Favourite corners and spaces Part 2

The kids have a decent-sized room here. Well, actually they've been lucky ever since we moved back to India in having large rooms allotted to them although now is the first time they are sleeping in their very own beds in a separate room. Growing up, I never had a room of my own. Most of the time, my brother and I bunked together. After we moved to Chennai (Madras) for high school, the shared quarters continued with the study table piled high with books being my only personal space. This arrangement continued into college and beyond with little change and the first time I had any scope to personalize my own space was in the second year of my MBA programme when we were given individual rooms. I well remember the excitement of collecting cast-offs from my seniors, choosing bed-linen and curtains and adding those little touches to make my room as warm, cozy and inviting as possible.

Anyway, given all this history, I wanted the kids to have a bright colourful room filled with their personality (not mine!). We picked up a bunk bed on sale for them as soon as we moved to Bangalore. Their 'study' table is actually our old dining table, a tiny 4-seater which is so badly scratched and dented that Ads keeps begging me to cover it up, Amma! So I do need to get it polished/painted at some point - I'm waiting to see if they manage to damage it any more before I get it fixed :)

Clearly, they do not need 4 chairs to study/draw on the table. And I wanted them to have a chair for when they want to sit by the window and read a book. So we took these two

and turned it into these.

Aren't they lovely? They even have the kids' names on them :)

All credit to the Spinning Wheel for the creative re-purposing. 

The kids' favourite stuffed animals find  a resting place on their beds...and on top of the toy chest of drawers!

My one indulgence was to get a nameboard done for them which now adorns the wall next to their baby pics. I'm tempted to add floor cushions and the like but keep restraining myself. It's a kids room and there should be a lot of floor space to jump and roll around and all the weird things that kids are wont to do :) 

Favourite corners and spaces Part 1

Sharing a few pics from the home which is finally looking the way I want ......after weeks of tweaking (or what the husband calls messing around!)

#1 - The entryway, where the biggest challenge was to find a really simple functional bench (not too large, no upholstery, no frills) to sit on to wear or remove one's shoes. I roamed around the city quite fruitlessly until I found Urban Ladder!

#2 - It's been a long-standing dream of mine to own a really elegant settee. Being mom to two small grubby kids and until now, not having a large enough living room, meant that all I could do was look and salivate :) I went all out after moving to Bangalore though. Found a fabulous woodworker/restorer, decided on a distinctly old-fashioned design, picked some pretty paisley-patterned cotton material from an awesome shop in Seshadripuram and ta-da! Definitely my favourite piece in the entire house (it's also very comfortable). S took one look at it when it arrived and wasn't too happy with the light colour of the fabric, given the aforesaid grubby kids, their grubby friends and all the accidents and spills that are likely to happen. But, hey, one can live dangerously right? :)

#3: Coffee table with hand-painted tiles. I got this done from another awesome guy in Mehrauli (Delhi).

#4: Partial view of the living room.

More photos coming up as soon as a couple of home improv projects get completed.

The embarrasing mom Part 1

I feel slightly guilty about not posting any updates on Y but truth is, Ads is providing enough and more intriguing/entertaining moments at this point. One of the latest is being thoroughly embarrassed by/with me (not so much with Appa - I have to resentfully wonder why?). It's a given that I do not kiss/hug or otherwise exhibit any PDA in public especially at drop off/pickup time, tennis class etc, where there are bound to be a bunch of kids looking on.

Some days ago, I had to give Ads a message while he was in the middle of tennis class. I walked in, maintained a safe (!) distance and talked to him. His expression was priceless! Or should I say lack of it. He was looking at me, but his eyes were beseeching me to go away. He knew I wouldn't move until he had acknowledged the message so he said Ok and managed to mouth it without actually saying it out loud and nodded his head oh-so-imperceptibly.

His entire body language said - Ok I got it...now can you please leave? Like RIGHT NOW?

Just when I thought girls aren't like that, Y tells me to buzz off from her dance class, cos "I won't dance if you are there".

Foolishly, I look to S for some understanding. He bands together with his kids. He says "I totally understand. I would have hated it if MY mom had landed up in tennis class!"

Talk about getting a sympathetic hearing!

PS: I named the post Part 1 because I sense this is just the beginning of my kids being embarrassed by me! :) 

And again!

Yesterday's gem -
Amma, is Gay a bad word?

I hastily explained that it is not a bad word at all, and demanded to know where he had heard the word (in the school bus apparently, where a couple of kids called Ads and his best friend 'gay').
Who are these kids?????
The list of words/concepts/issues I need to explain to Ads in a simple and age-appropriate manner grows longer by the day! Can't keep distracting him for much longer, I guess :)

Which type of boyfriend?

Today Ads asks me: So amma, was Appa your boyfriend in college?
Me: Yes (errr...where is this going? Not having a good feeling.)
Ads: So was he your kissing boyfriend or normal boyfriend??
I am speechless.

Choices

Several days after we had moved to Bangalore, Ads casually remarked that he liked Bangalore much more than Gurgaon. I asked him why. The pleasant weather? The large flat? The open spaces? His own room? His own bunk bed? The prospect of an extra-long summer break? For a 7-yo, there were reasons aplenty!

Instead, the brevity and simplicity of his answer took my breath away.

No, he said. I like Bangalore because you play with me here.

I was staggered. Probably I had hoped that he hadn't noticed? That I had not played with the most important people in my life for the past year. I hadn't gotten myself messy and hot and tired, laughed at silly jokes, and run around with them. I hadn't had the time to play board games. I hadn't had the energy to read books every night. In fact, while I was trying to keep it all together as a single working parent, I had done nothing more than the bare minimum of attending to their basic physical and emotional needs.

