Archu's Archive

Sex and Sensuality

2011-12-19T14:55:00.000+05:30

This post is one of my very dare attempts. An Attempt to challenge principles and practices that pose problems to today’s practicality. Culture is a cumulative collection of practices by people over a period of time. As time ticks, period progresses, and changes happen, good and bad, forming and deforming culture as it goes. Today’s working generation is exposed to globalization and have a bird’s eye view on cultures across countries. How do we discriminate the right and wrong when different people have different perspective on it? Who made us the judge of character or the moral police of the human society? What was practical a generation ago has either become a blind custom today or at times obsolete. What to carry forward and what to leave behind is a debate that has to get addressed in time for the progress of people and nation as a whole.

As discussing culture is too vast a topic for a single post and can get boring enough to encourage my readers to leave this page, I take up to talk about dating and sex which is still a taboo topic for discussion, especially by poised Indian women folks, but interesting to secretly read or hear from someone else. Sex is largely seen to be associated with Indian culture, sometimes synonymous even and yet we have a significant number of sexual crimes in our country. I myself agree and disagree to some of the points of my post and decide to do both the sides of the argument in this debate. My only intention is to leave open ended questions to various viewpoints, to ponder inside one’s own head, not to assume any supporting or defending status. If talking sex is blasphemy to you, this is not your post, skip it. If you can read it from a neutral, rational mind, uninfluenced by culture, religion, beliefs or teachings, there you go.

With no further delay, let’s get bang on the topic, DATING and CASUAL SEX. When you say that you are going out for dinner with the opposite sex, it’s not so offensive to hear but the moment you say that you are on a date with someone, critics pour in to point fingers at your morality. What is dating really? Isn’t it not going out for dinner with the opposite sex, or precisely just going out to someplace nice where you can spend time with a person and try to get to know them? Agreed, arranged marriages are still predominant in India and it’s sad that there are families which issue curfew on dating with even the fiancé on the pretext of culture. When friendship itself happens only when people share interests and have a basic level of compatibility, how do we decide to spend our lifetime with a person without having the slightest clue about him or her? If a person’s qualification, earnings, caste and family background is supposed to make marriages, where is the place for love which is the foundation for a solid marriage? Post marriage love is most often compelled love, when it doesn’t work out, a pretentious love. Is there really an option? True love is only for fables and fairy tales, is it? Why not for us?

An argument from the older generation - it worked for us and it will work for you. Years back, life was simple. Women had domestic duties and men were the bread winners. There was a pre-defined template for every role and everyone fit into one or the other with minimum expectations. When a match was made between the right templates, it clicks. Simple, isn’t it? Are we still in the same place now? With feminism on the rising ebb, communication bringing world at your doorstep and expectations in manifolds, templates have blurred, mixing a little of here and little of there and ending up with confused individuals who find it difficult to adhere themselves to any tampered template for the society’s sake but persue stealth interests for their own sake, eroding the grounds which formed the basis for arranged marriages that worked in the previous generations.

An argument from the younger generation - We do it for our parents’ wishes. I would simply have to say that if you are old enough to get married and lead your life with a co-aged partner, you are old enough to come out of your parents’ wings, make decisions of your own and be responsible for it. While Westerners arrange their marriage ceremony with their own earnings, here we are still counting on our parents’ bank balance or even worse, dowries from in-laws. Shame! Shame! All parents want their children to be happy. By choosing your own happy life, you will be happy, thereby making them happy in the long run even though they sulk in the beginning. On the other hand, you choose a blind marriage and get messed with conflicts, you end up sad, making them sad and guilty, even though it had a happy beginning. Which do you want, a grand start or a happy ever after?

Do all love marriages succeed? No, that is because we fail to identify love in the real sense. I am not going to go into stories stating differences between love and infatuation for those have been told for ages and ages now. I am just saying that a special category called lust marriages disguise themselves as love marriages and I have to blame that on our culture. We can get attracted to a person, or infatuated to a person or fall in love with a person. All may or may not happen with the same person. Homo sapiens are polygamists by biology and animal attraction because of hormones is inevitable. Casual safe sex with the attracted person would bring the hormone levels to balance and clear it out. Since casual sex is not accepted in India, some chose to quench it with deviated sexual behaviour, sexual crimes or by getting married to the attracted person. When that attraction fades after mating, marriage breaks. Come on, you can have sex with the person you love but you cannot love a person just because you had sex with him or her. Marriage should be built upon love for that makes the essential bonding between the couples and the off-springs they produce.

That makes me ask the next question, why is casual consensual safe pre-marital sex prohibited in our culture? Mind you, I stress on ‘PRE-MARITAL’ because I still believe that post marriage, one that was made out of love and understanding, infidelity is a moral offense. Why is losing virginity before marriage an unforgiveable crime? Human beings are not fruits or vegetables to go bad at one fling. Even so, people go bad all the time by nurturing wrongful thoughts in their minds, by bad-mouthing others, by being envious. Being a virgin makes no one any better if they store trash in their heart and mind. Purity of a person to me means purity of thoughts and soul, not the body. Oh man, you remain a virgin and don’t take bath for 10 days, you will still stink. Paid sex is prostitution. Is pleasure sex too? If casual consensual sex was an open option, people wouldn’t get married for lust sake or commit crimes to satisfy their over-powering needs.

In those days, our culture prohibited casual sex because there were not much measures or awareness for safe sex. Casual sex would cause unwanted pregnancy, affecting the mother and the child’s future. Today, we come to know over-the-counter safety measures before we are even 18, don’t we? Women’s active sex life is from her puberty to her menopause that is roughly between the ages 12 to 45. Earlier days, women were married within months they reached puberty to contribute their role to the ecosystem in procreating. That’s not the case today. Women want to soar to heights and achieve results before they tie the knot in their later twenties or even later. Just because they postpone marriage, isn’t our culture limiting their sex life as well which is already limited by nature? Love should be packaged with marriage, why should sex?

Casual sex is so much better than the traditional arranged married sex where the bride and groom would have hardly seen each other before their wedding and would be expected to consummate their marriage by the end of the day. Crude! Let us see it this way. In an arranged marriage with everything matching with everyone, all background checks done and clear, how does the bride or groom come to know that their partner is gay or a lesbian until the wedding night? What if one of them is a sexual sadist and derives pleasure in unacceptable, intolerable fore-plays? Which background check reveals that? What is the fate of the person who had got entangled in such a marriage with a sadist that he or she didn’t even love in the first place? Tolerate and stay put as that is what our culture teaches us or divorce and become an object of ridicule in the Indian society which still hasn’t come around the concept of divorce fully yet. Won’t casual sex give the answer to it before you say go?

Marriages are made to last. When love between the couples is lost, marriage becomes meaningless. Bold people go out and nullify their void marriage with a divorce while meek ones stay put, accepting their fate and preaching to the society that they had long lasting marriages. What’s the point really? I would say, fall in and out of relationships many times, burn your fingers and shed your tears. But when you marry, marry once, marry for the rightful reasons to a right compatible loving partner and stay married happily ever after.

When Indian constitution is subject to amendments from time to time, why not Indian culture too? Let’s be proud of our heritage, of our monuments, art and art crafts, of our diversified community, different life-styles, basically everything that also makes up our culture. Where we need to upgrade and progress, we need to. Change cannot be stopped but we can move on. Even though we were hard-wired from birth with beliefs that makes it difficult to agree and follow the change, we can at least accept it, can’t we? After all, we live this life just once, why not live fully and happily?

Meaningless Mad Mumblings

2011-10-21T15:09:00.002+05:30

I am under that spell again, the one that makes sure that everything we do goes exactly opposite to the intended direction. Why spread its fangs on my blog too? Why make my refuge known so I cannot go there and hide again? Is that why I was absent from my blog for a while? Maybe yes. But then, how long can I refrain from doing things that I want to, fearing it to go wrong? It’s spell-breaking time. I’ve done it before, I can do it now.

I might make it sound like I am on the edge of a huge precipice, ready to trip into an abyss at a single footstep. That’s because I am good at exaggerating. Trimming that out, it’s nothing but a chain of everyday inconveniences that frustrates me to the edge of a precipice. What shall I say? We make a call for a doctor’s appointment but the phone is not reachable. We finally get the line, make an appointment but the traffic blocks our way. We manage to huddle through the traffic and reach the doctor’s clinic ten minutes late and the clinic is closed. By then the ailment for which we wanted to get treated in the first place starts acting out painfully. Such inconveniences, suicidal no but suffering yes. None of these happened really but exaggeration needs examples. What is happening is somewhere between the exaggeration and the example.

When I wake up these days, I am unable to give myself a good morning smile. I don’t blame my orthodontic braces. They are just superficial. I’m talking about the ‘from-the-bottom-of-the-heart-happy’ smile. I don’t wake up with a gloomy face or tear-filled eyes either. Not that I am suppressing emotions, there really isn’t any need for that. What else then? I just wake up like waking up after futile attempts at going to sleep. Sleepless nights precisely. Why? Thoughts.

Thoughts! Oh my God! (I use God only as an expression of speech). Like a schizophrenic hearing voices inside his or her head, I keep thinking things all the time. So many things around me, happening, not happening, sometimes the way it should, sometimes the way it shouldn’t, sometimes the way it should and I don’t want it to or the way it shouldn’t and I still want it to, sometimes needing immediate action, sometimes wanting total inaction. Such sometimes happen many times causing infinite threads of thoughts running in parallel. Not exactly parallel either. Perpendicular. Criss-crossed. Tangential. Tangled. Basically confusing, confounding and compounding. Why take time to think?

The problem is not about taking time to think but not having time that I can take to think. Before one issue gets addressed, the second one joins its predecessor adding to the agony of celebrating the third’s birthday while the fourth just begins to take shape. I find my mind sometimes get heated like the processor when the coolant fan doesn’t function properly. Auricle of my heart says ‘Go baby go!’ while the ventricle calls for a shut down. What started as an itch had become a rash, eager to leave a scar if only I would allow it. So far, I hadn’t allowed and more far I wouldn’t deny.

As if to give company to the thoughts, memories from the past spring to the surface as more thoughts or shallow dreams to remind me exactly of things that I’ve vowed myself to do. Things that the current situation isn’t helping any better, making the self-aggression even stronger. Totally clueless proceedings tend to trigger philosophical insights like ‘Who was I?’, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Who will I be?’, and ‘Who do I want to be?’ and then my quest for answers kicks of another bunch of tangled thoughts messing up the grey matter, white matter and other colourful substances of the brain.

Take a deep breath. Relax. Chill out. Watch a movie. I did. I watched ‘Kung Fu Panda II’ where the Panda masters inner peace and throws the fire-balls left right and centre. If only I could be that Panda throwing away those crowded mumblings inside my head entirely out of my human system, will I be able to attain peace. If not total peace, at least peace enough for a restful, thoughtless, dreamless quiet sleep. Are there Pandas around?

Fitness Frenzy

2011-08-08T12:51:00.007+05:30

Six hundred and forty! That is how many muscles I think I have in my body, assuming I haven’t lost some in the last one week. What is left over is all twisted and turned and they make sure I know it. Such tests for my first attempt at the gym and I haven’t yet started full-fledged. Cruel body! Ever since the birth of my little boy, my body has gained extra pounds that refuse to rip off. I’ve tried dieting and taking nutrition supplements but that doesn’t work. My taste buds are too trained to tame down. Amidst a tightly packed schedule of life and work, there is no time to squeeze in walks or work-outs that those extra little pounds slowly started multiplying themselves like pathogens.

All through my childhood and teenage years, I had prided myself to be an activity girl. It was either hopping and co-co, or dancing to my favourite playlist or playing badminton or trekking. I had my work-out in a way that I enjoyed most without hitting the gym. Every time my body sweat, I felt the stress of the day sweating away too keeping me live and active. After marriage and kid, my life started getting consumed with different kinds of activities, the ones that tires your mind more than your body and doesn’t cause you to sweat so much, Bangalore climate an added culprit. If we had been slim once and know the stamina that it gives, it becomes very difficult to accept getting rounder. I couldn’t accept that I was gasping after a short run. That was when I decided to make time somehow and try the traditional tested method of fitness, working out in a gym that is.

Experiment began last week when I enrolled myself in a gym. Vijay warned me that working out in a gym could get tiring and boring after a while and unless we are stubborn, we’d get all tempted to give up. “Don’t give up!”, that’s another phrase that I used to actually follow earlier. Lately, lazily, I have started giving up on “Don’t give up”. Now, gyming should help me restore not only my body but my perseverance too. I bought two sets of track pants, T-shirts and sneakers as an investment.

I walked into the gym and stared at all the equipment, not knowing what and how to begin with. A young girl introduced herself as the trainer and showed me how to ride the elliptical bike. While I was at it, she casually let it slip that she was a mother of a 7 year old and a 4 year old. Unbelievable!! My mouth was still aghast when another so-seemed slim college student rushed in excusing herself to the trainer for getting late. Her excuse was that she had to pick up her children from school before she came in. A forty plus lady, whose matured face was the only proof of age was effortlessly stretching and lifting weights. That was it. I could see or hear no more.

As I walk along the streets, I know that I had already crossed the “slim” line but still within the average weight range. Inside the gym though, among all the fit people, I felt like an obese fatty pot. Comparison with the ideal make relativity extreme. To my eyes, my body fat seemed highlighted in neon lamps that I was ashamed to look at myself. All the more motivation to work-out, all the more reason to persevere.

It wasn’t so difficult in the beginning when all I had to do was warm-up. Ten minutes of thread-mill, ten minutes of cycling and ten minutes of cross rower and the trainer let me off the hook. Real work-out started last Friday when I was asked to stretch, turn, lift and jump. Only then, I understood the seriousness of Vijay’s warning. I headed back home with a sense of relief unaware of what awaited me back there. Vijay was out on a dinner treat and Akhil was enthusiastic to give me my post-work-out warm-up. Why else will he get extra hyper, eat twice, poop twice and play ten times more than the usual? I was exercised till midnight and dropped to sleep like ‘Tom’ after chasing ‘Jerry’ round and round and round.

Little rest that night made my body complain more and I spent the weekend identifying the sore muscles in my body. So much for my determination in just a week’s time. You do gyming continuously for 21 days and it becomes a habit, Vijay assured me. I have 17 days more for the 21 day mark. As I sit here blogging on my plight, a separate thread runs within my head reminding me to resume work-outs again today. Battle between my mind and body. Got to wait and see how long the battle lasts and who triumphs! Wish me good luck!

Vodka Venture

2011-07-08T17:37:00.007+05:30

Orange juice with vodka is Screw-Driver. Concentrated vodka is a shot. Beer contains the least percentage of alcohol and Breezer is more of a freezer drink. Is this glossary sufficient to testify that I did sip, or what is the right word, booze alcohol? Even though for just one night, I did it! Born and brought up in Pondicherry, it is a shame that it took me this long to try my first experiment with it. Alright, before you get all judgmental, let’s start the story from scratch.

All my life, I was never able to stand the stench of alcohol whenever I happened to pass by a wine shop. Just the smell did a lot of chemical reactions right at my nostrils, sending my brain multiple instructions to throw up. I wondered how was that people not only consumed alcohol but also craved for it, got addicted to something that was so foul smelling. The blinding “high” that it gives compensates for the stench, so I’ve heard. What was that high all about?

I’ve been curious about the feeling of getting drunk that I wanted to try it once, try just once but try enough to quench my questioning. Curiosity killed the cat. So does alcohol. If death is inevitable, I might as well see what the fuss is before I succumb. I decided that I should say my first wine-glasses cheers with my husband after I get married and this decision was made five years ago.

After marriage there were other kinds of experiments to try out that alcohol slipped out of my mind the way alcohol does to other things in the mind. Then there was the new-house-busy-busy, followed by pregnancy, childbirth, sleeplessness and so on that even if I remembered, it wasn’t the right time or the right place. Longer the wait, more the curiosity. Last week, I broached the subject to Vijay. Vijay was a social drinker before marriage and thanks to me that later on I forbade him from even that. Such a request coming from me, he grabbed this opportunity to conduct an elaborate theory and practical lesson on spirits.

The lesson began last Friday night, confident that there was a weekend ahead to heal hangovers if any. Bedroom nursed my little Akhil to sound sleep while the living room was set up to stage my adventure. It was during the preparation phase that Vijay lectured me the theory of screw-driver and shots which I've answered in brief right at the commencement of this post. We pushed aside the center table and sat on the carpet with newspapers covering the happening area. Two wine glasses, one bottle of vodka, one bottle of beer, lemon, salt, pickle and one carton of Tropicana Orange sat on top. Corner lamp was dimmed to create the right mood and ambiance for a different kind of seduction.

Vijay assured me that unlike brandy or whiskey, vodka was distilled thrice that it doesn’t smell at all. He mixed up the drinks and was ready for cheers. I stared at it for two seconds mulling over what I was about to do and before I could mull any longer, I was like on your mark, get set, GO…CHEERS. The drink drained through my throat creating a warm fuzzy feeling but otherwise, no high, no nothing. I gave a condescending look to Vijay as if this was all his fault when he offered me the second glass. Slowly, we emptied half a bottle of vodka together while I was still waiting for the high to hit me.

Once we were done, Vijay asked me to walk up and get him some water. I tried to stand up but my feet felt so heavy that I dropped down. I supported myself on the couch and started walking towards the kitchen but my limbs were directed towards the balcony. My mind was clear, I could feel that. I could hear every word of the soap running on the TV in the background and understood every word that Vijay said. Still, it seemed like my body possessed a different mind of its own and refused to listen to my instructions. There I fell down again. I thought that high would give an illusionary feeling of staying afloat. On the other hand, I felt as if gravity had gained extra potency and was pulling me down. It was like walking on a bouncer in kid’s amusement parks. It felt like moon-walking. There, I fell down for the third time and started giggling, knowing that I was giggling like a moron but not being able to stop it.

The experience was so funny that I simply kept strolling inside my house, afraid that the high would subside if I take a break and I’d miss the moments of kicks. Vijay took the camera out to shoot the wobbling me. I tried to stop him and fell down once again, laughing and making him laugh too. That was one romantic drunken night! I said and did so many crazy things. As the night progressed, I started feeling real heavy and was to some extent scared even. Adventure experiments are fine but not worth getting addicted for. I guess alcohol causes more harm by the way of people's social reaction to the liquid than to the physical body itself. I enforced to Vijay and enforced myself that this would be our first and last booze session and before I said or did anything stupid like vowing or swearing, I crawled into my bed and crashed for a good night baby sleep.

The next morning, Vijay woke me up and asked me how many fingers was he holding up, just to check my sanity and the extent of hangover. Thankfully, there was none at all and I woke up as fresh as any other day except for that satisfactory mischievous grin on my face. I did it!

Baddy Bangalore

2011-06-27T15:23:00.004+05:30

Disclaimer: Written in spirit of well meaning good humour. No offence please.

Do you know a decent place in Bangalore to hangout during weekends? A place to find our own space, to spend time in leisure without spending our lifetime's savings? Bangalore and peace, who am I kidding really? With all the malls, movies, pubs and restaurants, Bangalore might get offended for making this request. There is so much of buzz and glitter that my requirement even reads like a vacation request to a far far away land. How to make space for one self where there is no space on the streets for the traffic to clear? How to find time for leisure when commutation takes most of it? With sky-rocketing cost of living, I dare not speak about saving at all. But that was what Bangalore was once upon a time, wasn't it? Garden city I mean.

It is not uncommon to hear native Bangaloreans blame IT for setting its hub house in here. I wouldn't blame them for their blaming. My relative who had settled in Bangalore for a long long time recalls old Bangalore as a peaceful place with cool climate, fresh breeze, trees and gardens that I find hard to imagine today. The gardens that are still around have become substitute shelters for people who are unable to go elsewhere to procreate and help the cause of evolution. Definitely not a place to go with families anymore. Garden city has moved on to become a theme park or worse.

Every time Vijay and I want to go out, we spend more time deciding on where to go than the time spent outside. With limited choices, without much difference anywhere anyway, we end up narrowing down our hangouts on an ad-hoc basis. If only there was a beach in Bangalore! How I miss those endless stretches of shores and soothing waves that offer free massages to the body and mind! The same service at a parlour here costs a hell lot that you are stressed much more than being relieved from the stress for which you paid for.

Two member families own two four wheelers each. You want to make a decision on what automobile to buy and see its live performance, welcome to Bangalore. Once you learn to drive on these curvy landscapes, you can literally drive anywhere. You become one of those reckless, ruthless drivers flying and honking like they own the place. When was the last time I saw a bicycle on the streets? I'm not talking about those geared racing cycles that we ride with helmets, coolers, gloves and knee caps. I'm referring to bicycles that are just that. Hercules Caption, Hero Jet, BSA SLR and the likes of those. Now that I've mentioned SLR, folks here brag about SLRs all the time, SLR as in Single-Lens Reflex camera. What difference does it make to click pictures with a SLR or a point-and-shoot when the city doesn't stand still for two seconds to pose for pictures anyway?

