My useless banter

Mommy dilemma #1

2011-12-14T11:36:00.002+01:00

One of the two ladies who looks after The Boy at the creche, where he goes for about half a day twice a week, has suddenly started giving me an uncomfortable vibe. This is how it started: I asked her to come to my house babysit one day, but then we had to cancel. The next time I asked her, she was enthusiastic about it, but then found out she had another job the same day. So she put me on to the other girl at the creche, who came instead. I really liked this other girl. She's from Mongolia and is very soft-spoken and gentle. This being her first job in Geneva, she's also, I think, genuinely fond of The Boy, as well as the other kids at the playschool. Anyway, so because I liked her and developed a personal rapport with her, we call her only now every time that we have to go out for a dinner thing. At the creche, meanwhile, I started getting the feeling that the other lady was not happy with this arrangement, although she has never said anything directly.

Another thing that happened in the mean time was that this same lady (she's Spanish, for the purpose of distinction) suggested to me one day that I should leave The Boy at the playschool all day on his twice a week sojourn, and not just half day. She said, as a pro full-day justification, that all the other kids come for full days, and that he has a lot of fun there. I seriously thought about it for a few days and then decided to call the lady who runs the creche to ask for her opinion.

The matter was little to do with The Boy, but more to do with me.

I knew that he'd have lots to play if I sent him for all day, but what would I do all day? The two half-days that he goes for now I spend in running chores, shopping, having breakfast at a cafe, or just staying in and reading or sleeping. While I fully appreciate this "break" that I get twice a week for a few hours, I did wonder if I'd be happy if he went away for the full day? What would I do all day? But it wasn't a completely selfish thought either; it wasn't as if I meant to deprive him of all the fun that he might have there if he stayed all day. All day, in truth, just meant a couple of hours more, and it wasn't as if he got bored when he was at home. He is still at the age when just putting one box inside another can keep him entertained for hours. Besides, whenever he comes back from the creche, I notice that he wants to spend a lot of time hanging around me.

Anyway, so the lady who runs the place also agreed with me, saying that I should spend as much time with him right now as I had, and wanted, because one never knew when circumstances changed and you don't get to spend as much time with your children. Till the age that he isn't making me pull my hair out and wish someone would just keep him for a few days, why not enjoy every moment that I do get with him, I decided.

But the thing was, I did mention to her that it was the Spanish lady who had suggested that I let The Boy stay in all day.

I didn't think much of it till a few days later when I realised that this Spanish lady was not as warm to me as she was before; not revealing too much information about The Boy's day than what I was specifically asking. Earlier, she would tell me in her very broken English what he did, and how much he ate and how well he slept etc. But now, nothing.

And then N put the cherry on the cake by saying, "Don't worry about it. It's not as if she'll be nasty to The Boy just because she doesn't like you." I wasn't even thinking of it that way till he said it!

Will she?

The more people change the more they remain the same

2011-12-12T14:16:00.000+01:00

There used to be this girl in college (well, not mine but N's college) who was famous for her attitude. In face, when Na and I started dating, he and his friends were worried about the first time I would meet her. She was like the group's unofficial mother-in-law; all the boys were apprehensive about introducing their girlfriends to her -- nobody knew whether she would approve.

Point was, she was quintessential cool.

She used to wear sweaters with holes in them because she couldn't care less how she looked or how others saw her. She used to constantly abuse. She was loud. All the boys looked up to her because she was the sort of girl they'd never seen before and were sure if their mothers came to know about her, would never see her again, too.

This girl grew up to become a jewellery designer.

Don't you think that's rather contradictory?

I have also been constantly surprised at her since the time we got back in touch.

She seems particularly social and eager to please -- the opposite of what she used to be in college. She's still in touch with people she hasn't worked with in 10 years and has nothing to do with now.

She's even befriended a friend of mine on Facebook that she has never met, has never spoken to, doesn't know at all, and now often leaves comments on her pictures on Facebook.

I'm not trying to judge. I'm just surprised. Which one's the real her? Does she just do PR? Was she screwed up back then in college? Or has she done whatever she wanted to do, been however she wanted to be and is now finally being how she really is?

I know people change from how they were in college, but to do a complete 180 degree turn? I don't think I can trust such a person.

These boots are made for talking

2011-12-09T10:41:00.000+01:00

Every winter I read at least one post from a Delhi blog (usually the same blogger) where the writer can't get over the fact that Delhi now has boots. And that, more importantly, she has boots. And she can wear them. What luck!

It's like five-six years after boots became fashionable in the world, the blogger still can't get over how cool it is that she gets to wear them.

It's like if someone in this time and in this world muttered posts of surprise about skinny jeans or that you actually get to wear them in cosmopolitan Delhi.

Big whoop.

Another irritant is someone I know who posts pictures on her Facebook of new and "exotic" foods that she cooks at home. Scratch that. One can't be certain that it's food that she has cooked. She just posts random pictures of food on her Facebook without offering any explanation. The only sure thing is that the pictures are of food that in, certainly, Indian terminologies might be construed as "exotic". Beef Wellington. Pork dumplings. Pizzas with artichokes. And so the list goes on.

