Delhi’s Proust Questionnaire – Divya Babu, Sector 54, Gurgaon
The parlour confession.
[By Mayank Austen Soofi]
The rain has stopped and the evening sky is looking like an inverted golden bowl. Divya Babu is enjoying this magical sight perched far above the wet earth mired in flooded underpasses and traffic jams—on the balcony of her 30th floor apartment in Gurgaon’s Sector 54 in the Greater Delhi Region. “The sky is straight out of a Turner watercolour,” she says (the above photo was clicked by her husband Sanjay Arora last evening).
A watercolour/pencil artist, photographer and “a mother of one”, the high-altitude woman agreed to exploit her balcony me-time by answering the Proust Questionnaire in which folks are nudged to make “Parisian parlour confessions”, all to explore citizens’ distinct experiences.
Your favorite virtue or the principal aspect of your personality
Patience
Your favorite qualities in a man
Tolerance, kindness and humour
Your favorite qualities in a woman
Tolerance, kindness and humour
Your chief characteristic
Friendly
What do you appreciate the most in your friends?
Their willingness to tolerate me 🙂
Your main fault
Professional procrastinator
Your favorite occupation
Art, in all forms
Your idea of happiness
Pre-Covid times
Your idea of misery or what would be your greatest misfortune?
Losing the people I love
If not yourself, who would you be?
If not myself, I would not be
Where would you like to live?
The place doesn’t matter, the people around me do
Your favourite colour and flower
Purple, Hibiscus
Your favorite bird
Penguins
Your favorite prose authors
Keeps changing! Listing the last few I read – Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood & Rohinton Mistry
Your favorite heroes in fiction
The little prince
Your favorite heroines in fiction
Jo March
Your favorite painters
Frida Kahlo
Your heroes/heroines in real life
My daughter and kids all over who are braving their childhood being taken away from them by this lockdown life
What characters in history do you most dislike?
Churchill
Your heroines in World history
All the unnamed women who fought both quietly and vociferously to bring us to the point we are today, where we have the right to make our own choices
Your favorite food and drink
My mother’s prawn curry, Ginger chai on a rainy day (specifically on a rainy day – it just tastes different)
Your favorite names
Samairaa, my daughter’s name. It is of Persian origin and means ‘enchanting’
What do you hate the most?
Dishonesty and pompousness
The military event you admire the most
I can’t say I admire the idea of a military event at all!
The reform you admire the most
The abolition of the Sati practice
The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with
Singing
How do you wish to die?
Quietly, in my sleep
What is your present state of mind?
Scared for the world but thankful to be surrounded by the people I love
Faults for which you have the most tolerance
Ignorance, because it is bliss
Your motto in life
Go with the flow
Recent Comments