An accident

Shortly after we came back from our spring break vacation, Y had a bad car accident. Fortunately for her, it happened just outside her school during the morning school rush. She was driving alone in the car, and was hit by another kid driving 60 mph in a 35 mph school zone. Technically, she was at fault ("failure to yield on a left turn"), but the other kid was speeding so much she never saw him, even after she exercised due caution while turning. 

Our car flipped a whole 90 degrees and came to rest on its side. Thank God for airbags and seatbelts, which saved her life. She was very shaken but thankfully unhurt except for a few minor scrapes and bruises. More importantly, there was no drama or hysterics, and she stayed very calm throughout the whole ordeal. The car was totaled, though, and we had to get a new one at short notice.

Our family seems to specialize in near-death experiences :( 

Thank God we all inherited a sense of humor. For several weeks afterward, Yukta claimed that she had a "new perspective" on life. In the midst of a gossip session, she would deadpan, "I don't judge people anymore" or "I'm a judgement-free zone".

The girl can make me laugh even after going through a traumatizing experience! Cheers to that!

The Gratitude Project - Update 2023

A few years ago, we embarked on an ambitious “Gratitude project”. I was reading my old post where I wrote:

“Our family is definitely more grateful for all that we have! We are closer, more connected, more mindful. I personally feel more centered and conscious when I am not fully present for the people that matter. I am more proactive about being in the moment and can reset quickly when I am not. For someone who tends to have a million different things running through her mind all the time, this has been a big achievement.

The children are more centered too. They have learned to articulate and contemplate their feelings and emotions better than before. Are they more empathetic? I don’t know, but they know they need to be! Are they more resilient? Only time will tell, though I strongly feel that their can-do attitude and calm courage while negotiating a big cross-continent transition this year, is due in big part to the Gratitude Project!”

Fast forward four years, where are we? It has been hard to keep the practice going, no doubt about that. The initial enthusiasm with which we began and pursued it in the first few years was bound to plateau as the kids became teenagers (hence less amenable to listening to us), and as the family dealt with the logistical challenges of different schedules. With daily gratitude circles, monthly meetings, and annual goal-setting sessions, the 2 MBAs in the house I fear managed to make it all feel like being in an office with KRAs and OKRs to get behind :)

I have also been reflecting on the myriad ways in which we talk about privilege, a word that is bandied about quite loosely nowadays but not something that was consciously thought about as my generation was growing up. Perhaps we didn’t have the vocabulary for it then; though in fact, I was a child of privilege as much as my parents were (as successive generations kept climbing up the privilege ladder). So to accuse my kids, not directly but subtextually of being privileged seems not just disingenuous but also ironical. I am trying not to do it. I understand that my generation was fortunate to reap extraordinary gains during a period of history when the rising tide lifted our boats higher than those of many others. We could attribute our material success to our incredible efforts and hard work and that makes a great story to tell our kids (as if they care!) but fact is we are as much the lucky winners of the birth lottery as they are. So ever so often if it seems that our kids are unconscious of their astounding luck and “entitled”, yes of course they are, wouldn’t you be in their place? They have no real understanding of what it took to get here; and telling them that grandfather walked barefoot 10 kilometers in the blazing son to go to school is like one of those Amar Chitra Katha stories- fascinating but nothing to do with their life :) 

So I bite my tongue when Y complains about how her English teacher hates her, even though I’d like to remind her, to put her problems in perspective, about the children suffering in Gaza. It’s taken me time to understand that gratitude and compassion can be cultivated without forcibly injecting privilege into the conversation. I have to hope that within the narrow confines of their current worlds, our kids have enough interactions with a wide enough range of people to understand their place in the world (being in public school helps). When Y tells me about her friends who cannot wear what they want, or who aren’t allowed to go out and socialize with their friends, or who have troubled family lives, she understands how privileged she is, and I expect she is grateful for it. 

Building the gratitude muscle in the kids has been a journey of letting my parenting evolve as well. So much of good parenting is “Show, not Tell”. So we make it obvious how we live life with an attitude of gratitude and hope that being a good(ish) role model will do the trick. Until then, we turn into irritating nags who insist that the family gathers for monthly meetings (and the kids are so good at deflecting these requests so that the meetings never happen). Last week, Y was annoyed that she and her brother were trapped in an impromptu “monthly meeting” in the car while we were waiting for our table to be ready at a restaurant. Conditions were perfect as it was brutally cold outside and we knew they wouldn’t just walk off :)

Musing on suffering

Over the last year and months, many of my closest friends have been suffering - either the prolonged illness and death of a parent, or scary illnesses and surgeries of close family members, and in several cases a perfect storm of multiple such issues descending upon the family. So much heartbreak, and suffering. Part of it is just all of us hitting middle age and sandwiched between aging parents with health issues, and teenage kids with their own problems, at a time when our own bones are creaking and our bodies in most cases are slowing down. As so many of my friends exclaim - "All we seem to do is talk about health issues and doctors!"

Then just today, I was invited to attend the memorial service of the son of someone I know. This more-than-an-acquaintance, less-than-a-friend, is in his 60s and his 30-something son took his own life a year ago, after struggling for several years with a mental illness. The (Zoom) service began with a slideshow of the son's life. Looking at the happy smiling family pictures, I almost tore up. Even though I never knew the son and don't know the dad all that well, I could connect with the unimaginable pain and the rush of emotions he must be experiencing at the moment. And of course, as a parent, you can identify with the loss at a cellular level. As I was watching the slideshow, my phone pinged, and seeing it was an email from Ads' school, I immediately opened it. The principal was notifying the school community about the death of one of the students today. Even Ads had not heard about it and this was yet another heartbreaking news to top off the day.