I bet she wouldn't do such a thing if she made rajma-chawal. Yes, what's to show off about that?

Lessons after swimming

2011-12-08T11:23:00.001+01:00

I'll give you an example.

After The Boy's swimming lessons, this other lady at the pool who speaks very little English tried to make conversation with me asking if I was from India, and that she'd lived in Bangalore for about a year sometime back etc.

(Not The Boy)

All good. If I'd have been new in the city I'd have got excited at the likelihood of making a new friend. I'd have already been planning play dates; I'd have started dreaming of having coffees with other mums while our tots played by themselves; I'd have been imagining us mums taking turns to push our babies on the swing etc etc.

But I've been here more than 2 years. And I know the Swiss ain't having any coffees with you, or pushing any swings with you. Even the expats here seem so busy in just making money and living this ohmygod stressful life. (In an office where N is considered brilliant even after putting in only 25-30% of his potential, other colleagues are having stress attacks and claiming they're so tired at the end of every week and doing chores over weekends that they just want to spend all remaining time in bed.)

And there is the language issue. As illustrated in the example below.

After we had the little chat about the lady having lived in Bangalore etc., I tried to make conversation, too, pointing to my oh-so wriggly boy and saying how impossible it is now to dress him or change his diaper since he just wants to run around everywhere. And she pointed to her six-month-old son who was lying down peaceful getting changed, fascinated with a string of wooden toys, and said, "same here".

If you think for a second you might have found someone you meet at least once every week, who has a baby roundabout a similar age as yours, and that you might in the least have a decent enough conversation with that person after swimming lessons, you're once again reminded you're in a city where nobody understands you (and I don't mean this in any philosophical way; they just don't speak or understand your language).

"My husband makes me do it"

2011-12-06T14:15:00.000+01:00

"I hope you're making The Boy sleep in your room while N is away," went my mother.

I always knew she didn't get why The Boy sleeps in his own room. I mean, I still sleep with my mum when I go to my parents' place on my own without N. But now I know she thinks it's because N and I want to have sex while he's neatly tucked in his cot in the other room!

On the other hand, The Boy refuses to sleep even in my lap, so used to he has become of sleeping on his own in his own space. Even when he's sick and wants to be hugged several times at night, he still protests with all his might when I as much as put him on my chest and lie down to make him sleep close to me.

But she used to claim that he's not going to be close to me if I make him sleep away from me. "That's how it is in the west," she would claim, as if she knows so many families from "the west". "They're never close to their children; it's because they make them sleep in separate rooms."

Now I can just hear her think, "My poor daughter! She can't even hold her son close to her because that cruel husband of hers wants to have sex with her all the time!"

When she came to Melbourne some 5 years ago, she asked me to remove the little God's parking station that I had going on my bedside table. I'd just about cleared the dust off it before she arrived. I didn't understand why she was asking me to not have it in my bedroom, and argued innocently that she has hers in her bedroom back home, too. And she simply said, "but we are old" -- ie: we don't have sex any more, so god doesn't mind being in our bedroom.

It's interesting how in her world, the husband can "make" the wife do anything and it will all be forgiven and forgotten in the garb of "making your husband happy". I am allowed to have wine in front of my very-religious very-small-town mother and she doesn't even raise an eyebrow because it's under the excuse of "can't help it; that's how my husband wants it".

I bet I should start smoking in front of her now and shrug my shoulders if she questions me.

Reading list

2011-12-02T13:36:00.001+01:00

Need a new blogroll. Anybody out there still writing decent English? Send me your blog URL. I'm bored.

Horseshit

2011-12-01T12:30:00.000+01:00

The in-laws strike again weeks before they're supposed to actually arrive here.

The Boy is 15 months now and is only beginning to stand and take one step forward. I was never worried about this -- I'm told even N walked only at 18 months. (Of course, it is even claimed that his first word ever was "horse". Not mama, not dada, no baba, booboo, aggo.. none of that for our born Mr PhD. I used to think earlier when I was much in love with him and everything that that was awfully smart of him, but now that I have a baby of my own and I know how it all works etc., I know it for what it really was -- horseshit.)

But I'm digressing. So they have been saying to me now that he isn't walking because he wears socks. And I remember they used to say something similar when he wasn't crawling. That he wears diapers, which is why he doesn't crawl.

So apparently, in colder countries where children wear socks because otherwise their feet will be cold, and wear diapers because otherwise their mum will be the maid washing nappies all day, babies crawl late and walk even later.

Now I know they're just trying to justify to themselves why their little genius isn't walking yet, but not just do they only try to convince themselves; they actually manage to put a seed of doubt in me.

I have always known that it's absolutely normal for babies to walk anywhere between 9 and 18 months, and in any case this sort of race to the milestone doesn't mean a damn -- I mean, N walked later, talked late and yet he has a PhD and is one of the smartest people I know (I mean, he's an academic writing books and stuff; not just street smart, which he is not).

And yet after weeks and weeks of every Skype conversation culminating in the same observation, "he doesn't walk yet because he wears socks all the time", I actually did a google search on the damn thing and found no evidence whatsoever to support the view. What I did realise was that they were turning me absolutely cuckoo afterall!

