Tag: QB cartoon

The Sheep of Jannaram!

December 20, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Like I already mentioned in the previous post on Jannaram, I have a couple of cartoons. Here goes the first one.

While on the road to Kadem from Jannaram, as the Sun was setting in the background, we saw herd of sheep returning to their homes, along with their shepherd.

Sheep and their Shepherd!

GBee who was actively watching the road, started the conversation…

GBee pointing out sheep and KBee playing with his fidget toy slug!

The grammar Nazi that I am, (in spite of being tired of hearing loud screams and noises from both the kids in my precious little ears), I found the chance to correct GBee, even though we were on a holiday, enjoying the beautiful sunset as well as reminding myself, why I was in the car and where I was going! (I become philosophical sometimes…I must be aging rapidly!)

GBee agreeing to my gyaan and KBee seemingly ignoring me!

GBee has the habit of being attentive and at least look like he is listening to what all nonsense or gyaan I speak. Whereas my younger gem, KBee never bats an eyelid, even if I teach him something fun. He ignores me completely and I wonder if KBee ever listens to anything I say, just like his dad! (Mr.Bee has the habit of immersing himself completely in his cell, I have to repeat everything twice or thrice and even then he manages to forget some important stuff and later asks me if I ever talked to him at all regarding the said topic!) Like father, like son, I thought!

GBee and his laughs with KBee and his impromptu song!

Turns out KBee listens once in a while and can even sing in tune! Turns out, anything, even sheep can inspire someone to sing!

P.S:

  1. The cartoon is supposed to be in a car, while in transit. This is all I could come up with. It has a lot of sharp edges, because drawing curves is difficult in paint!
  2. I found the fidget slug online and bought it for KBee and GBee, one each. Whenever we travel, that is what the kids carry with them. Hyper kids love fidget toys. They also have other toys to play during our travels, but this is the latest addition.
  3. We recently travelled to Indore and I will post about them soon. Looks like BeeAfterYou is turning into a travellogue!
  4. KBee and GBee talk to each other in English. I talk to them in Telugu. Only GBee can talk in Telugu. KBee is yet to learn Telugu. He finds English easier. (No wonder Telugu is a dying language!)
  5. KBee’s language is still not clear and I sometimes giggle listening to how he pronounces stuff! He doesn’t like it when I laugh. He reprimands me saying, ‘It’s not funny! ‘It’s not funny’ is a line from Peppa Pig.  I think KBee takes after me, even I used to have trouble pronouncing words properly. LOL!

Till the next post, cheerio!

The (Un)Lucky Worm!

August 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

It gives me immense pleasure when I see my kids playing outside, with worms and insects no less. I feel satisfied and pat myself on the back, when they entertain themselves with insects and not with the T.V or the much dreaded cell phone. Ya, they take after me.(Though they still have a long way to go) I had the best childhood, playing with all kinds of insects (one of the perks of being an introvert) and I still find it funny how my mom never stopped me from playing with them.(She probably never knew!)

Let me make this clear. Playing with insects involves, observing them from close quarters, seeing what they do when a leaf is placed in front of them or when food is available readily. It also involves checking out their living quarters, like an anthill and trying to understand how they manage to make those! I hope this doesn’t sound creepy, but it is entertaining in its own right.

I had previously written innumerable posts about this, but they are lost in the sea of internet and my back up issues of blogging. I may write about them in future again, but for now, the topic is the kids playing with worms, an earthworm, to be specific, if you are really into details!

We went on our bi-monthly visit to my parents house and the kids were playing in the verandah, when this little incident had taken place.

My parents have a lengthy verandah which kids their age love. They can race each other, listen to the birds early in the morning, run after the lone butterfly or even spray each other with water from the low level tap. Once or twice, some birds may even come after you, to peck your eyes out (or to kill the lice in your hair), if you make any suspicious movements!

So, one Sunday afternoon, GBee and KBee were running after their grandfather, showing him around his own garden! (Ya, they took him to a plant to show its flowers to him. They took him next to the mighty coconut tree to show him the coconuts, as if its something new. It is his own house for Heaven’s sake!)