I had been a good mom, but only just. Certainly, I hold myself upto very high standards of customer service (!) when it comes to being a mother/parent. Last year, I had a tough time achieving my targets :(

No guilt-tripping here, no remorse etc (I don't do those). Just the increasingly loud voice in my head, getting more confident by the day, which is pulling me in a certain direction and towards certain choices. I can't ever be a stay-at-home mom (it's nice now, it's only been a couple of months but soon I am going to be pulling out my hair in large handfuls!) but I don't see a full-time career happening for a few more years yet. Not unless my parents decide to move in with me and give me a hand (Amma and Appa, are you listening? :))

It's that time again when well-meaning people begin to ask me when I am getting back to work, me having exhausted my relocation excuse, having had my summer holiday and having the kids back at school. I don't know, folks. My daughter's back home from school at 12.30. We have a leisurely lunch. We talk about what we did at school/home. Amma, you're sooo lucky to be at home, she says! We nap. I kiss her about a million times. We wake up. I have chai. We pick up a grubby older brother from the bus stop. Hectic activity ensues. Tennis class, music class, homework, park, bath, dinner. Sleep. It's humdrum but it's beautiful.

I will start getting out and talking to people and see if some work on my terms, comes up. I'm going to keep my career going, but I won't be driven crazy-busy by it.

Just so long as I can play with my kids!

A little-big boy and his imagination

Ads has always been a very imaginative kid. From the time he was around 2 years old, he indulged in a lot of pretend play although until Y came along he always expected someone to keep him company while he played. He's also passed through a fairly obvious and predictable trajectory as far as interests are concerned. Chronologically, they have been - construction equipment and heavy vehicles, emergency vehicles (fire-trucks and so on), tigers and other big cats, reptiles, dinosaurs, outer space, birds, and now cricket and superheroes!

Something that I've noticed with a lot of boys is that when they get interested in a topic, they dig deep and turn into a veritable encyclopaedia of knowledge on that subject! Their interest verges on obsession. I have never ever in my 7 years of being a mom (which is about when I started noticing these things!) seen a girl jump in so deep into any subject! I can't believe my sample set is too small or skewed - has anyone else observed this?

So, anyway, getting back to Ads. The joke around our home is that whenever you need to find Ads, just follow the sounds of what we call the Dish-bish. A vocal potpourri of explosions, snorts, roars, grunts and yells that express the imaginative space he is occupying at that time - a tiger stalking and hunting it's prey, dinosaurs fighting or Iron Man and Cap'n against a common enemy :) The package is generally accompanied by a lot of hand gestures and kicks so beware anyone who's at arms-length at the time!

Ads has been the recipient of many an amused and/or astonished look by onlookers when he goes Dish-bish on buses, trains and other public places. I still remember two little boys about the same age as him as we de-boarded at Jaisalmer railway station. We were heading towards the station exit. Ads was in his own world, utterly oblivious to the fact that we had landed at our destination. I walked behind him, holding on to my suitcase with one hand while steering him with another and ensuring he didn't bang into people. These 2 little boys watched, jaws dropping, as he approached them, eyes open but in a world of his own, making strange gestures with his hands, funny sounds with his mouth and with myriad threatening expressions rapidly flitting across his face :)

Every time he goes into his zone, the three of us collapse into giggles which take a while to penetrate his consciousness but when it does, he gets really wild with us :)

Another weird, funny, endearing thing about my boy!

Undecided

Still not sure which is my favourite spot in the new house.

This...

In the living room

Or this.....

In our bedroom

Though the fact is, I've barely had time to relax in any of these nooks ever since we moved. Mostly the reading gets a miss while they get used plenty for cuddling up with the kids :)

New city, new school and some ranting

I haven't slept well for the last few nights. Anxiety and a list of imagined and real afflictions reminiscent of first-trimester pregnancy symptoms have contrived to keep me tossing and turning all night; and tired and listless during the day.

The reason? Both kids start at their new school today. A week ago, I made sure S had cleared his calendar for the morning since he would be dropping Y off for her first day while I dropped Ads off (they are in the same school but different campuses). Yesterday I took Ads and one of his good friends (since he may appear often in these pages, let's call him V1) for a recce around the school. We looked at the class lists and found to our delight that Ads and V1 were in the same section! The icing on the cake was that one of Ads' friends from way back in Noida, who studied with him in kindergarten and later relocated to Bangalore, is also in the same section. This discovery brought a huge smile to Ads' face and eased my fears to a large extent.

This morning, we left at 7.15 am. Wading through heavy traffic as is usual in Bangalore, we reached the school at 8 am to find a scene of total chaos. I wasn't sure I would be allowed to escort Ads into his classroom, but I was confident I'd be allowed to hand him over to his teacher somewhere in the grounds or auditorium before leaving. Instead, we had the Principal at the entrance, bellowing instructions to the parents in his stentorian voice, in a most undignified manner. Children were being hustled inside the school while parents were sternly stopped at the door. Before I knew it, Ads had been pushed away from me and handed over to someone who handed him over to someone else and after that I don't know what happened because he was lost in the sea of uniforms. There was no kiss, no hug and no goodbye even! I went up to the Vice Principal to ask if I could go in seeing as he was a new student and all but she smilingly refused. Other parents reassured me that there were plenty of staff to escort the kids to their classrooms. Since I knew Ads would be having a couple of familiar places to eventually meet with in class, I let it go but the disorganized way in which the whole thing was conducted left a bad taste in my mouth. 

Back at the preschool, where Y starts LKG today, S reported that it was as chaotic but since that school has a much smaller strength it did not seem so bad :) Y cried a wee bit - but her class teacher picked her up and told S to leave and they would handle her, thank you very much.

The day was jinxed during pickup time as well. First, my driver was nowhere to be seen at the allotted time and his phone was not reachable. Just when I was going to run upstairs for the spare car key and drive the car myself, a friend (V1's mom, whose younger son also studies in the same school), offered me a ride. By this time, we were running atleast 10 minutes late and I was biting my nails as we snarled in traffic - being late on the very first day is so not on!! Then I almost had a cardiac arrest when I called the school to tell them I was running late - the front-desk guy (a nincompoop if there ever was one!) told me Y had been sent off in the school bus! This inspite of the fact that we had explicitly told the administration and the class teacher that Y would be picked up and dropped off for the first 2 days. At this point I had no choice but to continue onto the school because my friend had to pick up her son. 

