BEWITCHING BANDRA

Blame it on the Bandstand.

Blame it on the breezy sea.

Blame it on the bylanes.

Blame it on the bazaars.

Blame it on Bandra.

I am so bewitched by Bandra that I have neglected a lot of things. Blog-writing. Weight-watching. Researching...

The intricate, intersecting lanes that get clogged up with traffic at rush-hours.

The intriguing mix of fashion-savvy folks, laid-back lads, and crotchety crones.

The melting pot of religions and cultures that serve up a great variety of food fit for all pockets and palates.

The streets wide enough for REAL FOOTPATHS WIDE ENOUGH AND CLEAN ENOUGH AND FLAT ENOUGH TO WALK ON (which deserves a Hallelujah in suburban Mumbai), and which also houses stalls eager to sell everything from clothes, bags and shoes to trinkets, kitchenware and books.

Ah Bandra of the old-world charm and the nouveau riche fashion and the ...

...sea.

I'm bewitched. I've succumbed to its charms.

It's hard not to.

I KNOW WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER

I know that I have been off blogging for nearly two months this summer.

And I know the reason for it.

Shifting from one rented flat in Mumbai to another.

First, it was the decision to shift.

Then, it was a round of seeking admission to new schools in the chosen area. As a school Principal said, "If you had one child, it wouldn't have been a problem. But...". Since no one had informed us of such future problems when pushing the 'two-children-happy-family-theory', we had to make double the effort now. Finally, though, we got both daughters enrolled in Arya Vidya Mandir, which, from all accounts, is a good school to grow up in.

Then, it was a search for the right flat. Oh, there are flats and flats, but a suitable match between a likeable residence and an affordable budget is really tough to find. You see, you shortlist, you negotiate, you wait...the negotiations fail...and then you go through this over and over again.

Then, it was a matter of waiting for the right approvals from the right authorities, for legalities, and contracts and verifications. I AM NOT TALKING OF BUYING, BUT SIMPLY OF RENTING PROPERTY ON A COMPANY LEASE.

Then, it was getting in touch with Movers and Packers, and watching all your beloved stuff being ruthlessly stuffed into bubble-wraps, cartons and cardboards, dragged into wet trucks (it was raining heavily that day), and dumped carelessly in new, strange rooms.

Tiring.

Traumatic.

And also rather exciting, actually ;)

Suffice to say, we have shifted to a new flat with kids, clothes, books and utensils in tow. This flat is still being done up by the owner, so we will be living a very public life amidst carpenters, masons, plumbers and electricians for a few more weeks. The house in a mess, there is a huge amount of unpacking still to be done, the kitchen is a work-in-progress, one bathroom looks as if it has been bombed...

Still, we can see the sea in the distance from some of the windows, and there are a lot of quaint churches and little lanes with sloping-roof houses to be explored. When the sundry people banging away around the flat finally leave...

Thank God for Maa, but that's another post!

All in all, a summer spent in fretting and fuming and sweating and waiting, and a monsoon beginning in a shifting.

What a waste of a lovely summer vacation!

WOMEN'S DAY: A PRIZED POSSESSION

Here's the essay I wrote that won the First Prize at the Essay Competition for Lecturers by Hinduja College. It's rather long (they had a word limit of 1500) and rather dry and pontificating at places (academics are notorious for their incomprehensibility and verbosity), so feel free to skip as much or all of it if you want.

WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT: MYTH OR REALITY?

Miles to Go

“The race must be saved, and it can only be saved through the emancipation of women.”

(Emmeline Pankhurst, British suffragette, in her Freedom or Death speech at Connecticut, USA, 1913. Source: Wikipedia)

‘Empowerment’ means ‘to vest with authority, to authorize’. As men have been the ‘authors’ of most texts since time immemorial, it’s not surprising that women have always got a bad deal in the division of power.

Look at The Holy Bible. Naomi Wolf explains in The Beauty Myth (1991, Vintage, London, pp.93), “Though God made Adam from clay, in his own image, Eve is an expendable rib.”

Look at the etymology of the word ‘woman’. This Old English word is a compound of wif + man. A part of man, and not much apart from man – that was the woman’s lot. Till the first glimmers of change in the 18^th century, notwithstanding a few Cleopatras and Catherine the Greats and Joans of Arc dotting the intervening centuries.

