Shiv Ratri

We celebrated ‘Shiv Ratri’ on the ship today, or in the Antarctic continent.

Other than ‘Kailash-Manasarovar’ it was perhaps the most appropriate place for celebrating this festival. Geographically, Tibet – where both these sacred places are situated – owes its presence to the Antarctica only. To be brief, without taking the risk of boring you, Gondwanaland continent was a supercontinent till 200 million years ago and starting breaking up 190 m years ago. Seventy m years ago, all the breakaway pieces - South America, South Africa, Australia and India - had detached completely from the supercontinent (now reduced to Antarctica continent) and begun to move to their present locations. Twenty million years ago, Indian plate collided with Eurasia plate, and Tibet, which was under the sea, surfaced as one of the highest inhabited plateau. The snow, blizzards, avalanches, isolation, freezing temperatures, awe etc are some other characteristics which define both the places.

A very funny thing has been happening in India lately regarding the day when a particular festival is going to be celebrated. There are invariably two different days in different calendars/almanacs on which a festival is listed. I thought we would be free from this perpetual dilemma in this continent. However, this controversy finally hit us also. On the 4th evening a number of members got emails from their families about ‘Shiv Ratri’ being celebrated on 6th March. I do not understand why the families waited till the last to create this controversy. Anyway, only a few of us were fasting, so we went ahead and observed our fast today itself. I made a power point presentation of my Kailash-Manasarovar expedition to the interested audience in the afternoon.

I did my second galley duty on the ship today. The work is mostly helping the cook in making preparations. However, it gave me chance to observe the cooking, dinning etc of the ship crew. We share the kitchen with the crew (all Russians), but have different working platforms. A single lady handles all the cooking. Another lady comes to help her only at the time of serving food. It is not buffet style (as it is in our case), but food is put on individual plates to be served to each member. Each one gets all the dishes in equal measures. No one barges into the kitchen to find out what is being cooked, no one comes to offer any suggestion to the cook how a dish should be prepared. It is very much unlike what happens on our side. With buffet style, people eat or overeat their choicest dish, sometimes leaving none for the latecomers. Or, if they do not happen to like the food, immediately they would help themselves with maggie, eggs, etc resulting into sinful trashing of cooked food. Barging into the kitchen and giving unsolicited suggestions is a frequent occurrence. You go into the dinning hall at any time of the day, you will find someone or the other eating. I had written earlier about the food fads, but food preoccupation is another dimension. Some members begin their day with eating or for eating only.