This constant interfering just drives me nuts! And from just about anybody.

When The Boy happily chews a pen because he's teething, I'm told he will poke his eye with it if I let him do that. When the only way he used to sleep in his pram was when was completely covered off with a cloth and he couldn't see a thing outside that might excite him, I was told I was cutting off his air supply. When he crawls around at another child's birthday party, I'm told not to let him do that; the floor is dirty.

What's the solution then? Make him a bubble wrap myself or should I order one online?

Love you tender

2011-11-30T11:47:00.000+01:00

Among the very few things I remember from my Hons. in English at post-graduation was this one discussion that because man invented language, very often words that might describe what a woman feels can be inadequate. As an example I remember the teacher said, like if a woman forgets to get milk for her baby, there's really no word in this man-made language of ours that might be able to aptly explain her guilt.

I'm only beginning to understand a bit of what that discussion was all about.

There's nothing specific that has sparked off this thought. Every time I see another baby in a movie or something, I want to go and kiss mine on his forehead.

I wish I knew how to love him more.

But when he's awake, and I'm with him everyday, every minute of his waking time, I don't always feel that way.

Perhaps, it's like any other relationship.

I don't get along with my dad. Well, that's very simply put. He's just never been important. You have to do the "umms" and the "aahhs" with him on the phone, before he too gets uncomfortable and yells out to my mom to come and speak to me.

And yet when the other day my brother called to tell me that our dad had contracted something called chikungunya and that he had spent most of that day throwing up, not being able to make sense of anything around him, and that he was finding it difficult to walk, sit, or lie down etc., I felt the tears prick my eyes. Predictably.

It's worse when you're not with them and they insist on living in a small town which has no medical facilities, and where you still can't (in the 21st century) reach through a direct flight or train from Delhi.

Anyway.

Perhaps, the mother-child relationship is like any other relationship -- you miss it when it's sleeping/away-on-a-work-trip, but as soon as you have it, you can't look beyond the details, the stress, the baggage.

Yet, this is one relationship rife with so much judgment, so many expectations, and therefore so much guilt if you, god forbid, don't want to spend every single waking minute with your child.

I love him to bits when he's sleeping peacefully in his cot, but I try to stall starting my day because I know how routined it's going to be.

I wish I could be more like N. Not worry about struggling to put a diaper on him as he runs around and just be able to enjoy my time with him. Not stress that he eats one single spoonful of his food and then throws the rest on the floor, and just have fun throwing him up in the air and hearing that magical baby laugh.

I swear, every day I think, I'm going to love him more today, and by the time I have him sitting on the pot for his morning routine, I have given up on my promise.

The lady who takes care of him at the creche had been telling me to send him for the full day on the two days a week that he goes. I had been hesitating. Then finally I spoke to the lady who owns the creche and she told me what my in my heart I was already saying, "spend time with your baby, spend all the time you have right now. You never know when circumstances change".

I swear, I will love him more tomorrow.

Looking London Talking Tokyo

2011-11-29T23:18:00.000+01:00

Most irritating thing #516

When people pretend to talk to the baby when they really mean to say something to you.
For example:
"Where are your socks, boy? Aren't you cold?"
"Are you hungry, sweetie? Didn't mamma give you something to eat yet?"

On the funny side, N was completely new to this baby thing when, while travelling to Spain with The Boy when he was four months old, someone asked The Boy's name. And it was one of those talking-directly-to-the-baby-but-actually-asking-the-parent thing. They just said something like, "what's your name, sweetie?" And N, my dear silly sometimes totally socially inept N, was also talking to the boy and saying, "what's your name, boy? won't you tell this nice lady your name?"
I couldn't believe I had to whisper to him "she's actually asking you.. coz if you haven't noticed, our 4-month-old can't speak yet."

Travelling with someone

2011-11-24T11:05:00.001+01:00

If something can make you come face to face with someone's real character is when you travel with them.

Are they whiney? Are they super excited? Are they lazy?

Two non-Indian friends travelled to India together. Before one came to know their "real" selves, the older one of them (it appeared) was stronger, wiser, tougher, more well-travelled, a lady of the world. The other, as it seemed at the time, was more fragile, nervous, more likely to have food allergies, a greater tendency to get tired and sick.

Yet, the two were completely opposite in their temperament when push came to shove in Delhi.

The older one fell ill very quickly, was whiney about food, about mosquitoes, about the water, the noise, the dirt.. After staying in and then rejecting two apartments/guesthouses (and these were not the Pahargunj types; one was in Lajpat Nagar and the other in Hauz Khas), she finally checked herself into a bungalow with a pool on Pritviraj Road, meant only for foreign travellers.

I never liked travelling with N earlier. He'd be more frustrating than he usually is. He'd have no idea where we were going, and would just turn left if I said left and turn right if I said right. Which meant, that I had to plan everything and book everything. I still do, but he does take over now once we get to our destination.

Even while flying with him, he'd bury himself in a book or in the newspaper and I'd not be able to get a word out of him.

