Rice porridge with red rice, a nice coconut chammandi and some pulses cooked lightly with no masala, makes good food. So when you add some kondattam to it, well then it is a feast.

When advertorials present happy families crunching on packets of cereals, coated with sugar and chocolate and feeling so healthy and abundant, you are sometimes misled to believe that it is what is good food and good living is all about.

Packets of food lining up the kitchen cupboard, where all you need to do is to pour in to your bowl and consume it, children, adults and everybody else. And that is healthy living! Really!

What a cheat story that is?

My daughter asks me some times, ‘so all that bournvita that I drank, it was nothing but mere sugar, is it?’.

I don’t have an answer because as a young mom, ambitious for her kid, I had often coaxed her to have her bournvita, in the belief, then all will be well!

So I thought, or because every body seems to be doing the same, so I just followed it.

But readymade food has not found much space in my kitchen maybe because the weekly dosa batter, the alternate uppmas or the delicious piniyarams, or the many parathas, had still not given up their pride of the place on the breakfast table.

That helped hugely, I like to think.

Good food is simple, it is difficult to get that, like good life, which is better, the more simple it is….

Or maybe a good dress.

It is just that we get lost in labels and perceptions and appearances and find fun in sophistication or what is masqueraded as elite!

Strange that life principles are so fundamentally simple, yet we get lost in the maze of life, so many of us.. perhaps that is living.

Look at the skies

watch the butterflies

know the cries of the birds

the dance of the clouds

know mostly your body

and how it speaks to you

listen to your heart

her soft whisperings

her murmurs

and her many dreams

go walking by the long road

biking in the country side

sit down by the waters

listen to the ripples

the swish and swoosh

of the breeze

the trance of the trees

the search of the roots

light begins in your eyes.

Simplicity in attire: set mundu from Kerala, in pic, amma and valliamma Pic courtesy: achan