules:

1.link the person who tagged you.

2.copy the image above, the rules and the questionnaire in this post.

3.post this in one or all of your blogs.

4.answer the four questions following these rules.

5.recruit at least seven (7) friends on your blog roll by sharing this with them.

6.come back to BLoGGiSTa iNFo CoRNeR (please do not change this link) and leave the URL of your post in order for you/your blog to be added to the master list.

7.have fun!..."

The person who tagged me is Double-Dolphin (on 22June2009). THANKS! (AND I did not have to scratch, either!)

I BLOG, therefore I HAVE WON! And the seven people who get the award are:

Zillionbig, Aparna, Sujata, Jyothi, SGD, Swaram, Nona.

REMEMBER ANY SUCH INSTANCE WHEN YOU, ER, "SCRATCHED" AND WON?

FOUR-POINT SOMEONE

No, the reference here is not to Chetan Bhagat’s IIT-reminiscing bestseller FIVE POINT SOMEONE. Peter Rozovsky, who writes a full-of-twist-and-turns crime-fiction blog, has forwarded an interesting four-cornered meme. Digging into multi-cornered memories and fancies, I came up with:

Four Places I’d Like to Go, or Things I’d Like to Do:

1. The British Isles. Of course, in the 1990s, most students of English Literature in India were fed on an almost-exclusive diet of British fiction (as opposed to writing in the other Englishes), and so I have grown up visualizing (and being forced to write long answers about) Shakespeare’s London (and Stratford-on-Avon), Wordsworth’s Lake District and James Joyce’s Dublin and the place near Westminster Abbey where all the famous poets are buried (to name just a few of the Eng Lit hotspots). Besides, when I was in school, my Pishi (father’s sister) got herself photographed standing beside the wax statue of Indira Gandhi at Madame Tussaud’s, and I’ve always had a yen for doing such deliciously desi touristy things myself.

2. Switzerland. The Hindi movies of our childhood might be set in Mumbai or Delhi or anywhere else in sweltering India, but most of them would zoom straight to the snowy Alpine slopes for a song. And the unskilled-in-skiing heroine would tumble straight into the hero’s arms, and the cold weather would be a nice excuse for a cuddle. So environment-friendly, na?

3. The United States. Which we called “Aay-mey-rica” in unsophisticated Bengali. Associated in my childish mind with Walt Disney and Disneyland. And a Bengali translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which wrung out a flood of my tears. And HOLLYWOOD highlighted against the hills. And then, in university, with the Great Gatsby and the “green light at the end of the dock”.

4. And Enid Blyton’s books (like The Caravan Family and Five Go Off in a Caravan) have made me yearn to have a holiday meandering through the countryside in a horse-drawn caravan (with bunk-beds and neat shelves and a cooking stove).

Four Places I Have Lived:

1.Barrackpore
2.Kolkata
3.Mumbai
4. ----- (my imagination may fly, but the body had been fairly rooted)

Four Places I Have Been on Vacation:

1. Digha. My first visit to the sea. Digha was empty and unspoiled then. And I collected so many tiny colourful shells.
2. Darjeeling. My first visit to the Himalayas. The sharp frosty cold. The warm delicious momos. The white-crowned majesty of the Kanchenjanga peak.
3. Benares. Crowded with people making a living out of religion. Not really my cup of tea.
4. Goa. Blue sea. White sands. Quaint churches. Lovely people. Heaven!

Four Food or Drinks I Have Liked:

1. Fish. Especially freshwater fish. Especially silvery Ilish bought during a boat-ride with our entire family (father, mother, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousins) on the Ganga on a long-ago New Year’s morn.
2. Rezala (a yogurt-based mutton preparation perfected by the Muslim Nawabs) and Roomali rotis (handkerchief thin wheat flatbread) at Shabbir’s in Kolkata, a Durga Pujo treat given annually by Baba (father).
3. The kuler-aachar (sweet-sour berry pickle) and aamsi (sweet-sour dry mango pickle) bought from the vendor with the little wooden pushcart on the long walk back from school.
4. Natural’s Ice-cream. The sweetest, creamiest, fruitiest, yummiest thing in Mumbai.

Four Books or Movies I could Read or Watch Again:

1. All my dog-eared, much-thumbed, yellow-pages-falling-apart Agatha Christies.
2. The Harry Potter series for their intricate simplicity.
3. Sholay. The drama, the comedy, the romance, the banquet of emotions. And every time I do, I never fail to cry at Jai’s (played by Amitabh Bachchan) sacrifice and death.
4. Dr Spock’s book on Baby and Child Care. Endlessly fascinating for the last eight and half years. (Just kidding).

Four Works of Art Before Which I’ve Stood (or Sat):

Since I’ve never seen any really famous work of art up-close, I thought I’d mention four works which I’d love to stare at.
1. Michelangelo’s Pieta. How can marble express such pity and tenderness?
2. John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. How can such overloading of earthy details be so ethereal?
3. Claude Monet’s Waterlilies series. How can one subject produce so many variations?
4. Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. A perspective-puzzle or a new truth?

Four Figures From the Past Whom I’d Like to Watch at Work or Meet for Dinner:

1. Shakespeare at work on King Lear.
2. Cleopatra arming herself in glamour and guile.
3. Charles M Schulz at his studio, discussing the daily Peanuts-dose of innocent wisdom.
4. Rabindranath Tagore sitting under trees with his students at Shantiniketan.

Four People I Think Might Take it Upon Themselves to Take Up This Meme:

(Feel free to alter/add/adjust at will. Anybody else can also join in).
Suranga

Kavi

Santanuda

Pradipda.