I barged into the school premises, spitting fire and brimstone, only to find Y calmly seated with her teacher. Whew....I have seldom been this relieved in my life!!!!! The teacher who seems a nice calm sort of person reassured me that she had no intention of sending Y on the bus since she knew I was coming to pick her up. Obviously the front-desk guy had given me the wrong information without even bothering to cross-check with the teacher.

A couple of hours later, I was in the car again to pick up Ads - more scenes of confusion there. Clearly anybody can walk in with no identification whatsoever and pick up any kid with none the wiser.

While the kids had a good time on their first day, I can already anticipate many more rants and raves from my end given the lax administration - but let's hope I am proved well and truly wrong!

When a child sleeps too little - and a mom says too much!

Ads has always been a restless sleeper. Many days, he is over-stimulated and unable to fall asleep soon after hitting the bed. Plus he dislikes sleeping. Many a time, we have have conversations revolving around what a waste of time sleep is.

The last time he complained about sleep being a waste of time, I told him: The body needs sleep in order to rest and recharge itself. 

He said: what'll happen if someone doesn't sleep for a long long time?

I replied (hastily and thoughtlessly as t turned out): They would be really really tired and they may even faint or die.

I could have bitten my tongue out even as I said this but he said no more and I moved on, hoping he had not paid much attention to what I said.

Fat hope.

A day later, he comes to my room at night, very agitated and in tears.

Amma, I can't sleep. I'm going to have such a short life!!

Now what do I do with this boy???

Hindsight

Sometimes it takes a 6-month old niece to be snoozing peacefully on your shoulder for 45 minutes to realize what you missed with your own kids when they were babies.

Flashback to S reclining for hours on our lazyboy, Ads and later Y fast asleep on his shoulder, encircled in his strong warm arms. I would repeatedly ask him to put them down in the bed so that he could get on with whatever else he had to do. 

He would reply, simply: I don't have anything to do that's better than this.

As my adorable niece breathed softly into my neck, I craved for a few more such peaceful hours with her, while my kids squabbled noisily in the background. I really hadn't got it the first two times, had I?

Seems like you need a third kid to bring that perspective into a mother's life :)

New books

Of course I'm cribbing about having to do it....

But there's a certain pleasure in fingering the books for the new school year, and settling down with cellotape, scissors and pen to cover and label the textbooks and notebooks. 

The scent of new unsullied books, and the sense of a new beginning.

Plus we have been issued recyclable covers for all the books, which is nice but also weird because I thought brown paper was also recyclable? But it's a vast improvement over the plastic covers that we were given last year. 

Living it up in New York - Part 2

It is nearing the end of our 2-week stay in New York. We've reached the happy stage of having ticked off all the touristy must-dos. I took the kids on the Water taxi ride and went up to the Top of the Rock. We've gone to Central Park not once or twice but three times. We have gorged on some seriously good food. Some really tasty pizzas and pastas and some excellent Mediterranean. Yesterday the children had falafel for the first time (Ads has actually tasted it many times before while we were living in this country but he's forgotten) and they absolutely loved it. 

Before S went back to India, we did a leisurely 2-day trip to the Niagara Falls in upstate New York. While it was too cold there even now, this late in spring,  for our tropical constitutions, a trip to the Falls is a must-do. The town of Niagara Falls itself is quite unimpressive but the falls themselves are so awe-inspiring that they make up the deficit.  

These days, we are taking things easy. There are tons of other things to see/do yet, but I'd rather capitalize on the extra time to really get into the skin of the city; a luxury afforded by a longish vacation where room and board are largely taken care of! We aren't rushing around trying to pack everything into a few days. This is the first time that I'm experiencing the magic of slow travel and I'm absolutely loving it! NYC isn't a beautiful city like some others we've visited - San Francisco, Sydney and Vancouver come immediately to mind. It's far more like an Indian city, Delhi or Mumbai for example. It's a city not to be merely seen or admired for its dramatic skyline. It's a city to be experienced for its raw energy, to be walked around in, a city to have its quirks uncovered and have its layers peeled away, one after the other. 

It is such a cosmopolitan place that my new game is to figure out which country the people I meet or cross on the street are. Sometimes, its really easy, because they are speaking on the phone or among themselves in an easily recognizable language - Italian, or French or Spanish. Most times, its hard- like the cleaner at my friend's place whose English accent I was trying to place and who turned out to be from Guyana!

As for the children, they have been troopers. Which they normally are, of course, but given the amount of walking one has to do in this city, I had braced myself for some serious whining. My kids are too used to going everywhere by car or cab and they've hardly ever done any serious walking. But hey presto, they have been walking for hours here everyday without complaint, eating whatever is offered to them happily and for the first few days atleast, keeping pace enthusiastically with the packed itinerary.

Finally, the biggest take-away has been the quality time spent with my friend J. This has been our longest time together in the same space since we were roommates during MBA. Even though we've been meeting on and off over the years, nothing does the trick as much as extended time spent together, and I'm so glad to know that we've made the most of it.
I'm sad to be leaving so soon, but hey, the vacation hasn't ended yet :)

Living it up in New York - Part 1

We arrived in New York City more than 10 days ago. I was a little tense before we left Bangalore. The husband having flown the coop, so to speak, several days earlier (on work), the whole project of packing, cleaning the house, clearing the fridge, and locking up while being on track to catch a 4 am international flight fell to me. Obviously and fortunately, this was something I'd never had to do before and I was a little paranoid that we would land up at the airport at 2 am to find that I'd left our passports behind!! As it turned out, we managed to board the flight in one piece except that as I was checking in at the Emirates Counter, I realized that I'd left my phone behind in the cab! 