GBee suddenly found an earthworm on the cement walkway, slowly going about its business, crawling slower than either a sloth or a snail! He called out to us. KBee too came running at once, not to miss out on the fun, whatever that excited his brother.

Spotting the rogue earthworm!

Suddenly, GBee ran away and KBee tried to touch it (or poke it, probably), but I stopped him midway. GBee returned with a tiny bucket filled with water and splashed it on top of the earthworm!

Watering the earthworm or playing with it?

I thought he was intent on killing off the poor earthworm! But I was mistaken. He was in-fact making a swimming pool for the little creepy crawly! Goes to show how much he loves a swimming pool. (He keeps asking me to buy a house with a swimming pool, as if that comes cheap!)

Once he was done pouring water, I envied it, one lucky worm, got itself a swimming pool, no less! But that might be my opinion. Who knew what the worm wanted? (It probably wanted a less adventurous life with no sudden splashes of water immersing it completely!)

Imagine if we had a downpour of rain, just like a bucket had been emptied suddenly on our heads. That would suffocate us surely. So on second thought, the earthworm must have cursed its own bad luck!

Why me?

So what do you think the worm was thinking?

P.S:

  1. In the last panel, I zoomed the earthworm, so that I could show the facial expression better!
  2. My daddy was impressed by GBee’s thought process, about gifting a swimming pool to the earthworm and all! Did such thought ever run in your brain? NO, right! It is so out of the box, rather, out of the bucket!
  3. Watching insects of various sizes surely changes your perspective of life. We begin to understand life, problems and happiness are all relative. We also understand that philosophy also comes to us in bursts and intervals and thankfully, doesn’t engulf us completely. Even philosophical thoughts are temporary like our sorrows and happiness. Food for thought!
  4. I thought my readers needed a change of pace with all the posts about Ooty. The next post will continue the progress of our vacation.

Cheerio till the next post friends.

Holi Ke Din….

March 6, 2023 / / 0 Comments

As usual, at 1 o’clock in the afternoon,  I was eagerly waiting for the return of GBee from his school. Just as he put his foot inside the hall, I saw his face. It was covered partially with green colour on his cheeks and forehead. That was when it hit me that tomorrow is Holi!

The rectangular thing in my hand is supposed to be a cell!

Looking at GBee in colours reminded me that, gone are the days when I would look forward to Holi!

I remember the days when we used to return to school with traces of gulaal (pink colour) in our hair, faces and hands. The more pink one appeared, the more proud we would feel. Being pink meant, we had played and enjoyed the festival!

QB with pink highlights in hair and some random classmates talking about Holi

There used to be this gang of rowdy boys, who would come to our apartment every year on Holi,  They would catch hold of the guys in our apartment and brush their teeth with gulaal and blue colours! (Yuk!Who would want dirty colours in their mouth and teeth? Beats me!) They would also throw eggs at us kids. Phew, who would want smelly eggs on their heads, mixed with bunch of colours? Double yuk! If you are being chased by someone with an egg in hand, suddenly sit down on the floor and you probably would avoid being hit!

Trying to avoid an egg on the head? Just sit down suddenly!

Those were the days, we would drench each other in buckets of gulaal water and begin to shiver. To stop the shiver, we would stand under the Sun, in the middle of the road! (Who even does that now?)

Even the uncles in the apartment would play Holi. I remember one particular incident when someone brought silver colour to play and the next day, my father and I had severe rashes on our faces. (Silver is danger!)

The ladies in the apartment would play with the good old kumkum and haldi.  We even had fun scaring away the domestic helps, who would come to their respective flats to work. We would sneak attack! If we sneak attack now, we may get beatings, people are less forgiving these days.

During one Holi celebrations in my schooling days, I had taken an egg in my hair, from K, who was younger to me. (How dare he mess up with a senior!) I waited in the verandah, till my mom had hot water ready for my bath . Meanwhile, I was fed lunch, by my dad. What fun!

