bronzed days

come the weekend and my life follows a routine.saturday is mostly spent on finishing the domestic chores and the inevitable trip to the supermarket.

on sundays life continues between limbo (read that as inactivity, wine and sloth) and guilt ridden pangs of spending more time with the clan.
into this state of non perfect nirvana ,rhetoric questions of how creativity has been wasted has been surreptiously seeping in.

one of the things i have been noticing about is the number of bronze and brass figurines at home. i see them all over blackened by years of neglect and the sorry state of this world's pollution problem.
as i was contemplating about how these figurines must have looked before they all darkened,i decided to find out.
armed with economy size vats of brasso, silvo and other products which have sung and danced on television, i sat and laboured on the polishing. after nearly an hour of arm wrenching work peppered with with swear words as and when figurine has fallen on leg, i noticed they looked only slightly better.

2 clear options stood before me, give up and do something else like read a book or try something different.
the first looked good but would only induce pangs of guilty remorse later, hence i decided to do something different. Thinking back to what my grandmother, my mother and scores of indian women in the past would have done came to the rescue. voila - tamarind soaked in water (acidic prep...) and liberal use of dish washing powder later was the balm to instant polishing.

yes, i smelled terrible and would not be asked for a date by la lopez but the figurines glowed, the dirt and rust having disintegrated away.

next mission impossible - fix the ever growing army of my son's stuff with broken wheels, books without binders, etc.
here's a job for mr araldite man...