When he was doing his PhD and was constantly thinking about his PhD, I even stopped going with him out for a drink or dinner. He'd either just eat in silence (completely distracted with what was going on in his mind) or he'd sit in the bar and watch TV. At the most, he'd talk about his work.

Now of course travelling is so different. It's got nothing to do with holidaying or a vacation or even relaxing. And in any case any relaxing that you might have done on the travel spot, all comes out of your ears on the flight back home.

You just travel because you must. Because you're bang in the middle of Europe and if you didn't, you'd miss out this crazy opportunity. Because Geneva is the most sucky city there is. Because there are so many places you've got to see before you die. Because, what else you gonna do?

To potty or not to potty

2011-11-23T11:07:00.000+01:00

There is pressure, SO much pressure, yet again on potty training, of all things. Apparently in India if a baby isn't potty trained till they're, like, 2 it's blasphemous. "It's already too late for him" I'm told. Which means, what? My Boy is going to be pooping in his diapers till he graduates out of college?

Even the girl who lives in London and came to our house for a week two years ago used to let her little boy "run free" without any diaper, peeing all day on my floors and carpets and even on the couch one day. (It was funny that she greatly apologised when he peed on the couch, and not when he peed anywhere else, as if the couch was precious and everything else was just junk.) And when she felt he did want to go, she'd dangle him onto the bathroom sink for a wee whispering "shoooo shoooo" to encourage him to pee, and onto the pot for the big job. I spent all day scrubbing my house the moment they left. I was already brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink while they were here because I couldn't stand the thought of using the same sink she used as her son's urinating ground all this while.

And yet all the information I've read on the internet (and not just on those stupid mums forums where they claims their dear little geniuses were potty trained at, like, 6 months or something -- but real expert opinions) seems to suggest that starting at 18 months is ideal, and for boys it's still too early. Basically, the criteria is that they should be able to tell you they want to go; before that it's too early.

So I'm stuck now between too early, and, well, plain disgusting human behaviour, even for a baby.

It's the thumb-sucking story all over again. People in India were so totally disgusted that he sucked his thumb that I stupidly tried to "fix" the habit by putting a sock on his hand for several days so that he'd forget he had a thumb. It was all wrong, I realised soon enough. We had relatives, VERY difficult ones, over for some 10 days and he was so distressed by them and not being able to soothe himself by sucking his thumb to sleep that I finally removed the sock and let him go to town with it.

The problem with this one is that he refuses to sit on the potty for even a second, and if one entertains him to keep him on it, he forgets all about the job at hand.

Truth is, I'm just scared of my mommy and my mum-in-law who're certainly going to exclaim in disgust at him, too, when he poops in his diaper at 2 and beyond.

No one will say "what a lovely boy, sleeps dot at 7.30 every evening without troubling his parents at all", or that he "plays by himself without needing constant attention", or that he "eats practically by himself by now" but yes, the fact that he doesn't walk yet at 15 months or that he doesn't use the toilet on his own yet like apparently other similar-aged kids, will certainly be talked about.

About a boy

2011-11-19T16:00:00.001+01:00

One probably doesn't want to read another post about how stupid people are, but they seem to be coming out of my ears.

The lady who teaches The Boy swimming -- it's hardly a swimming lesson; they just make them float up and down with one parent (N goes, I can't swim and even though that doesn't really matter, I didn't want to pass on my insecurities in the water to The Boy), do some freestyle stroke motions with their hands and then towards the end one head-dip in the pool -- so the lady in one day probably has to deal with a lot of crying babies and anxious parents who don't let her do her job properly. But yet I thought it was too out of context when she started giving us a lecture on how Indian and Russian parents can't see their baby cry, even though she wasn't teaching our baby at the time and it wasn't our baby who was crying at the time. This other kid that she had with her was bawling his balls out and she started giving us a lecture. I swear, the whole time I thought that the parents whose baby it was were Russian. They weren't.

Anyway, nothing NOTHING not.a.thing has been happening. We missed a vacation to Athens because The Boy fell ill. I used to feel really bad about this sort of thing earlier, but it was the third time this time that this happened. So I believe N was more upset than me because it was during the time that we were packing to leave the next morning that The Boy had a terrible terrible bout of coughing and we thought he couldn't breathe etc. that we decided not to go.

The best thing is that he says "daddy" more than he says "mamma" so in the time that we had him sleep in our room, he'd wake up at 6.45-7am and utter a loud whisper (because he'd lost his voice during the laryngitis) "Daddy!" and I'd just roll over and say to N, "he's calling you", and N would be so thrilled that The Boy, for this one time, wanted him and not me, he'd run to pick him out of the cot.

So the extreme guilt has started recently because The Boy has an immense capability of pissing both of us off, and I sometimes give him one "chapat" on his head, and he understands that it's different from when we're playing and that I'm super serious and he starts crying so loudly. But the poor guy throws up his hands at me wanting to be soothed by the very person who made him cry in the first place.

They bear no grudge at this age, and that's a relief. I'm sure soon enough he's going to be hitting us back and not missing a single opportunity to tell us he hates us.

So yay! till that happens.