I pity the generation of kids who have no idea how to spend time away from a t.v. or cell.  They have no idea of how safe our world was and how carefree we were, while we played on the streets, away from deranged people who lay hands on innocent kids or the violent stray dogs or the lack of traffic and vehicles on streets. Those days can never come back!

P.S:

  1. Before going out to play Holi, it is better to apply oil on your face and hands. This way, you won’t look like a pink alien in office. This is for all those who hate looking like they drank gulaal!
  2. My favourite Holi song is Arey Jaa re Hatt from Navrang, a very old Hindi movie, directed by Shantaram. Not everyone likes it, but check it out. The dancer Sandhya acts as both boy and girl in the song. It was a sensation in those days. (Let me be your DJ for Holi and suggest grooving to these songs…)

and also this…from Sholay, hence the title of the post!

Lastly, I would like to mention Balam Pichkari from Yeh Jawani Hai Diwani….

Did I miss any popular Holi song?  Do drop a comment and let me know. Till the next post, cheerio!

The Tale of the White Leaf!

February 22, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Before I start today’s post, let me tell you that, if you ever read any post titles, which sound at once intriguing, rest assured that it is related to the kids. This is one such incident I would love to elaborate on…

The daily routine of GBee is, to wake up at 7 a.m. Laze around on the bed, planning ahead, about what he is going to do for the particular day! Then after much coaxing and coddling, get out of the bed at 7:40 a.m.

The next step is to run around the bed, either to wake up his baby brother KBee or to bring his school bag, open the pouch and begin sharpening his pencils and chatting all the while.  He has his pouch always filled up with atleast 10 pencils. He writes with a different one each day.  (Never buy kids pencils in various colours, they ask us for one in each colour. Buy them boring pencils in same colour and they never ask for another.  Don’t repeat my mistake! I bought him colourful pencils and now he has one in each colour ready for any emergencies and still asks me for more!)

When we first joined him in school, he would cry incessantly and always plead me not to send him to school. (I spent many nights wondering if he would ever make any friends or go to school at all!)

Because he manages to cry a lot, he would throw up before going to school, each day. So feeding him breakfast early in the morning was a bad idea. In his early school days, he never ate anything before going to school and always brought his tiffin / snack box, as it is, without eating. (For a week, it felt like he was fasting and opposing the school, in his silent way!)

That’s when I decided to just give him milk before going to school. To make him slowly begin eating at school, I would send his box filled with his favourite cookies and pooris in the shapes of hearts, squares and circles. The little GBee, never liked Pediasure to begin with. (Any new food / beverage never interests him. He has zero interest in trying new food) To get GBee interested in Pediasure, I bought the Vanilla flavoured one and would mix it in milk and give it to him before school and slowly he began drinking it. He never knew I mixed anything in milk, because, vanilla flavoured Pediasure was off white in colour.

Just as I was getting used to him having his morning cup of milk, one day ….

A white leaf!

Since I was busy packing his snack box, I really didn’t understand what he meant at first. My mind was occupied.

He was referring to the layer of protein on the milk, a White Leaf!

Milk Skin = White Leaf

I say ‘sad’ layer because, I hate the layer of protein on top of milk. I just hate when the milk skin forms on milk. Or even tea for that matter. I exaggerate and tell everyone who listens to me, that milk skins suffocate the throat, so I can’t have it! (which is a lie)

After he complained about the ‘white leaf’, i filtered the milk for him and then and ‘only’ then did he drink his milk.

That, dear readers, is the Tale of the White Leaf!

P.S:

  1. I was inspired by ‘The Tale of Two cities’ of Charles Dickens while naming the blog post. I may read it in future.
  2. The milk skin infact has a scientific name, Lactoderm! But,  as usual, I love the one coined by GBee, ‘White Leaf’. He also calls grey hair as ‘White Grass’!
  3. Do you know ‘the Order of White Lotus’? If you are an Avatar geek, you may know it. If you are not, it a secret society of intellectual people who share knowledge. It is part of the ‘Avatar’, the anime and not the James Cameron Avatar.

Till the next post!