I almost didn't attend the service but I am glad I didn't skip it. My friend's eulogy for his son was very moving. Being in solidarity with him and listening to his heartfelt words, even if only virtually, gave me a fresh reminder of how often we just sleepwalk through life, overvaluing a lot of things that don't mean much on your deathbed, even while undervaluing all the little joys and triumphs of daily life. What are the values we want to live by? Is this an issue I want to go to battle over? What will make the other person happy, while making me not-unhappy?

When people around you are dealing with life-threatening illnesses or the loss of a loved one, it's impossible not to feel grateful for all the good things happening in your life. Our life becomes much more meaningful once we practice gratitude so regularly it becomes like muscle memory. 

At the same time, I feel I am also getting impatient with problems that seem self-inflicted, superficial or just plain silly. And that's not a nice empathetic state of being. Edith Eger, in her thought-provoking book "The Choice", has this to say:

I also want to say that there is no hierarchy of suffering. There’s nothing that makes my pain worse or better than yours, no graph on which we can plot the relative importance of one sorrow versus another. People say to me, “Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain—it’s not Auschwitz.” This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering.

One morning I saw two patients back to back, both mothers in their forties. The first woman had a daughter who was dying of hemophilia. She spent most of her visit crying, asking how God could take her child’s life. I hurt so much for this woman—she was absolutely devoted to her daughter’s care, and devastated by her impending loss. She was angry, she was grieving, and she wasn’t at all sure that she could survive the hurt.

My next patient had just come from the country club, not the hospital. She, too, spent much of the hour crying. She was upset because her new Cadillac had just been delivered, and it was the wrong shade of yellow.

On the surface, her problem seemed petty, especially compared to my previous patient’s anguish over her dying child.....

I realized that day how much my two patients, who appeared so different, had in common—with each other and with all people everywhere. Both women were responding to a situation they couldn’t control in which their expectations had been upended. Both were struggling and hurting because something was not what they wanted or expected it to be; they were trying to reconcile what was with what ought to have been.

Wise words. I'm afraid I am not there yet! And sometimes I feel I don't want to be. Some people, I just want to knock them on their heads and say "Get a grip. Don't whine. Just think of actions and solutions, you'll be fine."

Of course, I would never actually say that. But I can't promise not to think it!

Family history in Triplicane

Reposted from Medium

Imagine a typical Chennai (Madras) morning. 7 am and the temperatures are already in the early 30s (Celsius). I don’t have to state that the sun is shining (it usually is!). My father and I are walking along Beach Road, and I am glad for the brisk sea breeze that is somewhat tempering the feeling of being in a hot oven.

For the past few years, Appa has been taking members of the extended family on a walk down nostalgia lane with his detailed posts on memories from the 1940s-1960s in Triplicane and Adayar. The family WhatsApp group, fondly named “Annapoorna” after the house where my father and his siblings grew up, like most family groups, tends to be a repository of happy birthday and happy anniversary wishes, but the memory train has engaged and revitalized it into something more meaningful. My dormant interest in documenting our family history has been rekindled, and today, I have asked Appa to give me a family history tour in this part of my hometown.

My paternal grandfather hailed from a village called Chandrasekarapuram near Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu. He was born in 1910. He was a journalist and a staunch Gandhian. A Congress member, I have heard he only wore Khadi until he died in 1975. He was a keen political observer and well-known to the political bigwigs of the day, while never holding a formal position in the party. He died some months before I was born, but I have always been fascinated with our origin story. Who are we, where did we come from, and what happened in those early years that influenced the course of everyone in our rather large family?

Our first stop on this history tour is “Thilagar Thidal” or Tilak Ghat, an area of Marina Beach that bore witness to many impassioned speeches calling for independence. This spot is right opposite the deep red imposing structures of Presidency College, where my father got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. We walk through a small part of what is evidently a large campus. The buildings are beautiful, but the grounds are so poorly-maintained. This is a 180-year institution with a huge list of notable alumni, including TWO Nobel laureates (S Chandrasekaran and CV Raman) and C Rajagopalachari. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan used to teach there. The place is a monument to 2 centuries of advancement in political, social, and scientific thought, and it lies in a pitiable state with plastic water bottles, polythene carry bags, dead leaves and plants, and general litter visible everywhere.

We step out of the college and start walking down Pycrofts Road, now renamed Bharathi Salai, the arterial road cutting through Triplicane (Thiruvallikeni). While I lived in India, I never gave a second thought to the hazards on the road or the need to keep all senses on high alert while navigating potholes, electricity pylons, cows, autos, buses, motorbikes, and people. How beautifully nimble all of us are — human, beast, and vehicle! I was glad I could still easily transition to the old ways, keenly observing life on the streets while deftly avoiding the generous helpings of cow dung on the ground!

The Triplicane area is among the oldest settled parts of Chennai. With the 8th-century Sri Parthasarathy Swami temple as its locus, the area is a multi-cultural neighbourhood with Vaishnavite Brahmin, Jain, and Muslim influences. It is a hub of commerce, religion, and living, breathing history and culture.

Our first stop in Triplicane is Raja Hanumantha Lala Street, where my father lived for the first few years of his life (maybe till he was 5–6 years old). He hasn’t been able to locate the exact house, but we saw the Siva temple, which was a few doors away, and the Corporation school where he and his brother started their education. In the early 50s, they moved to SMV (Sundaramoorthy Vinayagar) Koil Street to a bigger house with a verandah, large hall, 3–4 rooms, and a terrace. It needed to be that large to accommodate 4 adults and 7 children! Not to mention the relatives who kept coming and going. The house does not exist anymore but has been torn down to make way for a bigger, more modern dwelling.