Staying in Bangalore is like staying in an air-conditioned bubble all the time. The climate here pampers and spoils us so much that once we cross the boundaries of Bangalore, we start complaining of heat and sweat as if we had just migrated from the temperate to the tropical regions of the world. I couldn’t help but notice the irony with climate and culture. Colder the place, shorter the skirts of the ladies. If Mumbai makes the fashion statement of India, Bangalore gives its counter. One can take a stroll along the Bangalore streets clad in a bikini and wouldn’t raise so much as an eye-brow. On that note, I should say, Bangalore is sometimes sexless.

Jokes apart. In spite of the numerous inconveniences, Bangalore is the most sought place to settle down. Rich or poor, dark or fair, they get equal share of it all. The diversity of people living here and the diversity of language they speak amazes me no end. Hard-working people, call them fast-runners if you want, spend no time on gossiping near the water pump or brawling over a beer. They’d rather laugh at their plight with peers than mop about it. Change is the only constant and Bangaloreans constantly embrace the happening changes and move towards progress. That is something to give them credit for, give them that big time!

Poetic Past

2011-05-23T14:50:00.014+05:30

I’ve treasured memories through diaries, papers, pictures and what not and keep re-visiting them every once in a while. To relive happy times and re-learn from the mistakes, as a reminder to renew ambitions and aspirations. That’s how I came upon this today. What struck me the most was how my flair for writing in Tamil has almost come to zilch. Let this post be my wake-up call.

Dug out from my Tamil archives......

Time: A sunny pre-noon hour in 2004.
Venue: RGCET, Engineering 7th semester, Examination Hall.

I had completed my exam with half-an-hour to spare and started doodling behind the question paper. It was one of those dark times of my life. So many things were going haywire that I found myself most often, retorting to a corner of my mind, trying to sort them out, that my physical presence in the world was only that, just physically present. I found my solace and happiness in solitude and my weird behaviour worried a few friends. The few moments of silence in the examination hall were just apt to phrase my thoughts into an un-comprehensible poem.

நதியை கடந்தால் நகரம்,

கை அசைக்கும் தொலைவில் மனிதர்கள்,

தனிமையில் ஒரு தாரகை,

நதியை கடக்கவுமில்லை.

அவர்களுடன் கலக்கவுமில்லை.

விதி இல்லையா?

வழி இல்லையா?

விருப்பம் இல்லையா?

விடை இல்லா வினாக்களும் சில நேரங்களில் புதுகவிதை!

Once outside the hall, I tossed the paper out. A friend, who happened to see it, read and replied in style.

காலம் என்னும் இந்த நதியினிலே,

காரியங்கள் பல காத்திருக்கு.

கடமை என்னும் படகுமிருக்கு.

கலக்கம் என்னடி தோழியே?

பயனித்தல் கலப்பாய் அந்த மனிதர்களோடு.

இல்லையேல், கரை கடக்கா மங்கையாய் என்றும் உன் மனதில் கலக்கத்தோடு.

கேள்விகள் ஆயிரம் உன்னை துளைக்காதிருக்க,

வேலி ஒன்று போடடி பெண்ணே!

வெளி என்பது எதுவுமில்லை,

விடை தெரியா வினாக்களாக நீ நினைப்பவை தான்.

விடை தெரியா வினைகள் எவருக்குள்ளும் உதிப்பதும் இல்லை.

அவைகள் விடை கிடைக்கா வினைக்களாக என்றும் உதிர்வதும் இல்லை.

நட்பினை நாடி என்னை பணித்திட்ட நங்கையின் மனதில்,

நட்பென்னும் சுவடே அறியா மாயம் கண்டேன்!

கண்டதும் அறிந்தேன்!

கண்டதும் அதிர்ந்தேன்!

காலத்தின் கோலத்தில் உன் மனதும் கனத்ததேன்று.

Perseverance is the key to tread tough waters. The reply lifted my spirits with words of wisdom. Not just the virtue but the way it was told gave me a sense of companionship and being understood. I couldn’t go without thanks.

கவிதைக்குள் புதைத்தேன் புதிர் ஒன்றை,

எவருக்கும் புரியக்கூடாத படைப்பாக!

நீயோ,

விடையை கண்டாய்.

விளக்கம் தந்தாய்.

என் வணக்கம் வென்றாய்.

“பாம்பின் கால் பாம்பறியும்"

நான் என்றோ படித்த பழமொழி

என்னுள் எங்கோ எழுகிறது இன்று.

என் நலன் கருதும் நலம் விரும்பியே,

உன் கவி நயத்துக்கு என் பாராட்டுகள்.

உன் மனித நேயத்துக்கு என் நன்றி.

It's been years but my eyes still well up......

Love Letter

2011-05-04T14:08:00.006+05:30

Dearest Vijay,

Happy Birthday to us! We complete 27 years on this earth today. I have no reservations about disclosing my age. When a woman doesn’t, a man shouldn’t. Unlike many couples who share their wedding anniversaries, we share our birthdays too and that is because we share our birth-date too. How many wives get the opportunity to wish their husband “Same to you” when he wishes “Happy Birthday”? How many couples get to play hide and seek with the gifts until the birthday and treasure hunt on the big day? We do. We do because we had already said “I do”. Though I remembered, time and rain made it impossible for me to get down to get your birthday gift this year. Instead, I am presenting you this post – my chest of memories, which I believe is cooler than the coolers that you had wanted :-)

Has it really been 10 years already since I first met you in Vetri Coaching Centre, Pondicherry? Did we even have the slightest notion then that we would end up with each other as couples? Obviously, solving math problems and playing video games is definitely not one of the romantic ways to fall in love, more so when you made me lose those games by sucking my chances. Solving probability problems, we didn’t work out the probability of us together in future. Still, that was the very beginning of this long journey so far.

When caste system denied me the college that I aspired to get in, I was depressed and sunk into my shell for a long while. Your visit to my house every afternoon was the only limelight inside that shell that I looked forward to, not for the sympathy or pity that you never offered and that I never wanted anyway, but for the joy and cheer that you brought along and infected me with. At 17 years of age, when the world looked at me as a teenager, while my mind was still locked in my childhood, you were the only one who spotted that child and played as an equal. Is that when we moved on from “knowing each other” to becoming “friends”?

It was not until you were gone to Pilani for your college that I realised how much I missed you. I guess I had by then developed a fondness for you which was definitely more than friendship but not enough to call it love. Perhaps, a depressed child’s heart wasn’t ready then to feel love or lust. Thanks to regular e-mail exchanges and your semester holiday visits that our friendship survived time and distance. There is this problem with one-to-one e-mail correspondence. It makes us open our hearts more than what we do in person which was exactly why I was mailing you things that I told none but my diary. I mean, how many couples know and understand the crushes and ex-es of their spouses as much as we do?

Young people, particularly girls are self-conscious of their looks when they are around their male friends. With you, I was totally comfortable to walk out of the bed and greet you in a night gown with sleepy eyes and messed up hair. That was because I knew that you were friends with me for what I was within than on the outside. With each other, we were just each other in our true selves. What more can I love better?

When fate threw a tough bunch of cards at us, we shared our shoulders for support. Instead of crying it out like soap actor and actresses, we did it the F.R.I.E.N.D.S way. You helped me keep my perspective on life even when I was on the verge of giving up and were the silent smiling pillar of support. If you could do so much for a friend, why didn’t it occur to me then the things that you could do for your love?

I think the spark that happened between us happened after 6 years of our friendship for a reason. We needed time to grow and mature so that we didn’t mess up things when our friendship bloomed to love. Rightly so. Until August 19, 2007, I never had the slightest clue and then bang, we got Confirmed and Commited. From then on, my life has been one roller coaster ride with ups and downs. Just like a roller coaster ride, we’ve been screaming together with joy and sorrow along the ups and downs. My blog knows it and you do better than my blog.

When I grow old, sport wrinkles and grey hairs, I know you will still love me the same. When you grow old, I will love you so much too provided you lose those so called graceful dance movements with which you freak me out :-) Just Kidding! If I were to be granted a wish from a magical fairy, I’d wish to get hooked up with you as a friend, lover and wife in every re-birth that has been destined to me. Our friendship and relationship is just too good to exhaust in one lifetime. TOUCH-WOOD! TOUCH-WOOD! TOUCH-WOOD!

luv,
Your wife, Archu :-)

Happy Birthday Akhil

2011-03-30T09:33:00.001+05:30

Four months of marriage,
Life was a mirage,
We were still on our honeymoon.
Little did we know,
The consequences though,
I had conceived all too soon.

Shocked and surprised,
Happy and rejoiced,
I panicked about pregnancy!
With no water retention,
No swollen condition,
My baby took care of me.

The due date came,
But the baby remained,
So intact within my tummy.
The doctor put a knife,
And brought him to life,
There I was a mommy!

You wailed and screamed,
Hardly slept or dreamed,
Driving us insane!
Was it milk or diaper?
Colic or danger?
Phew! That was tough game!

As days went by,
You gave your first smile.
My heart melted like ice.
Your roll, your crawl,
Your stand, Your fall,
WOW! You are our precious prize!

In our arms,
You can stay,
Stay as long as you please.
You can jump away,
To run and play,
Our love will never cease.

Growing steadily,
Giggling merrily,
Today you are one year old.
In a matter of time,
You'll recite a rhyme,
And so I am told!

This fine evening,
With the world cup reigning,
We are all gathered here.
To wish you luck,
To wish you joy,
Happy Birthday dear!

Varying Work Styles

2011-02-24T16:44:00.007+05:30

“Man, what a hard-worker!!!”

Isn’t that a common exclamation that we make when we see someone spending long hours in office? Yes, it is. Is it really justified? Maybe it was, in the previous generation. Is productivity proportional to the time in office? No, definitely not!

The office-goers world was totally different some twenty years ago. It was a world of papers, files and folders, stacked in wall length cabinets. Smell of stationery was strongly associated with clerks and their ledgers. People get into office at 9 AM, work, lunch break at the stroke of noon, work again, leave for home at 5 PM. Longer hours meant over-time and additional pay. Time table was in place and everyone was happy.

Are we anywhere in the vicinity of traditional office setup today? Another big no! Lets face it! We are far away, miles and miles away. Many offices have global presence today. People work at odd hours with colleagues across the globe. Every bit of existing information is digitized and the new ones are computerized from the start. Offices without computers are offices of stone age. Scheduled work is no more a reality, surprise work is. In the pace that we are currently in, it is the sandwich generation, us, who have seen the past and playing in the present suffer the transition. We are loaded with expectations from our superiors whose mindset is locked back in a different world but are forced to perform in the generation next. Result is a mob of confused professionals, clueless, directional-less and tired, physically, mentally, literally!

Sam is known for his dedication to work. He slogs long hours at office to accomplish his task. Pam is dedicated too. She completes her task in half the time and heads home. Who would we claim efficent? Someone who works longer or someone who does it faster? Assuming the quality of food is great in both, which restaurant would you prefer? One with longer or shorter service time? Productivity at office is sometimes unfortunately and wrongly assessed based on the duration of toil than the results achieved. Today's world need more smart-workers than hard-workers. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, we'll have to invent innovations.

Sam has his reasons. As a bachelor in a mansion, office gives him plush conditions to hang around, with cool colleagues as friends and dinner allowances too. Who cares what he does in office after hours? Why would he want to head elsewhere post working hours if his convenience was going to earn him some “hard-working” credits from his bosses? Sam, of course, would complete his task at his pace and it wouldn't be right to condemn him so long as the job is done on schedule. But why should Sam's style become a comparison factor to condemn Pam who does her job within office hours and head back to attend to other priorities in her life. How fair can that be? Little does Sam realize that when his life-style changes to accommodate things other than work, he would be forced to follow Pam's policy, whereas his superiors would look at his sudden change in timings as performance slow down.

Mobile offices and flexible work life has become more of a necessity than a luxury today. Why spend hours on the road fighting traffic and pollution when the same work can be done in the comfort of one's home? Energy and time saved thus can be utilized in the actual work that is to be done. From an office's perspective, employees working from home save the company's electricity and amenities charges. Win-win situation! Agreed, self discipline and dedication is required on the part of the employees and that would be come upon invariably or he wouldn't be able reach the targets expected out of him to account for his paycheck.

John's dad calls him a slacker. He goes to work late, leaves early and sometimes works from home. His monitor is never on without a social networking site or a chat window minimized. But his manager at work has great regard for him. He is a top performer at work and his appraisal charts are always ahead of average. Is John a magician really? Maybe he is, a magician who knows to manage time. John has his philosophy. He is more productive when his mind is less stressed. He allows himself the time to unwind to ease his mind. A relaxed mind gears up and rises faster to challenges and performs better. When performance increases, time to achieve results decreases leaving him with time again to unwind and the cycle goes on. John is happy and his boss is happy. Win-win situation again!

John's philosophy is still unfathomable to Joe who burns his day at office. Joe stresses himself out with long working hours, commits mistakes because of his over-worked brain, puts more effort on re-work which calls for more mistakes again, thereby increasing more time at work and so on till he gives it all up. Poor Joe either calls himself dumb or cultivates jealousy and blames John's manager for favoritism. More the number of Joes, more is the disharmony at work, pulling down productivity even further. Despite knowing all this, it is a sad truth that many offices still prefer Joes to Johns.

Work-life balance has become a hard to buy commodity. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy! Nobody want dull Jacks to work for them and a dull Jack wouldn't definitely want to work to earn a living when there is no living to do. With ever-changing life-style and work-style, isn't it not time yet for amendments and refinements? Shouldn't corporates wake up to the truth of the day and acknowledge employees for what they are and what they do as against old prejudices or false charades? The consolation is that many organizations are coming out of their slumbers now and taking steps to work out methodologies that helps them grow bigger and bigger keeping their employees' life better and better. If such practices rub onto to everyone as well, world would not only become a better place to live but a better place to work as well.

P.S: Written for a business magazine.

Aunty-o-phobia

2011-01-17T14:00:00.003+05:30

Aunty...aunty...aunty...remember the Godrej hair-dye adv.? A teenage dude addresses the husband as 'Anna' (Brother) and the wife as 'Aunty' followed by an echo whispering inside the lady's head 'Aunty...aunty...aunty'. All for what? A single streak of gray hair! The lady turns miserable and seeks the help of Godrej hair dye. Her head is now all black again, she gets the apparent feeling of youthfulness and the same teenage dude now calls her 'Akka' (Sister). The adv. ends.

I didn't give a second thought to that adv. when it was first telecast as I was definitely in my prime youth then. Now that I am crawling slowly into the early half of my later twenties, I get sudden visions of myself playing the aunty in the Godrej adv. Not that my hair has turned gray but because of the many role transitions that I've gone through over the last two to three years. Honestly, it doesn't make me miserable like it did to the aunty and surprisingly I am even proud of it. Soon after marriage when Vijay and I moved into our new apartment, our neighborhood kids started calling us uncle and aunty. It felt strange in the beginning but seemed right too. Come on, we do address folks more than 20 years senior to us as uncle and aunty. Why get upset when kids 20 years younger to us call us so? That doesn't mean I'm cool with the title. I'm cool as long as the caller's age justifies it.

Coming back to the my pride in getting old. First and foremost, age draws respect. I personally believe that maturity of thoughts does not come from age alone, rather it comes with the experiences that one goes through in life. I've seen people much younger to me speak with great wisdom and people in their reigning 50s behaving immaturely. Still, it is a common prejudice, especially among the senior population that all older folks are wise and younger ones are irresponsible. Why? Because age draws respect whether it is warrantied or not. Population percentage is another contributing factor. At any given time, the number of oldies outnumber youngsters. Among oldies, I include middle-age people who assume themselves to be older than they are and wear a coat of ego and prestige.

When I was much younger, the first impression that I made to my seniors by look was this - 'Small puny girl. What will she possibly know of life?'. Some went further to assume that I was just another dumb dollie, batting her eye lashes, getting carried away by lovey-doovy dreams and cry at the slightest provocation. Assumptions before knowing a person! It took considerable time and effort every time to beat that prejudice, make a mark and show my spunk. Age was my disadvantage! Now, I don't have to take that extra inconvenient step of convincing. The road is just smooth and straight.

When it comes to the co-aged male population, a young female is first looked at as a candidate for flirtation before she is seen for what she really is. The same applies to young men as well. Carnal instincts! Marriage and parenthood removes that hormonal pull and makes us likable from lovable. Many might find that too difficult to accept but trust me, once in that role, it gives you freedom of self like never before.

As against fighting age with artificial creams and lotions, why not for a change get old with grace? Compromise on faded and designer jeans for comfort fits. Trade glossy stuff for classy ones. Drop the seductive smile and flash a confident charm. Look straight and act poised. You will be acknowledged as someone who knows his or her ground and act so. Subtle make-up and smart dressing is the secret.

Though I advocate aging as a positive phenomenon, I still condemn the idea of resigning to it as fate and leading a life of a recluse. Beauty is skin deep but physical fitness is deeper, much deeper. No matter how young or how old, hitting the gym or doing whatever physical activity that we've been doing before is something that shouldn't be given up. Reaching 60s with no cardiac or diabetic condition, with a happy heart and an in-exhaustive child-like zeal towards life is success. That is getting old with grace!

I might still be relatively young to comment on old age but I could set standards to conduct myself when the time comes. That is precisely what I am doing in this post, setting a code of conduct for a later me. I wouldn't develop any aunty affinity, that's for sure. At the same time, I'd watch out and save myself from aunty-o-phobia. Wouldn't you?

Sabka Sapna Money Money

2010-12-05T18:04:00.005+05:30

Let’s talk money. This is new to my blogspot and so is this experience. Variety spices up life and no harm in spicing up mine with a little risk and speculation. If you haven’t yet guessed what this post is leading to, its stock market. Unfortunately, I don’t find much company among lady folks in matters of finance and trading, who by far have made histories with their shopping sprees. Hold on lassies, trading is shopping too, a different kind but interesting nevertheless. Addressing to ladies doesn’t make all guys financial gurus either. I was talking in terms of relativity and with the excitement of a newbie. As an occasional player with ICICIDirect since I started working, I cannot really call myself a newbie. But intraday trading and margin trading is definitely new to me and I’m drawn towards it more for the strategy than the money involved. At any day, I might do it even with mock money. Let me see if I can succeed luring some more into the Indian stock market which after recovery from recession is progressively shooting up. Its game time! Let’s learn to make some pocket money!

Stock market is gambling, I’ve heard many say. I was under similar belief until I started looking into it closely myself. Now, I understand that stock market is gambling to those who trade without knowing the know-how, who trade without a game plan, who trade with greed. For the others, it is 80% strategy and 20% luck. If you had loved Mathematics in your childhood, trading is surely your cup of tea.

As a fresher while at Infosys, a senior introduced me to trading world. Since then, I bought and sold stocks based on suggestions given by experienced friends and colleagues. I was never able to cross my fingers on any stock on my own and make decisions. I always found that no matter what, I kept making more losses than profit while the suggestion makers weren’t suffering my fate. As quoted by a friend, I made tea-money and lost petrol-money. The whole market cannot definitely be watching me to make sure I book loses, can it? With recent recession and scandals, I almost gave up and went dormant on trading for a year until last week when I finally found the fundae of margin trading.

Margin trading is risky, very risky and that is what makes it all the more interesting. One can become a millionaire or a pauper in a day but that happens only when we play with huge money. In lesser volumes, you can make some side money for a Friday evening date, if you are at the same time ready to tolerate taking the bus instead of an auto on losing days. Got the idea? I was doing such small trading, gaining Rs.252 on one day and losing Rs. 60 the next, gaining another Rs.115 and losing Rs. 104, happy and contented. It was only last Friday that I experienced the gush of adrenaline by trading big time which was what that drove me to write this post before the ebb subsides.

I checked my portfolio on Friday morning as usual and went on to see the top gainers and losers. There was this company ‘X’ (no revelling names) that was under 22% loss in a single day. The open price was Rs. 219 and the stock was currently traded at Rs. 180. Surely, a company cannot lose quarter of its fortune in a single day without scandals or announcement of quarterly results or stock splits. I believed that a bubble was broken because of speculation and that the stock would rise at least by a few rupees by the end of day. With margin trading, I would be able to buy ten times more stock than the money that I put in. I placed a buy order for 50 shares of X @ Rs. 181, hoping that even if the stock hits Rs.190, I’d make Rs.450 profit, excluding brokerage. What I did not know was that SEBI had banned that stock from trading and the price fall was a result of that.

As the day progressed, X continued to keep falling down. I was slightly worried and to neutralize the loss, I bought another 50 shares of X @ Rs. 173. I was under the impression that the opening of the European market at mid-day would change the fate of that stock positively. The European market opened at 1:30 PM and contrary to my expectation, the stock started falling further down, making a loss of almost Rs.1,500 for me certain. I am a common man, okie, a common woman and Rs.1,500 in a day is big. I had two options. I could either book losses and exit or convert the stock to delivery and hold it for long term to recover losses. Though I felt forced, I wasn’t inclined on doing either. That’s when this great risky devilish idea popped up into my head.

