Kichdi Post

Bird Rescue:
Getting up early in the morning has its flip side too. As one to be the first in the house to get up in the morning there are certain chores one is compelled to do. The door has to be opened and the gate has to be unlocked to let the maid in, the paper has to be collected, the milk sachets picked up from the door step and other such mundane tasks. Of the above, opening the door is one thing that causes a bit of panic. Even so early in the morning my imagination isn’t no less overactive and maybe so because I haven’t yet had my first cup of tea of the day. Upon opening the door I expect to find a corpse in the courtyard, or an UFO or things like that. With cats prowling it is quite natural thing to find bloody remains of a rat or a bird scattered around in the courtyard. Sometimes it is strange gooey stuff splattered around. Once there was a black dog that had somehow got in sometime during the night and could not get out. Most days the courtyard is free of such disasters but yesterday morning we had an unexpected visitor.

After I open the door I take a quick glance around the courtyard to reassure myself that nothing has been added to the scenery while we were asleep. Yesterday I noticed a small bird sitting hunched up in a corner. We have two large Millingtonia trees next to the compound wall and I had seen a bird nest sometime back. But this bird seemed to be far away from the trees and appeared to be an eagle chick judging from its curved beak and the color of its feathers. I thought it would go away on its own but after I casually told my son about it that the trouble began. He insisted we’d somehow help the bird. I did not have a clue about what to do. He then got the idea that we’d tell the Blue Cross people before the cats got to it. It looked like a good idea but getting the telephone number of Blue Cross was the problem. I found it in an old issue of Channel Six. However Kiran gave me another number and though it was seven in the morning I was amazed I managed to get in touch with someone who was some kind of a bird/animal rescuer. She told me to put the bird in a shoe box with holes and bring it over. Within the hour I handed over the bird to a volunteer in the park near Arts College and felt a lot better for having heeded to the kid’s pleas rather than letting nature take its course.

Later I checked out the Blue Cross website and was amazed to learn about the wonderful work they are doing. I read that they run a shelter for sick, injured, and abandoned pets and other creatures apart from running an ambulance for animals. My kid’s been pining for a pet dog since a long time but since we never had any pets before I am not warming up to the idea. But now I think I’ll probably ask the kid to volunteer at the Blue Cross so he’d learn something about handling pets and other animals before he gets a pet dog for himself.

Holiday Between the Covers
Nothing upsets one’s holiday plans more than falling sick just before the holidays begin. I had made several plans to do a lot of things on last Sunday and Monday which was a holiday because of Ramzan. But on Saturday morning I got the first indications that I would be down with fever and by nightfall I was burning with fever brought on by a cold and sinus infection. It was pretty obvious to me that I could do nothing else than spend the holidays lying in bed until I was better. Usually I get annoyed at being confined to the house but for once I was glad I was home. I decided to read something that I had been planning to do since a long time. There are some books one has to necessarily read in a single sitting or at a stretch without many interruptions and fortunately I have many such tomes on my bookshelf.
Sometime last year I had picked up Jo Nesbo’s ‘The Leopard’ which I had been waiting for just this kind of a break to read. I began the book on Sunday morning and finished by Monday night by which time my fever was also gone. It was totally engrossing and unputdownable. I am glad I read it because it made me forget my fever and the discomfort but the only hitch is that now I am planning to look for Jo Nesbo’s bestseller ‘The Snowman’ and start reading it the moment I find it.

Another New Ho…Ho…tel
Obviously, in Hyderabad, hotels are where the money is. Quite a few people in Hyderabad seem to have realized this fact otherwise how does one explain so many new (and swank) hotels being opened in Hyderabad every other week. Sometime back there was the news about the Hyatt opening somewhere in Jubilee Hills. Last week even as I was lying in bed with fever and diminished appetite there was the news of the opening of another new hotel in Hyderabad. I read in the papers about the opening of Green Park’s ‘Marigold’ last Friday or so.

Like I said before hotels seem to be the new money spinner. As it is, there is a hotel around, that is, the Green Park at Greenlands, and now ‘Marigold’ has come up right beside it which isn’t exactly a bad thing considering there aren’t many star hotels in that locality. Though Green Park and Marigold are not in Jubilee Hills (where, in case you didn’t know, there are more foodies per square feet than anywhere in this city) it is, luckily, unlike the Faluknama Palace, within driving distance from Jubilee Hills. I read that Marigold has a Pan Asian restaurant called ‘Mekong’ where one can taste dishes from China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Then there’s ‘Saffron Soul’ which will serve dishes from kitchens across the world. Forget the fact that the Marigold is a Rs 100 crore hotel or that it has 181 rooms, this is enough reason for the Jubilee Hills crowd to come running to Marigold tongues hanging out.