Very luckily, the cab driver was someone we knew and I spent most of my waiting time at Bangalore airport trying to contact S through a pay phone so that he could alert the driver about my phone. 

Several hours of snoozing, eating and movie-watching later, we landed in NewYork, passed through immigration and hailed a cab to Manhattan, to the place of a dear friend and college batchmate, J. Day 1 was a light one (by our standards!). I took the kids to Times Square - ToysRUS, the M&M store, the Disney store. We walked around along with the teeming crowds, gawked like all the other tourists, ate lunch and were back in the apartment by afternoon. In the evening, I took the kids across the road to Hudson River Park where we walked by the waterfront, raced against each other and smelt the flowers (quite literally!).

S arrived the next day and it was such a lovely day (sunny and cloudy in turns with a sharp nip to the air) that we decided to spend it outdoors in Central Park. The cherry blossoms were in bloom and to say they were incredibly pretty would be an understatement.

View of the skyline from Central Park

Cherry blossom tree

Blue skies

The turtle pond

That evening, S and I took some rare and much-needed couple time off to catch a Broadway show (my first!) - The Phantom of the Opera. Later, we also walked around Times Square to incredulously take in the flashing neon lights and wonder at the mass of humanity abroad at 11.30 pm :)

Next day's stop was at the American Museum of Natural History. In the interests of accomodating varied interests, S volunteered to take the kids for the day to the museum while I took off with my friends to walk the Brooklyn Bridge and wander through Little Italy and Chinatown, capturing sone of the flavour of this lovely city.

Part II coming up in a day or two :)

In our own beds and happy (mostly)

The kids are now officially sleeping in their own room every night. A huge milestone for us! The one most affected will be the husband who cannot imagine how he will manage to sleep every night without his two babies to provide warmth and comfort.Yes, there appear to be THREE people in the house needing night-time comfort and cuddles! Fortunately for him, he left for the US just a day after the new arrangement came into force and hasn't had a chance to experience withdrawal symptoms yet :)

'To compensate, I'm dragging a kicking and screaming Y to bed every afternoon for a nap. It forces me to rest a while in the middle of rigorous summer days spent entirely with the kids and gives Y some much needed downtime from endless bickering with her brother. The bonus is I get some soft cheek-to-cheek time with my little girl not to mention a few moments of girlish giggling and exclusive cuddles uninterrupted by Anna.

Last night I woke up to find Ads snuggled up next to me. I woke him up and tucked him into his own bed. In the morning, he claimed that he only came into my room because he wanted some cream for a mosquito bite and that I had dragged him into bed to sleep beside me! I have no recollection of what happened but it sure looks like I am experiencing some withdrawal symptoms of my own here! :)

Bumpy-bumpy

Anna, do bumpy bumpy. 

Y orders her brother every few minutes in the swimming pool. Resigned, he stops whatever he is doing (which is trying to float on his back, and practising his freestlyle strokes), takes her in his arms, and bounces and whirls her all over the water while his sister shrieks in pure delight.

Duty calls. Even in the swimming pool!

Coming up for air

I would have blogged earlier but my laptop gave up on me and amidst the battery of chores that remain to be accomplished when trying to settle down in a new home/city, I've been on the phone with Dell tech support a lot! 

So. Here we are. A crazy couple of weeks of work and more work. A week at the hotel until our goods arrived, move-in cleaning of the new apartment, unpacking the cartons and getting the house in shape while simultaneously dealing with the Bangalore weather (Hot!! I feel cheated!) and follow ups with all the vendors and service providers we need. Think carpenters, plumbers, electricians, the water purifier guy, the TV guy, the broadband guy. Hiring maids, cook, driver and getting their ID cards done. Buying furniture, putting up pictures, making the house look like home. 

I told S the other day - Moving is like giving birth. You do it once and you swear you will never go through that pain again. But then some people like us never learn. Gluttons for punishment is the phrase they use for people like us.

Anyway, this is probably the nicest house we've ever lived in, a sprawling place with enough nooks and corners for everybody. The kids have their own bunk beds and for the last week, have been sleeping all night on their own, which is a VERY BIG DEAL for us indeed!

I'll get started with regular programming soon, hopefully. We have another week before we fly to New York City for a long-awaited trip. It's going to be my first long-haul flight without S so keeping fingers crossed, though I bet Disney Pixar will take care of most of the entertainment needs. At the end of the trip is our meeting with my mint-new niece, my brother and SIL -and my kids and I are super-excited at the bought of holding and playing with the little one.

Off I go now, to call some more people who haven't delivered stuff that was supposed to be here a week ago :)

Adieu and hello

There are some who'd like to give me a hard kick in the backside for saying this (read all my friends and relatives who are Delhi-haters and would like nothing better than to move down south/west but are stuck in NCR for various reasons). I had tears in my eyes after I handed over our apartment keys to the landlord and was on my way home to our Gurgaon hotel. As the movers were packing away, quite efficiently and obviously needing little or no input from me, I indulged in some reminiscing and grew all mopey thinking of the wonderful times we had in the last 3 years. Sure, there have been some lows, and I'll be the first to admit that for a non-native to live in NCR can be incredibly challenging and frustrating.

But people make all the difference and we struck pay dirt in that department. So many friends, lovely helpful people who enriched our lives immeasurably. Ads was using my phone to text one of his school friends. They promised to keep in touch through fb and skype (Aside: He asked me when he could have  a fb account - I pretended not to hear him!).

The friend texted: Friends forever.

Ads texted back: Yes. Friends forever.

The exchange has been running in my mind like a repetitive track all through the last few days.  Friends forever? I don't think so. Not when you are 7 and will in all likelihood never meet each other again. And when I was driving to the hotel, the thought again brought tears to my eyes. Lost and broken friendships, the pattern of my life and it seems, the pattern of my kids' lives as well.