The X stock was then trading @Rs. 160 levels which was close to the day low. If I bought a bulk of it now and sold it at a strategic point, I can still cover my losses. The stock was very volatile and every second made a huge difference. With some guts, I bought 1000 shares of X instantly. Since I was doing margin trading, I had to have Rs.16,000 in my account and I could actually buy Rs.1,60,000 worth of stocks. If the stock price increases by Re.1, I make a profit of Rs.1,000. On the other hand, if it goes down by 1, I lose Rs.1000, increasing my net loss. Converting the stocks to delivery was ruled out now, come on, I didn’t have Rs.1,60,000 to buy it all.

This happened at 2 PM. Since then, my adrenaline levels were so high and my fingers got cold. My eyes were glued to ICICIDirect, refreshing the page twice every second and willing the stock to rise by Rs.2 to save my neck. The stock was so so volatile that every wink caused a difference. If I were wired up to a cardiac monitor, you could have seen a curve more drastic than the market curve itself. I got lucky at 2:30 PM, that the stock slowly rose from Rs.160 to Rs.164. With no delay, I sold it all off and exited from the market, making a profit of Rs. 4,000. Covering previous losses of the day and brokerage, I still came out alive with a net profit of Rs. 1,600 and I was like YIPPEEEEEEE!!!!

Phew! That was one hell of an experience, risking Rs. 1 lakh and 60 thousand, when I realised how people freak out about the market or yell a cry of joy. I experienced it for real. The excitement didn’t leave me till the end of day that I went on endlessly narrating the details to my husband who got scared and excited as well. Infact, the excitement hasn’t worn out at all. Why else am I saying the same story here again?

We celebrated our profit with a superb luncheon at ‘Barbeque Nation’ on Saturday. For people who do trading, I’m sure you can understand what I am talking about and for others, the last couple of paragraphs would have been jargons. Don’t worry, stock market is not rocket science or complex formulae. All you need is a little money to play and lots of logical mind to analyse practically. Want to learn more, come to me for tuition and as a typical trader, I’ll give you gyans for a commission (Just kidding)!!! Try it folks! If not for monetary gains, you’ll experience an excitement equal to waiting for Sachin’s century in the last few overs. What’s life without a little excitement?

Busy Breathless

2010-11-02T13:15:00.038+05:30

Every single muscle fiber in my body reminded me of its presence when I tried to rise from my bed this morning. They were so taut and tangled that all commands from my brain went unheeded. Brain is to be blamed too for such loose leash on my physic and the excuse is exhaustion. It took considerable effort to convince one to convince the other and get them all up and ready for another full day's work. Life has been this way for the last one plus month.

After my long maternity break, I was overjoyed to get busy again and expend my energy on a variety of tasks. Commuting 8 km to and fro office in my bike, concentrating on work, back home to play with my toddler, nurse and rock him, managing household chores and attending to little bits and pieces here and there has stretched my bed-time to a minimum of 1 AM in the morning and that is during the weekdays. Weekends are packed with shopping for groceries, provisions, plumbing work, electrical work, blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah...I'm running out of fuel and I find no time to replenish. Why can't nature bless me with 30 hour days?

The irony of it is that I love these individual tasks that keeps me busy. Morning bike ride is great if I happen to escape traffic. Work gives me a lot of scope to learn with enough challenges. My little Akhil, come on, I adore him and spending every wakeful moment with him is so much fun. Household chores, its my house and I like to tidy and polish the tiles to perfection. With helpful husband at home, friendly neighbors around and understanding management at office, I have nothing to complain really. My only problem is that everything is happening together that I have started getting breathless.

I don't get a little alone time that I can spend for myself. No time to have a nonsense love talk with my husband or the daily private hug that we used to share before. Any conversation is a discussion to do something or to make plans, execute them...just materialistic every day stuff. No time to reply to my friends' mails, no time to Gtalk, no time to read a book, no time to blog, no time to write my diary, arrey, no time to drink a cup of coffee peacefully without having something or the other run through my head or to get disturbed by my sleeping son. To get it all is luxury, I know but to get nothing at all is bad, very bad. For a person like me who finds harmony with solitude now and then, to re-charge my system, such continuous cravings can be detrimental and I'm afraid that is exactly what has started to happen.

There are a few special days when my son chooses to sleep through and stay awake for very long hours in the night. Those days are real nightmares. Working during the day, staying awake with my kiddo in the night and working again the next day is inhumanly difficult. Worse if he is awake because of any illness. I'd be so worried about him combined with my own weakness that I'd be tempted to jump out from my balcony.

It wouldn't take much time to call it all quits and stay at home, happy with my baby. Honestly, in today's metro life where the price of 1 kg of rice has shot up close to Rs.40, single salary with home loan EMIs is definitely not sufficient to provide quality nourishment and education for our off-spring or for a comfortable living for the family. If finance is one side of a coin, personal gratification is on the flip side. Choosing to stay at home voluntarily is good but believe me, after all the years of studying that you do and if you have passion for your work as well, forcing yourself to remain alone at home day-in day-out due to circumstances, can lead to a different kind of depression, the kind that I was suffering from before I joined workforce again. I'd rather stay this busy.

Women everywhere have been tackling this problem for ages and ages. Is it because they were full-time-mothers? Or is it because they had support from their parents? Or is it because they have transformed to a multi-tasking machine that doesn't take time for its own greasing and overhauling? Well, if I were to be that machine, I doubt if I would be able to make a good one at that in the long run. And again, women are problem to women themselves. When I speak to a lady who is a happy home-maker, she looks down at me as if I have neglected my house and kid. When I meet an ambitious career lady, she looks down at me for not being a full concentrated career woman. Women like me who are juggling in between trying to strike a balance, are too busy to look up or down on anything. What they don't realize is that we are sailing with two legs on two different boats, ready to trip into the water at the slightest mistake while they are comfortably seated in one, swaying their hands in passing waters. Mind there, I am referring only to those lady-folks who have a big mouth or a long taunting tongue. Not that I care, but it would be so much better to be left un-bothered. And to do all of this and more, there are still women in some places paying dowries. Such injustice!

Alright, back to track. You see, when frustration crawls in, every little taint in the society would fling your anger like the way it has in me right now. With Diwali coming up in two to three days, life is even busier with sweets and snacks preparation in the little of the left-over time if any. But then, this was a choice that I made. Just like how I enjoyed my childhood days when mom prepared delicious Diwali delicacies, I want my kiddo to enjoy the same. So here I am toiling with oil and stove for hours, cleaning up later on, the result of which was the refusal from my physic to rise up this morning. Women though strong in many things are unfortunately weak with sentiments!

Word Play

2010-10-22T11:55:00.044+05:30

A woman of few words. That's what I am attempting in this post. For someone who is used to writing page length narration on simple things, lamenting on the happenings of life for the last two years in a couple of words is a challenge. I'm trying to rise up to it, not to prove vocabulary excellence or poetic prudence, just for the thrill of it. Throwing in words at random without worrying about the grammatical correctness, here I am giving a gist of my life and hubby's in the last two years – my marriage, new house, pregnancy, stress, childbirth and job change in rhyming syllables. I've already given credit to each of these in prior individual posts. Now is just a summary time!

Two long years,
Two love dears,
Too much chores.

Waltzed along,
Weak and strong;
Waiting throng.

Family made.
Flat purchased.
Fun evade.
Milestones crossed.
Memories chased.
Many days.

Pennies lost.
Playing cost,
Pregnant post.

Tired it got.
Things forgot.
Taunting thoughts.

Baby came,
Bringing fame,
Busy game!

Jobs changed,
Journey re-staged,
Just engaged.

Suddenly soon,
Sunlight shone,
Sorries gone.

No complain,
No bargain,
Normal again.

History short,
Happenings assort,
Happiness re-sought!

Job Jumping

2010-08-27T14:05:00.011+05:30

OK, I do it again! Do it by not doing it, my blog break I mean. How long has it been this time? Close to three months? Bad girl Archu but a good mommy Archu too to have sacrificed my personal interests for one full time prioritized interest – Akhil. It’s going to take some time for five months old Akhil to grow up, read this blog and understand that I am blaming him for my laziness and lack of creativity or creativity directed elsewhere. Until he comes storming to me, questioning my alleged accusations, he is my excuse.

While Akhil keeps me fascinated on one side with his growth spurts, smiles advancing to giggles, face and people recognition, toppling over his tummy and adorable stuff like that, I’ve been into some serious job hunting over the last one or two months. Yeah right, job hunt again too! My maternity break had extended to a little over one year and with life starting to settle down, I had slowly began getting unsettled in my thoughts. The motherly me wants and is willing to extend the break even longer and spend every wakeful moment with my naughty son, but the career girl is slightly getting restless. If I try to turn the cards in favor of my career, I would suffer severe admonition from not only the motherly me but also my little son. If I choose to stay as an at-home-mother, my career is finished, all those years of efforts in vain. Like many corporate women of today, I’m torn between my career and family.

Remember ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ childhood folk tale? The moral of that story suits IT industry better than anywhere else. Every new day sees a new technology and unless you keep pace with it, a breath break can silently silence your career. By keeping pace, I mean not the self-study that you do. Those study-hard philosophies we all know and some of us might still be doing it too. I meant the pace that keeps us on the payroll of some organization as you take your breath break, benching there. What difference? Lots really, lots apart from salary! That is one of the reasons I am hurrying myself to get back to workforce. As the market is opened now, people changing jobs and HR hiring once again, look before you leap, jog before you jump. Here are a few little tips (not the usual tips) that this job hopper had learnt from experience.

I had seen a few of my friends who had taken a sabbatical for maternity or other personal situations and even though the break in terms of tenure is the same, they can still claim organizational experience while I cannot. In spite of having worked on in-house projects during my break to keep abreast with technology, my experience counts only till the last working day in my last organization. So, lesson one in IT: Your experience refers to your organizational experience and not your hands-on with the technology.

If you are looking for a job change for whatsoever reason, find your change first and then put down your papers. Somehow searching for a job when you don’t have one at hand, demeans you irrespective of how skilled you are. You lose your negotiating advantage which clearly shifts sides towards the companies. That’s lesson two: Act before you react.

Once your interviewer commits on making you an offer, do not rejoice or gloat until you get the offer letter in hand. It has become a common trend to interview a number of candidates, make false promises of an offer and eventually reject you or put you on hold for reasons other than skill-set. Lesson three: Stay put still your stay is assured in writing.

I have some interesting stories on that front. My last drawn CTC was slightly above the industry standards that well-paying companies were bothered about my maternity break and those that were fine with the break wasn’t willing to pay up as it doesn’t align with their pay slab. If I volunteer to take a pay-cut, I’m looked with questioning eyes wondering if I were hiding something wrong or projecting me as too desperate. Result, I go through all the technical and non-technical rounds of interview and was kept waiting at the final stage for something that I had already mentioned in my resume. Why screen and take me for a ride when you can see it in the first place? What did I say about staying jobless and company advantage? Every street I turned, I encountered a dead end. Lesson four: Discuss your liabilities when you are approached for a job interview before you subject yourself to it. Otherwise, you might end up spending hours in studying and answering, shelling out pennies to pounds for commutation alone, only to find yourself where you started for the same reason that was evident from the start.

Congratulations! You have got a job! Once you have found the job that you’ve desired, a job that does justice to your position, without compromise on compensation, commit. Once you commit, stick to it. Though you might have a couple of offers at hand, chose your options and make a single commitment with your date of joining preference if any. It is not ethical to commit to multiple companies and keep them hanging on hook while you make up your mind, even though vice-verses do happen. Lesson Five: Corporate’s rules does not apply to common man.

Having learnt my lessons, I’ve found a challenging position in a start-up firm that I’ve decided to join. Small firm, big growth! No stiff policies, no subtle politics! More ownership, more learning! The transparent discussions and honest forthright clarifications from the board have made me feel good that I am eager to earn their goodwill. I believe this to be a job that wouldn’t be just a dream. Gut feeling says ‘Go for it Girl’ and here I am going to begin yet another adventure and this time, to stay for a while (hopefully).

Akhil Asserts

2010-06-08T17:15:00.032+05:30

Hello! I am Akhil. I am 2 months and 8 days old. Mummy has always been boring about herself in her blogspot and I am afraid that I’d be pulled into it too. Before mummy could have her chance to tell tales about me, here I am, sneaking a peak to brag awhile. I was born on March 30, 2010 and elders have quoted that the day fell into an astrologically significant ‘Hastham Nakshatra’. Whatever that means, I have no idea, neither does mummy nor daddy but Google always knows. It has listed out a number of virtues belonging to Hastham that the burden of proving myself worthy of those has been imposed upon me. What responsibilities for a baby!

I am a humble boy with simple needs. Milk and diapers is all I cry for and my parents are already cribbing that I am a lot of hard work. I made mummy crave for delicacies when she was pregnant and happily feasted on it. Now that I am out into this world, all I get is plain milk. It’s not my fault that I wake up and sleep at odd hours. Mummy’s womb was so warm and cosy. While big-bodies suffer change of food, climate and culture when they travel across the world, how can it be unfair for my little body not to have any adaptability issues? To top it all, my parents were complaining that I was turning them into a zombie. Total injustice and that was why I kept crying and fussing for the first 40 days. Otherwise, I am an absolutely adorable baby.

You see, even with all my difficulties, I had the maturity to understand my parents’ plight. I was co-operative when I was given a bath and reduced my weeping decibels, which they claim to be heard till my apartment’s parking lot. Instead, I chose a variety of noises to indicate wetness, colic and hunger and trained my parents to tend to me properly. Now they’ve learnt finally. Phew!

After 45 days of house arrest, I was dressed up on a fine day for an outing. Blue sky, green trees, cars and buses were all fascinating. If not for the smoke and dust, I wouldn’t have missed mummy’s womb so much. I was taken into an air-conditioned room and placed on a table in front of an old man with white hair and white coat. I was happily staring at the toys suspended near the table that I was placed on when I felt two sharp stings. The old man pierced a needle on my thigh in the name of vaccination and my parents were looking at it without objection. My daddy even helped the old man to hold my legs. Brutus! Both mummy and daddy! I screamed and screamed for five minutes, and then I realized that it wasn’t hurting so much and kept quiet like a big man. Had I wanted to, I could have gone on crying, couldn’t I? There is where I display my tolerance.

Mummy and daddy have been making comical faces thinking that they were entertaining me. Seriously, you grown-ups know nothing about baby needs that all those strange faces sometimes look pathetic. Only because my gentle heart refuses to hurt their feelings that I return a smile or two for their sake. At times, a crooked wink from daddy or an exaggerated smile from mummy looks so stupid that I giggle naturally and whoa they are overjoyed. How silly, na?

My parents’ friends must have foreseen that I might grow up into a potentially eligible son-in-law that they gifted me a baby pram. I am a gentleman and won’t accept advance dowries but this pram means more rides for me, rides that don’t end up with needles. I am no saint to resist temptation and these days, even saints yield to worldly pleasures. What resistance could I possibly possess? I accepted the pram as a symbol of love.

Mummy pushes the pram within the apartment compound every evening and I observe every face that looks at me resting on it. You might not believe it if I say that I am a lady charmer and only because my modestly intervenes, I refrain from boasting that every girl baby in my apartment premises have called me ‘cuteee’. One of two even pinched my cheeks which instantly turned pink, partly cause of the pinching and partly cause of my blushing. I've even started going for longer rides now, suspended to my mummy in a baby carrier like a kangaroo while my daddy drives the bike. I’ve been to my parents’ friends’ places and restaurants and cross my heart, I was a well-behaved baby everywhere. Just like my parents, I’m a born outdoorsy and enjoy every bit of it.

Life is getting better as I’ve come to terms with the reality. This world is where I have to spend my lifetime and playful though they are, these are my parents. My daddy has already challenged me to beat him in table tennis and my mummy has promised not to lecture too much if I were self-disciplined. This is where I take my vows. I will rise upto these challenges like a typical Aries and achieve much more than that. I will definitely be a naughty kid but not in an arrogant way. I've made my parents a mother and father and I will certainly make them feel proud of it. Amen.

To my juniors...

2010-05-31T16:39:00.028+05:30

Seriously! This is called an addiction! I have an urge to blog something, anything, even though there is nothing news enough to blog. Akhil keeps me busy and it would take some time for him to make stories for me to write on. Obviously, writing about baby-feeding and changing diapers is going to interest no one and I do not want to do it in my blogspot what I’m doing day and night these days. An unknown paranoia of becoming extinct at my blog spot just as I have become invisible to the outside world for the last two months makes me want to rant and ramble to give my attendance. At such a desperate (?) moment, I stumbled across a letter that I had written for my college magazine, addressed to my juniors as a final year student on the 11th January, 2005. Thanks to my diary archives for date accuracy. I should say that this was my first attempt at blogging without being aware that I was actually doing it. I’m now putting it up at my blogspot, not only for my juniors to reminisce but also for all the present day college kids, enjoying their carefree college lives and of course to say ‘I’m present’ to my blogspot :)

Pondicherry
11 January, 2005

Dear Friends,

Precious little memories,
Are treasures without price.
And through the gateway of the heart,
They lead to paradise.

I’m sure any romantic soul that has a glimpse at this quotation would pause a moment, look back and heave a longing sigh. A sigh the surfaces past memories…a sigh that kindles sentiments…a sigh that makes you miss something (or someone). When I was young, I’ve heard people call college life as the most fun-filled part of one’s life where we learn not only lessons but life as well. I used to dismiss it as yet another philosophy but today I realize how true it is. As a final year student, on the edge of a transition from girlhood to ladyship, here I am turning around to look at the path that I had travelled for the past four years.

It was a September 10, 2001 when I stepped into this college as a timid teenager, half excited about the uncertain world ahead and half eager to explore it. I exchanged greetings with similar faces that beamed with smiles and hellos but anxious within (just like me). That was the beginning and before we realized, days rolled by, buds of friendship began to blossom and its sweet fragrance became contagious. There was laughter and play, teasing and tripping, comments and gossips.

I hope most of you, if not all, would agree if I say that we happened to meet our first crushes within our college premises. Our first love which may or may not be expressed, which may or may not be alive today but still the memories of the first secret fluttering of heart are those that we would always like to embrace forever and never forgo. That was our first step into definite adulthood.

There were days that we spent organizing events and participating, winning and losing, arguing and fighting, a bit of misunderstanding, a bit of jealousy, a bit of ego, drops of tears and unknown fears. All those incidents that appeared to be too big an issue and made us demand instant justification now make us feel humiliated and small. Where does all these realization spring from all of a sudden?

The answer is TIME. As I approach the end of my college life, I am overwhelmed with a strong urge to cling on to the glorious past, relive those wonderful memories, find repairs and remedies for thoughtless actions but is there time? The society outside is where I have to step into and where my destiny awaits but suddenly I find myself again a timid girl, half excited about the uncertain world ahead and half eager to explore it. There may be a number of friends of mine who share these feelings and whose minds play the same thoughts over and over again.

My dear juniors! Expect less from others and more from yourselves. That is the only way not only to success but to happiness at large. Make mistakes but never repeat them. Stumble and fumble but don’t give up. You can still undo and redo a lot of things. You can still make the most of your college life because you have something that we don’t have. You have TIME!

Your senior cum friend,
Archana

Dramatic Delivery

2010-04-18T10:58:00.022+05:30

(Pregnant women, please avoid this post)

IT’S A BOY!!! I AM A MOM!!! YIPPEEE!!!

That’s the headlines. Being more of a spontaneous blogger than a planned one, this is the longest post that has been planned and postponed and postponed again for the want of time. As the concerned person who had undergone this experience, I wasn’t so much inclined on even talking about it. But for the blogger in me, such dramatic experience was too much to resist, more so for its happy ending. The blogger won hands down. Perhaps, I should consider journalism as an alternate career. Before I could venture further into the cover story, I would like to assure that by being able to publish a post, I am doing hale and healthy. Also, if I accomplish to publish this post before a month from my delivery date which was March 30, 2010, I need a pat on my back along with compliments for being a voracious blogger.

It was 29 March 2010, 9:45 PM when I was admitted into Manipal Hospital, Bangalore, for my delivery. I didn’t get labor pains naturally till my due date. Prolonging gestation period might have adverse effect on the baby and so we had decided to go for induced labor. Until that evening, I was happily filling my tummy with somosas and gulab jamun with the excuse that I wouldn’t get to enjoy those in the hospital and back at home for a couple of days after delivery. It was only on my way to the hospital that I started getting slightly uncomfortable, uncomfortable to the extent of calling it fear though I did not want to admit it. I had no idea then that calling it fear would have been more than justified in a few hours.