And then there came the three waves of the Women’s Liberation Movement, from the 18^th century to the present day. The movement varied in its aims and achievements in different nations and distinct cultures, from opposing female genital mutilation in Sudan to breaking the glass-ceiling in Western countries to abolishing the practice of Satidaha (burning of widows) in pre-Independence India.

And, no, female empowerment is not a mythical struggle like the symbolically-laden fight between Judith and Holofernes (where Judith cut off her assailant’s head). The achievements are very much real and hard-won – one of the most noteworthy being women’s suffrage. From New Zealand in 1893, Great Britain in 1918, the USA in 1920, and India since its tryst with destiny in 1947, women today have the right to vote. Such a long journey from the ideal state of Aristotle’s Politics, where women, infants and lunatics were denied citizenship rights.

Beyond politics, other struggles have been played out across the globe, on issues such as reproductive rights, domestic violence, equal pay, sexual violence and gendered language. The manifestations of male power are so insidious and entrenched, that we have a long way to go before women’s empowerment becomes as much of a ‘given’ as men’s empowerment has always been.

Protest through Silence

“Silence can be a plan

rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence

it has a history a form

do not confuse it

with any kind of absence”

(from Adrienne Rich, Cartographies of Silence, 1975)

To know the real status of women’s empowerment in India, we can do a number of things.

We can look at the figures. India has always performed poorly in gender-related indices. www.nasscomm.in informs us that The Human development report of the UNDP ranks India 98 in its Gender related Development Index. While 85% of the total girl children attend primary school, less than 12% still carry on to the tertiary level. These women who drop out, as well as those who go on to have a job, do not sit idle at home. Indian women typically spend 35 hours per week on household tasks and caring for family-members, as against 4 hours per week for men.

We can look at the faces. Women in India have had their poster-girls and role models. From Indira Gandhi (“the only man in her Cabinet”) to today’s Mayawati-Mamata-Jayalalitha in politics, from Indra Nooyi abroad to Naina Lal Kidwai and Chandra Kochhar here in the corporate jungle, from Arundhati Roy and Medha Patkar in the jungles of injustice, from Sonia Gandhi, the de facto leader of the nation, to Pratibha Patil, the de jure head of the state, famous Indian women achievers make a long list.

Or we can look at the total picture. In a country of 496.4 million women (2001 census figures, source: www.merinews.com), pulling out a few hundred names from the conjuror’s hat is mere tokenism. Remember, India is also the land of Roop Kanwar, the 18-year old who committed sati on 4 September 1987 at Deorala in Rajasthan. We shall never know her real story, forever silenced on her husband’s pyre.

We can listen to the many silences around us – the silences of the women away from the limelight, away from our own educated, privileged world. Let me share with you my maid’s ‘herstory’. She is seventh-standard pass, abandoned by her husband even though she has two children, and she works from dawn to dusk washing-cleaning-sweeping-mopping to bring up her two children and to look after her mother and sister, who share her destiny of abandonment and subsequent self-sustenance through hard labour. She does not know about any charter of women’s rights, but her gut-instinct makes her refuse to take back her husband when he comes inebriated and wheedling to her door.

This is the power of silence, the real story of those who cannot voice their protest.

Power and Violence

“Girls never mean it when they say stop…

Was it rape, then?”

(from Rape, Joan Larkin, 1986)

Many a times, though, silence is at a disadvantage. Especially since violence is an inescapable ingredient in any struggle for power.

One of the most disturbing obstacles to women’s empowerment is the growing trend of violence against women. This violence takes many forms – dowry harassment, bride-burning, eve-teasing, sexual harassment at the workplace, honour-killing, marital violence and rape.

The Times of India, 27 November, 2010, reports that “statistics on rapes in the country shows how more than two women are raped every hour….The number of rapes across the country has increased manifold from only 2,487 in 1971 to 21,176 in 2008.” To each of these victims, women’s empowerment may just be an empty, broken promise.