My ever-unflappable and practical husband asked me to be more positive, not realizing that I just needed a day or two to collect myself and miss the good times. Soon I will be able to collect them all and store them away in memory, to be relived and smiled over again and again in the future. 

To be so sad at leaving one home, yet so happy to be entering another - aren't I lucky?? :)

One down, one to go

I went for my usual morning walk today. When I came back, the kids were up. The huge (and obviously, very pleasant) surprise was that Ads had brushed his teeth and done potty AND he had brushed Y's teeth and cleaned her potty!!

Is my work here done, or what?? :)

Ads has been more or less taking care of his own stuff for the last few months. Bathing, potty, wearing clothes and so on. He has trouble with buttoning shirt cuffs, clasping his belt and so on. We haven't even gone anywhere near shoe-laces yet. But having him take care of his own toilette frees up a large amount of time.

Lately, I have also been getting him to do some outside chores. Pay the electricity and maintenance bills, for one. He needs to drop the cheque at the office downstairs and wait until the surly manager draws up a receipt. He has been buying simple groceries like milk, yogurt, paneer etc from the shop downstairs. That is also an exercise in addition and subtraction since I always give him a 100 or 500 Re note and ask him to calculate how much change he should be bringing back. He recently started charging a commission of 10 bucks for every transaction he carried out, and we are still arguing about that because according to me, you don't get paid for chores like these and anyway he eats most of the milk and paneer that we buy :)

Next up, he wants to learn how to make his own breakfast (simple toast and oatmeal), soap his back and strap on his watch :)

Durbar

The review of "Durbar" by Tavleen Singh in some newspaper or the other prompted me to buy the book. I haven't read any of this veteran journalist's other books but assumed it would be an interesting read. And it was. The story starts with Tavleen as the newbie journalist, learning the ropes as Emergency is declared in India. She gets to know people close to the Gandhi family and is privy to intimate dinner parties and social occasions where she meets Rajiv (then still a pilot), Sonia and the other Gandhis. Her impressions, good and bad, of the Gandhi clan are interspersed with various assignments across the country - Operation Bluestar in Punjab, Kashmir and later the IPKF intervention in Sri Lanka.

The book is racy and gripping. I got to thinking about what a monentous decade and a half that was - the Emergency onwards to Rajiv's assassination in 1991. There are a lot of memories, too many in fact.

Chennai, 1991. I remember my grandmother rocking back and forth on the sofa near the TV in our flat that hot summer day when Rajiv Gandhi was killed in Sriperumbudur. Enna azhagu, enna azhagu (how handsome, how handsome) she kept saying, tears streaming down her face, distraught at the gruesome manner of his killing.

Meerut, 1982. I remember my mom sleeping for several nights with a kitchen knife under her pillow because there were communal riots in the city and in our locality, and my dad was away. I must have been as old as Ads is now, and my brother about the same age as Y. I'm not sure whether I was frightened then. I know that the mere recollection of it gives me palpitations now! One night, we had a violent mob baying at the gate. Were they Muslim - I assume they were - otherwise why would they come attack a Hindu home in a predominantly Hindu locality? Amma fled with 2 half-asleep children across the connecting door to our landlord's house. We rushed to the terrace and hid ourselves and some of the family members threw down stones and other handy items at the mob. I have no recall of what happened later and how we escaped lynching or worse; I keep thinking about how brave my mother was and how terrified she must have been.

Lucknow, 1984. I remember that morning on TV and hearing that the Prime Minister had been shot down by her Sikh security guards. There were angry crowds roaming the streets, attacking Sikh neighbourhoods and homes. They were barging into every house and demanding to know whether any Sardars lived there. All I could hear from the inside of our house was a loud angry hum. There was an atmosphere of deep tension in the house. Amma asked me to keep writing Sri Ramajayam in my diary and that monotonous exercise calmed me down. Incredibly scared, I focused all my energies on filling up the pages and with every letter I drew, I prayed really hard that the mobs should go away and peace return to our street and the city.

I was left with a lot of admiration for this gutsy lady journalist who went willingly into some very dangerous situations, spent years following political campaigns and travelling the length and breadth of the country, and hobnobbed with the high and mighty of the land.

Yes, those were stirring times. Durbar brought all those years back in bright technicolour. I think for that reason alone I liked the book, spicy backroom palace gossip and all. Sometimes all you need to enjoy a book is a large dose of reminiscences!

Afternoon rambling

Slowly and surely, it's all falling into place. The familiar feeling of being suspended in-limbo has taken over and the heart has guarded and steeled itself against any unexpected emotional responses and withdrawal symptoms.

The house in Bangalore is being painted and necessary repairs done. A hotel has been identified close to it where we'll stay for the week or 10 days that we have to wait for our goods to follow us from Gurgaon. Friends have been commandeered during this time to provide moral support and shopping companionship as I sally forth to buy furniture, curtains and rugs for the much larger place we are moving into. Peeps in Bangalore, much appreciate recos on places to buy all of the above -- we'll be staying in Whitefield, so please don't suggest places in JP Nagar!! FYI, I strongly veer towards traditional Indian work.

The schools have been given notice, as have my maid and cook, who are understandably sad at my leaving. Even if I say so myself, S and I are very good employers - I pay above market rates because I think a good househelp is the greatest treasure anyone can have (and its a hard job as anyone knows!), I do atleast of the quarter of the work assigned to the help by myself (I like washing dishes and doing laundry!), I'm generous with loans and advances (and I've never been taken for a ride - yet) and most importantly, we travel so much that the help has atleast a week off every month! :) Last minute shopping has been done. We're getting some furniture custom-made - Delhi is really good for that sort of thing and you have excellent carpenters and woodworkers here. The car will be sold in a couple of days. Fortunately, our current place is very centrally-located and it won't be a major hardship to be bereft of a set of wheels. The movers have come looked at the stuff we have and provided a quote, which has been duly accepted.

