POST-Kerala trip I’m finally back to normal. Nursing rainy day blues and seeking inspiration for this, that and the other. Without inspiration life is not worth living! My second-floor balcao’s live painting across the road is full of rain-filled greens these rain-filled days and in one corner there’s a garbage dump which has become permanent. I try to ignore it. In favour of moon mooning over the stark wet black and green silhouette of a caju tree and casuarina trees with burrs and pine-styled needle leaves… with a sparkling shower of teeny weeny rain droplets hanging on to create a bit of memorable enchantment.

By Tara Narayan

BREAKFAST Club: healthy breakfast for all! Great new health club, friends of good nutrition meet every day between 7 and 10 am at Porvorim. Call 9822863072″. The little ad in the classified columns of a daily newspaper sparked the curiosity cat in me and I called thinking that hey, what a good idea to open a breakfast club…offering the good things of life for breakfast…freshly squeezed fruit and veggie cocktails, wholegrain bread loaded with real grapefruit marmalade, tempting muesli combos…may even aloo paratha spiked with tangy pomegranate choora like I like it! Or real idli-dosa with various chutneys and drumstick filled sambar to die for

By Tara Narayan

DEAR LORD, thank you for this precious peepal tree which I pass by daily on my way to office on my Red Angel! I think the peepal is my favourite non-flowering tree and this particular beauty at this point of spring-turning-rapidly into summer time is a study in soft tender greens against more mature fresh greens…ravishing, cooling greens, looking at it while passing by makes me cool down! Has the month of March ever been so hot and humid before? Is there a heat wave on… or am I imagining I’m living in a permanent sauna bath? Sauna baths are for free for the aam aadmi!

WHAT do moussaka, caponata, Baba Ganoush, ratatouille…have in common? Right! Aubergine or eggplant, brinjal, baigan (Hindi) vangi (Marathi, Konkani) and they are in season currently. It is vangi season, so make the most of them. Huge big royal purple aubergine (aubergine is from the French and so much more romantic than the American or Australian eggplant!). Look at them, they come in several colours and shapes…round, oval, long and slender eggplant…

By Tara Narayan

IF YOU haven’t discovered the legendary restaurant of O’Coqueiro yet you have missed out on something! You can’t miss it. It’s right there flush on the highway to Mapusa at Porvorim …a single line of golden bulbs running around the twin-bungalow complex of Portuguese vintage. Low and inviting, it has a cool open courtyard set within and set off by this beautiful frangipani tree…

By Tara Narayan

DON’T KNOW about you but I’m quite sick and tired of festivals, feast days, carnivals, holidays, entertainment… galore! So it’s the season of Holi or urban hooliganism as it tends to be out on the streets because only the north Indian migrant workers and service folk who come to “Goa’s Dubai” celebrate it in nostalgic memory of their impoverished lands left behind in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Nepal or wherever, to work for a living amongst folk who don’t have to work for a living - at least not like them! Our urban celebrations no longer turn me on because they’re so fake and out of connect!

BY TARA NARAYAN

SIGH. COME TO think of it, the best of everything goes to big-time markets like Mumbai! To think that this time last week I was moon mooning nostalgically down one of my favourite wet or al fresco veggie and fruit markets i.e. the road side market outside the Vile Parle (East) suburban railway station. Taking pleasure in buying bunches of tender spring garlic (wonderful in a green chutney), big round golden green aonla (or Indian gooseberry, Rs.40 kg), tender amba-haldi — the twin spring time gingers, one creamy in colour and with a faint green mango enshrined in it, and the other golden aromatic turmeric root…

BY TARA NARAYAN

FOOD FOR thought! I’ve come back from Mumbai which was Bombay feeling like a mall rat or a mall moll (as the hubby puts it)! All one needs to feel at home in Mumbai is lots and lots of money to spend for the city itself is like a mega mall and leaves one with a desire to shop and shop till one drops dead. The ultimate material metro has arrived and I’m not sure how much I love or hate it! Certainly I don’t love it for life suddenly seems to be revolving around youth and their money power to buy, buy and buy, it makes me feel so old for I can’t compete in all the shopping around!

BY TARA NARAYAN

THE HUBBY’S back in Goa but I’m hanging around in Mumbai which was Bombay for old time’s sake. Can’t take the Bombay girl out of me! It’s Mahashivratri season and Valentine’s Day week and love is in the air, at least love in all its multifaceted pretence! If you’re asking me, Valentine’s Day is yet another one of our infernal days to buy, buy, buy till you drop dead just to tell someone “ILU”! I don’t know why one must prove love in material gifts when the immaterial gifts of life are so much more precious?

BY TARA NARAYAN

COMING BACK to Mumbai-which-was-Bombay is always an education. Also an exercise in how not to go the Mumbai way! Amongst other things, I’ve been hanging around at hospitals and Mumbai has the best of the them of course - seeing how much ill health there is in this over-grown vertical megapolis i.e. city within cities. There’s a mega conference going on currently on vertical cities with the leading experts of the world in attendance but I don’t think I’ll be able to attend any of the sessions.