A Muddle

Outside my circle,it is very difficult for me to praise someone directly and also to receive praises or any favours without feeling uncomfortable. Not that I get into that situation daily but of late it has become more frequent and I'm not liking it much. One thing is that if you keep on hearing the praises, it gets into your head and another is that I'll get into the mindset of repaying their 'generosity' in some way and that is something I could very much do without. SK is giving me some anxious moments nowadays while being very nice to me and I hope not to get into any sort of trouble.

Reading The Last Mughal, I couldn't help thinking again how religion has got so many people into trouble. But though everything happens in the name of God, it is not really Him that people are fighting for but only to preserve their interpretation of Him. And nobody who died for it or got killed for it has come back to tell us if God really appreciated what they did. So it looks so futile that we are all taking exception to every small thing that is being done by the members of other faiths and go on a spree of one-upmanship. But now we've come so far that I wonder what can take us back. It's like people are running a race and we tell them to stop and the race is to be cancelled. Some do but one crazy guy doesn't and now others will stop believing you and run because he may win otherwise. God knows!

Winter is drawing to a close and it's a pity. I love the chilly mornings and though the evenings are even better, I seldom get to feel them. Very rarely when I do, it takes me back to the winters of 2001 and it feels like yesterday. Anyway, other things that I love about the season are slowly vanishing too; the Himachal apples and Nagpur oranges that I crave for the rest of the year. Actually we are already feeling the heat(or the other way round!!) of summer in our building; this week one or the other of our geysers is not functioning thanks to the water shortage and lukewarm water for me has become the order of the day.

Nameless Feelings

We went to Cubbon Park over the weekend and Rishi's excitement was obvious considering that we were going there after a long time. It was funny how Rishi, who was just a while ago complaining that we were not buying skating shoes for him, suddenly became nervous when I asked him to try it out first in the Park; there you have an instructor, the shoes and a place to skate also.  He started giving all sorts of excuses but I prevailed and in the end, though he fell 20 times in as many minutes, he looked like an achiever. Nearby, a couple of young girls sang folk songs and danced Bharatanatya so Anu and I became part of the audience.

Actually, living in Bangalore East, where one would wonder if it is really Karnataka or any of the more dominant neighbouring states, I'm used to a sense of pleasant surprise everytime I hear my mother-tongue. When I moved newly from Hyderabad to Bangalore, it wasn't obvious that I had moved to my state as far as my interaction with my neighbours was concerned because hardly anyone spoke the native language. So when the kid in Cubbon Park sang so beautifully, that too with an impeccable diction, it made me so proud and happy somehow. I know there are many who feel this way and no wonder when I asked Abhi what he liked the most about Mysore where he went to study recently, the first thing he said was that everyone spoke Kannada there.

There are various mazes for kids at the park and kids are very good at them but what surprised me was that I never saw anyone trying to climb the trees on the opposite side. I mean, I know there are few guards and they may not allow it but I don't know if that stops kids from having a shot at it anyway. I want to try it out myself some day just for old days' sake; Manjanna and I would climb the old white Hibiscus tree in front of my grandmother's house every morning and while Manjanna(and even Shashi!) was very good at dangling and jumping down like a monkey, I found it surprisingly hard to get down. The boys had to pump me in with confidence with multiple demonstrations and I felt I had mastered the art once I got down but the butterflies would fill my stomach again the next time. Though the tree itself died one summer before I conquered it, it served as a good foothold for my future climbings.

Doesn't it happen sometimes that there is someone you see everyday but hardly pay any attention to until one fine day you discover by accident that that person has so much in common with you and so different from the image you have built and you regret not knowing it before? That is happening to me now.

Vows and Woes

This year is the year of weddings for our team and as of now, all of them will be Kerala weddings. We have four of them involving 6 of our colleagues, all lined up in the first half of the year and my neighbour will start the proceedings next week. In fact, another one also sits in my bay of 3 people and you can imagine the excitement around me. It is one thing to pull their legs and smile when they blush but another to be extracting any kind of work from them, though thankfully I'm not their boss. Throughout the day they do nothing but plan their wedding attires and mehendis online(as if it's for ten weddings!) and do all sorts of chats. One of them will move to the US after marrying and I told her she'd better show that she could work independently if she wanted to work from home. Don't think that has made any lasting impact though.

In another coastal area, my native place, desperate efforts are on to secure a bride for my cousin of 28 years, who is not into a white-collar job. These days guys who are looking after their plantations and parents/grandparents are finding it really hard to get married there because typically girls are studying well and becoming at least teachers easily and expect to get relocated to a city after usually marrying an engineer. We as a community did not have the concept of dowry but now we have one. Guys are looking far and wide for a bride and in some cases as far as Jammu and Kashmir also, with the only condition that the girl should be a vegetarian. The lucky ones end up paying anywhere between 50k to 2 lakhs to the girls' parents, apart from bearing all costs of the wedding. It is just the opposite of the general trend of guys getting everything and my aunt says that the situation becomes really bad if the grandparents are also at home, the girl's family treating it as an additional burden on their daughter. Even the unaffected families are bewildered by the novelty of the situation and ladies are often seen lamenting on how respectfully guys used to be treated once upon a time.