It helps that the weather here seems to have moved seamlessly from winter to summer with no suggestion of spring! It makes the thought of moving to cooler and infinitely pleasanter climes so much easier! I've been trying to find one good thing about the summer in Delhi-NCR for the last three years and have come up with precisely one reason. My appetite drops so dramatically during the season that all I consume is loads of water, lime juice and icecream. Plus I try and swim almost everyday, with the result its the time of year I look the most fit and toned (if a little wilted). The one silver lining!

Another 2 weeks to go! It's been a good innings here (nonwithstanding the gun that was pointed at the husband a couple of years ago - remind me to relate that incident sometime!). I have never had any major separation pangs while moving; sometimes I wonder whether it's a coping mechanism I developed early on to deal with frequent relocations. When we moved to the US from Bangalore, a dearly-loved city, the tears that flowed were only because I did not know when I would be seeing my parents again. When we left San Francisco, there was anxiety about a new life in India, worries about Ads being able to adjust, but no regret about leaving that golden land. Perhaps, the new economic reality for many of us is that India is the golden land of opportunity, much as the USA used to be a couple of generations ago!
Enough rambling for one afternoon, I guess :) Time to go and prep Ads for his admission test!

Tiger odyssey

Whew. What can I say about Bandhavgarh? It was the trip of a lifetime. It was a dream come true for Ads of course, given his previous obsession with all manner of big cats. We had booked, postponed and rebooked this holiday so many times that I was despairing of ever going. Until a week before, S did not confirm to me whether I should cancel (yet again) or pack. Fortunately, the stars aligned and a week ago, we were on a train bound for Jabalpur in MP. Thanks to a last minute tip-off from a friend, I had hastily included Jabalpur in the itinerary and we were spending a few hours there before heading to Bandhavgarh.

Jabalpur is like any other Tier 2 (or 3?) town in the country but that's not why we were there. We were there to see the Dhuandhar falls and the Marble rocks at Bhedaghat. I thanked my friend from the bottom of my heart for tipping me off because....well....here are the pics...see for yourself!

 

The Narmada. These falls aren't the tallest or biggest but the volume of water is significant.

The water cascading through the gorge

A more peaceful avatar of the Narmada, at Bhedaghat.

Anybody remember Kareena Kapoor's song and dance in the movie "Asoka"? Well it was shot here.

The rocks are brown, blue, light pink and finally pristine white marble!

After a quick lunch (which was promptly thrown up by both kids within a couple of hours!), we started the longish drive to Bandhavgarh, passing through some unexpectedly pretty countryside. Farmland on both sides of the road was circumscribed by rolling meadows and low hills with small ponds appearing in between. The biggest surprise was how sparsely-populated the region was. Add to that the general aura of prosperity and the smooth road we were whizzing on, and I could almost imagine it to be the countryside of any First World country!!! Incredible India never ceases to surprise.
We reached our resort around 7 pm by which time it was pitch-dark. The property is inside the forest, occcupying about 25 acres of land. There are enough wild animals roaming around the property for us to need an escort every time we had to go back and forth between our cottage and the common areas such as the dining room and reception. The sky was crystal clear and we could actually see countless STARS!!! Imagine! It was most thrilling to identify constellations and bask in the clear unpolluted air.

View of our cottage - can you see the two chairs on the deck? Perfect for basking in the sun!

A few words about this place (let me know if you ever travel to Bandhavgarh and I'll let you in on my secret). It had wonderful reviews on tripadvisor, my trusted travel buddy and while they were marginally more expensive than many of the other resorts, they more than made up for it by their impeccable service, mouth-watering food and extensive knowledge of the forest and its wildlife. It was more like an intimate homestay than anything else. Ads in partcular had a wonderful time outside the safaris since he was able to have long conversations with the owner-manager about everything from the jaw movements of a tiger, mating calls of the spotted deer to raptors and at one point they were even talking about the 2013 Oscars!!!!! The owner is UK born and bred with strong family ties to Tanzania and an encyclopaedic knowledge of African wildlife so obviously I picked his brain for the best spots to view wildlife in Africa and so on which has been filed away for future use :)
The major crib of most people who run tourism ventures in the area is the short-sightedness, incompetence and ignorance of the bureaucrats who are in charge of conservation efforts and the ever-changing rules and regulations that make wildlife-viewing so much harder than it needs to be. The common thread ruunning through the conversation is a fundamental dispute about whether tourism is good for conservation or vice versa. Clearly sensible tourism plays a major role in policing the forests as well; if tourists were not around, the poachers would have a free hand. A shabby, fluctuating and person-dependent conservation and tourism policy is doing far more harm than good to both the tiger and the environment it lives in. Sadly, this is the case in most of the wildlife reserves in the country. I don't have experience of any countries outside the US and India but there is definitely a lot that can be learnt from the fantastic way the US Parks Service does their job (budget cuts and the never-ending criticism nonwithstanding).
The forest is incredibly beautiful with dry deciduous vegetation, stunning blue cloudless skies and countless birds, reptiles and mammals which can more often be heard rather than seen! We had to wake up at 5 am everyday, fortify ourselves with nothing more than a cup of tea or hot chocolate. The open jeep was well-provided with hot-water bottles and thick blankets which were huge essentials in the biting cold. The roads inside the park are horrible and jolting along these for 4-5 hours, twice a day, is bad for the back and bones of two people on the wrong side of 30! The safaris were themselves pretty interesting. We would be jolting along a mud track and suddenly (based on alarm calls of deer, monkeys and birds) the driver would speed off like a maniac with no regard to life or limb, gathering more jeeps crammed with hopeful and bemused tourists like us along the way. We would screech to a halt somewhere where they expected to spot a tiger and wait there in pindrop silence for several minutes (or an hour, or two). We did not have any luck with the first two safaris but managed to catch a tigress and her 4 cubs on the third one!
No one said meeting a tiger in the wild is easy!! We saw wild boar, jackals, langurs, rhesus macaques, deer (sambar and spotted) and plenty of birds but missed the elusive leopard. Ads loved the entire experience and is already plotting vacations to other reserves. It was a little hard on Y though; while she managed the strenous schedule with loads of grace and enthusiasm, it was a bit much for a 4 year old to handle! Fortunately she did manage to catch up on sleep during the safaris, uncomfortably perched on my lap or sprawled out on the backseat of the jeep.
I think the wildlife bug has bitten all of us - not good for our pockets at all :)

 

A sorted-out 7 yo (I think!)

