Uneasy

How to shake off this feeling? That you couldn't do it any other way but it's still unfair? 

The Hidden Lives

My boss is frustrated. This silly nonsensical nothing-on-email policy has finally got to him. I know how it feels because he has been preaching it to me for some time now. We are just making ourselves a target for ridicule, that's all. Anyway, before finishing the call he still said, "Be very careful when you deal with these people!" and frustrated me. I can't! And though he used plural I know he meant J specifically because he's the one I'm 'dealing with' these days. I don't want to be careful of J and treat him like a thug. All he's doing is working hard to get new business for us and he needs help and I need work. And I don't mind going an extra mile for that.

Today I kept getting the error "The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed". Seemed pretty apt.

I sometimes feel abandoned by Netflix. It's like all they are interested in are teenagers and old-agers. I mean, people beyond 70. What about women my age? Too uninteresting? Actually no, they seem pretty busy solving crimes - Paranoid, Marcella, Broadchurch, Deadwind, Ultraviolet...

I liked Deadwind. 

School Days

We watched Sa.Hi.Pra.Shale...over the weekend. It's actually a joyride around the beautiful place with the language issue thrown in. I would've preferred to have some songs removed to add some meat to it and the characters of Anant Nag and Ramesh Bhat totally eliminated from the story. Why couldn't it be the village's story end-to-end? Children are cute and Anu, who had declared that she was coming with us only to eat popcorn was hooked throughout. 

Truth or Dare

At the kids' corner, ages between 6 and 8 -

Girl1 : Hey, you lied to Didi!
Girl2 : It's none of your problem. Anyway, lying is much better for us than telling the truth.
Girl1: But all mothers say lying is bad!
Girl2: I don't believe that. My friend liked this boy in her class and when she told her mother about it, her mother slapped her. Then when she lied about it, she said okay okay. You see?

Looking to Age

I love Kalki's new hairstyle and when I reach fifty I'm going to have mine like that. Actually I seem to have pinned a lot of hopes on fifty which is pretty far right now and I really can't say why I can't do some things today. I guess I'm expecting some magic to happen by then.

The thing is, a few years ago it was 45 and I don't know when I automatically shifted the goalpost to 50...

The Learning Curve

We have suddenly woken up to the fact that Anu needs to learn Maths too and it's not been very easy to convince her. She said she would be either a singer or an artist or a writer so she didn't need to learn Maths whatsoever. Then we told her about the money part and she grudgingly sat to do the divisions. But it's been a bumpy ride so far and at one point she got so annoyed that she shouted at us all in general, "I know nobody understands Maths, everybody just tries to explain it to others that's all!". P hasn't given up though, even at the cost of losing his 'favourite' position.

Just when I thought my work life had become dull and monotonous, the higher-ups have made it very eventful, too eventful to my liking. 

Mirrors

It's still surprising, though not entirely unexpected, how our prejudices, jealousies, hatreds towards a community can express themselves during a disaster. How we can immediately bring up a past unkindness of a person and make him or her the representative of the entire community to justify ourselves in saying, "Of course it had to happen", "These people..." and an excuse to do nothing of help. And it also makes you wonder what kind of representative you may have been for the many slots you may represent, when someone sits in judgement some day. 

Missed Hits

On whatsapp you can relay a lot of words but it's still difficult to send the thoughts across. My ex-boss who forwards me political cartoons or photos has never been able to understand my responses so far. In reply to my responses when he begins, "No, but the point is...", I can hear the hidden "Oh no, I have to make this lady understand the basics now..." and after that it feels sad to explain to him that I was being sarcastic. I give up. I'm going to stick to plain smileys now. 

The Straight-talker

Among all my co-sisters, S is the only one from a wealthy family. My father-in-law looked up to her father who was a self-made man and had five daughters and no son. So when her father wanted his second son who was getting slightly out of hand as the resident son-in-law, I suppose my father-in-law was relieved. My husband's impression of S as a child is that of a girl who was very well aware of the economic positions of both the families but then her husband was a good looking guy in his younger days, has retained a very good sense of humour and has the best temper among six brothers so I guess that worked in his favour. They seem to have been a very happy couple all these years too.