I was given induction treatment at around 10:30 PM and I started getting my first contraction at 11:15PM. All through the night, the labor was progressing and the pain was becoming increasingly difficult to bear, let alone sleeping through it. By 3 AM next morning, I was repeatedly asking the nurses for an epidural but they had refused saying that I was only 1.5 cm dilated. Active labor happens only on 10 cm dilation when I would need epidural more than ever. I had always been of the kind who could manage emotional pain by taking head over heart but a big gofer with physical pain. I used to close my eyes and wriggle at the dentist’s when he brings just the torch light near my mouth. Even then, being unable to bear pain at just 1.5 cm dilation, I felt so ashamed of myself.

By 6 AM in the morning, I shunned aside all my sense of shame and pleaded for some kind of pain relief as I couldn’t take it at all. I was checked again and said that I was only 3 cm dilated but contradicting it, my contractions were severe at 1.5 minutes intervals and lasting 30 seconds. The confused nurses consulted the doctor and put me on sedation. The dosage was good enough that I slept tight. I was awoken now and then for progress checking and was assured that I was responding properly to the medication. Within a few hours, the labor should be over naturally.

It was 9 AM. Inspite of the sedation, I felt slight pain that kept me awake. My husband who was awake and beside me the whole night went down for 5 minutes to receive my parents and bring them to me. Call it fate, it so happened that at the very moment when he was absent, I started to feel a gush of liquid flow and thanks to my big belly I couldn’t see what it was. I just assumed that my water had broken and managed to wriggle on the bed to ring for the nurse. The nurse who hadn’t expected active labor for few more hours, registered panic on her face when she looked at me. She immediately rushed for help and more nurses crowded the room screaming ‘blood’, ‘placenta ruptured’, ‘active labor’…I could only catch syllables here and there.

That was how it started. In no time, I was put on an oxygen mask and was rapidly prepared for surgery. The doctor rushed to the room and said than an emergency C-section was adequate. She was more like giving me information than seeking my permission. My husband who came back had panicked but he did a tough job masking it and kept holding my hands and assuring me that everything was going to be fine. I was put on a stretcher and hurried to the operation theatre with ‘Emergency…emergency…movie aside move aside’ noises that I partly started doubting if I would see the same way back again. It was all so much like an Indian movie climax. There was a frenzy of activity in the theatre which I hardly know was what. The only thing I remembered was someone telling me “Don’t worry, we’ll put you to sleep” and then it was total black out.

Someone pushed something into my mouth. Someone told me it’s a baby boy. I kept fading in and fading out. When I had consciousness long enough to register the time on the clock it was 11:15 AM. I was still on oxygen mask and I started worrying if they were preparing me for a second surgery or something. Another worry of developing sudden fits clouded my mind. Not able to talk much, I let my eyes wander in all directions. Seeing that I was awake, one of the nurses, removed the mask, told me that the surgery went perfectly fine, I was doing good and baby was great. After two labors and one childbirth, I was slowly rolled back to the recovery room.

My husband came to me in the recovery room. He had gotten to see our lovely little boy, born on March 30, 2010, 9:33 AM with a perfect birth weight of 3.16 Kgs. The little fella was happily resting in the neonatal unit and joined us within 2 hours. Seeing his tiny body and knowing that it’s a part of us overwhelmed us so much that all the trauma seemed worth it. The doctor had told later than the reason for the emergency was that I was in active labor but was not getting sufficiently dilated for the baby to come out. So, the pressure was put on the placenta and got it separated which should ideally happen after baby birth. The baby was in distress and they had to take it out as early as possible. No wonder I was in lot of pain at small dilations. In a way, the doctor assured that it was all for good because the placenta was three layers around the baby’s neck and had the labor proceeded normally, it might have been very harmful to the baby and the mom. Once again, my little one has saved not only himself but me as well. Survivor fighter boy!!!

Two days later, my husband, baby and I finally got some alone time in the hospital recovery room. We were silently holding hands and tears streamed down our faces. I don’t know if it was tears of anguish or tears of joy but it sure did lighten our hearts and then I could see my road to recovery much more clearer. If anything, this experience had bonded us more than ever. It’s queer that in needy times as now, both my parents and in-laws should be unavailable for help and support because of their sudden ailments or busy schedules. Well, if westerners can manage alone with their newborns, so can us. Besides, our neighbors had helped us so much all through my pregnancy and delivery, more like foster parents and I take this opportunity to express my deep felt gratitude to them.

Two and a half weeks now since the D-Day, both baby and I are doing wonderful. We have named our baby ‘Akhil’. Akhil is naughtier than we expected him to be but again being born to Vijay and me, we cannot expect anything less. Vijay and I had always given our big news out of the blue. Our little Akhil has lived up to our name by giving a surprising dramatic entry into this world. More stories on the little one in subsequent posts. He is calling out to me right now and failing to answer the call in minutes would trigger wild screams.

Pride and Pregnancy

2010-03-02T17:30:00.044+05:30

And there goes the tooth paste, tooth brush and baby diapers…the hospital bag is packed, I am ready! With the D-Day around the corner, I’m suddenly all into nesting syndrome. Researchers suggest that a sudden urge to clean, pack and set stage to welcome a new member to the family is an indication of an imminent labour. If that is scientifically true, I am ready to go into labour right away. In my 37th week of pregnancy, my baby is now officially considered full-term. All that is left for the little one to do in the next few days is to relax, put on weight and practice skills it would need for the real world. Archery and cavalry can wait; I’m talking about blinking and breathing necessities. My tummy is round and ripe like a water-melon ready to burst open. So am I!

I cannot believe that nine months have gone by since I first got to know that I was pregnant. Looking back, I am surprised at my own transition both physically and mentally. I was honestly scared in the beginning. Happy yes but definitely scared at the prospect of being a mom. I had my anxieties and worries about surviving nine months of pregnancy and that is without mentioning all my doubts about labour and me making a mom material. But here I am today, near the finish line, talking and cooing to my tummy, waiting ever so eagerly for my baby’s arrival. When and how did it happen?

I should give the credit to my baby inside me, to the tiny miracle that grew and made me grow along. For those who know me, know pretty well of my energy sprouts and restlessness in staying put at one place. Given that, I am hardly the candidate to take gentle steps and great care during the first trimester. Perhaps that is why it took me nearly two months to become aware that I was carrying, in spite of a little nausea. When I met another lady yesterday who was suffering from intense first trimester morning sickness, I touched wood a hundred times for being blessed with a smooth beginning with minimal discomfort. With all my monkey activities, my baby just held on patiently.

Come the second trimester, I was on an eating spree, craving for cakes and candies at odd hours. My husband who was used to seeing me skipping breakfast and nibbling food before pregnancy was taken aback at my capacity to attack full square meals, in addition to the numerous intermediate snacks. At one point, it seemed like all I did during the day was to eat, eat and eat more. And the happiest part is, when you are pregnant, you don’t have to worry about dieting. Eat all the protein and fat and it’s absorbed by your body in a jiffy. Second trimester is really the honeymoon period of pregnancy. Hormones helped a pregnancy glow and I was all jubilant. Apart from the increased energy levels and eating addiction, this is the time when I first started bonding with my baby. Feeling the first kicks and the little movements is so heavenly that I involuntarily started connecting with my baby and talking to him or her aloud.

By the time I moved into my third trimester, I was properly showing. Not too prominent as I’ve seen in many women, but still I did look like I had swallowed a basket ball. Friends who had seen me thin during college times and initial career days were longing to see my blown up frame. I surely did disappoint them when I sent them my picture. One of the sure comments, “Girl! When you are pregnant, you are expected to round up from head to toe but you are just pregnant at your belly!” Ha ha! Didn’t I tell you that my baby has been taking care of me throughout? It just kept me a small mummy with a small tummy while taking care of itself and coming out with flying colors at every pre-natal checkup. Except for a little insomnia during the nights, which is the time my baby chooses to move around inside and play with me, I had been spared of any swollen feet condition or water retention.

I really do owe it to my baby a lot. Infact, I do call it my destiny baby. It was the baby that decided when to come inside me, without my husband or me doing any planning towards it. Ever since, it has been keeping me and itself healthy, knowing that we have little support from our respective families to devote special care or attention. My mom would surely be surprised to see me eating all the green vegetables that I had always shunned away all these years. Twice a week potato fry is now just two weeks once, replaced with veggies whose names I last came across in my first standard vegetable chart. Till date, at 37th week of gestation, I still go around the city sitting on the pillion of my husband’s two wheeler, making my neighbors nervous, knowing that for a baby who has seen worse adventures, this wouldn’t be least inconvenient. When I am busy or occupied with guests at home, my baby remains quiet like an angel. And when I am done and relaxed, it seeks my attention with prominent bumps, making me smile. As I see my husband talking to my tummy and my baby’s responding movements inside me, I can feel my family.

All these little things summed up in making me feel more motherly with every passing day. I admit that I had been a lousy mother and I really feel its time I make up for it. I promised myself to take good care of the little one, just as it has been taking care of me all the while. As days are closing in, my baby has coached me enough with mothering instincts that I am not scared anymore. Hey! I am not even really scared of the delivery like I had been a few months ago. Be it a normal delivery or a C-Section, I’m prepared as long as the baby is hale and healthy. A baby who knew its way in would surely know the best way out. I am just ready!

Scary Story

2010-01-12T17:29:00.038+05:30

I used to pride myself for being a brave and bold iron lady but that is an outright lie. I have my fears, I fear ghosts! Technically, I know that demons belong to fantasy and there is no way that they are going to come down to our world and haunt us. But that knowledge doesn’t help when the light and sound effects combined with circumstances are just so apt to create an eerie feeling, even more when I am all alone. Alright, this is where you can have your two minutes break to laugh out loud at me for being so stupid and silly in this 21st century era. When your stomach starts hurting, you can come back to reading the rest and get scared yourself.

I have an unanswered question though. This universe always has its complements in everything – good and bad, male and female, light and dark, positive and negative. So, why not, God and Ghost? I mean, if it’s true that an almighty super power by the name God exist, so should an all-evil deadly power to counteract it? I am not analyzing further in these lines as I’ve already started feeling a chill down my spine. What if an invisible spirit is right next to me, reading my post as I am writing it and chooses this moment to introduce itself?

Right from my college days, I often find myself in situations where I have to be alone. My father and brother were working in different cities back then, leaving mom and me in our native place. There had been ample nights that I had to spend by myself all alone in our house when my mom too had to stay in her mom’s place for some reason or the other. Even otherwise, I am used to being a nocturnal specimen, enjoying reading suspense novels in the wee hours of the night. My fresher year at work was in Mangalore, a town that goes to bed by 10 PM with pin drop silence. When my roomie went on a short training trip to Mysore, I was again forced to spend three months alone. To be able to do all that, I took great precautions not to watch any horror movies that might come back to me later, at times when I cannot afford it at all.

A couple of months back, my colleague cum friend at office showed me a few clips from the Bollywood movie ‘1920’ in YouTube. I watched it under bright office lights and that too without audio. Still, I couldn’t sleep that night and kept staring at the ceiling, waiting for a ghost in white night gown to descend down and possess me any moment. During my tenure in Chennai, I happened to read a scary novel, not knowing that it was one, till 2 AM in the morning and ended up phoning my husband (my boyfriend then) and begged him to keep talking something to distract me till I go to sleep. All common sense takes flight when I am scared and I would hear my heart pounding in my ears.

I have a maternal uncle who is very good at weaving ghost stories. He articulates his stories in such style that you would get shit scared and yet the suspense element wouldn’t let you give up. Instead, it would make you long for more. He had once started one such story to us, cousins, when we were young, on our walk back home from the beach. On reaching home he dropped it abruptly and announced that the story would be continued at 11 PM on our terrace without lights. Daring kids welcome! All our pleadings didn’t change his mind and we ended up crowding and cuddling beneath his knees at midnight, listening to his narration, casting glances all around us every minute, expecting the ghosts to pop up from all corners. Here is one of his short stories for my bold blog readers.

Long long ago, in a lonely village lived a beautiful maiden with big sparkling eyes and long mane. She was heart-broken when she learnt that her lover had cheated on her and committed suicide in her own house. Years later, the same village had grown to a township and the house was renovated. A young working woman who had no tolerance for ghostly beliefs and wanted to enjoy the peace and solace of being alone occupied it. Since the day she moved in, she kept noticing unusual activities around her. She kept warding them off on various grounds but it kept haunting her time and again till she couldn’t get rid of the feeling of being pursued. Wondering if she had fallen a prey to multiple personality disorder, she went to consult a psychiatrist.

After thorough examination, her psychiatrist concluded that she was perfectly normal. He presumed that the nature of her work had put her into so much of stress that she was unnecessarily hallucinating. She was advised to take a hot water bath before going to bed as it would ease her mind and body and help a peaceful thought-free slumber. She followed her prescriptions seriously. On one no moon Friday night, she relaxed herself in her bath tub, dressed at leisure and spent minutes in front of her mirror drying her hair. Just when she was done with her grooming and about to hit the bed, she got the shock of her life and dropped down dead. Her image was still drying its hair in the mirror!

Needless to say, I didn’t look into the mirror for the next two weeks. Well, I might not have been as pro as my uncle in story telling but you get the idea, don’t you? Recalling and re-telling this story has slightly disturbed me, more so as I am alone now. Getting dressed and going out now, not to return till my husband is back from office!

New Year Nostalgia

2010-01-03T02:18:00.013+05:30

Pardon me one more time for getting nostalgic with childhood memories. I realize that I am very much grown up now and lapsing into repeated nostalgia might annoy my matured readers. But given the circumstances, I got so carried away that I couldn’t keep my lips locked. The last week of December to the first week of January is a holiday season to get carried away too. For someone with nativity from along the Coromandel Coast, for someone who has been under the courtesy of North-East monsoon, this short season would be the best of the year. The cakes and carols of Christmas, the cards and cheers of New Year, the festivity lent by the cool weather just make those half-yearly holidays more perfect than the long summer vacation in May. A perfect feeling that cannot be reminisced without nostalgia!

I was awaiting my hubby’s arrival from office on 31^st December 2009, just so we could go to the supermarket and do the last shopping of the year. And as I was at that, I thought of my hubby’s status message in Face book – “How different is Dec 31, 2009 11:59 PM from Jan 01, 2010 12:00AM?” Common sense doesn’t make a big deal of the mere change in the figures of the calendar. So much fuss about another dusk and another dawn! Yet, folks of all faiths and beliefs unite in cheering and celebrating a New Year. Do we all lack common sense or what? Absolutely not! Applying reasoning to all aspects of life might stimulate us intellectually but at the cost of simple merriments that blind beliefs bring in. A new year gives an apparent feeling of newness, a fresh beginning to re-write follies, to revisit happenings and to re-live life with newer resolutions towards making us a better being. That is not so bad, is it?

2009 has amassed a few major events of my life that I wouldn’t forget in this lifetime. Marriage, purchase of house, career drift and first pregnancy are more than enough events for a year. No, it wasn’t clouds and candies all the time. I had my blues in between which I consider to make a good talisman to evade eye-castings. Taking collective stock, I am glad that 2009 has been the way it has been. On my way to the supermarket this evening and back, I was completely drenched in rain, the showers from the heavens, farewell tears for letting go of this year which perhaps must have been a glorious one in the supernatural surrounding as well.

It was 8PM when I dried my hair and readied myself to the New Year dinner party among the folks of our apartment. After experiencing a similar party on a previous occasion, I had no doubts about the deliciousness of the dinner. It had to be mouth smacking and so it was! Even without pregnancy cravings, I would have helped myself to every delicacy on the buffet the way I did that evening. But that alone wasn’t the one that made my day or I should rather say made the year. The hours that followed until midnight triggered my nostalgia, marking this as one of the best new years that I’ve had in a long long time and the motivation for this post as well.

I remember my schooldays when we, cousins, gather around on New Year nights, staging dances and skits for our elders in our hall. The days when we had organized fancy fete for our family and having fun together till the stroke of midnight when we would scream our lungs out with New Year wishes and simultaneously scurrying for our share of the home-baked New Year cake. Blissful innocent moments! College New Years were spent on midnight phone calls with friends and Corporate New Years were all dances and DJs. Fun though they were, they wouldn’t stand up to the ones that I enjoyed as a kid, with the freedom to be playful and naughty in a childish way, the way our apartment folks had organized this New Year celebrations with games and galas.

Families together young and old, tiny toddlers, shy and bold willingly joined and participated with equal enthusiasm. The MCs were not the yo-yo types with fake smiles but real next door people warming the togetherness even more. Passing balls, chasing balloons, packing presents and acting ads brought back my once-upon-a-time that I long everyday to get back to. I was momentarily transported to my pre-teens until a kid addressed me ‘Aunty’ and reminded me of the years passed. Well, kids can’t help making mistakes, twenty- five is not an aunty age! Count downs done and screaming too, I returned back to my flat with my hubby, tired but satisfied.

Writing more on the celebration is akin to either bragging my joy or butter-coating my neighbors. As I do not want to be mistaken doing either, I’m halting here, thanking them for a nice sendoff for 2009 and a great welcome for 2010. I don’t have my expectations hyped up as I get this queer feeling that 2010 would just be a year to wade through to welcome better years later on. With self defenses tuned up and hoping that the services of those defenses would not be requested for, here I am metaphorically marching into 2010. Happy New Year one and all!

The Journey

2009-11-16T17:28:00.015+05:30

Trust your gut feeling! That intuitive inner feeling near the sternum which pushes us to do something with no logical explanation, till it leads us to discover our desires. My gut feeling prompted me to revisit my archived blog posts today and the moment I did it, I realised the reason for it. My first blog post with blogger was dated 16^th Nov, 2006, meaning, Archu’s Archive has completed three years with blogger today! Happy Birthday to Archu’s Archive! It’s interesting how I started blogging and surprising that I have been able to manage a blogspot for so long and lure a few readers. Here is my blogging journey...

I talk a lot or at least, I used to talk a lot. When I moved out of my hometown, Pondicherry, for the first time as a freshly passed college graduate to work as a Software Engineer at Infosys, Mangalore, I was scared! I was seriously scared at the prospect of meeting new people in a new environment all by myself. I had my own inhibitions on how much should I store for the generic word ‘friend’ and how much should I trust people with my blah-blah. While I was surrounded by newness everywhere, the little adventurer in me peeped out, wanting to explore it all and go gaga about it in a lively animated way, the way you can get only with the ones you trust. Those days, due to the lack of known folks, due to the lack of speaking out, I started speaking within. I grew more intimate with my personal diary than I had ever been. Fortunately or unfortunately one page per day wasn’t sufficient for my enthusiasm.

I started jolting down interesting events or lonely thoughts as a write-up and mailed it across to a few among my chosen few. One such write-up, ‘The Window Corner’ happened to fetch me compliments on my writing style and made me wonder if I did have a flair for writing after all. As if to confirm, I posted the same in my office bulletin-board and was flattered by the responses from fellow Infoscions. Had it not been for them, I’d have still been talking to my diary alone.

Getting a little more confident this way, I started an external blog with www.blog.com. Someone suggested me to add pictures to the post to make it more appealing and I took it as a wise suggestion. Colours and pictures give more expression to the words than words by themselves. I added images, modified template and migrated my blogspot to www.blogger.com. Since then, I kept updating my posts at www.archuzarchive.blogspot.com.

I should admit that my journey wasn’t all that smooth. There was a period of time, when I was down and depressed and kept venting my negativity thru my posts. That was when I decided to bid adieu to my blogs with ‘Bye Bye Blogger’ for I figured I needed a break to bring myself back to being me. Never did I guess that the break would be so brief or that I would be transformed from a damsel in distress to a dandy daredevil in a matter of few months. To be honest, I should accept that it didn’t require so much effort on my part except to keep an open mind. Just when I readied myself to stand up again and welcome new changes, things changed most miraculously as witnessed by my blogspot.

My entire life has been running on a fast forward mode over the last three years that now, all of a sudden, you find Archu, married, lady-like and an expecting mother. Do not believe in deceptive appearences, particularly mine. This wicked witch is still alive, carefully concealed behind curtains of maturity. Having said that, rest assured Archu’s Archive would never cater to philosophical babblings or phony preachings that I do not believe in myself. It would always be an archive of Archu in her natural self, whatever natural is at that moment and of course, fictions and fabrications have their place.

I express my sincere thanks to all the readers responsible for bringing out the writing potential in me that I never knew existed and for all their valuable comments. Only during dark times, when the background glitters fade away, are the real caring folks brought to limelight. I would forever be grateful to those who helped me revive not only my writing abilities by myself even. My heartfelt thanks goes to them, much more than to the almighty above for all the experiences that I was made to live through and the blessings for making me blog thru without which Archu wouldn’t have an Archive today.

Three year old kids are put into school to learn things outside the confines of their home and family. On its third birthday, Archu’s Archive is shifting base from www.archuzarchive.blogspot.com to its own custom domain www.archuzarchive.com. If you are following my blog, kindly update the revised link.