The park's a jungle

2011-09-29T16:30:00.001+02:00

The first time I saw my nephew get bullied was when he was three, and I was still basking in the pleasure of becoming an aunt. We were at a party and he was happily trying to make friends with the other kids there, chasing them as they ran among each other. Except that they were bigger, and he was eager to please.

One of them pushed him over and he immediately, humouringly, picked himself up and started chasing them again. I informed my sister-in-law, hoping she would intervene and these those older louts to behave and include one and all. But she just smiled and said, "Oh good he's getting bullied. he's got to start somewhere."

At first a bit hurt, I quickly understood the deeper reason behind her gladness that her three-year-old was being laughed at when they pushed him to the ground.

But when The Boy recently got pushed around in the park, it has taken me two weeks to come to terms with it.

We'd gone for a barbecue in the park, and there were four other kids there. Two of them were older, three-year-olds, while the other two were newborns who happily slept in their respective prams all day and only woke up to be fed before they went back to sleep again.

So the two older kids had been going at each other's throat from much before we arrived, and by now they were adequately charged up, jumping on each other, racing the other down the slope of the park, rolling about in the lawns, and all the while screaming and laughing at the top of their voices.

The Boy, on the other hand, first took quite a while to get familiar with the grass and start crawling. Then when he finally did start crawling about, it was more to explore new territory and find things that he could use to pull himself up.

So when he finally found one of the prams where a newborn was sleeping a sturdy enough base to stand up with, and helped himself to it, the two older kids came charging at him, screaming "NO" into his face, at the top of their voices.

They were shooed off by their mums.

Later, when the two mums were busy with the newborns, and I was looking after The Boy, the two older ones came and again screamed into his face. It was like they'd suddenly notice that there was this person who was littler than them and didn't really walk or talk, and was therefore excellent target for screaming practice.

They were sitting close to him and I was standing behind waching carefully, telling them to be soft with him. They were touching his cheeks and he was looking at them questioningly, "are they playing with me?"

And suddenly came the slap. A loud laugh followed.

I took in a big breath in, and told them to be even softer. I didn't know how exactly to react to a 3-year-old who had just slapped my boy across the face.

The Boy, meanwhile, was a little stunned, a lot unsure, "I'm not sure if they're still playing with me?"

More screaming in the face followed, and finally one of the mums came to shoo the older kids away.

I saw The Boy slapping his face twice then because he'd thought this was what you did when you got older.

I still felt I shouldn't hug him and tell him it was alright, because frankly, I was unsure how a mum was supposed to react in a situation where her kid had just got bullied by other kids who didn't really know what they were doing, and that her boy was too small to know what was happening in any case. Hugging him would have made it a big deal.

I had noticed a bit of a run-up to this day, when at playareas older kids (2.5-3 year olds) would come with their toy cars trying to run over him; or some of them would just make loud sortof "booing" noises at him even if he was only crossing by. One of them had left the toy car and was walking off to greener pastures but just as he saw The Boy crawling towards it, he ran back and reclaimed it. This happened several times during the day.

Later that afternoon, the louts struck again and when The Boy was happily crawling one of them picked his leg up from behind and made him fall on his face.

He wasn't happy this time and started his big noiseless-first-but-turning-to-earscreeching crying. I hugged him this time. I was happy to.

Not a Hindustani married woman, I'm afraid

2011-09-21T19:27:00.001+02:00

I have come a long way from ironing N's undies and vests (I don't know why, but I thought they were part and parcel of when you do the ironing at home). Now, the only clothes I ever iron are The Boy's, and that too if I'm feeling particularly gooey-in-the-centre about him.

I was watching this film last night called Aaina (I have NO idea why), with the not-particularly-attractive Amrita Singh, an aeging Jackie Shroff and a pretty but baby-voiced Juhi Chawla. In short, Amrita Singh and Jackie Shroff are an item and are about to get married, but no one knows that younger sister Juhi Chawla also liked Jackie Shroff before he and her older sister decided to marry each other.

Before the wedding, Amrita Singh is getting cold feet about the whole idea and confesses to Juhi Chawla that she doesn't think her life should be about being Mrs Jackie Shroff for the rest of her life. And the younger, but infinitely wiser Juhi Chawla says incredulously, "then what should it be about?"

There are other refences to "Hindustani married woman" etc later in the film when Juhi Chawla is dressed in a saree and jewellery, her long hair cascading down her hips, while Amrita Singh is wrapped in a bathtowel gown.

Before N's friend and his wife were supposed to come and visit us in Geneva, we would chat with them often to make plans about where all they were to go in Europe etc. One night I was kidding with them about how N had not been a good maid today by going lazy on giving The Boy a bath that evening. And the friend asked me unbelieveably, "N gives the bath, not you?" I said casually, "sure, he needs to do something around the house, doesn't he?" Pat came the predictable reply, "he should go to office also and come home and do housework also?"

Yes, yes, that is how we in the west live. We have no sense of the boundaries between a man's work and a woman's work. I sometimes ask N to make himself a cup of tea when he gets home from work, or better still, make one for me as well. I often stay a few extra minutes in bed while he changes The Boy's diaper and gives him breakfast and makes us some tea.