Ads graduated from bedtime stories quite a while ago and for the last year or more, his bedtime routine has consisted of either a quiz (we ask him questions on a mutually-agreeable topic) or else a "discussion". The latter again involves a specific topic on which we have a free-wheeling chat of sorts. Nothing very elaborate, 10 minutes tops is the usual duration because we have to start sleeping and therefore the same topic may be continued for as long as a week depending on how interesting it is.

For the last few days, we have been talking about religion. What it is, why the need for religion, the different religions practised in India, and so on. Naturally, we have also talked about evolution and God and faith (mine, his and the world's at large!). Last night, he floored me not once by twice by saying something that was not just extremely insightful but totally unexpected for someone his age.

#1 - During a discussion on the negation of the theory of evolution by conservative Christians, he said: Only fools think they know everything. It was almost telepathic, because just then I'd been about to say something on the lines of - Only fools think they have all the answers, the wise man is full of doubts.

#2 - We were talking of the commonality between all religions and I told him that all religions seek to answer just a couple of fundamental questions, and then I casually asked him whether he could think what this question was. Pat came the reply: Who am I?

His prompt and ready response shook me up. How did he know? We'd never discussed this with him before. How had he cracked this most fundamental question of all? Who am I? Why am I here? To what end?

I find it very hard to reconcile this kid with the kid who fights over the last piece of chocolate with his baby sister and who throws a fit because I gave her 3 kisses and gave him only 2! I feel like saying - Dude, you cracked the meaning of life! You cannot, simply cannot, be acting like this!

Oh well - that's what makes life with Ads so interesting :)

Movies, cheesecake and work

It's been a busy week or two. We had the happy entirely novel experience of having S working out of Gurgaon for the entire week, and of course we all made hay while the sun shone! The kids and I got to spend quality time with dad/husband. We watched movies, went on walks, played board games, ran errands jointly - it was so much fun to do the normal mundane things!

Talking of movies, Lincoln was a wonderful watch. Daniel Day-Lewis was brilliant - what an actor! I was left spellbound by the many shades he brought to the character of the great American President - his humor and wit, his gentleness, his oratory, his fits of depression, his political genius. I could not but help but notice the parallels between those stirring times and the present day American context - the rivalry and later, mutual respect and cooperation between Lincoln (the little-known lawyer from Illinois) and William H Seward, his Secretary of State and an illustrious NY Senator who was defeated by Lincoln to win the Republican nomination. The shenanigans and antics of the legislative process have been brought out beautifully - times have changed but politics has not!! No surprise that Day-Lewis has won the BAFTA Award for best actor and I have my money on him to bag his third Oscar as well.

Special Chhabis was another entertaining, crisp and edge-of-the-seat crime caper, witness to some fantastic acting especially by Anupam Kher and Manoj Bajpayee. Even Akshay Kumar (gasp!) put in quite a creditable and understated performance. We enjoyed the movie thoroughly while getting annoyed with the side love-track and couple of totally unnecessary songs.

There was a Valentine's Day party that my friends and I threw for ourselves :) We all dressed up in red and had a lovely potluck dinner, accompanied by tons of gossip and laughter. I'm so lucky that I managed to find such a good fun group of friends in Gurgaon. When we moved here 2 years ago, I did not know a soul. As you grow older it becomes more difficult to make friends, especially if one is, like me, not a natural extrovert. But with 2 young children, living in a cocoon is not an option and one is forced to socialise with other moms and force-fit oneself into some sort of loose network. Sometime you get lucky and meet people who you like and who like you back, and sometimes it's just a marriage of convenience. Fingers crossed for the new environment and new people in Bangalore - the bar has been raised!

My second time with making an Oreo cheesecake - a no-bake, no-egg affair this time - lip-smacking delicious! It was my contribution to the Valentine's Day potluck and the oreos on top are a feeble attempt to create a heart-shape :)

 

 

And oh yes, the most important update for the last! :) I quit my job! The small non-profit which I was a part of, has most of its work in Delhi and there was nothing I could have done out of Bangalore (except fundraise maybe, and I did not want to do that even if the option had been offered to me). The last year has been a lot of fun but there's also been a lot of stress. The overwhelming feeling now is one of relief. The sense of freedom is just wonderful. I have to wonder - what does that say about me and my approach to paid work? I would be less stressed if I was a SAHM, that's for sure. Would I be more fulfilled or less? Would I be happier? Having been on both sides of the fence now, its very disconcerting to discover that I still don't have the answer to those two critical questions. The most important learning I've had in the last year has been that flexible working hours aren't some kind of a holy grail. Sure, it's pretty cool to be at the door to receive your kids with a hug and a hot drink (and it makes you feel sooo saintly!!) but the craziness that precedes the rush back home and the physically-present, often-mentally-absent state that I am in even when I am with Ads and Y.........well....clearly, it's not ideal. Ok, there is no ideal, we all know that.

So, at this point, there are far more questions than answers. More than enough fodder for another long post! I'm spending the next month prepping for our move and hopefully all that clearing of junk from the house will go hand-in-hand with some clearing of mental cobwebs as well :)

Papad ki sabji and misc.