On Big Street (Veeraraghavan Street) off Pycrofts Road is the venerable Hindu High School, where my father studied from Grade 5-SSLC. He says when he was a student there, the school was already 100 years old, populated mostly by Brahmin boys with tuft and dhoti-wearing male teachers. It was a 10-minute walk from the house. Interesting to imagine those days with few cars on the road, no autos, motorbikes, but only hand-pulled and cycle rickshaws. Many more cows!!! People walked or cycled everywhere, or walked to the nearest public transport option (tonga, rickshaw, bus, or tram). The women worked hard at cooking, cleaning, and caregiving. I recently read RK Narayan’s autobiography, where he speaks of taking long walks along Beach Road. No wonder they were all able to digest those big meals and keep a trim figure!

Our last stop in Triplicane is, of course, the Parthasarathy temple. En route, we stop to click a pic of the home and memorial of the great Tamil poet and activist, Subramania Bharathi. Partha is majestic and handsome, and the sanctum sanctorum seemed to be air-conditioned! A welcome respite from the heat outside. The area around the temple is full of name boards like Rangarajan (Chartered Accountant) and Srinivasan (Advocate). Not a single obviously Shaivite name in sight, and bare-chested Iyengar mamas are much in evidence!

There is more to see, but it would require a longer walk. We have seen the “Chinna Kadai” (small shop), a shop owned by my grandfather, where my dad used to be in charge during his school days, but the “Periya Kadai” (big shop), where my Periappa (father’s elder brother) was in charge, was some distance away. I guess this is what we call an “internship” these days!

Hearing my dad talk about his days playing truant from school, walking merrily along these streets unsupervised, and spending entire days bouncing a ball inside the Parthasarathy temple, I am fascinated by what I have not experienced, or experienced very differently- those tight bonds of community, the culture of sharing material things and responsibilities, the carefree days of childhood undiluted by any safety concerns. My childhood was vastly different from my father’s, and my children’s bear no resemblance even to mine.

No one wants to turn back the clock, but learning about our families’ histories can certainly help with identifying best practices for living and being. What can we learn from the experiences of our elders? Migration, the generation gap, and modern lifestyles have taken a toll on family connections in any case; however, I don’t want to have genealogical amnesia. I want to have a small window, if nothing else, into the unique memories of past generations. Reminiscence and nostalgia are pleasurable but useless exercises if they don’t help us reflect on our own journeys. And if there is one thing that we learn as we age, it is that there is no making sense of who were are if we don’t know the journeys of those who came before us.

Toddlers vs teens

Now that I have 2 teenagers in the house and will be sending one half-baked adult out into the world in a year from now, it felt like time to address the rhetorical "Toddlers vs Teenagers - which would you rather have?" question. 

Well, gotta have both, obviously (what's the option?!).

Right. The answer as far as I am concerned is ......DRUM ROLL......

I will take teenagers any day.

With their smelly feet and armpits, acne and dandruff, moods and sullenness, hair and large hands and feet! Shall I go on drawing this generally unappealing picture? :) 

I just have these very sympathetic feelings for the underdogs you know. Toddlers are CUTE. Who doesn't like them? Certainly, even the kid-haters will good-humouredly set off the whining against the cuteness quotient.

But teenagers. Boy, they can be a tough breed to like. Tall, sometimes huge, they look like an adult but have none of the usefulness or know-how of one. They are unpredictable and moody. They eat massive amounts of food. They demand your time and attention and love and yet look the other way when you provide all of it. Arrrggghhh...they are infuriating!

Note: My kids were easy toddlers and are pretty easy teens as well; so not complaining here. These are general observations (my kids will call them sweeping generalizations!) based on all the kids I have encountered :)

Moving on...

These infuriating teens are also so vulnerable. Caught in the no-man's zone between childhood and adulthood, brains and cognition only partly developed (the brain is the last organ to mature; this happens in the early to mid-20s), misunderstood and misjudged even by the people who know them best, bodies growing in all sorts of uncomfortable ways, dealing with high pressure academic and social environments. One cannot but feel sorry for these poor souls. 

Research has established that the level of stress varies very little whether you have toddlers or teenagers. I personally think the difference is in what kind of stress. Parenting toddlers or very young kids creates a huge physical workload while with teenagers the exhaustion is primarily mental. Second-guessing what they are feeling, reading between the lines, worrying about risky behaviour or social media exposure, etc takes a toll on the parent's mental wellness. On the other hand, they are very well able to clean and dress themselves, navigate their social calendars, and under duress make their own meals and get themselves from one place to another without my help!

The old parenting wisdom is that you only have 18 summers with your kids. The thing is, when the kids are toddlers, 18 summers seems like light years away. It cannot come soon enough. Fast forward a few years and they are teenagers and that 18th summer is really really close and you'll do anything to have your sweaty stinky messy teenager lounging around your house for just one more summer.  

I never in a million years thought I'd say this. But I can now empathize with all those wannabe grandparents who are dying for their kids to procreate. It's not just some ego trip and carrying-on-our-family's-amazing-genes stuff. It's just plain old-fashioned "I need to smell that baby smell and feel that delicious baby fat and remember that feeling of wanting to gobble them up" stuff.

Gasp! I am going to be insufferable as a 60-year-old aunty!

Driving

Another milestone...another opportunity for the progeny to look down on me :)

Armed with lots of theoretical and very little practical knowledge, Ads has evolved into an effective backseat driver/commentator.

"Your hands are supposed to be at 9 and 3, you know that right?"

"Amma, can you stop driving with one hand?!!!"

"Did you check the speed limit?"