I think the main difference between what he considers his work and what I consider my work is the lack of a fee in mine. I'd got exremely annoyed with N once when he'd left all the housework to me for days, and I finally suggested he pay me for all this work I did at home. Looking after our child, cleaning up, making dinner, cleaning up, doing the laundry, cleaning up... I swear, I'd be happier to do it if I was getting paid for it. It's not like any other job -- there's zero job satisfaction, no help from the other staff members around, you pick up after everyone and then at the end of the day, it's not even considered work.

I can on good days (or on N's bad days when he has to go to office even on weekends) do all this work without cribbing. But on other days I don't want to feel like a maid whose only job is to make sure the man who brings home the bacon is fed, his clothes clean, his shirts ironed and his house spotless.

Some birthday cheer

2011-09-20T08:48:00.000+02:00

Is it just me that gags at the mention of anyone over 20 celebrating their birthday? (And that age limit too is a very generous allowance as far as I'm concerned.)

N's cousin who's now 22 has been celebrating her birthday all these years as a kind of festival that lasts all week. There is a series of big parties in her honour and then some small ones thrown in for good measure; one with the family, one with friends, one with the boyfriend, one at the South Delhi club, one at a hip and trendy restaurant... it goes on all week. Once she called all her friends and told them to "surprise" her on her birthday at midnight.

A colleague of N's recently did us a huge favour, and I promised her I'd get her something nice from Spain. So when I sent off a box of miniature perfumes with N for her, she sent an excited email thanking me for the gift and said a cursory, "you didn't have to", but when I insisted she keep it, she said excitedly, "ok, this can be my birthday gift!" And I was like, I don't even know when her birthday is/was/would be, and now I surely didn't intend to give her a present for it. Of course, no birthday invitation followed, so I still don't know when her birthday was.

The same colleague had called us over for her birthday the previous year, and throughout the time sat comfortably among an awkward group of guests (us and four other people) while her husband did everything from cooking to serving to cleaning afterwards. She even boasted that he was the one who'd done the settling of the house before the guests arrived as well.

Anyway, so the latest in this series of birthday attention-seekers is the wife of a friend who came to visit here this last fortnight.

They had been saying since before they arrived that it's her 32st birthday, and that she'd be celebrating it in Switzerland this time. Much excitement on their part.

When the day arrived, she waited all morning for people to call her and wish her, and when she didn't get as many calls as she had expected, she started calling up her friends who she thought might not have her Geneva number, and reminding them that it was her birthday.

In the meanwhile, another piece of news that floated in amidst all this was that her younger sister had given birth to a baby girl that very day. Her joy at this was worth seeing. Interestingly, the joy was more at the fact that the birth had taken place on this very day, and then the excitement that the baby is going to therefore be like her, in looks as well as personality.

It really surprised us that when we asked her whether her sister (who had delivered in 37 weeks, and who had also had a miscarriage the previous time at 35 weeks) had delivered naturally or through caesarean, what the weight of the baby was, whether she was in an incubator etc. neither the friend nor his wife seemed to know for sure. In all the excitement of "oh, I can't believe she's born on this very day" they had forgotten to ask about anything else other than "does she look like me".

Throughout the day, the woman whose birthday it was got her son to wish her several times, because I assume he was the only person who was small enough to care about his mother's happiness as to do exactly what she wanted, as many times as she wanted.

Later that night, when I thought all the celebrating was finally over, I realised it wasn't. The husband had brought out a handycam and we were all supposed to wish her on camera.

She then sat at her Facebook, and was genuinely surprised that there were all these birthday messages for her on her wall and inbox, and seemed to not be aware of the fact that Facebook had generated a computerised programme to ensure that all her friends were reminded everyday of her birthday from weeks before. She sat and replied to each message, and constantly (rather happily) complained, "there are so many of these!"

And this was not her 30th or 25th birthday. She had done this 31 times already, and still found it thrilling that it was here again. Oh, the miracle of it all!

Girls that don't giggle

2011-09-19T08:24:00.000+02:00

Yes, I'm a girl. I laugh harder when I try to explain why I'm laughing. I walk into a room and forget why I was there. I count on my fingers in math class. ..I lie sometimes to hide the pain. I say it is a long story when it's really not.All right i confess a release the parking brakes after driving for a while.. I cry a lot more than you think I do. I get attached to people who care even a little about me.But I love to be all of that..I love to be a GIRL :)

Saw this post on Facebook today, and god, it really got me thinking. Could it be that I was not a girl at all?

I'm not a giggler. Even though I'm a girl. I don't laugh for no reason.

I'm not absent-minded. Even though I'm a girl. I might have slipped since I had a child, but overall I think I've become more aware in the past few years.

I have NEVER left the parking brake on while I was driving. In fact, I believe I'm a better driver than N. Even though I'm a girl. I have a lot of angst that comes out while I'm driving, therefore I believe I'm very well suited to drive in Delhi.

Agreed, I used to get attached to people who cared even a little about me, but I'm over that now. I'm older, more sensible. Plus, it's been really long since my last challenge.