When the breaking dawn sees you in the kitchen, having already finished baking a pound cake, mixing the batter for chocolate cupcakes and the cooker whistling away in preparation for a batch of sweet pongal, then it's party time for my kids :) It has been raining cats and dogs here since yesterday and so I magnanimously decided to keep the kids home from school (had to extract a promise from them that they would play amicably together and allow me to work for a few hours, otherwise I was driving them to school myself, rain or no rain!). 

Sweet or chakkarai pongal is one of my favourite sweets, and no one makes it better than my mom. After years of practice, I guess she can make this dish in her sleep and it tastes absolutely delicious even though she does not add dollops of ghee to it. Warm and mushy or cold and firm (which is the way I like it), it is the perfect comfort food as far as I am concerned. It's been frustrating for me that I can never get my sweet pongal to taste as good as my mom's (it doesn't even come close). I always console myself by blaming the quality of the jaggery, rice and dal...everything, in short, except my culinary talent :) This year, 2013, I am going to crack this recipe!!!

Today, the kids had requested burgers for lunch so I was wondering what to whip up for myself. Something really quick and non-fuss. Aha! Papad ki sabzi! The first I heard of this strange dish was from my Marwari friends who claimed it was a lifesaver when you were short of time and/or there were no vegetables in the fridge. Having tasted it once, I was hooked. The recipe I used today was different from what my friends told me (they skipped the curd but added tomatoes) but the popular internet versions all seem to incorporate dahi. I finally used Sanjeev Kapoor's recipe here.

As expected it was absolutely yum and I definitely plan to make more of this dish. It may be a mundane dish for a lot of people but it's definitely a novel delicacy for me! Here's a pic of all the ingredients simmering away :)

PS: The only thing to remember is to go easy on the salt. I forgot that the papads themselves have salt so the dish was a tad saltier than I like...but my salt tolerance is very low so it might be quite ok for most people.
PPS: This is to be eaten hot with rotis. The besan can make it pretty smudgy after a bit, but I guess that can be rectified by adding water and boiling again. I saw several recipes that did not use besan so that's another option.
 

 

De-toy-clutter

Another practical, control-the-chaos-in-your-home-with-kids kind of post, which appeared on Mom's Diaries.

 

Surely kids have way too many toys nowadays? How does one keep the clutter under control? The task can seem pretty overwhelming at times. Yet, it all boils down to some commonsensical strategies.

Me, I follow the mantra of Reduce, Rotate, Recycle, Donate.

1. Reduce. Just buy less. We’ve all noticed the 80-20 rule. It’s just 20% of the toys in the toybox that get played with a lot or most of the time. The rest seemed to be played with only when other kids demonstrate an interest in them! My husband and I have almost completely stopped buying toys for our kids except on birthdays and maybe Xmas. There are no impulse purchases. The children get a lot of toys anyway as gifts and I have a hard enough time dealing with those, thank you very much. Plus most of the habitual gift-givers know that my children adore books so that’s what they get a lot of nowadays (so now we have book clutter instead of toy clutter….which does not seem so bad!).

Additionally, with toy libraries mushrooming nowadays, it is easier not to buy new toys and gizmos. I sometimes miss my mom's club in the US. One of the cool things they used to do is to have a toy swap every 6 months. Everyone (we had more than 50 active members) brings their unwanted (in good condition and cleaned/sterlized) toys to a common place. You get to pick other kids' toys for your own kids and vice versa. All the toys left at the end of the exercise would be donated to charity.

2. Rotate. Put away half of the 80% toys in a box somewhere. Pull them out after a few months and put the rest of the toys in storage. Keep rotating toys every few months and they’ll always stay fresh and exciting!

3. Recycle. The kids get to choose which birthday gifts they want to give away and which they’d like to keep. The ones they don’t care for are gifted to kids who would want and enjoy them. We try to gift thoughtfully and not palm off unwanted gifts to other kids.

4. Donate. Extra toys and games are always donated at the end of the year. They normally get passed on to the maid’s kids, a needy NGO, a Xmas drive or to younger neighbours and cousins – wherever the toys would be ensured of a loving welcome.

 

So how do you de-toy-clutter your home?

Delhi goodbyes#1 - Kamla Nagar and saree shopping

The countdown to the move has begun and one of my priorities is to complete my list of Delhi to-dos, be it shopping, eating or sightseeing. I'd been toying with the idea of buying a typical saree from these parts, you know like the ones seen in Bollywood movies :) The problem really is that coming from the South, one's taste seems to be more subtle and less inclined (or very wary of) bling. It has been pretty amusing to see my Marwari and Punjabi friends cock a snook at my beautiful Paithanis, Kanthas, Pochampallis and Kanjeevarams (these are priceless heritage weaves people!!!) while lusting after net, georgette and supernet sarees which seemed excessively showy, blingy and shiny to my eyes.

But now that I am leaving, I thought I must buy atleast one of these sarees. A souvenir from Delhi must be obtained! Something typical, yet subdued enough to appeal to my taste. So some friends and I took the metro to Kamla Nagar where the shopping (and chole bhatures and panipuri) is supposed to be out of this world!

Having been to the shopping hotspots in Delhi like Lajpat Nagar, Karol Bagh and Sarojini Nagar, I wasn't expecting too much but was pleasantly surprised by how large and well-stocked the market was. We bought a lot of stuff but the main agenda was saree-shopping. The ones that I liked, my friends were doubtful about.

Hame Marwari colour dikhao, bhaiyya, was their refrain; while I pressed for more sober shades, less kundan and silver work, more brocade work and embroidery - in short, as un-Marwari as I could get!

Needless to say they preferred a bright blue and parrot green saree for me while I finally went with a heavily embroidered dark green and beige combination :)

We rounded off the day with a spot of chole-bhature (awesome!) and some freshly squeezed sugarcane juice.

A day well-spent :) Leaving you with some snaps.

 

Checking out the wares

This was the line for the chole-bhature. We waited for more than 30 minutes to attain nirvana!

More sarees