"I don't think you indicated for exactly 4 seconds before you switched lanes"....and so on and so forth.

My funny remarks about other drivers on the road are funny only to my own ears, I guess. I am anticipating being canceled by my own kids, very soon!

Ah, what's life without being patronized by our teenagers?

It's ridiculous to allow 16-year-olds to take the wheel, but that's a rant for another day!

First job

Ads recently got his first paycheck. It’s always hard to tell from his inscrutable demeanor whether he found it exciting to have earned money through his own hard work, but he was definitely amused by what he would only think of as my ludicrous over-excitement :) He worked as a cricket coach for a summer camp that his cricket academy was running for 8–12-year-old kids. 

The work started more than a month ago with designing and printing flyers and doing outreach. There were a lot of Zoom calls to discuss the revenues, expenses, and likely profits (how many lanes do we need, what is the daily rental we need to negotiate for, what should be the camp fees, etc). Ads solemnly biked over to the Indian grocery store nearby to stick the flyers in their window and asked me to socialize the camp in my desi WhatsApp group :) The boys made a list of likely prospects and called them to gauge interest for the camp and register those interested. They planned the daily and hourly schedule, including a “Friday Fun Day” that seemed to include playing everything other than cricket! On the days of the camp, they had to go to the academy early to sweep, mop, and sanitize the premises, and they stayed back after the kids had left to clean up again. 

The boys were doing this for the first time and they made plenty of mistakes, which hopefully they have learned from. They will be savvier and more organized the next time around. They started the planning process too late (the marketing effort should have started immediately after spring break, and not in June when most parents have already signed their kids up for various activities). They didn’t have a large enough “pipeline” and struggled to get registrations. They didn't harness social media to get the word out. Finally, they realized that planning something on paper (or a Google sheet!) is easy; on-the-ground execution is much harder! 

I was happy that Ads did things that were completely out of his comfort zone. Cold-calling people, trying to sell them something, doing the grunt work of follow-ups, dealing with younger kids for several hours a day, cleaning and organizing- each of these activities is tough in its own way, and especially so for our kids who are cocooned in a comfortable bubble most of the time.

I'm hoping that in the next few years he will work at other jobs that are not in the comfy white-collar zone, especially those that are customer-facing in service industries. Restaurants, retail stores, supermarkets….I want him to bag groceries, fold clothes, work at a cash counter. I really believe that these are tough jobs that will be a fertile learning ground for young adults, and part of me wishes I had had the opportunity to work at such places when I was younger. So maybe I am projecting all that onto him, but with the best of motherly intentions :)

Goals for 2021 and 2020 report card

Since 2019, our family has had a formal goal-setting exercise every December, for the New Year. Since 2020 we expanded to doing a family meeting at the end of every month to review where we are on our goals, how the last month went, what's top of mind of us for the next month etc. 

Last year's "performance", I am quite happy about actually. My goals were doable, and some I knocked out of the park. And for the rest, well it was 2020....we can be kind to ourselves :(

Report Card 2020 (and my report card for 2019)

Learn swimming - Did start classes in early 2020 at our health club, which shut down in March 2020 :( At this rate, I might be pushing 60 by the time I learn to swim like my kids!

Teach Ads some life skills - same as last year. We made some good progress. I don't do much after dinner other than putting the leftovers away, which is great because clearing up after a meal is my least favourite activity. Ads now (most days) cleans the kitchen after dinner. He wipes down the dining table and all the counters, the gas stove, sweeps the floor, and if I am on a call or something, loads the dishwasher. Y is in charge of refilling the water filter and making me my post-dinner cup of green tea :)) I taught Ads to cook things like Maggi but still a long way to go.

Join another nonprofit Board - Done, since April 2020

Work on Ads' college plan - Middling progress. Since he doesn't know what we wants to do, I'm somewhat at a loss on what I am supposed to research on!

Paint more - Accomplished. 

Write more - On this blog and Linkedin/Medium. Accomplished.

 

Some of the other goals carried over from 2019 were accomplished as well. Exercising and meditating every day, reading a Tamil book, and teaching S how to cook (he has learnt a LOT and very comfortable cooking a full meal now). In addition, COVID gave me the opportunity to resurrect an old hobby - singing.

Goals 2021

Lose weight- This will be the hardest, I think?

Meaningful work portfolio (including my Board work)

(Continue to) paint, sing, write - have targets for each of these :) 

Ads' college research 

Connect regularly with friends and family - something we started doing more intentionally in 2020 when we couldn't travel. I reconnected with school and college buddies and with cousins and extended family a lot more in 2020. Hope to continue this good habit going forward as well.

Bombay Blues

Originally published on Medium.

On weekend mornings, the maidan reverberated with the cries of children. The soft thud of cleats banging against football, the sharp crack of a leather ball hitting bat or wicket, and the booming voices of a herd of elderly uncles on their daily constitutional. At 9 am, the sunshine would momentarily blind as I stepped out of the building, drawing perspiration almost immediately as the humidity of the coastal city coalesced around me. I ambled along the boundaries of Cooperage football ground, feasting my eyes on the wilting green grass and trees, slowly making my way to the sandwich-wallah at Nariman Point, the only breakfast option open on weekends within my budget. 4 slices of white bread (no organic or whole-wheat!), Amul butter slapped on one slice, and mixed fruit jam on the other, the whole deftly wrapped up in a neat paper packet, to go! A cup of tea from the chai-wallah a few meters away completed this humble breakfast.