Night Rider

2009-11-04T16:09:00.004+05:30

10 PM by Bangalore weekend standards cannot be qualified as proper night, probably a late evening but not night. Even if it is, what’s the big deal about going out shopping provisions from the departmental store a few streets away from my residence, alright, even if I have to go alone and in my two-wheeler? The fact that I am carrying should not be an issue for ‘gentle careful’ ladies like me, would it? I might bump over a few pits on the road since the street lamps are not functioning but my baby would have got used to such bumps by now. I would whizz out and back in no time that my baby will hardly know. What’s this about safety concerns? When has Bangalore ever been safe for women, let alone pregnant women or when has it been safe for two-wheelers either? Life is all about risk-taking! Why is my hubby making all the fuss on the phone about a thing as simple as that? After all, I’m going out shopping to make a surprise yummy lunch tomorrow when he returns back from his friend’s place. Yes, that’s it…he’ll enter our house tomorrow noon, smell the aroma and realize how silly of him to have almost denied himself a treat by fussing over a bold daring lady like me into going out shopping at 10 PM.

There is it! See! Forty-five minutes and I am done with my purchases and riding back home. I am not scared about the fact that the local residents have tucked in for the day, deserting the dark alley nor am I scared of the street dogs that glare in my direction, deciding whether or not I’m worth giving a chase. I’m not scared of this strange fellow escorting me at a safe distance ever since I turned right from the main road. Men! Why was I born as attractive as I am? In spite of me being married and now pregnant with a slightly bulging belly, I’m never stopped from being pursued! Now what? He’ll follow me all the way to find my address and later pester me with anonymous phone calls? Give me a break! I’ve crossed teens a long time ago even if I do look so damn youthful.

Okie! Okie! Let me face it! On a new moon night as tonight, making out a silhouette is tough enough without having to fall head-over-heel about my fine-featured face. Who am I thinking I am? Ashwarya Rai’s younger sister? My vanity has flattered myself way too much. If I am, well, not so a beauty-queen, why is this fella following me? Is he someone I know? Is he my friend’s husband who I happened to stumble upon in the store? I must have missed something at the counter and the poor man is following me to return it. Should I stop and say hello?

“Hey there!”

Heyyyy…he just called me hey and I definitely don’t recognize his voice at all. If he knows me, why doesn’t he call me by name? Hey there it seems! Nah! He is someone else. He is after my purse and gold chain. Why did I don those fake stone earrings that glitter as bright as diamonds? Why did I don them at this hour of the night? 10PM! Where were my senses? I’m carrying my ATM debit card. What if he forces me to tell the PIN and makes a clean sweep of my account? He is still following me and if I ride any faster, I’ll hurt my baby. Oh no!

He seems to have accelerated, shortening the distance between us. Wait a min! What if he is not after just my money and jewelry? What if he is after me? He could be a gangster trying to kidnap me and hold me for a ransom? Or Heavens! For all I know, he could be a sadistic rapist! What am I going to do now? I don’t even carry a pepper-spray. I should have listened to my husband and waited till morning for the purchases. Who cares if we didn’t have an extra delicious lunch tomorrow? This is bad! This is really really bad!

I’m damned. He has just crossed me and parked his bike in front of mine, obstructing my way. I’m so damned! There is no escape in this dark alley. I’m sorry baby for making you go thru this as well. Hubby, I’ll miss you! Don’t cry over me forever. I’ll stay up above the world so high as your guardian angel and protect you from all evils.

“Hey there! Your duppatta is flying close to your Scooty wheels. Please tie it up before it gets caught and cause an accident.”

The stranger just said that, just that, gave me a disapproving look as if to mean “How the hell did this lady’s husband let her alone at this hour in her condition?” and sped off without voicing it.

“Oh yeah, right….thank you!” I called back in sweat and stammer and hurried home before I could get pursued again for real. Phew! That was so close!

At our dining table the next day, my husband relished the products of my culinary skills and also complimented me for being a brave lady. He says that as a father-to-become, he was a little over-protective of me and our baby but understands now that I know to manage myself. Well…I don’t think now is the moment to mention yesterday’s episode to him. No harm done and anyways what’s the big deal about it?

Baby Babble

2009-10-04T01:29:00.021+05:30

“Ouch! Mommy, that hurts!”

“Oops sorry! I only rolled on to my sides very gently. You are a fussy kid! You can’t expect me to lay erect the whole night.”

“I’m not a fussy kid! YOU ARE A CARELESS MOM!”

“Careless? Me? I gave up coffee, I gave up wearing jeans, I gave up doing all the crazy things that I do and you call me careless? Now, you are a fussy UNGRATEFUL kid!”

“Oh yeah? Do responsible moms participate in badminton matches when their baby is one and a half month inside the womb? You have no idea how difficult it is to cling onto your slippery uterine wall!”

“Don’t start on that again! I wasn’t aware that I was pregnant then. I can’t be responsible for that.”

“Well…you know now, don’t you? So, stop behaving careless!”

“Oh God! Why can’t I be blessed with a nice non-pestering peaceful baby?”

“Listen mom! We only have to put up with each other physically for another 6 months or so and then later we’ll part ways. So, let’s not make life difficult for each other.”

“What do you want me to do now?”

“Just roll on to your sides very very gently, okie.”

“Alright, alright and you better don’t wake me up again until dawn.”

As daylight filters itself through the dark curtains of our window, I lazily open my eyes and heave a longing sigh at my hubby who sleeps like a contented kid. Obviously, he isn’t the one carrying our kid.

“Wake up, wake up!” I was all enthused to disturb my husband just like I was disturbed in the night by our baby in my womb. After all, someone did call women jealous.

“Good Morning Archu!” (followed by a big yawn) “Its weekend…one more hour, pleaseeee.”

Look at that! He hasn’t even opened his eyes yet. “No grace hours today. Your baby didn’t let me sleep yesterday night. It’s only fair that you give up some sleep too.”

“Ha! Like mom, like kid!”

“What are you talking about? I was such a sweet well-behaved baby.”

“Really? Your mom wasn’t so sure about that when she talked about how you rushed out into the world 10 days before the expected due date…how you cried through the night soon after your mom’s C-section.”

“Err…well…your mom did tell about what a fatty you were at birth making her go thru intense labor. You are no better than me.”

“Certainly! That is why we cannot expect our baby to be calm and cool. Mischief is in its genes and considering that it is going to be born to a crazy couple like us, I’d disown the kid if it was any less naughty.”

“Whatever! Now you better wake up. WAKE UP!” I pull out his blankets, switch off the fan and walk out of the room, satisfied that his slumber is shaken. He will have to wake up now…haa haa haa hee hee hee (imagine a devilish grin on my face).

As I boiled milk in the kitchen, I felt my tummy and there was no tweeky feeling there. After having disturbed my sleep most devilishly as it does every night, there is my baby, all quiet and angelic in the morning. Like mom, like kid, uh? I was just about to acknowledge my hubby when he casually walked into the kitchen.

“Did you have your breakfast and pill? Care for some Horlicks?” My hubby was all caring and concerned. O’course he is usually of the caring type but my pregnancy makes him extra caring (I wonder if our kid would call him careless too).

“That’s okie, I am done. You go and get ready. We need to go for the ultrasound scan today.” My lips play a smile as I reply to him. Pregnancy has its advantages though, at least during the initial stages. You are properly pampered and all your cravings are made to be met. That is without mentioning the goodies specially prepared and packed for you from your family. You ask for juice and there is it. You try to do some work and someone rushes to your aid. I feel like a princess…a princess with a jumpy froggy baby inside my belly.

My husband and I waited at the hospital lobby for my turn to get scanned. My eyes though scanned the lot of expectant mothers at various stages of pregnancy. How many of them are first timers like me? Do they feel the way I do or do they feel different? Should I have a small talk with the mom-to-be next to me? As I sat wondering , with thoughts wandering around, I was called in into the sonology room.

The doctor, who with his spectacles and comp, looked like a programmer to me greeted us with a plastered pleasing smile. He wasted no time in pleasantries and got to his job, placing the ultrasound device over me. That must have been the moment when my hubby and I got so engrossed into the monitor. A blurry image beamed on the screen which got clearer with the doc’s explanation. A tiny little being almost the size of an orange was floating within a confined space, wriggling its very very tiny arms and feet. The doctor pointed out the miniscule heart and almost simultaneously our heart skipped a beat. To know that at the very moment, this little being was happening inside me was so exhilarating that I could feel goose pimples over my hands. Miracle! Surely, every little baby is a miracle!

My hubby and I talked about the baby all day and still didn’t feel enough. The one minute scan video was recorded and replayed in our minds over and over again that all we did all day was relish it and relish it again. That night, our junior started off at its usual time.

“Oh Mom! You don’t understand! It hurts!”

“My dear, I love you!”

“Errr…what?”

“I said, I love you.”

“Well…uhmm…okie.”

“Just okie?”

“You see mom, you don’t want me to be the super-senti- serial types, do you? I wouldn’t be disturbing you every night and be craving for your attention if I didn’t love you. I love you too mom!”

FREEZE! The rest is silence. Anything said more would taint the charm. I am freezing this post here.

Stars Shine Down

2009-09-02T20:26:00.009+05:30

Hi! This is Archu back at ArchuzArchive. We’ve had a long-time-no-see for almost two months now that I feel it wouldn’t hurt to do a little re-introduction. Two months really and that’s longer than the longest breaks that I had ever taken over here!! A few friendly folks had pinged me to enquire on my continued absence at my blogspot, wondering if I were up to something else or had given up blogging altogether. That wasn’t something that hadn’t occurred to me. I was taking a voluntarily career break to attend to a few personal priorities but blogging would most definitely fall under that category for which I was taking a break for. Yet, I had remained all still and silent, which as it turns out was totally unintentional. Well, to write something, you need something to write on. Having been busy for a long while, the first thing one would want to do during a break would be to stretch out and relax. That’s exactly what I did, only that I never let it go.

A fish out of water is always fidgety even if it were blessed to be an amphibian. I was that restless amphibian who wanted to plunge back into IT waters within one month of a so called break, more out of habit than need. I dived into job portals on look out for another job and recession times necessitated deep diving that I wasn’t exactly used to in spite of my frequent job hops. I sank and surfaced a number of times, not really knowing why I was getting so desperate when I had my hubby to support me. Maybe I needed to satisfy my ego that kept pricking me every day that I spent as a home maker. Not that home making is easy. Infact, from these three months of experience, I understand that home making is even difficult than breaking our heads in front of our comps. Even though timelines are tighter, I would gladly prefer to do my household chores alongside my career, not the chores alone. It has taken me three months to realise that I was not cut out for that.

Stubborn and steadfastness are characteristic Taurean traits that made my life even difficult. If you were pushed to do something by someone, you can always rebel and retaliate but when it’s you who is pushing yourself, you have no choice but to succumb. My restless soul was pushing me every moment to begin working again and with house EMI commitments, I felt guilty staying at home and letting my husband bear the full burden. I tried and tried but recession rejected me making me get fully frustrated.

Had it been only that, I wouldn’t have given up so easily but strangely I found that my body wasn’t exactly co-operating with my mind. I felt lazy and lethargic. I felt like lying down and resting in the bed all the time, even after 10 hours of sleep. I had lost my appetite and lived on bread and ‘Lays’ chips that I promptly threw up in a little while. Doing the slightest task felt like a huge ordeal and my mood swings were erratic. One day I brightly tell my husband that I would stay confident and get a job and the next day I would be weeping in his arms. My decisions were confused and it seemed like I had no control on myself. I was so not being me.

DEPRESSION! I was going down a depression drain helplessly. That’s what I had concluded to myself. Depressions affect not only the victim but the people associated with the victim as well. I couldn’t let it happen, or at least I didn’t want to pull my husband along too. So, I gradually became mute. I kept myself alone, away from friends and family. I stopped visiting friends. I stopped blogging, afraid if I would let my depressed mood ooze in here as well. I greeted my hubby with a smile when he returned from office but while he was away, I just kept sleeping and sleeping as if nothing could console me better. I was cheating myself.

I would not have been writing this blog now if I hadn’t learnt a news last week that changed my world around, from dull greyscale to jubilant technicolor. As I was enjoying my self-diagnosed depression, I puked away all my favourite food for the nth time last week. I decided it was time I did something about my sickness and googled for the cause. As the links kept popping up, my eyes grew wider and I quickly rushed to re-check my menstrual chart. It was then that it hit me like a lightening that I COULD BE PREGNANT.

As soon as my husband returned from office, I told him my doubts. He immediately suggested me to take a home pregnancy test which sharply turned positive. We went through a swell of emotions in a few minutes – from shock to surprise to excitement. We again hurried to a gynaecologist who confirmed pregnancy and subsequent scans told us that the junior was already 2 months old. No wonder I felt like sleeping all the time, no wonder I was sick, I was not depressed. In fact, this isn’t a news to get depressed at all. It calls for celebration!!! We were happy and elated and laughed at the prospect of us as responsible parents. No matter, we’ll be just good friends to our kid! We informed the good news to all our well-wishers who made the news even merrier with their enthusiasm.

In parallel, I had received a job offer from IBM. We had not exactly planned for a kid but the news comes as an unexpected astonishment. I had been trying for jobs everywhere but now I have an offer from a company that is known for its work-life balance, which is a huge boon for pregnant women. Sometimes, we never get what we crave for. But again, something better turns up which we never would have even thought of. In my life, miracles never cease to happen. I experienced it once in choosing my life-partner and yet again now with my baby. Speak about destiny!!!! TOUCH WOOD!!! TOUCH WOOD!!! TOUCH WOOD!!!

Home Sweet Home

2009-07-01T17:03:00.021+05:30

Have you ever participated in a 600 m running race? A race where you start out slow, accelerate your limbs with every lap and run with your fullest towards the end. A race where you finally reach the end point, panting and pounding that before you could even absorb the victory, you would feel a relief beyond relief that the race has ended fully. An end where you crave to gulp a whole bottle of mineral water and lay back, before your lips break into a broad smile and a satisfactory glow radiates from your sweaty face.

Building a house, or in our case buying an apartment in Bangalore and doing a few alterations is akin to a 600m running race. Seriously! A race where my husband and I were the only participants on the track, competing not against each other but running together to attain our common goal – to buy a house and make it our home! It didn’t seem like such a big feat when we started off until we really put our feet down and realized that it was a bottomless abyss, at least it seemed so at one point of time during our 8 months journey. Now that we’ve got somewhat settled, I was like ‘Why not list our experiences as advices to others with home dreams?’ After going through a neck-choking schedule to become proud house owners, a little boasting and offering unsolicited advices should be agreeable. I mean, come on!

This is how it goes.

Decide the kind of house that you want. 2 BHK, 3BHK etc., the locality, accessibility to everyday needs, built up area, and layout. In short, imagine your dream house in your mind before you set out to action.

Start on a house hunt to find the place that you want. Check out with real estate agents, cyber space, visit a few sites and everything till you get satisfied and cross your fingers on a house.

Enquire the cost per sq. feet and make sure it is within your budget. Remember, on top of the house cost, there are registration charges, service tax, katha, woodwork, bathroom extra fittings, re-paint (if needed), furniture, decoration and stuff in that order. It would easily come to nearly 30-35% of the cost of the house itself. If your budget is 43 lakhs (for example), make sure that the cost of the house is somewhere around 33 lakhs.

Next and the most important. Enquire on the credibility of the land and the builder. There are so many varieties of real estate fraud happening around and you surely wouldn’t want to get fooled in any way in as big a project as a house.

You are happy with the house and with the builders (although you can never 100% be), next comes the home loans for all the middle class folks whose pockets wouldn’t be able to shell out lakhs. Decide on the bank from which you’d like to take the loan. Government banks like SBI are always preferable for lower interest rates but again, they wouldn’t offer more than 70% of the house cost as loan during recession times as now. And again, they’ll require a lot more procedures and visits that unless you know it’s within your scope, do not venture. As for the private banks, they steal from you anyway with higher interest rates. Just find a bank that steals the lowest of the lot!

Once you have finalized on the bank with the help of Google and enquiries from others’ experiences, approach them (read as, beg them). Fill in all the forms, submit all the requested documents, sign in all the so many places and wait…wait patiently!

One fine day, you will know that your home loan is approved. Before the bank changes its mind, go to the registration office and register the house to your name. Phew! That completes lap one.

While the first lap involves a lot of self work, the next involves getting work done. Drive the site engineers with calls and visits as frequently as possible or the work gets done like forever. Polite pleases will never do the trick. There would come a time when you realize that a few loud authoritative words is the only language that the workers understand.

Design the wood work for the wardrobes and stuff on an A4 sheet and find a sincere carpenter who would be able to replicate it for you. Make sure the carpenter doesn’t compromise on quality for cost or vice versa.

Purchase things and provide as and when the workers demand. Shopping for geysers, bathroom rods, fans, tube lights, plumbing fittings, floor and kitchen tiles, paints etc. is certainly a different kind of experience from the everyday shopping that you do and gosh, everything costs like hell!

Check if there are necessary electrical points in the house. Else, make sure you get the electrician to fix it all up before the painting begins.

Painting surely does the magic in spite of all the tougher businesses behind. A few strokes of shades transforms the look of the whole place. So chose proper shades as per your liking and if you are planning for a house warming ceremony, stop with a single coat of paint where the pooja is to happen or the smoke would tarnish the look a little.

Getting the cleaners to do the acid wash would finally remove the construction mess and make the house ready for occupation. So much marks lap two.

The final lap is the house warming ceremony. I would almost equate it to the convocation ceremony after your degree program and so you would want to do no less than what you did for the house.

Fix an auspicious date and arrange for a priest to conduct the pooja. Get a list of pooja items from him and run around the city in search of them until every item is ticked. Make a list of invitees and invite them. Arrange for catering including rented tables and chairs and arrange for transport and lodging for outstation invitees.

Look your best during the ceremony even though you might be deprived of sleep and suffocated from the pooja smoke. It’s your house and you want to drive the evil spirits away from it (that’s the point of the pooja, isn’t it?). If you sport the natural look which would have been totally screwed up due to all the efforts so long, your dark-eyes and soggy self might make the priest mistake you for the evil-spirit that he had come to drive away.

House warming done, officially announces that your house is livable. Wait no more! Pack your bag and baggage from wherever it is that you are put up and shift over to your new place. Why pay rent anymore when you are a proud house owner yourself?

Dump your belongings in your new place and unpack them. You would need another shopping spree for curtains, door mats, cloth hangers and what not. There is this final stage of losing hairs to the workers for painting re-coat, a nail here, a wedge there and a crack on the fourth tile in the second bathroom. I know, its pretty irritating and frustrating to have someone hammering and polishing after you have moved in but believe me, the earlier you get this all done, the warmer your house would be.

Bring in the furnishing now to fill up your house. A couch to sink in, a dinning table to eat (often used for multiple purposes) and a cot to stretch are certainly luxurious at the moment but necessities nevertheless.

Last but not the least is decoration. A flower vase, a wall clock and a painting is all it takes to finally transform your house to a cozy home, understood that you are going to scent it up with love and care and all that is good in the world.

Phew! Until I wrote this post, I didn’t realize that we had actually undergone all of these steps. OH MY! I am feeling mighty proud and rightfully too! My husband and I had to go through each of these phases all by ourselves and together. Right from a tooth brush holder to bedroom dresser, both of us had equal consent in everything and that is why we love this house so much. Now, as I rest myself on this soft sofa, after sipping hot tea at our dinning table, a tea prepared in our altered kitchen, before I go and inhale fresh air from the balcony and stretch my tired bones on our cot, I lift my chin and give myself a pat, this is our dream house and forever it will be!

Word Warriors

2009-05-14T14:17:00.029+05:30

This post is entirely a piece of fiction. Any resemblance to real people - living or dead - is purely conincidental.

“Prasad, our MD would like to meet you at 5 PM. Can you make it?”

Prasad checked his watch when the HR requested for the meeting. It showed 4:45 PM and there was a little more than an hour before the office timing for the day ends.

“Of course, I’ll go.” he replied politely. “And I know why I am being summoned.” he thought. Since the day he disagreed with his MD in an open town hall meeting on work-life balance, they had started sharing a silent rapport. Even after a year, the debate had not perished but the communication channel has been opened. It was no big surprise to figure out the reason to be called now.

Prasad walked to the MD’s cabin and told his PA that he was expected. MD was on a conference call and the PA assured to inform him once he was done. Prasad came back to his desk.

“Hey dude, what’s the matter? The big guy wants you?” His colleague poked in.

“Oh yeah, we have a date at 5.”

“Looks like someone more important has intervened his appointment with you.”

“That’s right! If our MD couldn’t make his appointment before 6, he’ll have to wait for mine until tomorrow.”

“I know… Pretty strict time principles uh? MD or MLA, you never budge. Some nerve you’ve got.” His colleague smiled and turned around to face his monitor, “which makes you YOU”, he added carelessly.

Prasad really didn’t have a choice. He was already juggling between his work and family in tight schedules. His wife falling sick suddenly tightened his schedule even more that he was about to snap. He wasn’t able to align with the company’s culture of stretching for long hours and extending weekends at work which he wouldn’t do even otherwise. He believes that work, agreed, consumes a major part of our life but there are things outside work as well that demands equal attention. There should be a balance!