Violence can take other forms, too. It can be self-inflicted, brought upon oneself by peer pressure and social expectations. The notion of ‘beauty’ can be fiercely competitive and mercilessly cruel. Isabelle Caro, the French actress and model who died on 1^st January, 2011, aged 28 and weighing under 30 kilograms, exemplifies the violence of beauty.

Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth (1990) analyses the ‘Walking Wounded’ – women who undergo cosmetic surgery, who become victims of anorexia and bulimia, to attain or maintain the ideal of ‘beauty’- beauty which always lies in the eyes of the observer, usually male.

The Bondage to Stereotypes

“The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women.”

(D H Lawrence, quoted in Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, 1973)

Down centuries and across cultures, one of the most debilitating bondage that women have had to face is the bondage to stereotypes.

As Eve the eternal temptress, or as Mary, the selfless nurturer, as Durga, the ten-armed super-force, or as Savitri, the unquestioningly devoted wife, men have created the image of their perfect woman. In religion and literature, from the epics to the romantics, women have always been the ‘object’ – of possession (Draupadi and the game of dice in The Mahabharata), of adoration (read any romantic poem by Shelley), of suspicion (Sita in The Ramayana). Women have always been expected to conform to this straitjacketed stereotype constructed by men.

And they still do. Look at the popular television serials, with their docile/domineering saas-bahu (daughters and mothers in law) in aspirational finery and patriarchal set-ups. Most advertisements sell cars and deodorants through Eve-like femme fatales, or peddle noodles and spice powders with the help of supermoms and yummy mummies. Feminine cosmetic products glorify the most fantastic stereotype of them all – the ‘fair and lovely’ lady, impossibly beautiful, unattainably fair-skinned, dangerously slender centre of male attention.

As long as popular culture continues to endorse these stereotypes, women will continue to be enslaved by them. And women will liberate themselves financially and politically, only to be disempowered by subtler socio-psychological forces.

Break Free, Fly, Choose

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.”

(from Hope, Emily Dickinson, 1861)However, there are encouraging signs. According to the Registrar General of India, the proportion of women in the workforce rose from 19.7% in 1981 to 25.7 % in 2001. Currently, in the Indian IT industry, women form 45% of the toal workforce. (source: www.nasscomm.in). More women are stepping out and speaking up, demanding and getting education and employment and some semblance of equality. Women earn outside and also slog inside their homes. But it is a choice many of us willingly make.

So, women’s empowerment is neither a myth, nor a fully-achieved reality, but a work in progress. A process that started long ago and far away, but carried forward each time any woman asserts her rights. My mother had to quit her job to bring up her children. I am managing to balance work and home. Maybe my daughters will have an easier choice, a smoother flight, a safer freedom, and a more equal empowerment. For the betterment of the entire human race – man, woman, transgender – we can all hope.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH PISTACHIO SHELLS?

Being a neat-freak, I would probably have chucked them straight into the dustbin.

Till the tear-drop-shaped beige half-shells of a kilo-bag of pistachios were rescued by my daughters, who demanded, "Maa, we want to play with them."

The younger Copy-Kitten, who loves her Sunday-morning pasta, went to the kitchen, withdrew enough pots, pans and ladles to set up her own restaurant, and started cooking pista-shell Macaroni (resembling the shell-pasta - conchiglie - I often make for them).

The older Lil Cat, who is now deeply into the rollicking-Roman-and-gallant-Gaul world of Asterix comics, decided to convert her hoard of pista-shells into sestertii - the coins used by Julius Caesar and his ilk.The Copy-kitten, true to her name, abandoned her presumably half-cooked macaroni, followed her sister and became a sestertii-trader.

When children propose, Mummy obliges. So I spent the better part of Valentine's afternoon (the spouse was away in Pune on post-blast news-duty anyway) mixing gold and silver acrylic paints with binder and applying colour painstakingly to about two hundred gold and silver sestertii. The new-found treasure is now safely stashed in an unsed moneybox. And I re-learnt a lesson that happiness often lies in the most trivial of things.

You are welcome to come and share. The macaroni, the sestertii, or the remaining pistachios. Or your take on the question stated in the title of this post.

SHOW ME THE WINTER

So, it's already mid-December here in Mumbai, and the shops are selling green tinsel Christmas trees and red Santa caps and rich dark plum cakes.