It was 1999. The world was on the cusp of a new millennium and I was poised at the edge of a new career. Like thousands of other single women (and men), a paying guest in what had clearly been the servant’s quarters of a large apartment. My home was a narrow dwelling of approximately 12 ft by 6 ft, containing a fan, a couple of naked bulbs, a narrow bed, and best of all, an attached bathroom (which also had the only window!) For these luxuries, I shelled out the princely sum of Rs 6,500 every month, an amount which left a big hole in the budget after paying for the education loan payments and sundry other essential expenses. So much for the well-paid post-IIM job!

But, as they say, location is everything. Unlike my contemporaries, I did not have to wake up early to be squashed in a crowded train for an hour’s commute. Nariman point was an easy 15-minute walk in one direction. In the other direction, Colaba Causeway was a hop skip and jump; passing on the way the intriguingly-named Wodehouse Gymkhana named not for the famous author but for a past Governor of Bombay Presidency. Circumscribed by Marine Drive, Fort, Gateway of India, and Cuffe Parade, it was a paradise for anyone who enjoyed art and culture, shopping, and eating! To be mesmerized by the sophisticated bustle and pulsating energy of the metropolis was a given. The pseudo-intellectual pleasure of experiencing a high brow play or string quartet concert at the NCPA was rivaled by the gustatory delights of the bhelpuri on Churchgate B Road, and a big bowl of strawberries with cream (very English!) at Bachelors in Chowpatty.

In that first year of near-disillusionment with the corporate world, good friends at the office kept my days filled with fun and laughter. Shereen was my age, a Parsi girl and blue-blooded “Townie” who was horrified when I suggested that do some shopping in Bandra (she refused to venture north of Worli). As I entered the office every morning and headed towards my desk, we would make rapid eye contact. Seconds later, my desk phone would ring so that we could update each other on the happenings between last evening and this morning (which, in my case, would be nothing-much-to-report). At around 11 am, we would rendezvous in the ladies' restroom, to touch up our lipsticks and exchange office gossip, sometimes joined by one of the many secretaries. Come 1 pm, we would join other colleagues for a meal in one of the many eateries that dotted Nariman point, our loud and boisterous exchanges adding to the general lunchtime cacophony. No one was in a hurry to return to their desks, and invariably someone would suggest topping up with a big glass of fresh mosambi or watermelon juice, thereby extending the lunch hour by a few precious minutes. Every now and then, this camaraderie would spill over after-hours, and some of us would head to Marine Drive for some fresh air before having dinner together. One conscientious and chivalrous male friend would insist on safely walking Shereen and me to our respective homes, before starting on his long train ride home to Chembur.

Shereen’s family was part of the South Bombay social circuit. Her evenings and weekends were busy with cocktail parties, and lunches and dinners at various clubs. Ever so often, she would drag me to her Sunday family lunch at the Cricket Club of India, where her mother would imperiously ask the chef to make a vegetable dhansak especially for me.

What carefree times! Nowhere to rush to, no chores waiting to be done, no responsibility, and all the time in the world. On weekends, I would board a train to go to either Prabhadevi, Versova, or Napean Sea Road, where friends and family lived. For two days I would be a part of humdrum domesticity, going grocery shopping, assisting in the kitchen, or catching a movie, before returning to my solo life on Sunday evening.

In spite of a fairly eventful social life, there were many moments of loneliness and homesickness, and always, the sense of being in transition. I felt like Trishanku, suspended between the occasional forlornness and precious independence of my Bombay life and the uncertain future, approaching closer with every passing day; marriage and a different life in another city.

When it was time to leave, relief at moving out of this transitory state, was the overwhelming emotion. Bombay was (and Mumbai is) intensely alive with its unique brand of enterprise and pizzazz but in the end, it overpowered and intimidated me. It was the perfect city to take my first steps towards true independence, but I couldn’t picture myself living and working and raising a family there. Even as a raw 25-year-old, I recognized in my unarticulate way that what I yearned for was a slower gentler pace of life, preferably in a bucolic setting!

Bombay, in that year straddling the new millennium and the old, was a place of liminality. From the high-rises of Nariman Point to the chawls of Jogeshwari, it juxtaposed the mundane and the exotic, the rich and the poor, the old and the new, the hyperlocal and the global. As for me, I existed in that liminal space where two worlds collided — the person I was, and the person I was on the verge of becoming.

How many, like me, would have taken their first tremulous steps towards self-sufficiency here! How many would have been charmed and dazzled (as I was), or maybe later disenchanted and dejected? In this city of dreams, anything was possible.

I remember one memorable walk on Marine Drive at the peak of the monsoons. That Monday morning, I had boarded a train from Dadar to get to work, only to be blindsided by a heavy downpour as I exited Churchgate station. With no umbrella, I was soaked to the skin in seconds. Fortunately, a colleague spotted me and offered to share his cab. I shivered in wet clothes all the way to the office and spent 30 minutes in the restroom trying to dry myself. By the evening, the rain had stopped. All along Marine drive, a mass of humanity strolled along, enjoying the temporary respite from the rain and seemingly in no hurry to head back to the teeming suburbs. Lovers canoodled in their own private world, and small boys jumped along the black rocks in a dangerous fashion. Food and drink vendors steadfastly turned their back on the Arabian sea — they had no time to daydream when there was business to be done! My friend and I strolled along the promenade, not saying much. A brisk sea breeze buffetted my hastily-acquired umbrella, threatening to spin it out of my hands. We laughed, for no reason (as twenty-somethings are wont to do), and just for a moment, I felt touched by the very edge of happiness.