“It doesn’t work that way dude, atleast here in this company. The philosophy is, the longer you sit in office, the more efficient they claim you to be.” One other friend told him previously over a cup of coffee, just like many others who had been cribbing to him casually on how their personal lives were getting screwed as well.

“But as long as I complete my work within the normal working hours, why should that matter? Isn’t completing work in lesser time more efficient than slogging and stretching for the same result?” Prasad argued.

“You are right, Prasad! But you are right in the wrong place!” He realized that his friend made sense. That’s when he decided to quit.

It was 5:30PM now and the PA came to his desk saying that the MD was now free. Prasad followed.

“Good evening, Shankar!”

“Good evening, Prasad! Well, not so good an evening as I’ve just learnt that you have given your resignation. I am disappointed. What’s the problem?”

Prasad was glad that the MD came to the point right away instead of beating around the bush. That’s why they like and respect each other in spite of conflict of ideas. Both Shankar and Prasad personally prefer upfront conversations to buttery, sugar coated ones. Like minded people at the two extreme and opposite rungs of the corporate ladder!

“My wife is sick and I need some time off.”

“Is that all? So how long do you need?”

“Two months would be a great time. I have decided to take a break, get things settled and then resume my career.”

“Two months it is then. You can take off for two months and come back to work. Resignation is a big step.”

“Not really, Shankar! I did request for a sabbatical break without salary from the HR and it wasn’t granted, rightfully of course as I had no leave balance anyways.”

“We can make exceptions for ‘A’ players. I’ll talk to the HR. I just accidently happened to hear of your resignation and am here talking to you. I wonder how many such people I have already lost!”

“That’s exactly the point. You have known me and we are here talking. There were and are people with similar concerns who have been and would be leaving for the similar reasons. If I were allowed a break, it should have come from the HR as it always does for everyone. I don’t want to take advantage of your influence.”

“Good! That’s why I always ask people to express themselves, express themselves to the HR or me or to whomsoever they are comfortable with. It almost never happens. They crib within themselves and call it quits on a fine day. I thought you were different Prasad.”

“I am no different from anyone who wants a proper work-life balance and I believe I did my expression when I had to.”

“Don’t go on again about work-life balance. The term eludes you to think that work and life are different entities. Work is a part of life.”

“PART of life, not life itself.”

“I didn’t say it is. I only hate the terminology. Call it work-family balance, work-kids balance, whatever, why work-life as if they both are poles apart?”

“Alright then. It’s just a terminology and I wasn’t the one who coined it. The concept still remains the same, doesn’t it?”

“I keep hearing it all the time that there is no work-life balance in this company. Do you really think so? It’s true that we have loads of work but that’s something we pride ourselves of. We leave it to the individuals to take accountability of their work. Its upto the people to balance their lives.”

“Not when there are official mails floating asking them to stretch. Not when they are set up with over-ambitious work estimates. You can’t be accountable for something that’s beyond you.”

“Agreed! We do not have proper estimates. Our customers are as demanding as we are at a grocery shop.”

“Customers demand quality and delivery, not the means adopted to produce it. Most of the extra hours are spent on rework than work, re-work because of errors that happened by tired people at odd hours of the night.”

“We are only asking our people to make centuries, we encourage them to. It’s for their own growth, for their own good.”

“We are ready to make centuries, even more. But limit the overs to 50; please don’t take 70 and 80 overs for granted.”

“What if it happens to exceed 50 overs then?”

“Once in awhile is fine. Else, call for another match!”

“Look here Prasad, every soil has its pests. The farmer should decide the pesticides he wants to.”

“The soil is fertile, Shankar. I just don’t see it fertile for my crop.”

“That’s it then, you are going in search of fertile pastures?”

“The weather is not good. I have halted cultivation for the time being.”

Small silence…

“You know you can influence people here, Prasad, if you want to. You have the capability.”

“Unfortunately, I am on a technical job, not political.”

“Fine! You win! You always manage to win Prasad. I wonder if your wife ever has a chance in an argument with you!” Shankar gave a defeated smile.

“Oh! She does and she wins. That’s how she married me.” Prasad returned an I-am-so-sorry smile.

“Good luck to you! You are welcome back anytime.”

“Thank you, Shankar! I do wish I would.”

Prasad comes out of the MD’s cabin and checks his watch – 6 PM sharp. He locks his machine, grabs his bag and walks to his bus-stop, remembering a few indirect incidents and unpleasant discussions that he was subjected to with his other superiors, the discussions and superiors that he entirely kept away in his conversation with his MD. He knew what he was doing; he knew he had to move on and that’s exactly what he did.

Love or War?

2009-04-20T16:24:00.007+05:30

A surge of emotion swiped through Rakesh everytime he saw Suchita’s expired wedding invitation. He wasn’t exactly happy for her happiness, neither was he too upset about losing her. He had resigned himself to the fact that she no longer belonged to him, belonged the way she once did when he could manipulate her feelings to his advantage. She no longer brooded for him or begged him to be back. She was now married to someone who would love and care for her the way she would in return. She was cured of her sickness for him, was fully free and shining in spirits with all due help from her husband.

Suchita, as he knew her back then was a quick-witted clever female with the reputation of being the prim and prom ice princess. She was good-looking, smart and amiable which naturally made her enticing to the youthful lads of her college. Yet, there was that impenetrable stone wall she surrounded herself with and dared not allow anyone to penetrate. Whatever the reasons, it was safely concealed beneath her masking confident grace, enhancing her dignity.

Rakesh was too proud to be aware of her vulnerabilities when he first courted her. The very fact that the unattainable ice had melted to his charm had baked his ego to un-proportioned magnitude. Ego - well, that was his something! He always projected himself as a martyr, a big brother, a this, a that, that he finally ended up in having no identity of his own. He was always a gentleman and succeeded in creating first impressions. It was the maintaining of impressions that became a problem for it never was his in the first place. Weakness, doubts and double-facedness would give away one time or the other. However, Suchita’s smartness crumpled before her fluttering infatuated heart, that she made excuses to herself for Rakesh’s misgivings, yearning for a love that she seldom got from her family. Rakesh on the other hand wore her like a crown, used her head for ideas and his mouth to advocate advices to his mates that he was soon acknowledged better than he had expected. He became more conceited than he cared.

Conceit it was but that didn’t stop him from loving her; He loved her because she loved him. Precisely, he loved himself. He had drawn Suchita into an abyss through his pretences like Satan alluring Eve with the forbidden apple. Already troubled in other ways, Suchita didn’t pose much of a difficulty to his expertise. When he had finally triumphed as her emotional ring-master, he had started exploiting it gradually. She had to agree to what he said happily and if she didn’t, he accused her for not being understanding. He would make promises that he wouldn’t keep and still expect her to accept him as trustworthy. All said and done with an oh-so-goody-good accent. Her skills scaled her to heights better than Rakesh which skidded on his ego. What started as a swirl soon became a cyclone. By the time she saw him through and through, she had already lost her heart to him painfully.

After many hurtful arguments and neglected isolation in needy times, Suchita finally realized that she was pointlessly trying to resuscitate an empty one-sided relationship. Given sometime, she understood her follies and decided to go on with her life. When decisions were made, her determination took in charge and there was no going back. Fortunately, the stars favored her when her stamina was exhausted and bestowed her to her true beloved, who went on to become her husband. He helped her help herself and restored her to the princess that she was, the ice replaced with warmth.

This nagged Rakesh. He had got accustomed to Suchita’s pleadings that he couldn’t come to face the fact that she was fine without him. He now had no one to show himself off or to borrow her cool as his to administer. Besides, he had loved her himself and even though it was selfish, it still hurt. Rakesh knew that the moment he takes the so-sad approach, she would melt down again and become his puppy. He called her back to his life, not realizing the transformation that a spurned heart can go through. Pent up anger boiled though Suchita like a volcano when she heard him in the same sorry tone that he always used on her. She erupted out with fury, sending his egos to ashes. He can never pretend a martyr after crucifying her soul. She was someone else’s then and packed him off with his pretences.

Time as it always does moved on unhindered. If anything, Suchita‘s unfortunate experience with Rakesh only made her appreciate her beloved’s true love for her all the more. She was happy and peaceful, with life returned back to her manifolds, letting away all the grudge and even forgiving Rakesh. She knew that she was happy off without him and thanked heavens for her realizations before it was too late. After ages of no contacts and with no beguilement, she had sent out her wedding invitation to Rakesh, not really expecting him to turn up but glad enough if he did.

In the meantime, Rakesh had tailored a sacrificing story to win his friends’ sympathies, transcripts borrowed from the senti movies across all languages. It was when Rakesh received the invite that the surge of emotion swipped through him the first time. With many false smilies, he offered his wishes and congratulations, promising to be there on her wedding. How would he ever miss her wedding, his pretended personality beemed in his reply. She inwardly grinned at his wishes and pitied him for his disguises that had become his second self, too late now to let go. She let go of him with a smothering answer, knowing that he was suffering from a nagging ego that hadn’t altered a single bit. She was sure that there wouldn’t be another meeting. Rakesh never turned up at the wedding.

Honeymoon Hungama

2009-03-17T17:10:00.027+05:30

Right decisions never call for regrets. At any point of time when we look back at it and still feel the same way that we did when we first made up our minds, we know we had made the right decision. I had made my most important right decision on the 19^th of August, 2007, I tell myself. That’s the day when I committed myself to marrying my husband who, today, at this morning hour as I wake up, lays wriggled under his blanket like a grown-up kid beside me. His face is calm and serene and to my sleepy eyes they seem almost innocent, signifying deep drowned slumber, much in contrast to the thousand monkey expressions that he makes at me during the day to see a smile stay put on my face. I smile at him now, even without his funny expressions. I had made a right decision! Touch wood!

The clock warns me to either be up and ready for the ITPL bus or bunk office at loss of pay. As much as I desired to yield in to the second option, I decided against it. Having just prided myself for my right decision, I wouldn’t want to make a wrong one on the spur of the moment. A quick bath under the shower, a quick sip of hot coffee and I was ready to be transported to the other corner of the city where my office and desk awaits me.

I follow a standard pattern during my morning bus ride to office. 1) Wait at the bus stop 2) Get into the bus 3) Sit 4) Sleep 5) Get down at office. Simple! Today, my pattern was disrupted at step 3. I saw a crowded bus with more than twenty people without a seat. That bus guaranteed a minimum of an hour and half of standing and there was no other ITPL bus on that route thereafter. For a split second, I was tempted to run back home and nestle myself cozily beside my sleeping hubby and join him in a dreamy duet. In what was left of the split second, I climbed into the bus and plugged my headphones inside my ears to make myself deaf to the rolling traffic. My favorite romantic melody collection from my playlist poured into my ears one by one and I was within the bus only physically. Just like the movies where our heroes and heroines play their romances under the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum, I remembered the romances of my honeymoon. Even for a dream sequence, our budget wouldn’t allow us to the Eiffel. So, I remembered my true trip to Kalimpong, Gangtok and Darjeeling.

Vijay and I had planned and booked our honeymoon package two months ahead of our wedding and with the conclusion of the wedding on the 2nd of Feb 2009, our anticipation started mounting. Anticipation not only for the obvious reasons of a honeymoon but also for the lovely sightseeing that the North-East India promised. The chilly weather, frosty air and snow clad peaks were romances by themselves. Off-season was winding up and season was slowly blooming. We were extremely lucky to enjoy the low tariffs of the off-season and the view of the amazing landscapes of the season, with ultimate privacy.

Our first halt at Kalimpong was the most silent and the scariest of all. I had never heard of Kalimpong as a place until I was there myself. The hotel where we stayed hosted just the two of us for the night. It was a grand antique place with deer skin decorations, wide moon-facing windows and full length mirrors that reminded us of all the horror movies that we had ever seen. Like the only lovers, amidst throngs of spirits, singing seducing symphonies!!! Kalimpong at day light was very scarcely populated which assured a pollution free scenery. There was that Tibetan touch everywhere we went, right from the Buddhist monasteries to the like-faced-people with slit eyes and flat noses. Adventure was inevitable when we adorned the life jackets for 11km river rafting. As we bumped up and down the melting waters of the glaciers with the misty mountains, carving along either sides, I couldn’t help getting glimpses of William Wordsworth’s ‘The Stolen Boat Ride’. Had it been nightfall, the ride would have exactly been as poetic as that. Loved it! Absolutely!

Our next destination was to the capital of Sikkim – Gangtok. Neither as calm as Kalimpong, nor too dazzling as Darjeeling, Gangtok was the place of our choice, a place of courteous people whose humility and hospitality made us almost feel indebted. More monasteries and museums! Carpet weaving and colorful handiworks! It’s difficult to believe that Gangtok is in a country that homes trendy and buzzing cities with overflowing population. People there have in plenty what we are deficient in – peace and harmony! While Gangtok made me heave a sigh, its super spot made me envious, the super spot called Tsomgo Lake. At an altitude of 13,500 feet above sea level, the hills were coated with ice flakes and the frozen ponds. Snow found its nest here and there over the rocks completing the picturesque. Vijay and I had fun; I mean real fun with the snows. Our shoes lost their grip on the ice floor and that was our natural ice skating there. No rest at all to the cameras which in addition to capturing the exquisite beauties, had to bear with the funky and romantic poses of tourists and honeymooners like us. Our taste buds miss those steaming hot Chowmein and spicy fried Mou-Mou (a delicacy there) eaten in a climate of -4 degree centigrade. If any place deserves a WOW, it was this.

The final part of our honeymoon was to the queen of hills – Darjeeling. Marvelous though it was, after Kalimpong and Gangtok, I should say that we were slightly disappointed. Being marked as a tourist location, it was properly commercialized and that somehow compromised its virgin beauty. Yet, with the zoos and gardens, it was awesome in its own way attracting the tourists with its foggy façade. The weather was at its extreme cold and with two layers of winter clothing, we still couldn’t feel warm. Day turned dark by 6 o’clock and an evening walk along the mall seemed like an after dinner stroll. Sweaters and shawls were for sale at simple prices and antique stalls were on every street. Asked for an adjective to describe this place, all I could say is ‘proud but a little haughty’ Darjeeling!

After one week of honeymoon that stretched across Kalimpong, Gangtok and Darjeeling, our last day back home happened to be on the Valentine’s Day. All those previous mornings, we were hurrying up for another day of site seeing that only on this last day as I woke up from my bed did I pause to notice my hubby in sound slumbers beside me, wriggled in rugs, just like the way he was this morning. One might be brainy or brawny, clever or cunning but when asleep, one is just his natural self. I guess that was when I started admiring my hubby’s sleeping self. He surprised me with a bouquet at breakfast and winked at me his naughty way. Was he the same little fella curled up in the bed that morning? I couldn’t believe! Nevertheless, I loved him, love him and will always do. The bus reached ITPL and I broke away from my trance. As I walked to my office, I still hadn’t washed off that smile, a satisfied smile. I had made a right decision! Touch wood!

From Miss to Mrs.

2009-02-23T14:46:00.015+05:30

Why did I feel like running away to some corner of the world and hide myself to be undiscovered forever? Why did I feel that way when I had been running a count down for months together for that day and for that moment? It was my wedding within a week and I had been eagerly awaiting it. I knew my groom better than I knew anyone else in the world. I knew how things were going to be and was prepared and happy for it. Still, there I was feeling so scared and nervous, totally unlike me. So many pre-marital rituals and ceremonies were happening around and I couldn’t really participate whole-heartedly. My plastic smile was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain when marriage-o-phobia started creeping into my heart. Has someone thrust a huge bar of beam onto my shoulders to bear for always or has someone clipped off my wings? Is this the way every bride-to-become feels or am I the odd woman out? I did not know and I did not want to know. All I wanted was to be free!!!

The jitterier I became, the quicker time drifted by leaving me on the porch of Feb 1^st, 2009, evening, my reception evening. I was all dressed up and ready to be driven to the wedding hall but the sweat beads wouldn’t stop coming, messing up whatever effort the beautician had put in making up my face. I was pacing up and down within my house like a husband outside his wife’s delivery room, waiting for the car. That was the most difficult of all the waits that I had to endure. The car horned after an hour sending the butterflies in my stomach for a jolly ride. “Archu…come on, its okie, you can do it, you can do it…”, with all self motivation, I set my face again to an expression which I assumed was a decent smile and with pretended confidence, opened the car door to sit beside my groom.

Vijay, my groom, whom I knew for years together, suddenly seemed to me like a stranger in suit that I had to blink twice and pinch once to remind myself I wasn’t dreaming. He wore a bright smile and I half believed that he was sporting it for everyone’s benefit just like me. The car took off and chucked us out to the mercy of the photographers. I couldn’t differentiate between sisters, aunties and grannies when the ladies in silk started to take turns at us with ‘aarathi’ plates (that’s another custom there). The fact that my cousin Aarthi was among the ‘Aarathi’ queue didn’t amuse me then and I even forgot the fact that she was among my friends’ hot crush list. Suddenly I wanted to swap places with her. I wanted to be the carefree girl enjoying the reception of her sis with no fears or worries except to bask herself in the young men’s gloating. “Idiot!”, I scolded myself once again as I proceeded inside the hall along with Vijay wearing the same setup smile that I swore to wear on for the whole evening.

That was all the memory I had of that evening. No sooner did we step up the dais than friends and families poured in from both sides with wishes and gifts. It was all happening too fast that we had to shake hands with one and pose for a snap with another. We couldn’t really turn to one another to introduce our guests among ourselves. But I was secretly glad for it. The frenzied environment gave no time for any fears other than to stay focused on whatever was happening. Amidst all the activity, there was that good feel which kept us on ground. Meeting friends and families from far and near, from long ago to just awhile under a single roof was really rewarding and the rewards didn’t subside until after dinner time.

It was an effort to keep my eyes from drooping and dozing when Vijay and I were again subjected to the photographers’ so called romantic poses. Who would feel romantic with a flash light on their face at 10 o’clock in the night and cousins passing swift comments? Vijay was lucky for he was excused for the day after the photo session but the poor me was again asked to change costume for another round of ‘Nalungu’. If it not had been for the rose water that the women folks were sprinkling on me one after the other, I would have fallen asleep right then.

Though I was totally tired, sleep evaded me. Reception was just a rehearsal, wedding was the D-Day and it was our wedding the next day. I was tempted to SMS Vijay and talk to him just the way I always do when I was feeling different. Of all the days, it was then that I wanted to hear his voice and feel the support in it. But know what? They say, bride and groom conversing before the wedding was bad omen and it wasn’t the omen but that belief that made me feel bad. We both were in adjacent rooms, not seeing or talking or sharing our feelings, turning and trying to sleep fruitlessly.

Feb 2^nd,2009 dawned early and thankfully my restlessness had gone to sleep when I woke up. Fresh oil bath and the scent of morning flowers lifted my spirits that I smiled without forced effort. I was again dressed and made to adorn traditional attire and I didn’t crib about it this time. Daylight and a proper breakfast indeed had magic-ked my mood from mourn to merriment. Vijay and I didn’t have to stand or pose as much as we had to the day before for the priest kept us engaged. The analytical me mocked at me myself for doing and chanting things that I never understood but the coyness of a bride (believe me, I did feel a little shy and coy) made me succumb.

Neither Vijay nor I realized it was time when the priest gave his ‘Getti Meylam’ signal. With all the pee pee pee dum dum dum, Vijay tied the nuptial knot around my neck making me his life partner. I felt a lovely feel within, a feel that Vijay and I have been bonded forever, to belong to each other fully and rightfully with no inhibitions or reservations. No more ‘just friends’, no more ‘boyfriend-girlfriend’, no more fiancé, we were now proudly husband and wife. Thanks to the marriage registrar who had come to the wedding hall and had us sign our marriage agreement that we officially became Mr. & Mrs. Vijay.

Whatever confusion I underwent over the week before the wedding seemed too insignificant then for my heart re-iterated it loud and bold “This is what you wanted Archu and that is exactly what you have”. I was genuinely happy, as happy can be. More rituals and customs followed but nothing bothered me anymore. Let the ceremonies run on for hours. Let the celebrations go on for days. Let them take all the time they need to settle down. I have a lifetime with Vijay and that is what that really matters, isn’t it?

Dear Diary

2008-12-29T13:30:00.016+05:30

I feel like I had aged a hundred years in the last two months and why not? Two things that are considered essentially challenging by the Indian community are building a house and preparing for a wedding. When you try to do both simultaneously, aging a hundred years is slightly on the down side. I only hope that I don’t sport wrinkles and grey hairs on my big day and if I do, I only hope that my groom goes bald to compliment me! :) It all started in the first week of November when Vijay and I had set out to order our wedding invitations. That officially marked the beginning of the preparations for our marriage. Then came the house hunt process and home loans procedures to eat our time and chew our energies, and that is without mentioning the financial stress and budget planning. All the necessary and unnecessary, expected and the unexpected lined up in queue and liberally used our weekends, competing with the office work and Bangalore traffic that always swallowed the weekdays. The only solace in the midst of all the hassles is that busy though I am, it gives me immense happiness and satisfaction at the end of the day when I realize that I am finally, contentedly settling down.