That brings me to a totally different topic, actually.

Do people only "improve" when they don't really have any other choice?

Take, for instance, this friend of mine. She was doing, well, a whole lot of people when we were in college. She continued doing a whole lot when we both started working in the same office, including the super boss who was like 60 at the time. OK, she was probably not doing him (what can I say, I'm a uncharacteristically naive in this matter), but she was definitely purposely giving him a hard-on just to ensure a promotion (or maybe not even something as specific as that, but just because she liked playing with fire, albeit a dying one).

Anyway, so she's married now and has two kids and everything and lives, like, in the back of beyond. But ever so often, she gets a glimpse of what her life could have been, either when she meets friends who live in the city or in other countries, or when the old dying flame revisits briefly.

But other than that she's totally "improved", focused on her kids, making sure she butters up her husband's boss' wife so that her husband keeps getting his promotions...the works.

And yet, when she came here to visit us last year, one wondered if she had really changed.

And I think the consensus was, which she herself led us to, that she simply doesn't get the opportunity any more. I believe the exact words were, "Where does one have the time?"

Who knows what she'd have done with it had it come knocking?

Happiness, that's all?

2011-09-16T10:04:00.001+02:00

We were watching this film last night called The Rebound, with the gorgeous Catherine Zeta-Jones in it who's going through a divorce after she catches on tape her husband getting a blowjob during their child's birthday party. She leaves him, brings her two kids along, moves to the city, gets a job, gets a nanny etc. Except that the nanny is a manny (a male nanny), who was born in 1983, hot as hell (Doug, the lost groom, from The Hangover) and is dreamily romantic. Apart from the 15-year age difference between the two, the issue also is that he's a rich kid who went to an Ivy League college and is trained to be a lawyer (I think). So when he tells his parents he wants to first work at a coffee shop, and then that he wants to be Catherine Zeta-Jones' nanny, they're like WTF?

And he says, "But I thought you wanted me to be happy?"

"Within reason," his mum replies.

And here, I come to the point of this post.

I, for one, will never tell my kid "you should be happy, but within reason", even though I might think it. But what if he decides to waste his education, his upbringing, and work in a coffee shop? Or become a nanny? Because that's what makes him happy?

And secondly, if he's getting it on with a woman who's 15 years his senior and has her own children from a previous marriage, would I be happy about that? And I mean, not just getting it on, because that at least would not be as crazy an idea as if he wanted to marry her.

Real-life situation: Our two very good friends who were each other's best friends since long before they knew us, started seeing each other and now have a baby together. Except that the guy is 33, and the girl is 45.

But that's not the least of the issues. She has two daughters from her previous two marriages, so one from each. For some time early in their relationship, she was also cheating on our friend with one of her ex-husbands.

Now, he (our friend) has left his city, his family, taken a transfer on his job etc. to be with this woman. And when they had a baby together recently, she decided to not give her his name. So the little baby now has the mother's surname and not the father's (not even as a middle name), because she said her two older daughters both have their father's surname and nothing of their mum's (and look how that turned out).

But again, the point is, the guy's family is like super educated, relatively wealthy, they're really intelligent, liberal people who have taught (tried to) their son well.

But yes, he's happy. Or so it seems. Is that all that really matters at the end?

This is why we don't make friends in Geneva

2011-09-15T09:13:00.001+02:00

They called us for their daughter's first birthday party. And said it would be a potluck! Really? You can't take out the time to even buy stuff, forget about making, for people to eat at your daughter very first birthday? Salad, bread, cheese, cold cuts. That's all it really takes.

The "party" was supposed to happen at a park, but they wouldn't give us the time. So we had to have our whole day free for them to tell us what time we were supposed to get there. So when finally they told us a time of 4pm, and it started raining at 3.30. They said in this case the party will shift to their house, "if you're still interested". Is that supposed to mean they were not as interested now?

As for their home address, they wouldn't tell us on the phone: "check the e-invite" they said, for the address.

When we got there the guy opened the door in probably the same clothes that he had worn to sleep the previous night. The other invitees were all office folk, who apart from not knowing us, didn't even know each other. So everyone was just having tiny bits of conversation between long pauses and awkward silences.

And, agreed they were both American and everything, but not once did anyone ask us to eat. Not even a casual "help yourself". Of course, when the birthday cupcakes came, all they said was, "help yourselves, everyone". Considering it was their daughter's first birthday cake..

Also, since I, especially, did not know a single soul at the party, I busied myself watching The Boy interact with the birthday girl who was two weeks younger than him, and went to the same playschool (so they were mates from before). It was so interesting to watch them! When one did something, the other followed. From exchanging syllables, to head banging, sharing food, and passing around toys, it was all so cute.

Yet, there were no pictures.

I didn't take any because the hosts whose party it was and whose daughter's first birthday it was didn't take any pictures of their daughter's first birthday.

I don't mean to go on and on about the first birthday, and yes, the babies will not even remember any of it when they grow up and yes, even I thought we can do whatever we want on this one because he's going to do what he wants on all the others, but still, a first birthday is a first birthday and your child will only have one.