Reflections on a college campus (and some musings on life)

This post originally published on Medium 

Bangalore, 30th March 1997, 1.30 pm. My father and I took an auto from Majestic circle and crossed the portal of IIM Bangalore for my IIMA interview. I didn’t even know where or what Bannerghatta Road was, much less that a leafy paradise existed there. Entering through those gates, all the anxiety about the upcoming interview fled as I gaped at the imposing stone structures, the skylights, the slatted slate-grey roofs that let in fresh sunshine even in cool Bangalore weather. We walked through green corridors and pergolas, lawns and gardens inside the building so that it seemed that we were in the verdant outdoors even when we were inside. Many years later, I watched an interview with its celebrated architect and learnt that he had been inspired by the 16th century complex of Fatehpur Sikri.

We walked up a stairway to reach my interview room, where my nervousness returned with renewed fury as I watched men and women dressed in formals sitting outside the various classrooms, their expressions mirroring my own.

Getting into the IIMs had been a theoretical exercise thus far, the good showing at the CAT only serving to boost morale and ego, and I had not thought much about whether I actually wanted to study at this hallowed institution. Gazing out at the emerald green juxtaposed against the muted grey stonework, trying hard to drown out the muted conversations around me, I realized that more than anything, I wanted to spend 2 years in this building and these serene environs. I wanted to walk these hallways, recline on this grass under the trees, drown in books in that stately glass-fronted library.

The IIMA interview was a disaster. Perhaps, subliminally I did not want to get into IIMA, now that I had seen IIMB?! Whatever, I walked out rather less disappointed than I should have been and determined to crack my next interview. The rest, as they say, is history.

By the time 1999 rolled around, the dramatic campus that I had drooled over, became the customary background. No longer did I marvel at it. Life became an unending mosaic of classes, grades, assignments and caffeine. When friends from the outside world visited, they would gape as I once did, at the beauty around us and I would preen as though it was my intellect that had conceptualised these buildings, my minds’ eye that had conceived that perfect amalgam of space and light.

In the years since then, I’ve seen the dreaming spires of Oxford, punted on the Cam, strolled through the halls of Harvard and many other august institutions. None captured my imagination as powerfully as my alma mater did, that summer day in 1997 (perhaps because I was no longer a romantic 21-year-old with stars in her eyes)!

Often I wonder, at the random events, these rolls of dice, upon which our lives turn. If I had not been mesmerised by the beauty of that campus, if I had not messed up my IIMA interview, if I had chosen to accept one of my other IIM admits, if my parents had not wanted me to stay close to my hometown Chennai……how differently this life could have played out. Instead, I met my husband, made some wonderful friends, spent 2 very happy years working toward an MBA degree I had no interest in! My destiny led me there, to that time and place, that shaped everything that came afterwards. Sometimes, when life feels baffling and mysterious, when I wonder what I am doing and where I am going, I hold on to that thought, simultaneously dispiriting and hopeful, that there is a grand design into which I fit. I can stop trying to interpret and comprehend individual events. They don’t mean anything, but the great tide that sweeps me onward knows where it going and where it will come to rest.

And sometimes, just sometimes, good things come out of being shallow and judging something by its exterior beauty!

The questions we must ask - a letter to my kids circa 2020

Why do old men run for President, asked my daughter. 

My innocent one, don't you know?

That's just one question of many.  

Why do white men rule?

Why do black men die?

Why do baby girls get killed in the womb,

or raped and murdered outside?

Why do the poor have to be poor,

when the rich are so very rich?

You know some of your schoolmates have to have free meals.

Why do we treat animals, even worse than we do our own kind?

I hope we raised our children to ask these questions, 

relentlessly, doggedly, repeatedly; 

I hope you are braver than we are.

More empathetic, less apathetic. 

I hope you care deeply and feel strongly.

I hope you protest, dissent, debate and oppose, 

but also give, comfort, agree and respect.

I hope you always feel that you did your best, 

but that you could have done just a little bit more.

I'd rather you sometimes felt honest incertitude in your beliefs,  

than constant unwavering assurance in your rightness. 

I hope you compromise, question, contemplate and endorse; 

but also thwart, confront, negotiate and defy. 

Does it feel like I'm asking too much?

I know you will do all these things, and more;  

your thoughtful questions tell me so.

Our rules and laws and conventions, they

circumscribe us, but your desires and thoughts will be limitless.

When I get depressed (as I often do), that in the same week 

that we launch astronauts into space,  

we descend into hateful depths of racism and bigotry,   

I am comforted by what you will do.

Only in optimism do we move forward. 

The Covid life -Part 1

I never thought that the word 'Pandemic' would make it into the everyday lexicon. March madness, now I know what that means! Life has changed drastically in a few weeks, yet I find myself experiencing a certain guilty pleasure in this new normal. Yes, it's great not to have to do the school/bus stop pickups and drops, the shuttling to various classes (only twice a week, but we are lazy like that!). But more importantly, being a tad unsocial and retiring by nature, none of us misses the social activities. I like not having to go into DC for meetings. S enjoys not having to travel on work. 
We aren't being asked for much at this time, unlike many many others who cannot afford to stay home like us. 
Our school district had a very rocky time, transitioning to online learning. First, they took 4 weeks just to train the teachers. I would have thought that someone in the administration would spend that time stress-testing the software platform to make sure it can handle 189,000 students plus teachers, but apparently not. The first day everyone logged on, the system crashed. Ditto the second third days. Ditto several weeks! Parents were mad, poor teachers were stressed, and the kids were having a gala time :) 
I realized that our school district is one of the best and richest in the nation, and can afford to give laptops to everyone, but simply had not planned on supporting synchronous OR asynchronous online schooling. Several weeks behind many other proactive school districts, and with just over a month left before the summer vacation begins, they have finally got their act together and some learning is happening for the kids. High school and elementary school are on different schedules so Ads & Y have been waking up, coming down for meals, and finishing up schoolwork at different times (the schedules also change based on the day of the week). At any given point during the day, 3 bedroom doors are shut with everyone in front of their screen while I stay downstairs with my screen :) 
I have been working with the kids on life skills training. Ads has been trained in doing a full laundry cycle (including sorting, drying and folding). He finally knows the difference between kitchen towels and bathroom hand towels :) though he still seems confused about which underwear belongs to whom :)) He knows how to load and unload the dishwasher, hates doing dishes by hand and has been doing some basic veg chopping as well. But the biggest skill he learnt was how to clean the bathroom, and he does a pretty good job of it.
I have dusted off my singing chops and found a lovely app called Starmaker studios that allows me to record high-quality songs with backing tracks. By high-quality, I refer to the app and not necessarily to my singing :) It's been a lot of fun immersing myself into something that was a big part of my life until the kids came along. It feels strange now that I waited so long to resuscitate this hobby, but I guess there is a time for everything. 
I don't suppose anyone knows what the future will bring, whether we are going to have another wave in the fall, or whether things will settle down, even whether schools will finally reopen come late August. For now, we are truly living day to day and in the moment!