The colourful woollies newly-knitted by my mother are waiting eagerly in the cupboard. Where they are in the competitive company of a stack of other colourful woollies, all knitted by my mother down the years. Enough to warm the cockles of an army, if they felt any cold.

My elder daughter, Lil Cat, has taken out her monogrammed navy-blue school cardigan and has worn it to school for a couple of days, just because it is DECEMBER. Defeated by the clamminess and the sweatiness, she's keeping it off for now.

Her sister, the Copy Kitten, threw a tantrum and managed to get me to buy her a similar-but-smaller monogrammed school cardigan. Which is lying pristine, waiting to be inaugurated.

Our maid has gifted them two lovely bright batik scarves, and even these are hanging forlorn in the cupboard.

And the superpowers and the wannabe-superpowers and the movers and shakers have all hot-footed over to Copenhagen, interfacing and OD-ing on Global Warming and Carbon Footprints, and the Kyoto Protocol, some trying to slip in sly measures, some trying to pull a fast one, some trying to bully the weaker ones, all for their own short-term advantage. I mean, in the long term, it is like cutting off the branch on which we all are sitting, is it not?

And here in muggy Mumbai, we - all the small fry - are still waiting for winter to turn up.

OUT FOR A DUCK

The Copy-Kitten is having some sort of elaborate programme at school where she has to go all dressed up exactly like Donald Duck.

The teacher in charge of such superfluous entertainment called me and stuck a shiny photograph of Donald, with eyes closed and nose in the air (Donald’s, not the teacher’s), in my unwilling hands. “Make it at home,” she loftily said, “we don’t want cardboard cutouts,” (reading my mind), “You’d better make it with cotton-stuffing. IT MUST LOOK EXACTLY LIKE THE PHOTOGRAPH.” (Or else…)

Meekly I nodded, saving my indignation for later. I am poor even at darning and button-sewing, let alone such ambitious projects like home-sewing the iconic bad-tempered duck.

Donald’s bad temper was rubbing off on me. None of the shops which sold fancy-dress costumes on hire (I got the names off the Net) had anything near an exact replica. One shop (a “high-end” one) had a coming-apart-cardboard-mask you would really have to imagine hard to be DONALD, which they stuck on top of some ubiquitous Charlie Chaplin-type costume with a tailcoat. I wanted a nice stuck-up fluffy white ducktail, not a dirty black coat with a tail.

Wherever I searched, I got a duck (as in cricket, not cartoons).

Finally, when I attended a pre-programme meet organized by the teacher (which, I suspect was to catch hold of laggards like me and push us into getting the costumes done), I met a pair of parents who had brought along a Doremon who looked exactly like his namesake. A tailor, who mercifully happened to be quite close to my college, apparently specialized in such complicated costumes. You just had to give him the photo (and a rather obscene amount of money), and within two days he would give you a 3-D costume.

And so I rushed right out of the meeting into the shop of the tailor with the magic Walt Disney-esque scissors. And two days later, like a conjuror pulling rabbits out of a hat, he pulled out a Donald Duck costume in luxe velvet-with-sponge-stuffing, looking exactly like that da---ned photograph, with gloves, webbed-feet-footwear, mask, right down to the fluffy white ducktail!

Only snag is, the lookalike costume is tailormade…to fit some child three sizes larger than the Copy-Kitten.

So, as she waddles about like an overstuffed inebriated duck, I’ll have to bring out all the large child-safe pins in the house to keep Donald Duck on his feet. And keep my fingers crossed and hope that Donald a.k.a Copy-Kitten does not have a wardrobe malfunction on the stage.

And if anybody mentions how sweet cartoon characters are, especially Disney ones, especially a cantankerous yellow-beaked duck called Donald, I’ll shove an entire roasted Peking Duck down their throats…on second thoughts, down mine. Or maybe Duck with Orange Sauce…and chew all of it down really viciously. Quack! Quack! Quack!!!

‘AM I LIKE THIS ONLY?’

The other day my daughters were playing together at home (harmoniously – which is a pretty rare occasion). Apart from ‘teacher-teacher’, one of their favourite role-plays is ‘mother-offspring’, with the elder Lil Cat enacting the ‘mother’ and the younger Copy Kitten being the impossibly obedient ‘daughter’.