The Ugly Butterfly

February 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Those were the ‘Happy Days’ of my life! (Just like the Telugu movie, Happy Days, set in CBIT, Hyderabad, this post is of me, during my Engineering College days.)

During those days, the only worries I ever had were, does my dress look too flashy? Will the seniors decide to rag me because of my dress? What seminar should I attend? What is my attendance percentage? Is it really above 75% ?

Anyway, I have always been insect friendly.  So, naturally, the ever beautiful butterflies were also among my friends, who caught my attention every now and then. But don’t go imagining the beautiful Costa Rican blue butterflies here!

Blue Butterflies = luck

The Costa Ricans actually  believe that spotting a blue butterfly means luck is on your side. (Lucky Shivudu. Spotting a group of blue butterflies must be the reason he could climb the waterfalls, defying death! This is part of Baahubali story. Hope you watched it. It is one of the most iconic scenes, with a magnificent waterfalls in the backdrop. Never was CGI used more beautifully for creating a waterfall)

The butterfly that I am actually referring to was a far cry from these beauties. Although our Engineering college campus had its share of huge farmland insects, thanks to all the farm lands and vineyards around our campus, this one was a surprise.  I had seen big grasshoppers the size of my hand, beetles the size of lemons and some insects whose names I don’t even know.

After a fun filled day at college, I was exhausted and I lept on to my bed , ready to end the day.  We (me and sister shared our bedroom) chatted away, after turning off the light in our room. I turned to my side in my bed and put my hand on the pillow beside me. My hand touched something and I felt something flee the spot, like rushing away! I jumped out of my bed, ran towards my sister’s bed and turned on the light! I saw the most surprising thing ever!

It was a huge butterfly, with each wing, a little bigger than the size of my hand, whose wings were as rough as the skin of a crocodile! It was wheatish in colour. (That must have been the reason I couldn’t spot it before sleeping. Camouflage!)  It was completely different from the notion I had of butterflies and the tender love I always had for the colourful beauties vanished!

Once we spotted the butterfly, all hell broke loose!

The Ugly Butterfly, refusing to budge, while I and sis were at wits end.

We began jumping up and down, crying out loud. Our commotion brought my parents into our room. We demanded our dad to chase it away or we wouldn’t sleep at all.  After 10 minutes of extreme effort with a mop, dad managed to chase it out. It was such a stubborn butterfly refusing to budge. It must have been scared about the commotion it was creating!

Sadly, one of its wings was hurt. (It was unintentional. Seeing such a butterfly in our midst made us adamant. We wanted it out of our room at any cost.) I am mostly a forgiving person, but once it perched on my bed, I knew it was better to get rid of it. I can still remember how I felt when I touched it by mistake!

Looking back, I now understand that, even in the midst of the concrete jungle, a wild butterfly managed to survive!

P.S:

1.  Our college chairman once said during our Annual day celebrations, that he was torn between, whether to use the land to ‘grow’ grapes in his vineyard or to use the land to build the college to ‘grow’ students!

Our college was in the middle of farms and vineyards. I also remember seeing Sunflowers each morning. Happy Days indeed!

2. One of Mr.Bee’s friend, J from our days in Charlotte had presented him with a souvenir of a Blue Butterfly, after his trip to Costa Rica. That’s how I got to know the significance of the blue butterflies.

More posts coming up. Till then, cheerio!

Dadamoni!

February 15, 2023 / / 1 Comment

As I begin to write yet another post, I am beginning to understand myself a whole lot better. I keep going back and forth between movies and book references in my life! ( It must be due to my upbringing, in a family where both books and movies were treasured alike!) Today, it is the movie influence that is apparent in my post title, Dadamoni.

Dadamoni is a Bengali term, where ‘Dada’ means an elder brother and ‘moni’ means a jewel. An elder brother who is as good/precious as a jewel! (If you have been Indian cricket fan, you will know Sourav Ganguly was referred to as Dada. But the original Dadamoni was the actor Ashok Kumar, the elder brother of the eccentric Bollywood singer Kishore Kumar da)

Since I am done with the introduction, lets jump into today’s cartoon…

The scene starts with an interaction between QueenBee and KBee. My aim was to teach KBee some basic words.  KBee had successfully repeated Amma, after me. Then I make him repeat Nanna, Anna and other two letter words. Then, I see GBee zooming away, running fast, passing us both, shouting at the top of his lungs ….