Goals for 2020 and 2019 report card

Since last year, our family has had a formal goal-setting exercise every December, for the New Year. My goals last year were fairly ambitious, and a few weeks ago, we had a family meeting to revisit how each of us has done, and what our goals for 2020 should be. 

My own performance has been patchy. Of course, I blame myself for setting the wrong goals, not for underachieving on them :) How did I do?

Report Card 2019

Exercise everyday - Yes yes and yes....at it, with my yoga and walking and now swimming, I feel good about this. Feeling chuffed at having kept up the fitness regimen, even during the winter, anything above 1-2 deg C and I am outside. 

Meditate everyday - 20-30 minutes of deep breathing exercises and just sitting still. This has been a daily practice and now looking into doing a meditation retreat when I go to India next. 

Read a Tamil book - So hard! I'm halfway through a novel, hope to finish in a few months. Yes, that's the speed I am at :( 

Learn some Spanish - This has been difficult. I simply haven't been motivated enough. Part of the problem is that Ads speaks reasonably well now so when we travel in Latin America, I just fall back on his ability instead of trying to navigate on my own. I've dropped this from my list for 2020. Maybe later!

Craft a family mission statement - Hmm...we have discussed this and none of us is convinced we even need this :) So dropped. 

Learn ice-skating - Big fail. 'Nuf said. Dropped! Life is too short to learn stuff that is completely useless :) 

Learn swimming - Yes! In adult swim classes now. Progress being made. This is actually going on my bucket list (separate post)

Teach S how to cook - Lots of progress on this because I have a motivated student. He can make a mean omelette, dal, and with the instant pot curries have become super-easy. He rolls out parathas and rotis very well, and dosai has been mastered. 

Teach Ads to iron clothes, cut veg, make Maggi - So far we have been doing a lot of veg chopping. I taught him how to use the washer and iron. Practice practice practice :) 

Get on a nonprofit Board - Yes! Joined one Board, and talking to a couple of others.

Goals 2020

Learn swimming 

Teach Ads some life skills - same as last year 

Join another nonprofit Board

Work on Ads' college plan 

Paint more - Plan is to have 3 more artworks complete by the end of 2020

Write more - On this blog, and Linkedin/Medium 

Fairly confident about these goals. Lessened my ambition a bit this year, so they seem very do-able. 

The Confidence Gap

Last year, Y's school asked for kids in her grade to self-nominate if they would like to stand for election to a few school office-bearer posts. Initially, Y showed some interest but as she got to know more about what it involved, she rapidly backed off. I tried to encourage her to stand, remembering full well my attempts at such electioneering in my school days, most of which led to thumping defeats! But all my encouragement seemed to make it worse. She simply did not want to make posters, stick them up all over the school, give speeches and generally ask for votes. I let it go, thinking that she may be more confident after a year. After all, it was her first year in a strange environment. 

Of late, I have noticed a worrying insecurity that lurks beneath her surface confidence. She will show us our assignments but balk at showing them to her brother. Ads is notoriously critical (those Virgo genes!) and does not mince words when offering feedback (he is also very mature about accepting feedback about himself or his work, recognizing that the comments are not personal but designed to help him improve). Yuks, unfortunately, does not have the maturity to accept constructive (if blunt) feedback in an unemotional, impersonal way.

Often, showing us something she has made, she will preemptively announce "It's very bad, I know" and rush off into another room while we examine her work. A few days ago, she showed me a school assignment and while I was reading it, she was crouched under the bed as though I was going to pronounce a sentence on her!

Every time, I tell her the same thing. It's your work. If you put in your best effort, it's good. Don't aim for perfection. If it is flawed, or imperfect, you need to love and respect it anyway because it's yours. Don't allow other's comments to hurt so much. Do take feedback and examine it carefully to see if it has merit, then use that feedback to improve. But ultimately, be your own judge and judge yourself kindly. 

Reading articles and books harping on this theme does not help. As much as I want my daughter to grow up to be a confident woman, I understand that modern pressures will always pull her down unless she learns how to recognize the insidious nature of her own mental blocks, and knows how to cope with them and ultimately surmount them. My alter ego, of course, is laughing heartily and sarcastically at my attempts to inject confidence into my kid when I myself am subject to imposter syndrome, performance anxiety and sundry other imaginary syndromes, disorders and maladies :))

So, still working on how to tackle this. One more parenthood challenge! Will it never end?? 