Busy as I was in doing housework (you know, the usual stuff like folding washed clothes, dusting bookshelves, straightening the bedcover for the umpteenth time, etc,etc), one snatch of their dialogue was repeated so often that it caught my attention.

“Taratari, taratari, deri hoye jabey” (Hurry, hurry, you’ll be late). The Lil Cat would pretend to hold a glass of milk in front of the Copy Kitten and say this. When the Copy Kitten finished gulping down this imaginary glass of milk, the Lil Cat would pretend to button-up an imaginary school uniform, all the while repeating this sentence. Then she would give a hurried kiss to her pretend-daughter and, giving her a small push at her back, say again the same thing, while waving good-bye as the Copy-Kitten rushed to pick up her pretend-schoolbag and ran to catch her pretend-bus.

Then, within a few seconds, she would be back again from her pretend-school. And her pretend-mom, the Lil Cat, would start rushing and fussing all over again, undressing her sister, hurriedly feeding her some pretend-lunch and then urging her to go to sleep. All the while repeating like a mantra, “Taratari, taratari, deri hoye jabey” (Hurry, hurry, you’ll be late).

Feeling rather indignant, I asked them why they were hurrying through their game. In an exasperated way, they said, “But Ma, this is what you keep saying to us.”

“What? And what about the time when I read all those endless books with you and make you sit on the kitchen counter when we all bake cakes and cook noodles and stuff?” I accused, feeling hurt and absolutely horrified at this image of myself as a hurrying harridan, forever pushing my children from one task to another - wake up, get ready, have breakfast, go to school, have lunch, have nap, do homework/study, gulp down milk, go to play, have dinner, go to sleep.

“Oh, but that is only on Sundays and holidays. And we are playing Monday to Friday mummy-mummy now,” and they shooed me away.

So, am I like this only? Caught in a fast forward loop throughout the week, giving no time to stand and stare to either myself or my family. And then, pushing the pause button only on ‘Sundays and holidays’, to rest, relax and revel in the joys of family-life? Time to chill?

THE UNBEARABLE SWEETNESS OF BEING (IN YOUNG LOVE)

This evening, the ‘ladies’ of the household were all watching an episode of the hugely popular syrupy-soppy-soap “Bidaai” (running successfully, and sentimentally, on Star Plus). Almost half-an-hour of the hour-long telecast was devoted to a pair of, er, devoted lovers having a rooftop midnight tryst at a picnic with their families a few days before their wedding (hopefully, unless the devious scriptwriter decides otherwise).

What struck me was the sheer inanity of the romantic meeting. The conversation, or lack of one, was punctuated with minute-long sighs, and gazing-at-each-other and gazing-at-the-moon. There was a lot of heavy breathing, hand-holding and half-smiles. There was lot of giving-of-lavish-compliments and making-of-promises-of-eternal-love, repeated ad nauseum for half-an-hour (with, thankfully, some ad-breaks between, for relief) . There was a lot of sugar, but absolutely no spice.

The overdose of calorie-rich cootchie-cooing made me irritated and nauseated. I tried to be less intolerant and sarcastic, thinking of my college days when the then-boyfriend-and-now-spouse and I must have exchanged similar hour-long idiocies, but I could only recall spicy fights and spicier making-ups.

Young love seems so unreal, so uninteresting, so vacuous-empty and so over-sweet, it can give any mature person like me diabetes. It is very definitely a great thing to experience (once or twice, or many times over), but a very awkward and annoying thing to witness. My maid, who is usually silent and wide-eyed, sneered and made catty comments about how this shower of mutual love will dry up, post-marriage. My mother hardly looked up from the Sudoku she was doing (give her a juicy in-law drama and the sudoku will lie forlorn). Only my elder daughter was glued and giggling, thrilled at her first exposure to ‘adult’ things like ‘love’.

I guess it’s all about which side of the fence you are. If you are young, then young love is the stuff of dreams and desires (I used to devour Mills and Boon paperbacks during adolescence). And if you’ve crossed the first-love-phase, then the sighs and cries will probably make you want to puke (I picked up one of the new ‘Indian’ Mills and Boons, but I couldn’t go beyond the first chapter). What's your take?