But what she has never been happy about is the family she got through her husband and she's never made any bones about it. The circumstances of her marriage seem to have given her a strong sense of detachment but she retained the feeling of entitlement nevertheless. My in-laws' place provided enough opportunities for a critic; the muddy approach road was and to some extent is, a terrible mess most times, the house itself had nightmarish facilities, if at all, especially so for anybody who believed in least amount of privacy. To boot, the firewood kitchen would spew ample smoke and if it rained, the hall and the rest of the house would be like two islands. S visited the place on occasions and she says she spent the first few years sitting on the steps of the door opening to the alley with tears in her eyes; from smoke or otherwise. But I've wondered often that she visited so many times at all; may be it was because she had running feuds with her sisters and parents both and she wanted to show them that she had someplace else to go to.

When I got married in 2003, things hadn't really changed except for the construction of a toilet and a better-designed bathroom. S visited my in-laws' place whenever I did and for me, who was struggling to find my feet there, she was support, a comfort and a relief. She gave expression to many of my frustrations, which I could never do myself because I thought it wasn't appropriate. S never seemed to have any such qualms; I remember her in the old house with a perpetual frown on her face, a picture of oddity sitting on a chair fanning herself furiously with a newspaper roll and when tired, requesting some child to do it for her, criticizing the men for being stingy in not having a generator. She was a marvel to me, a refreshing one; I had never seen anybody who was so outspoken, least of all a lady, a daughter-in-law. I was proud of her, of her ability to pinpoint the reasons for the current state of affairs and that she wouldn't even spare my father-in-law, who was and still is the holy cow of the household. And she did it all as if there was an invisible protective layer around her; a shield of sheer contempt emanating from her which kept other people from counter-attacking her often-sharp-and-harsh comments. My mother-in-law would mutter some defenses, my third co-sister would silently sulk and my brothers-in-law would laugh and move on.

But over the years, as I gelled more with the family, the novelty began to wear off for me. I began to realise that her brutal assessment was not always right and that she rarely acknowledged merit in anyone or anything that the family did. Yet, people tried hard to please her and it seemed nothing was good enough until she approved of it. We moved to a new house, facilities improved, new co-sisters joined us but S remained the same. May be I developed a thick skin or I could just see that people were earnest about bringing about changes, may not be overnight but very much visible to someone who wanted to see it, S lost me somewhere along the way. It seemed as if she had become a compulsive critic and she was afraid that if she said a good word they would appropriate her for good and she couldn't allow that. Anyway, I started contradicting her when I could, respectfully but firmly. Then a lot of things happened in the family and now she's strictly not on talking terms with them, putting me in a quandary. I call her up once in a few months but it's not easy for me. But I do feel sorry for her at times.

Razed

What seemed like would be there forever is done and dusted now and it's still unbelievable. So now there is this bigger club a little farther which is also much more expensive and that's where I'll be going to swim and play badminton some day, of course, surely.

Do we really root for the underdogs in real life? I mean, as much as we want them to do well in the movies and shed tears over their troubles...why do we do a u-turn or avert our eyes when we see them around us?

I had a fleeting glance at the Test match and before I winced and moved on, Anu caught a glimpse too. She wanted to know where the pom-pom girls were, having seen them in IPL before. May not be a bad idea when India plays in England because this Jimmy Anderson kind of entertainment gets on your nerves after a while.

The Odd One Out

I realise there are so many parasites in the workplace. People who would've spent years in the system but never want to invest their time in it either due to lack of aptitude or of energy. They instead take shortcuts, go to people who think they need to own up everything and get their work done. The worst part about them is that they give you a false or elevated sense of your own capabilities.

One of my peers is moving out. He was my punching bag for long; silent punching, that is. He took great pleasure in telling me that I joined the module before him, as if it was an excuse to do nothing. There are occasions I've felt frustrated with my boss on account of this guy and whenever I felt guilty about working from home, I thought of him and felt better. So there is now going to be an odd sense of loss.