This is Us :)

It is Thanksgiving. My brother and his family are in town and we are joined for a few hours by my cousin and her husband and their grown-up kids. Stories fly around, fast and furious, some old, some I had never heard of. Family members near and distant are discussed threadbare. Peals and howls of laughter periodically punctuate the conversation. The children flit in and out of the discussion but mostly they just look bemused (in the case of the older kids, amused). Every now and then I glance at my husband, wondering whether he feels bored with all this family talk. However, I feel not a smidgen of guilt, having been a patient witness at similar gatherings of his family.

Later, in the family WhatsApp group, photos are posted. My father starts a thread reminiscing about the family home in erstwhile Madras and the many happy memories associated with it. Cousins, aunts and uncles jump in with their anecdotes about the house, sundry family members, vacations, weddings and other seminal events. 

Reading through it all, I can vicariously experience that long-gone lifestyle, a house and life teeming with extended family and friends, brimming with hospitality and generosity. Over the years, like all other families, this one too has gone through ups and downs. Its members now live far in time, distance and thought from that house in Madras, but their shared history and collective memories have woven a rich and unique tapestry that binds and cocoons generations of us, whether we are conscious of it or not.

One of my fondest childhood memories is lying down between my parents at bedtime, and drowsily listening to them talk over the days' events. For years (thanks to never having my own bedroom as long as I stayed with my parents!), I dropped off to sleep listening to the soft tones of two people recapping their day, discussing family matters and indulging in gentle gossip.

I'm in my forties, yet even now, I slide easily into the old ways. Sinking down onto the cool floor or onto the bed during afternoon siesta time, only for the pleasure of hearing my parents tell some stories. 

I think of the stories I tell my kids. About how I grew up, places, people and incidents that shaped me and made me what I am today. I think of similar stories my kids hear from their dad. I think of the stories that we laugh about amidst our close friends, the ones that have survived endless repetition. Doubtless, we'll continue to tell them well into our old age. I think of the new stories we started weaving after we became parents that are now a part of my children's memories. 

Family stories are free, portable, revealing, and inspiring. 

Stories capture the narrative arc of our lives. But more than that. They are us. And we are nothing without our stories.

Every now and then, I will sleep in Y's bedroom. Before we turn off the light, she will ask "Can we talk?" I acquiesce even if I am sleepy. She's only asking us to make more stories!

The power of transitions

This post was originally published on Medium.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us……

These immortal words by Charles Dickens come to mind when I look back at the last year. In the summer of 2018, we moved countries and continents and I faced failure after repeated failure in getting my next role. I give myself an ‘A’ for effort; I networked, called and met people, applied to all sorts of organizations for all kinds of roles, had several interesting conversations and promising interviews; yet, the result, if measured in terms of a concrete job offer, was a big fat zero.

I played the blame game for a while. I blamed the lack of opportunities suited to my profile. I blamed vague implicit hiring biases. Most of all, I blamed my fate as the trailing spouse, being forced to move cities and continents for the sake of my husband’s career. I am not proud of the many resentful thoughts I harboured for months. Try as I might, the worst and pettiest elements of my nature reared their ugly heads as I focused angrily on the most negative aspects of my life. Every day, I had to brutally refocus my thoughts on all that was beautiful and infinitely precious — good health, the kids, our home, a loving family, financial security — and give thanks for all that I had. It was enough, I told myself. Even if I didn’t have anything else, what I already had was over and beyond what most people enjoyed.

I walked for miles and miles, in the most inclement weather, pounding out my frustration on the asphalt. Over a period of months, slowly but surely, my confused thoughts gained clarity. Out of the bleak and opaque quagmire settled in my brain, arose some degree of coherence.

I was able to answer some cardinal and elemental questions. What did I really want? What were the fundamental principles and values on which I wanted to base my life? What was truly important to me? Did I need or want the career that I was expected to have (and whose expectations were these?), or did I need to craft a life that would harmonise every aspect of my life and leave space for my many eclectic interests? How could I unshackle myself from some deep-rooted insecurities, and the expectations of others, to pursue a life that was truly undeniably authentically mine?

I believe this is an Alcoholics Anonymous mantra- “You can’t think your way into a course of action; you can only act your way into a course of thinking.” I like to think that all those hours and miles of walking, all those hours spent cleaning/cooking/caring for my family, all those hours meditating and twisting myself into yogic asanas, all of this inexorably led to a profound re-evaluation of my life goals.

I’ve been told by people who know me well, that I am confident, and resilient, and strong. The last year tested all those assumptions to the hilt, and then some. Transitions lead to unexpected and often painful change but as I learnt, change is often a prized gift, an opportunity to reflect, reframe and recharge.

I used to think of opportunity costs, the sacrifices I made to support someone else. On a bad day, I could easily relapse into a quasi-victim mentality. Haven’t I paid the double tax of being a woman and a mother, and being a trailing spouse? But victimhood helps no one. What the transition gave me in spades, was time. Immeasurably priceless, for how often are we offered an all-paid holiday to just think? Clear the cobwebs of the mind, contemplate, ruminate, chew the cud?

Finding one’s life purpose, I used to think, was that lightbulb moment when all would be magically revealed. I did find my life’s purpose in one such A-ha! moment many many years ago. What I did not realize is that purpose, just like one’s personality, beliefs and tastes, changes over time. It mutates and evolves, fueled and enriched by our experiences, our difficulties and our failures. What is my purpose today, may or may not stay the same a few years down the line.

Today, having “acted my way into a course of thinking”, I remember this famous poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth……

No matter what we do, we will at times always think about what we didn’t do, what we could have done, what we were meant to do but didn’t….But the difference is only in our heads.

What is, is now.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Character is destiny”. Who we are, is infinitely more important than what we’ve done.