INDEPEN-DANCE WEEK PROGRAMMES or HERE WE GO ROUND THE FESTIVAL BUSH

The past week has been a hectic one, for me as well as my daughters.
First, there was Unity in Diversity day celebrated as the Little Cat’s (my elder one’s) school, where she had to dress up as a Bengali bou (lady) in red-bordered white-saree with a box of sandesh (a specifically Bengali sweet).
The same saree did double-duty under a sober shawl a few days later when the Li’l Cat pretended to be Indira Gandhi at her school’s National Leader fancy dress day.
Then we had to nip and tuck a rather large green salwar-kameez for the Independence Day patriotic song-and-dance competition, “Aao bachcho tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustaan ki” (Come children let us see glimpses of India…).
The lyrics be damned (or, in this case, hummed), there was much enthusiastic dance practice on the bed and elsewhere for days (with the copy-kitten, my younger one, dutifully imitating). “Vande mataram” (Hail motherland), especially, is a very acrobatic dance-step, involving a simultaneous raising of one fist with the stamping of the other foot. The copy-kitten is just two-and-half, so the complicated fist-foot co-ordination would fox her at times and she’d topple over, only to get up gamely and continue, much in the true revolutionary spirit.
But the copy-kitten had her own set of school activities, too. One day for pretend-rakhi festivities in a hand-me-down salwar-kurta, the next for independence-dance-jump-prance-stomp in white kurta-pajama with tricolour dupatta (stole) and Gandhi topi (cap).
Coming up next is Janmasthami Day when the copy-kitten will be copying Radha, the eternal beloved. The blue/orange chaniya-choli is awaiting its turn.
Only problem is the copy-kitten insists that all her school dances be performed to the tune of “Sare jahan se achchha, Hindustan hamara hamara” (India is the best), ad infinitum. She keeps on re-cycling this same line over and over again. After half-a-dozen repetitions, she pauses, realizing that something is amiss, and says “What?” That is my cue to step in and complete the song, which ends on the same line, which starts her parroting and prancing all over again.
As I said, it’s been a hectic Independence week.

FRYING FISH AND CRYING FOUL

Recently, I’ve taken up copy-writing, after a very long hiatus. I’ve always liked writing ads and stuff, and now that I’ve got the chance to freelance for a design company, I’m all eager and excited. Only catch is that I’ve cut down on my sleeping and blogging time, because I always tell the designers and the client that, “I’ll work on it tonight (as in post-midnight) and send it to you by moon-set.” They usually agree, because then they can wake up to fresh-coffee and fresh-copy in the morning.

But then, sometimes there are can-you-do-this-at-this-very-nanosecond deadlines. And you can cry foul but you can’t say no.

Picture this. It’s almost eight in the evening. I’m frying fish in mustard oil prior to making fish curry (the ‘proper Bengali way’). Inevitably, the hot oil splatters my arm (maybe I’m an ‘improper’ Bengali). Phone rings. Rush to pick it up, and balance it on a hunched shoulder while talking and cooking (My right hand has the ladle – my left hand has the lid of the wok/kadhai – I fry fish in the attack-cum-defence mode – slide a fish in oil with the ladle and immediately cover with lid).

Client wants new taglines for partywear lingerie, pronto. Huh? My mind’s blank, then groping. Rush to comp, open mail inbox, search client folder, and go through visual material sent by designer. Come up with matching lines as the fish come out of the wok, slightly more fried than my brains. Heat oil for curry and mail new lines to client. Woooh!

Not quite. Designer calls, more options requested by client. Bloody hell. These taglines are for the lingerie packages…who’s gonna read them anyway? (The next time you buy a bra or a brief, please please read every bit of text printed on the package, just to make some poor overworked copywriter feel good.)

As the mustard paste, chillies and tomatoes sizzle and fuse in the wok, my brain-cells are fizzing with lingering lines: “Turn heads behind your back” (for a backless bra), “Push-up the glamour quotient” (for, you guessed it, a push-up bra). If this is what makes the client happy, then dish it to him.

I call up the designer and dictate the lines (a dozen or so, actually) as I ease the fish into the boiling gravy. The comp would have taken longer. That done, I lower the knob of the gas-oven, and my brain, to sim.