Jumping right away into bigger words!

Just when KBee was getting comfortable with two lettered words, I threw a bigger word at him, Dadamoni! (I am a para bhasha priya! One who loves other languages, more than their own. My bad!) It is safe to say that KBee found it difficult to even utter ‘dada‘.  He already calls his brother, anna.

Meanwhile, Mr.Bee in his office room…

Done with two syllable words already!

I would still prefer if KBee referred to GBee as Dadamoni, but, I am not going to force it upon him! Some words are just so beautiful, they remain with us. Dadamoni is one such word, which captured my heart, during my movie research, years ago.

Does anyone like Golden Oldies? Like the movies of Dev Anand, Ashok Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna and the likes?

P.S:

  1. My all time favourite actor has always been Shammi Kapoor.
  2. Dev Anand’s brother,Vijay Anand, played a detective in an old Hindi serial in Doordarshan, Tehkikaat. It was the first detective serial I had ever watched, not that I remember much. I hope to watch it again. I also watched Byomkesh Bakshi, a series in Doordarshan, starring Rajit Kapur and not the one starring Sushant Singh Rajput. (God I feel so old!)
  3. Some day I will surely write about all the detective movies and  series, I ever watched. It may end up being my longest post.  And, did anyone observe that today’s post has a lot of Bengali flavour!  😉
  4. I think Mr.Bee in today’s cartoon looks very young! I should have given him a stubble!

Until my next post, cheerio!

The Banana Guava!

February 9, 2023 / / 0 Comments

After almost a year and half,  I have taken to drawing a cartoon again. It feels so gratifying, being able to draw and write, like I used to. It is also the first cartoon my new character, my younger son, KBee is debuting in!

Anyway, coming to the present topic, the title must have confused you readers, let’s be frank, its not even a word. It is a group of words. Thanks to GBee for coining the term for me and as I put our conversation here, it will be a tiny part of internet history!

As is usually the case, whenever we bring home vegetables and fruits after buying them from the market, we lay down everything in the open, ready to put them in separate covers.

This time around, we did the same and had all the vegetables out on the floor. Little did we guess that we may get the attention of the baby, KBee! He and his brother had been immersed in D-Billions, but then, who can resist colourful vegetables? Not a certain KBee!

KBee picking up the bottle gourd, (Lauki.)

KBee usually enjoys, ‘tomato’napping (kidnapping tomatoes), mostly to either smash them or bite them off. But this time, he ran away with a bottle gourd! I went after him, to ask him, if he knew what he was taking…but the kid hardly knew how to say amma! (He was a little over 1 year, during this particular scene)

Once, KBee he had our undivided attention,GBee, likes to be included too! GBee, who had been listening to me, had given me his answer…

Getting a response to one’s question can sometimes baffle us!

Yes! He replied Banana Guava!

Eye opening moment

Even though it was a baffling moment. It was also crystal clear, why GBee had given me the answer he gave! (He looked happy and content, he felt proud of himself, for coming up with an answer, to shut his mother down!)

According to him bottle gourd is Banana Guava, because, it is elongated and almost shaped like a banana and also in the colour of a fresh guava. Hence the name. Of course, this was my deduction, since I know GBee like the back of my hand.

So the next time you see a bottle gourd, I hope you remember ‘The Banana Guava’ episode!

P.S:

  1. Apart from Cocomelon, Chuchu tv, Infobells, Grizzy and the Lemmings, the kids love watching D-Billions, which is fun to watch. Even I like watching those. (Actually, its the only stuff I get to watch on T.V.  Our T.V. has been conquered by Samrat GBee for now. It is under his rule! Some day, it may be under the rule of Samrat KBee.) Mera number kab ayega? Can’t say!

Cheerio till the next post.

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