Actually my mother tells me that this is only an aggravation of an old story and reminds me of Kumudakka, wife of her father's cousin, who hailed from Kerala. I saw her in my grandmother's place on the occasion of my grandpa's shradhdha every April and she provided a comic relief to the children and elders alike, though I guess only ladies, on account of her funny Kannada. She had assimilated well into the family and acquired a reputation of a hardworker but as if she had got tired of it all somewhere, mixed up the masculine and neutral genders all the time, making it very hard for us not to burst into laughter right on her face.

Great Expectations

Never was the weekend more welcome than this time. My daughter has caught the habit of sleeping fitfully in the early mornings when my sleep is very dear to me. As a result, my eyes are always drooping these days and it's not a nice thing to be yawning when your manager calls for a meeting. So I hope to catchup with some sleep though we are expecting guests both the days. Today's ones are P's school junior and his family who have come from Mumbai.

I'v left Phantoms in a lurch and moved onto The Last Mughal, the book on Bahadur Shah Zafar. After reading these books, I've lost all illusions of my knowledge of history and I think my reading comes at the right time because my son has started asking a lot of questions on all subjects, history also among them. And he is not the one to hold back his disgust if I'm not convincing enough.

Why do we, or say myself, expect someone to be a good human being just because they are good at what they are doing? I do that all the time and feel disappointed though I don't know if it's a fair expectation at all. One can't be perfect I agree but I also find it hard to admire someone who can spend thousands on luxuries but can not part with a rupee for an old beggar.

Life of Pi is in news but I didn't find it great and that is not because my daughter used my 3-D glasses for most part of the movie. I didn't find any emotional connect between any of the characters and I blame Suraj Sharma for it. Actually the only ones I liked are the writer fellow and Ifran Khan. Though Suraj may have done well for a debutant, I strongly believe that had Ang Lee taken an experienced actor, the movie would've been a much better one. For example, when the tiger left him and went off, I didn't feel anything at all though the visual was in front of me and I felt sad only when Irfan was talking about it. Tabu's English sounded so out of place and artificial. So except for few stunning visuals of the ocean, there was nothing in it for me and it was a letdown. 

Phantoms in the Brain

This one is possibly going to be the next book I'll read, now that I'm done with White Mughals. "Phantoms in the Brain" is the kind which I generally keep at an arms length but now that someone has gifted it to me, that too saying it's one of the best books, I'll venture into it.

6 days of homestay has come to an end and tomorrow when I enter the office, I'll feel like I used to when we would return to Modankap after 2 months in my grandmother's place. I know that I enjoy the thought of being with kids all the time but as someone said, office is a place where you can get some rest to your body, especially if you have active kids at home. Also, "I do all the work at home on my own and I don't need any maid" is a very feel-good statement but the execution is not easy. You'll have to leave your dear post-lunch naps, late-night movies etc and you must have a huge reserve of ...self-belief to be able to complete cleaning the kitchen even if your eyes are dragging you towards the bed and telling the brain that the sink looks clean enough. The only question that pops up in my mind is how a person like me, who does not heed the call of sleep even at 11 to complete the chores, can behave like a helping guest the moment my mother is at home and be happy playing with the kids. Part of the blame I shall shift to my mother herself who thinks I'm doing a great job by working(in the office) but it is a shame on me that I let her do so and I'm going to change.

My son enjoys my cooking and he's asking almost everyday when I'll quit and be with him at home. I told him it would be next June. Whenever this topic comes between us, I remember my old landlady who had admonished me when I quit the last time; when my son was 6 months old. She had said, "Don't you feel sorry for the kid and leave such a good job just like that! Daycare will do fine for him. Anyway these boys don't remember a thing you do for them and happily go behind their wives!"!! In fact, it was her son who had just then got engaged to a girl outside her caste and I could see that anguish reflecting in her warning.

I'm in awe of storytellers. Sometimes the things they write are exactly what I would've felt and I cannot imagine someone else can feel that way too, they are so odd. And they write about so many other thought-processes and feelings...how would they know all of them?

Busy

Both my husband and son have left for work and school and the house resembles warfront. My daughter and I are enjoying assorted songs on internet and her latest favourite is "Take My Breath Away".

Very soon we'll have to look for her admission in a playschool and the thought is dreadful, especially from our previous experience. I know there are many children who love going to school but neither myself nor V nor my son have had such upfront affinity and we got along after being pushed to school day after day. Going by my daughter's responses to our teasers about school, hers won't be a different story either. I wish we could tutor her at home for some years at least. The other day I saw a little girl being dropped into a daycare/kindergarten facility by her father and hardly had she alighted from the bike when a young lady, may be the caretaker, started complaining with a very stern face that the kid was talking too much and she was not at all interested in her 'studies'! Felt so sorry for the poor thing.

We did a good thing on the kid's birthday and the satisfaction that comes with such a thing has made us determined to do more.