There was a time when I felt compelled to blog on the vents and events of my life. Lately I had been blogging fictions and fantasies and very recently, I am hardly blogging. But there is one other place where I document my days in spite of my moods or schedules, a place that needs no sensor, and a place that’s only for me. Oh yeah, in this ultra modern twenty first century, I still suffer from the age old habit of dairy writing. Only when I purchased a brand new 2009 diary and was stacking my old ones that I realized that I’ve been suffering through it for at least 10 years now. It is a physical log of reminder to the number years spent or wasted just like the new one reminded me that I have not aged a hundred years after all. With my ‘settling down syndrome’ running its course, I fondly turned the pages of some of the previous years and that took me on a roller-coaster ride of feelings and sentiments.

I was around fourteen years old when I started pouring out to empty pages of a diary. Nah, pouring out wouldn’t be an apt term for that age, as the entries were mostly like “I went to Queen’s Land theme park with my cousins. Oh what fun we had!” or “The annual day celebrations in school happened this evening” and so on. I smiled at my innocence when I read my own lines written then with bold green sketch pen on the front page “Princess’ secret chamber…Trespassers prohibited!” as if visiting a theme park or celebrating annual day was any juicy secret worth trespassing.

As the years passed by I realize I had been unconsciously and involuntarily bonding with my diary stronger and stronger that I’ve started addressing it in second person. My revelations sent a strange feeling down my spine when the memories flashed before my eyes as if yesterday. That’s what diaries do; they make you re-live your life all over again with each word drawing images from your memory. It wouldn’t be a lie if I said I was slightly shivering.

How many people have I met in this ten years span and how many experiences! Some still in contact, some who are lost out, some had bonded closer, some gone afar, some I miss, some I’d never forget and some I’d never want to meet again. How many people! And how many experiences have they brought by. Good or bad, each experience has tamed and taught me things I wouldn’t have learnt from all the libraries around.

There is no better friend than a diary to speak out. My diary carries not only my life or people but my own mindset and emotion as I had narrated then. When I crib, my diary would simply listen. No judgments, no unsolicited advices, it simply listens till I feel heard out and relieved. When I give it sometime and re-read my verse, my diary would do my talking back to me and I become the listener. Hearing my own thoughts and feelings from my mouth but in a clearer mind had helped me sort out whatever mess that I was in. It made me feel good about my little unknowing deeds of kindness or feel sorry and ashamed for the wrongful things I had done or the hurtful things I had said. All in all, my diary has aided me to grow and mature from an innocent teenager to a ‘would-be’ bride of today without external dependency.

I even believe that my blogging inspiration sprang from my years of diary writing, agreed; blogs are revised and manipulated versions. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have cultivated a liking for writing without my diary. Years from now, when I am old and withered, I would rather spend my years reading my diaries and re-living my life than chanting verses from Bible, Gita or Kuraan. What better way to count my blessings and repent for my sins than my own diaries! With just another three days to wind up with my 2008 dairy, here is a tribute to my next one.

As earth spins to another day,
I pause each night to have my say.
To voice my heart, my own way,
Imprinting memories to last and stay.

Pouring thoughts these pages down,
Gentle talk with silent sound.
My diary, my friend, I trust you to the end,
Come what may, don’t give me away!

Escapade - True Episode

2008-12-04T09:36:00.015+05:30

Ajay was too short even for an eight year old but his face reflected determination. He had made up his mind; he had to leave! He re-checked the contents of his school bag and found his scales and stencils intact. If he were to make a living out of drawings and calligraphy, he would surely need those. He got down from his school bus and started walking and walking, not in the direction of his house.

Ajay’s mom checked the wall-clock. He was supposed to have reached home an hour ago but hasn’t arrived yet. She must teach him to come home straight after school, clean up, finish home-work and then go out to play. Naughty Boy!

“Ajay! Ajay!” Ajay’s dad remained a teacher not only at school but stretched it to his family as well. His loud authoritative voice as he called Ajay was an evidence.

“Your son is not back from school. Why don’t you pick him up from school when you return than letting him come by school bus?” His mom started.

“Hmm…I know what to do without telling. I am his father.”

“And I am his mother.”

Silence! Quarrels and arguments have become so habitual to Ajay’s parents that they fix it with the only solution they had. Silence! Cold war had always been in the waking.

Ajay felt proud to be walking alone along the main road much like Ishaan of Taare Zameen Par. He knew he could do this even though he hadn’t come class first. His dad had warned him last time, “Do not enter the house without topping the class!” He opened his progress report, saw the “II Rank” against his Half-Yearly exams, scribbled by his class teacher who often criticized his hand-writing and felt justified about his decision. He was always an obedient boy and he wasn’t going to digress now. The sun was winding up its job on Ajay’s side of the world and a semi-transparent moon in the twilight sky followed him as he walked on.

The clock struck sharp seven times and the acoustics of the house amplified it in spite of the chaotic household.

“Are you sure he didn’t play cricket with you this evening?”

“No mas-ter…uhm …uncle. He left school at 3 O’clock. I called him to the canteen to share my pepsi cola but he said he was not thirsty. Ajay loves Pepsi cola, particularly orange flavor. I like pineapple; still I offered to get orange as he seemed very upset. He didn’t want it. He only wanted to leave. I really don’t know where he is, God Promise!” The child who was Ajay’s dearest friend started rattling, scared to be questioned by his teacher about his son.

“Don’t worry sir! He must have gone to another friend’s house. We’ll check out. He’ll be back.” Neighbors who got a sniff of the story came to Ajay’s residence in curiosity. To make the reason seem less obvious, they wrapped it with the excuse of providing comforting words.

“How long are you going to keep talking? I need my son. Do something. Get him back to me!” The weaker sex isn’t so weak when it comes to expressing distress. Ajay’s mom was wailing.

Ajay was beginning to get afraid when his legs started hurting. He had been walking for a long time. The night was getting eerie as the traffic settled down. He had gone to his grandparents’ house many times with his mom and dad but never in the dark and never by walk. Why hasn’t he reached his grandparents’ place yet? Tiny drops of tears rolled down his little cheek as he remembered that he hadn’t eaten anything since that morning and was very very hungry. He wanted to eat, he wanted to sleep, mummy…he wanted to go home. He was blinded momentarily by the bright light spilled by a lorry behind him and turned around. Maybe, he should ask for lift from the lorry uncle? Maybe….

“Who are you boy? Where are you going? Whats your name?” There was no need for Ajay to ask the lorry uncle for the uncle stopped the lorry and took the boy in by himself.

“I…I… I am Ajay. I am going home from school.”

“Home from school? At this hour? Which school?” The driver took a notebook out of Ajay’s bag and saw that the school from which Ajay was going home from was at least 16km away in the town. They were now in a high way.

“And where do you say your home is?”

“It’s near only. If I go straight, there will be a mango tree. Take a left from there and go straight straight and straight till Lallu’s sweet shop. Two streets from there is my house.” Ajay was carefully giving his assumed directions to his grandparents’ house.

The lorry driver raised his brows, hearing Ajay leading him to the neighboring town. This boy was surely upto something. “Now boy! Where are you going? Tell me the truth or I take you to the police. NOW!”

Increase in decibels in the driver’s tone broke all the confidence and pretence in Ajay that he started crying.

“No uncle, Don’t take me to the police. I am a good boy! My daddy…my daddy told me not to come to my house if I don’t come class first.” Ajay’s voice broke as he spoke” I studied really hard but that fat miss cut two marks for my lack of neatness in the answer sheet and I lost first rank. I don’t know where to go…so I am going to my grandpa-grandma’s house. Granny is so good. She will not scold me.”

The innocent confession coming from a tired little boy must have touched the driver’s soul for he changed his mind about abducting him and claiming a ransom. Before temptation could convince his morality, he stopped by a chai-shop and stuffed a glass of tea and bun in little Ajay’s hand. The shopkeeper took a good look at Ajay and repeated the interrogation, “Who are you boy?”

Ajay was just about to begin his woeful plight in between his breaks from munching the bun when the driver saved him the trouble by filling in the shop-keeper. As the shop-keeper and the lorry driver together ransacked Ajay’s school bag for his address and schemed ways to take the boy home to safety, Ajay had had enough of his adventure and looked longingly at the chocolate tins at the shop-keeper’s display.

“Alright! Alright! I have waited enough. I am going to the police.” Ajay’s dad was partly angry and partly anxious. He, accompanied by his brother walked towards the police station when they saw him. Ajay was hiding behind the shopkeeper and was tagging along reluctantly like a wounded puppy as he was being led towards his house.

“Sir, Is this your son?”

“Yes! Who are you? What happened?”

“And boy, is he your dad?”

“Yes uncle! Dad…dad…I didn’t come class first. You said….”

The shop-keeper stopped Ajay and narrated the episode to his dad. As a compliment, he prescribed a little kindness to him. “Poor child! Do not ask him anything, atleast today. He is scared!”

Ajay was handed over to his father’s custody once again and Ajay feared the look in his dad’s eyes. He was taken home silently, along the street that was lined up with muttering neighbors. He felt like a yuvaraj being led to his guillotine.

Ajay’s mom rushed to him. “Oh Ajay! My dear…I was so worried. Where were you?

“Shhh! Don’t ask him anything!”

Ajay was taken in and left by himself as his parents started discussing in low volume. Ajay entered his room and was waiting to drift off to slumbers. But Alas! He just remembered! His absconding plans included a day-off from school and escape from homework. Now that he was back, he would have to face his eagle-spectacled Maths teacher the next day. Like a good boy, as he thought he was still one, he opened his homework notebook and started writing the multiplication tables…two ones are two…two twos are four…two threes are six…

Tangled Affections

2008-10-16T18:00:00.040+05:30

“Warrey Wah! Look, look, over here!!! What a face, what a figure! She is a killer!” Ashok felt handicapped. He needed more than one pair of eyes (so wide open that they would pop out of their sockets anytime) to admire the skimpily clad sexy chick on the front page of a leading fashion magazine.

“OOOOOOOO WOW she is simply gorgeous! Is she really a lady or a wax doll? My my my!!!” Amit extended the services of his eyes to where Ashok was pointing to.

These two bachelor friends in their twenties were bachelors in the real sense. In spite of having watched a number of adults-only movies or having browsed thru numerous pornography magazines, they were still virgins. Confused between the Indian tradition and culture, their own physical calls and lack of opportunities, they remained so. Imagination, expectation and anticipation coupled together proved to be more vicious than any Viagra of any kind. They always got excited at the slightest smell of female for it was something that they had never smelt in reality.

“Not again! Please, not again! Stop gaping at it…err…her, you shameless dumbos! She is nothing but a silicon beauty! Anita was getting cross as she always does when her buddies got into such boys-only talk. Though she tried to sound like a ‘goooood girl’, age was not the only thing that she shared with these guys. She fancied such lustful ideas herself but within her head only, afraid of having her so called dignified outward impression and name spoilt.

“You are a hypocrite! I have seen you passing stealth glances at this magazine. Come on, why do you pretend? Why don’t you just be?” Amit sprang to his defense-by-blame mode immediately.

“Don’t bother Amit! They all pretend! Girls, I mean. They preach something and act different. Living together with two bachelor guys in an apartment in America does not change them. Good old Anita!”

“That’s enough! I live with you guys because you are the only folks I know in this new country. And mind you, just because I share the rent, it does not mean I share everything! I trust you people whereas you mock at me! Beasts!” Anita had the knack of working her tear glands at beck and call. Her eyes had moistened already.

“Hold it Anita! Now, don’t pull another drama. We are tired of it…”

“…and hungry too. Whose turn is it at the kitchen today?”

Anita threw a dirty look at the two of them and walked into the kitchen. Her hand was luxuriously spreading the jam on the toast while her mind was thinking of Ashok. How dare he takes sides with the senseless Amit and not her? How dare he ogles at a semi naked shameless slut when she was in the vicinity? Had she not worn the peach colored T-Shirt and black jean because he had once complimented her look on it? How dare he fails to notice her this time? Does he not share the same secret feelings that she has for him? When would he realize! Oh! When would he realize!”

While Anita was cooking crooked thoughts at the kitchen, Ashok and Amit had their own small talk.

“Sucks man! Why does Anita always behave like this? She has just spoilt the gleeful evening here with her oh-so-goody-good-acting. Didn’t I not tell you that girls are good only to look at? The closer you get to them, the madder they make you.” Ashok was clearly irritated. He never liked the idea of letting Anita join their apartment in the first place. Had it not been for Anita’s sister’s request he would have flatly refused. Wasn’t it not enough that he wrongly mistook Anita for her sis once and complimented her attire? Wasn’t it not enough that she blushed like a pinky and bragged about it to her sis on the phone who in turn refused to reply to Ashok’s mails for the next two days? What the heck? Why all the trouble?

“Cool it buddy! Cool it! She isn’t so bad. You know, it isn’t so easy for a girl to put up with two guys like us and lie to her parents about it. She is just so scared but too proud to admit it. Give her a break!” Amit tried to see things from Anita’s point of you. He always did. He convinced Anita to move in with them when she announced her on-site travel for he was worried about leaving her by herself in a new country. He loved to tease her and pull her legs. He loved to make her angry and irritate her. He loved to be around her and protect her. He loved her.

“Whatever…I don’t care a damn!” This was Ashok aloud.

“I hope he does care someday” Anita murmurs alone.

“I care the world for you darling!” Amit smiles to himself.

And so they live…

Reel or Real?

2008-09-23T17:07:00.012+05:30

Sometimes she never understood what she wanted to do with her life, what she wanted to be and what to become. Her life was a perfect piece of poetry with a decent career, loving partner and happy neighborhood. There isn’t anything more that she could probably ask for without having her coined greedy. Yet, there she was sitting poignantly, with an unsettled nagging feeling lurking inside her head making her hallucinate at odd times. Yet, there she was hitch-hiking her life aimlessly, hitting the stones on the way, and gaping at the heavens to guide her to her destination.

If you are able to align yourself with the “she” above, welcome to my league of confused professionals. Three years into IT has made me reach a summit of saturation with the monotonous routines and endless hours in front of a dumb machine. I just want to break away the imaginary shackles of the corporate world and breathe in fresh air. Hmmm…. fresh free air! Discovering my destiny has become my recent obsession and I have been doing nothing in the way of it than prodding on and muddling multiple ideas. I am not unhappy, no not at all; I am only interested in finding out the one thing that would make me happy – unraveling my life’s mission (or mystery, whatever!).

Now honestly, I do sound like a monk (with no Ferrari to sell) who is out on a walk to the Himalayas in pursuit of inner peace, don’t I? But that’s not my general idea. Mine is not an age to renounce the worldly pleasures, nor do I find Sannyasa alluring, considering that I am just engaged. In simple language, I am completely confused! And when my mind is in such an alcoholic state, what do I do? That’s Right! Allow my imaginations to take freewill……

I had never seen such pure blue before. Blue above, blue below, blue all around as I sat on the white cloudy patch. The altitude was definitely not beyond stratosphere for I was breathing freely without the help of an oxygen tank. But surely, I was floating in the upper layers of atmosphere at least. The cloud that carried me seemed to move on its own as if an invisible driver steered its way. I squatted on my knees and peeped below at the dotted landscape and felt a strange sense of power! I was up above the world so high! I felt like God!

There was a tiny twinkle ahead which gradually grew in size as my cloudy boat approached it. Thanks to my childhood bedtime stories, it didn’t take me long to make out that I was driven to the Cinderella castle, supposedly housed by a fairy Godmother. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I sailed between the huge pillared hallway, shivering slightly at the magnificence of it all.

“Do not fear my child! You are not brought here to be harmed.”, A soft voice spoke from behind me. “Rather, you are brought to be blessed!.

I turned around instantly and found myself facing not a fairy Godmother but a fairy Grandmother. With not a single strand of hair that hadn’t greyed from old age, not a single inch on the face that wasn’t wrinkled, I randomly judged her to be not less than a hundred years old.

“Err…you are Cinderella’s God Mother, aren’t you?” I hesitated.

“No dear, I am Snow White’s evil mother who gave her the poisoned apple...” She told this casually and still expected me not to fear. Absurd! “…but that was in my previous birth. Not only men, but we heavenly creatures are also given second chances. Now I’ve turned a new fairy!”

I looked at her, not understanding a word, still puzzled about the purpose of my visit. As if knowing my confusion, she continued, “You are brought here to be blessed with this magic lamp.” She stretched an Aladdin lamp from beneath her cloak and winked mischievously.”

“Aladdin lamp from Snow white’s mother in a Cinderella castle?” I wanted to ask. But all the same, I knew that any answer to my query would sound as insane as the previous exchanges. I remained silent.

“My child, you are fast! This is of course Aladdin’s lamp!” She read my mind once again before me and she calls me “fast”!!! “Whenever you are confused, whenever you are frustrated without answers, just rub the lamp. My genie would pop-out with all possible solutions and your needs would be addressed.”

Solutions? I have frequently heard this word before in a different world. Coming from a habitant of paradise, I was amused. “Thank You!” I thanked her for her kindness and reached out for the lamp. The minute my fingers touched the lamp, I was blacked out and brought back to reality, in front of my machine, far far away from the clouds and skies.

The code window that I was working on before my visit to the heavens was exactly the way I had left it and the debugger was still flashing an ‘exception’ in the code. There was no lamp in my hands and I felt disappointed. Oh, not just another dream! Yet, it all seemed so real. I grabbed a coffee, got to my seat to continue my work. By default, I opened Internet Explorer and typed www.google.com in search of a solution to my exception. The Google window popped up with a genie logo on the letter ‘G’. I understood the rest.

Dreams and Déjà vu

2008-08-04T17:56:00.008+05:30

Dream people dream.
Dream wild dreams.
As dusk draws its screens,
Begin wicked dreams.

I am not chanting Dr. Abdul Kalaam’s words. His dreams are conscious, those that you think, imagine, plan and set stage for execution. I am talking about silly, stupid and senseless dreams. If you are worrying about my sanity, oh yeah, I am not insane yet, just instilled with dreams. So...dream people dream…dream wild dreams….

When the alarm screamed into my ears this morning, I didn’t feel like waking up at all. Not because I was tired. Not because I was sleepy. I had had a wonderful dream. I was dreaming of the jungles…thrilling, fascinating and myself casting the heroine – CUT – I was tangling from a rope tied from the apex of a waterfall, tempting the splashing waters to wash me away – CUT – I was tying my shoe lace unaware of the tiger behind me, ready to pounce – CUT – I was eating hot banana bajis and sipping hotter elachi tea – CUT – the alarm screamed into my ears. I had missed my dream ever before the imaginary taste of tea on my tongue could fade away. No wonder I didn’t feel like waking up at all! I squirmed on my bed for a few more minutes in frail fruitless attempts of reviving them. Like time, dreams once lost doesn’t come back, or at least doesn’t come back when you want them to.

I am a dreamer, sometimes day-dreamer and that sometimes happens often. I love weaving vivid dreams and living them in my mind for dreams have no boundaries. They are beyond the laws of physics or the logistics of life. They pull out the deepest desires and safest secrets of our hearts and direct those to a film with inherit story and screenplay. Oh, dreaming is pleasure! Some psychologists preach alpha mind concepts to turn your dreams to reality. But I don’t not want them to become real. The sheer fact that they exist between the real and unreal is what makes dreams so tantalizing.

“Why a sudden post on dreams today?“

“Déjà vu.”

I started my work at office with a bug fix. At a precise moment, when I was writing a particular line of code, I had this strange feeling of having done this very act before…of course, this is my occupation and that’s what I do everyday but its not that…err…I had seen this very picture of me sitting in front of my system, at exactly the same location and writing the same line of code for the same bug before. Probably in a dream? Sounds silly but its sounds even sillier to assume that I have become clairvoyant. To emphasize, this wasn’t the first time that I get such queer feelings and I am not the only one either.

I remember having conversations with friends on this regard and most of them have agreed that they share similar experiences too. A little googling told me that it is common phenomenon while no where could I find a decent scientific explanation. Now, that’s scary! Though I immensely enjoyed my jungle gymnastics this morning, I definitely wouldn’t dare the same. Dreams are like video games – you have many chances to die and come back but life does not provide such luxuries except of course for Jesus Christ.

Coming back to my point, do dreams contain glimpses of our future or are they forged versions of our past? Do they portray our longings or betray our insecurities? Are dreams and prophecies related or are they one and the same? This line of questioning sounds more sinister than sensible but it has just aroused my curiosity. So…dream people dream…dream wicked dreams and when you get the déjà vu feel, drop me a note on your dangerous dandy dreams.

Engaged and Entertained

2008-07-09T12:29:00.024+05:30

“This is definitely not me!” I sweared indignantly from behind the two inch make-up that messed up my face. Plated artificial hair and huge rolls of flowers sat heavily upon my head while six foot long silk saree and jewels restricted any possible natural movement. Why should the festivity of an engagement ceremony require me to have my face painted ghost-white? The beautician however was not satisfied with her handiwork that she threatened me with a dark shade of lipstick and that was the last straw. I phoned my dad to rescue me from the parlour and take me to the safety of the engagement hall at Hotel Ram International, Pondicherry, happening on July 4th, 2008.