Even as I’m pouring the fish-curry into the serving bowl, designer calls up to say that the required lines have been “frozen” (i.e finalized). Great!

Thank you, God, for the curry and the fish,
Thank you, God, for satisfying the client’s wish.

YOURS INTROSPECTIVELY, TAGGED (AGAIN)!

Sukku, the multi-faceted, globe-trotting, corporate honcho who can cook a mean rasam/sambal/omlette, has tagged me with a meme which required some amount of soul-searching and number-crunching. Thanks Sukku, and here goes:

5 Annoying Things (as in things that annoy ME):

The inevitable wait as my obsolete dial-up net connection blinks and flashes and STRUGGLES to open and move from one site to another

Getting mud-splashed by thoughtless cars while going to work during the rainy season

The didn’t-dry-properly smell of clothes inadequately dried under fans on sunless, rainy days

Going to my fourth class of the day with a mouthful of lectures, only to find that the students have run away after the tiffin break

Being refused by autorickshaw drivers when I’m pressed for time.

8 Habits (that I have):

Waking up reasonably early even on holidays (The Pavlov-effect of weekday alarms at 5.30 a.m)

Snacking on sour/sweet stuff in the staffroom when I’m not taking classes

Blogging post-midnight

Sleeping even later

Opening the refrigerator door and wondering what on earth I wanted to take out from there

Packing more clothes (in the suitcase) than I end up wearing (in the holidays)

Buying loads of stuff that is on sale to ‘stock up on kitchen-essentials’ (my kitchen is a hoarder’s delight)

Working best under pressure (which I self-create by leaving many things for the proverbial last minute)

6 Quirks (of Myself):

I always play Microsoft Solitaire when I open my PC before moving to worthier pursuits

I always carry two bags when I go out

I compulsively straighten bedcovers which are not laid neatly

I love to sprinkle salt on my cola

I cannot stand the sight of unwashed utensils in the kitchen sink piled untidily and always pile them neatly or wash them immediately

I always read books when I’m eating out alone.

That’s it. A whole lot of info about I-Me-Myself. Please feel free to help yourself to this meme if you want to dig deep into yourself. I enjoyed the self-dissection and the dissertation!

MAID IN INDIA

I know this may sound preposterous and pre-historic to anybody who does not live in our part of the world. But for those who do, especially those with kids or jobs or both, will understand how our entire life is maid-dependent. That’s to say, the peace and pattern of our existence (and many times, the progress of our careers) depend upon the ifs and buts, express-arrivals and explanation-less-absences of our maids.

As of this present moment, my sister-in-law is in a soup because one of her maids (they have a complicated system of checks and balances comprising ‘many maids, all-in-a-row’, devised in part by my mother) has upped and left, without any notice and with many lies and excuses. She has recently joined a new job (six-day week) and has two small kids (three and one year old), so obviously the domestic disarray has demolished the carefully built maths of her existence.

My neighbour, who has to leave for her teaching job at 6 in the morning (and whose live-in maid has also left without a bye-your-leave), is having sleepless nights and pre-dawn hysterics, waiting for the stand-in help to arrive before sunrise so that she can run to catch the train to reach her school by the morning bell.

Maids rule, period. Eavesdrop on any conversation involving working moms, and you are sure to listen to complaints about their maids (when they are there) or condolences (when they have left). Maids do not come on time, maids do not come at all, maids go AWOL interminably, yet mysteriously and quarrelsomely turn up when you optimistically try to replace them. They are often tardy, oftener temperamental and, a few times (very few, to be honest) thieving. And if they do deign to come somewhat regularly, you’d better count your lucky stars and stop counting flaws and faults in their housework.

Some women are maid-lucky, they have trusted maids who are paragons of perfection and punctuality. Some are plain maid-unlucky, and spend a major portion of lives searching for, or training, or waiting for, or agonizing over, or searching again for…you get the drift? But maid-luck is as fickle as maid-mood (i.e. whether your maid is chirpy or grumpy) and all we can do is hope and pray that we are maid-for-each-other…and do the housework when they are AWOL. There is no maid-to-order solution, is there?