It was my engagement day and I was getting engaged to the one I love. I relished this realization as I walked proudly into the hall, expecting to be marveled by all the guests. But alas! I was instead greeted by photographers, making me pose in all 360 degrees till I joined my cousins who turned their nose on my Dasavathaaram-Fletcher-like-face. I was eager to see my bridegroom, Vijay. If I disliked make-up, Vijay detested it. I wondered how he’d have taken it all until I saw him make his majestic entry thru the doorway – he hadn’t taken it at all!!!! Except for a clean shaved face and probably a little powder, there was no trace of face painting. Dressed in Sherwani suit as he was and surrounded by friends, for a moment I admired him like I had never admired in all the seven years that I knew him. He raised his brows at me, smiled a ‘hi’ and walked on to the front, leaving me to decipher whether the look was one of astonishment or admonition.

And thus the ceremony began. I was asked to change over to my engagement saree as a semblance of tradition. Once wrapped in a copper blue authentic silk, I felt a little more confident and let my inhibitions go. Vijay and I adorned garlands (which helped me maintain my equilibrium with the long hair-dress) and sought blessings from the elders. The aunties from everywhere queued up to garnish us with sandalwood powder and kumkum and I was thankful this time to see Vijay equally tarnished as well. By then I had stopped cribbing about the make-up for I was swept away by the festivity myself.

With the ‘Nalungu’ session done, it was time for more snaps. Our bunch of friends from Bangalore had come with bouquets to wish us. All of us knew that the real fun would begin only after the function for we had a Pondy outing planned on our agenda, starting that every evening. More friends from our school and college days made the event merrier and merrier. Vijay and I introduced each other’s relatives and pulled some of their legs innocently. The glittering lights and chattering voices lasted till noon and once our tummies were filled, we finally drifted off towards our houses.

A small afternoon nap restored my energy fuels and I woke up in time to attend Vijay’s phone call saying that our friends and himself were at the Pondy beach. I duly happily joined. We discussed the function and checked out the Digicams, talking and walking along the shore. We spent a few minutes at my place for a cool drink and dined at Rendezvous. Thanks to Mr.Subash Chandran for his generous treat for making it big yet again into another reputed software concern. People, you might like to get introduced to him ;)

The next day was even more entertaining and exhausting. Our group of fourteen visited Chunnambar beach resort and freaked out with Frisbees and volley ball until the sun hit us strong. The last time I came to this place was in my college final year with my class mates as a farewell hangout. Though not entirely nostalgic, it was a reminder of the velocity of time. Our next destination was the famous Auroville of Pondicherry. Silence was not the trait of our group but with our stamina drained; we were naturally silent and blended in with the ambience. And finally, it was shopping time. Movie DVDs for Rs. 30 is one of the reasons why I love Pondicherry. Vijay and I took our friends to a DVD paradise. They were enthralled at the collection and started grabbing as much as they can till the shop keeper fell short of teeth to express his happiness on the sales. A little more roaming and a little more shopping before we finally called it a day.

To me, it was one of the most memorable weekends that I ever had and I enjoyed every minute of it. I wouldn’t mind another five inches of make-up if I were to get engaged the same way to the same person every other day. Thanks to everyone who graced the occasion with their presence and wishes. Welcome back for my wedding as well!

New Arrival

2008-05-29T14:12:00.022+05:30

“I love you!” He whispered those magical words in her ears as they lay undressed in their bedroom, fully spent. The blush of the new bride was radiant in spite of the darkness and she kissed her reply with a seductive smile. Love was most potent at the moment and it lulled them to sleep in tight embraces.

Two months hence…

“I’ve been delayed by more than 40 days. I think I am pregnant!”

“Hey, you can’t be. We’re taking precautions, are we not?”

“You can’t be so sure. Nothing is fail-safe.”

“Still…uhmm, you want to go to a lady doc?”

“O’course! But hold on, you don’t seem to be as excited as I am. Are you not glad?”

“Oh yes, I am! I am! But…but…it’s a little too early.”

“You are doubting me?”

“Idiot! I meant, we’re married for only three months. You know, there is lot of time for kids, why hurry so soon? We need to get sometime for ourselves.”

“I don’t understand. We need time for what? I promised to make your mom a grandma within a year since our wedding. She’ll be so happy, everyone will! I had skipped the pills and have made you a dad. That calls for a celebration but here you are looking glum as if I have given you some bad news. I am disappointed!”

“Hey Darling! I know, I am happy…I am just not sure we know each other fully yet. Its so soon…err…I had lots of plans for the two of us, I mean, just the two of us, before extending our family.”

“Nah, you are lying. You don’t want the baby! You don’t want responsibilities! You don’t love me!” (She cries pathetically).

“Baby, now relax! I love you and you know that. Alright, I am ready! I am happy! You’ve made me a dad! Now, let’s go to the doc and if the test is positive, we have a number of calls to make and tell the world. Love you dear!” (He falsely hugs and pacifies her while his inner self wasn’t fully pleased with the happenings.)

While she was being examined at the gynecologist’s, he waited outside, feverently hoping that he’d be given sometime. It was only four months ago that his parents showed him her photograph. She was simple and sweet that he liked her instantly and gave a yes. He fantasized dating her and spending time in courtship, talking both their likes and dislikes, understanding, teasing and joking….but before his fantasies could complete in his mind, his wedding dates were finalized. He got engaged, married, mated, all in four months and now he is sitting outside the gynecologist, hoping for the time that he always hoped for.

She came out of the clinic with a beaming smile which clearly told him that his wish was not granted. “I am right! I am pregnant! I am going to be a mom!” One cannot blame her for not understanding her husband. She was brought up in a conservative traditional family where she was taught over and over again that a perfect wife would cook, clean and wait on her husband, would procreate and be a mom on time and raise her kids. She has just lived to her teachings and was so immensely proud of it.

Time rolled on faster than the last four months. With the arrival of the news, arrived a whole huge household. There were functions and ceremonies to rejoice. The house was filled with family and in-laws fussing over her, pampering her and her unborn child. There were uncles who discussed the best schools for the kid already. There were aunties who winked at him and said “Bravo naughty boy!” He pretended a smile for her sake and others while deep within, he pleaded for sometime alone with his wife, to love her and tell her that he cared. But hey no, pregnancy and childbirth were ‘ladies’ things’ that the grannies and aunties took full charge, leaving him a mute spectator to the happening circus.

She was taking a nap that afternoon when he managed to squeeze out from the crowd and whispered in her ear “I love you”. She didn’t blush this time. Instead she opened her eyes sleepily and smiled “Hey hey hey, it is moving, right here, feel it feel it.” She was talking about her baby in her womb.

“I just said I love you”

“Oh yes, I know darling. I was just wondering if it’s a boy or a girl. What will we call the baby? Rani aunty said we should name the baby after your great grand parents. What do you say? Hey look look, the baby is moving again….”

He understood that she was clearly lost with her own baby. He was no longer her priority. He even felt resentful and jealous towards his own kid and he hated himself for that. He left the room.

Time rolled doubly faster. She delivered a beautiful daughter and nursed her all the time. Farex and Huggies became a part of the shopping list and there was cradling and crying all around. He had much serious responsibilities now which took all his time. In what time that was left, he played with his daughter. He told stories to her and adapted to play a perfect dad. He adored his daughter of all the things in the world for the mother whom he adored even more, was still busy in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning, continuing to be the perfect wife that she was trained to be.

Happy Happenings

2008-05-20T14:22:00.021+05:30

So much has happened in my life since March 31, 2008 - that’s when I published my last post. I had been quite a busy bee for a while, running around and putting pieces of my life together, aiming at getting settled atlast! On the road to it, I’ve lost contacts with a few, forgot to update a few and worst of all, I have none of the contact numbers stored in my mobile as yet that every friend and foe is now an anonymous caller to me. Every time, I speak to someone, I find it increasingly difficult to answer the standard ISI pleasantry question, “How are you? How is life? What’s up?” for there has been a lot to fill in over the last few days and you know how talkative I can get with the simplest thing in life. To make life easy for you and me, here is a gist of ‘What Archu was up to since she cribbed about losing her third precious mobile?’ Pick up whatever is relevant and leave the rest in peace.

April First Week, 2008 – I had put down my papers with iNautix Technologies Ltd. and was serving the notice period. Was winding up my office assignments, making vacation plans and burning a big hole in my pocket in terms of Air India tickets and shortfall notice compensation.

April 18, 2008 - Last working day at iNautix. Bid bye-bye to folks, got done with official clearances, happily grabbed the farewell gifts, had a Coffee Day treat with friends and walked out of Ascendas, Chennai, breathing the evening smoky air.

April 19, 2008 – Packed my things from my house in Chennai and moved out. Temporary stay at my aunt’s place and conveyed wishes to my cousin’s wife, now a carrying mother. Got to wake up at 3:00 AM to catch my flight to Andaman with family. Sunny Summer Vacation ahead!

April 20, 2008 – Reached the Island Paradise at 8:00AM and checked into Andaman Residency. I would surely recommend this hotel for any tourist. Decent accommodation, good service and hospitality, well worth the money you pay. You can trust me!

April 21, 2008 – Visited Ross Island, Viper Island and North Bay. Did some underwater snorkeling and loved the corals reefs. No, don’t ask me for details here for that would make another five posts. Go to Andaman and see for yourself! Then, you wouldn’t agree more to what I boast.

April 22, 2008 – My first ship journey in the vast ocean to Havelock Island. Clear sky and rippling water and there you are in the midst of no land for miles and miles. Vijayanagar beach and Radhanagar beach in Havelock was nothing like any of the beaches that I had ever seen in my life. Crystal clear and light blue, it was indeed nature’s own swimming pool. Loved it! Loved it! Loved it!

April 23, 2008 – City tour today covering saw mills, museums, aquariums and science centre. The highlight was the Cellular Jail in Andaman. Having a look at the plight that our freedom fighters had to suffer would stop us from cribbing about our mundane trivial encounters of our daily life. Special thanks to Mr.Tirupathi, the tourist guide who explained the significance of the prison to every detail, dates inclusive.

April 24, 2008 - It was Jolly Buoy Island today and true to its name, we were all jolly jolly there, swimming in yet another blue beach with cranes for company. Little rain, little boat ride and lot more snorkeling. If only I had had an underwater camera case for my cam, I could have captured those beauties in a medium. As of now, they are still beauties in my memories.

April 25, 2008 - Its pack up time from Andaman and flew back to Chennai, tired, exhausted but completely contented.

April 26, 2008 - Bye Bye to Chennai now and back home to Pondicherry with bags and baggages to rest for a week before I join Bally Technologies, Bangalore.

April 27 – May 3, 2008 – Slept a lot, watched LOST serial addictively, pampered myself with home food and got my documents and belongings, ready to relocate to Bangalore for good.

May 4, 2008 - Happy birthday to Vijay! and Happy Birthday to me! Both of us spent our birthdays in K.S.R.T.C bus, traveling from Pondicherry to Bangalore. Office cab took me to the company guest house for a two week stay. Air conditioned room, good food and laundry, all taken care by Bally, now that’s called queen’s life!

May 5, 2008 - Joined Bally Technologies Ltd, Bangalore and spent the whole day filling and signing documents. A new beginning once again and I am getting used to new beginnings now. Wishing myself good luck for another turn in my career.

May 6 – May 9, 2008 – Opening bank accounts and PF transfers are done. Getting to know Bally culture and slowly getting involved in work. So far so good!

May 8 & 9, 2008 – Hanging out with Vijay and showing off my office premises to him. Together we met my schoolhood buddy and had a little chat. Found a house to stay after the guest house comforts and called it a weekend.

May 10 -16, 2008 – More work and settling down.

May 17, 2008 – Shifted from the guest house to a rented house which was just a street away from Vijay’s. Bought gas cylinder with stove and other household articles to set up the house. Its onething to do things alone and another to do it with a loved one. Vijay was there thru and thru with me and that made a lot of difference. Finished the day with dinner treat with friends.

May 18, 2008 – A new Onida washing machine came home and with provision purchases done, my new rented house is now warm and livable.

May 19 & 20, 2008 – Commuting to office in ITPL buses for more than an hour one way, fighting thru the Bangalore traffic and starting the day for regular work makes life seem settled for the time being and I decided to blog the updates to friends. With that done, my stomach is now grumbling. Going out for lunch. Ciao all in my next post!

Punishment

2008-03-31T19:28:00.008+05:30

When I woke up this morning, I never guessed that I was going to lose my wallet once again in the same Pondicherry bus-stand to, (God knows) the same pick pocket at 6 AM in less than four months. Like hell, how could I guess? I had a leather shoulder bag, tightly zipped and pressed close to my body and I kept occasionally feeling for the bulk of my wallet. I checked it when I started from home, it was there. I checked it when I waited for the bus, it was there. I checked it when I got into the bus and Viola; the purse was gone, taking along some money, my mobile and the debit card. I shouted to the fellow passengers and we did a quick search below our feet. A lady asked for the number and called my mobile several times. Someone picked up the call and remained silent. She tried again but heard no ring tone this time. Instead, the default Reliance call rejection message was returned, clearly confirming pick-pocket!

I muttered a few silenced swear words under my breath and resigned to my seat, sighing heavily “Once again me!” Only if the novel that I was reading yesterday night wasn’t so interesting, only if the mosquitoes weren’t biting till 2AM in the morning, only if I had had a decent good night’s sleep, I’d have been less weary, eyes less droopy and more cautious to have caught the burglar red-handed in the act, my wallet safe. Now, no ‘only’s would get it back for further calls to my mobile received ‘Switched off’ replies ‘only’. The pick-pocket better have a damn good reason to justify his theft. If it does turn out that he was having the time of his life in a local pub or bar at the cost of my money, I’ve cursed him to die in a hit-and-run accident. THIEVES!!!

The bus geared up its way towards Chennai while I was fancifully imagining a conversation between the thugs who stole my belongings. What else to do when you know that there isn’t much you can except to block your debit card? I had done that by then. I didn’t want to block my mobile with the ISIN number as I attributed it to killing my phone myself. Strange that stress should stimulate creativity….

Rambo: MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Sambo: Stop yelling! How many this time?

Rambo: Just one. Jackpot!

Sambo: How much?

Rambo: One five hundred note, three hundreds and few tens.

Sambo: Hmpf! (smirking) Jackpot it seems!

Rambo: (adds hurriedly) and a mobile.

Sambo: Model?

Rambo: Looks like a Classic.

Sambo: (examines) Classic? Looks cheap to me.

Rambo: The brand is ‘Classic’ - Reliance.

(The irritated Sambo gets the mobile from him and fondles when it starts singing its usual ‘Wish you a merry Christmas’ ringtone.)

Sambo: Probably the owner is giving calls to trace it. Let’s see… (pressing the call button, he gets amused at the helpless hellos being shouted into and switches it off) Ha! So it’s a pick from a lady?

Rambo: The same lady infact.

Sambo: Same lady?

Rambo: The one who left us with a thousand bucks and a costly Sony Ericsson W710i some four months ago. I stalked her this morning as she was waiting in the bus stand, boarded the bus alongside and pulled out her purse. Then descended thru the back door and was gone before she suspected. Neat and Clean!

Sambo: Hmmm… (more to himself) but she was more generous last time. So, is the ATM card there?

Rambo: Here it is, blocked! No use!

Sambo: You should have tried her tomorrow. Pay Day!

Rambo: Boss. These IT folks travel from Pondicherry to Chennai only on Monday mornings and as a rule, I find all IT wallets heavy always. Tomorrow would not have made a difference or might have been late.

Sambo: As if I didn’t know that. Abrush yourselves with some current affairs, Smarty! TCS weekends are on Sundays and Mondays until May. You can still try tomorrow for loaded purses.

Rambo: Now that’s why I need a boss. As you say…I…

Sambo: Stop ranting and listen! Our ‘friendly’ constable tipped me off. There are a number of complaints filed against us and the job is getting risky. Keep changing targets and grab healthy pockets. Less picks and more cash.

Rambo: Yes Boss. (Scratching his head in an ugly gesture and smiling sheepishly)...Err…what about celebration for today? Shall I open the Whisky?

(Sambo nodes and they open their bottles. One cannot say which of the two - the foam erupting out of the bottles or the lather from their leers was dense?)

Sambo: (toasting) To Sambo and Rambo! The thriving thugs of Pondicherry!

Rombo: (adding) To all the goosey guys and careless chicks for their wallets!

Together: CHEERS!

Fully drunk and singing merrily, Rambo and Sambo danced along the main road as kings of the world. The ECR bus that had geared up minutes ago, now took a U turn to keep up with the one way lane. A swift U-cut and the wheels screeched. Loud music from the audio system had deafened the passengers from the feeble screams emanating beneath the tyres. The jerk and gallop was partly attributed to “rash driving” and partly to their semi-sleepy-state and the bus unmindfully rolled on towards Chennai while the bodies of Rambo and Sambo lay mutilated, floating in their own blood.

Identity Inquisition

2008-03-08T14:23:00.013+05:30

Asked who are you, I would most certainly answer just like any other female of our species, “I am so and so’s daughter.” or to keep it generic, “so and so’s so and so”. A common answer to not an uncommon question. Are we answering correct? Read again – it was ‘Who are you?” and not “Whose are you?”. Pause...I’d blink twice at the intention behind the question before I come up with, “I am a software engineer, I am this, I am that”. Vocation defines ‘what are you’, not who. Yet another pause…Alright, “I did my schooling at…blah blah…college at blah blah”. Stop! That gives the “where of you”. Once again “Who are you?”. Deeper pause this time. “Who am I?” I can’t obviously be a Jackie Chan movie. I must really be someone or at least should intend to become someone. What is that? For the fourth time, “Who are you?”

I was pissed off at suffering an identity crisis, way after my adolescence for it was my inner self that kept nagging me and made me wish the wish I wouldn’t do everyday - Wish to be born as any teeny-weeny creation of God than living the kind that I do, the kind called mankind. Free-willed and merry, I would have had my life at my own disposal, unbound by pre-defined rules, set to be followed from the time of my birth, to the day I become fertilizer to the soil. Naturally, I assume the role and play it to perfection. Lived – Died – Buried – Decayed - Amen. Is that all? I mean, is that really all about the fascinating four lettered word called LIFE? Back again, “Who are you?”

At an official meeting with my superior, I was posed with this question. I stammered a little and he completed the rest. Done with the agenda and back to my seat at office to resume my work but this single question kept reverberating inside my grey matter, over and over again, “Who are you?”. Echo effect was most evident to me at that moment, making me deaf to the hiss and buzz of the numerous keyboards being punched by the tired professionals, striving to meet their deadlines. What a strange pre-occupation for a mind in the middle of the day when there were things of higher priority awaiting my attention!

A sip of coffee beside the glass enclosure, up above the world so high from the pantry in the eighth floor, is all I need to ease my thoughts and finalize decisions, usually termed as “Cool it buddy!” I was peeping below at the tiny human figures on the ground, hurrying about in cars and bikes with different chores. A world of haste making life a waste! (Wow! That rhymes, doesn’t it?). Frustration could be dangerous for it poisons you with deadly self-pity. Waking up with routine, cooking and cleaning, going thru monotony all through the week and spending weekends in tired slumbers, forgoing matters that interest, for the want of time and energy. For what? - A few pennies which would invariably be denied on various pretexts, leaving a little to fill our bounty. Shame! I was inwardly fuming at the injustice of it all, trying to keep a calm face to save my professional ethics.

Its two months already since we screamed “Happy New Year” and I am surprised that I had let two months go by uneventfully, just as I had let the months of the previous year go by having done nothing worthwhile. No wonder “Who am I?” makes me ponder so much. The drop in the frequency of my blogging, the reduced number of calls to friends, for that matter, the reduced communication with the real tangible world, the neglect of book reading are all obvious proofs. I wouldn’t relate it to disinterest for I am all interested in turning the world upside down and energized with enthusiasm as well. It’s just that I have been caught up in a swirl of boredom and ironically, I don’t have the time to feel bored even.

I could feel ‘the me’ that I had been gradually evading away making me a mechanical moron and I have no one but me to blame. Preaching balance to my mates, I am losing balance myself. Good gracious! One or two hours per day is the maximum that I could hope for myself in solitude to do the thing I like or speak to the one I love. Amidst the hay of activities that consumes my day, this meeting held a check point.

“Who are you?” made me want to answer in hundreds of fanciful ways on various contexts both philosophical and practical. But finding myself dumb-folded as I couldn’t justify my answers myself makes me feel utterly remorseful. ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’ seems to smile at me in his Godly halo, with an invitation to join his league. No, not yet, I do not seek to redefine myself at the moment. All I need is to remember to live a life and grow to become a somebody such that my fellow folk would answer it for me when asked “Who am I?”