I had got so upset with N when on The Boy's first birthday last month, the waiters had brought the cake out, and it had broken from the top, and N thought they'd already cut it, and he already fed The Boy his first piece without us singing Happy Birthday, or blowing the candles, or taking any decent pictures.

But this...

Anyway, so a week later and they wanted to meet again because they said watching the two kids play together was so great. And I was like, "when did you notice them playing together?"

Even this time they didn't tell us what place we were to meet, "It's the same park where we were supposed to meet for the birthday party." So we had to open our email and search for that e-invite from the trash that it was in now.

We bought a few things on our way to the park, because we'd been to one of these with other friends, and they always bring a lot of food, and we always seem to bring like one packet of chips.

So the park was a bus ride and a long walk away, and when we reached there there was no one around. Called, messaged, no answer. Finally they told us we were in the wrong park. Right name from the e-invite, yet the wrong park. Walked about 800 meters back, and reached the right park. Wrong name, but apparently the correct park.

There was another lady with her 2.5 year old son who was bumming around in the paddling pond there with other kids, and throughout the 30 minutes that we were there, all attention was on that kid. So much so that I thought the girl who had invited us to the park was the kid's aunt or something. Turned out, they were just friends.

And The Boy, who had been called there to let the two babies play together, was hardly noticed. And neither were his parents. The whole time we felt as if they just wanted to hang around with the lady and her 2.5 year old son and that we were imposing.

Having spent more than an hour getting to the "correct" park, we left in half an hour and swore we'll never see these people again.

Sharing EVERYTHING?

2011-09-04T21:33:00.000+02:00

"Do you have some extra milk stored?"

"Milk?"

"Yeah. I'm going off on a work trip to India for three days, and I don't have enough milk."

I looked at N. Was she really saying what I THINK she was saying?

Thank god I didn't go ahead and say something stupid like, "Have you tried the corner shop?"

'Coz yup, she was asking me for my breastmilk.

Was this kind of thing okay in Europe?

She's even suggested once that The Boy was so well-behaved I could leave him with her anytime that N and I wanted to have an evening to ourselves, and now that she had a brand new little daughter and enough milk to feed a village, she could even feed The Boy, and I wouldn't have to worry about it.

I guess I'd be really worried if another person offered to feed my own baby when I was well and perfectly available, and especially now with the advent of powder milk which can be "just like the original".

Anyway, so I ended up lending her my breastpump, and I don't think I'll be able to use it again. There go my 200 dollars down another woman's tits.

Watched, heard, read and hosted

2011-09-01T10:11:00.000+02:00

Watched
This film called Pyar ka Punchnama. Came highly recommended. It started funnily enough, with three friends bumming around together, sharing jokes, chai and beers, slaves to some corporation or the other, looking for women who'd be naive enough to sleep with them.

And then the three do find women but as it turns out all three women are taking them for a ride and they just can't seem to have the balls to make it all stop. As if men are the most patient, rational beings and that even when the woman insults them in front of their 'real' boyfriend, they still call them the next day and ask them if they're okay.

Very uni-dimentional film with zero nuances and highly unrealistic characterisation.A must watch though, if you fall in the category of people who leave their brains behind before they go to watch a film. (I wish I had such a flexible, dismantable brain)

Overheard

The Crazy Lady who came to The Boy's first birthday party in London gave him a stuffed toy (all non-baby people give stuffed toys, which babies, by the way, never touch -- I have given many a stuffed toys in my non-baby days) and said, "I have given you a toy, now you be my friend", while The Boy just tried to bite her finger.

She also said to The Boy, "Your Daddy was my friend first. I have a bigger right over him".

She and her husband were the last to arrive but wanted to sit at the head of the table "where all the action" was, near The Boy ans his parents, except that the mum (yours truly) didn't want to ask someone else equally important to vacate their seat and hand over to me, so I decided to sit at the other end of the table and entertain our other set of friends.

Anyway, so Crazy Lady said in conversation that she was writing a novel, and that she'd done all the research for it and that all that remained now was the "easy part": the writing of it. She was basing in on the "Amitabh Ghosh model", and that she was giving herself about six months to finish the first draft. Well, all the best to such precise book-writing, I must say.

Also, she's planning to have a baby next year; apparently their calendars are fully booked before that and the only window they get for "the process" is not before 2012. So the guy's going to take a sabatical all of next year to, well, DO IT. Also overheard was their proposed approach to child-raising, "I will take care of the baby, and husband will do all the bonding. I'm not good with people and relationships and bondings."

Read
Amitabh Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. I'm finally coming round to reading all the unread books on my bookshelf before I buy any more. I haven't read a decent book since I got pregnant, and since after that, I haven't had the brain to concentrate on something that makes sense.

About the book, I really really liked the first half and looked forward to reading the rest of it; but I think somewhere from when the story shifts from being ashore to being on ship, it loses my attention. There's too much sea language, technicality, too many characters and sub-plots and it doesn't really come up to the crescendo it had been building.

Hosted
A woman straight out of the saas-bahu serials in India. She's the wife of a friend of N's, and they're here for a visit and a forced tour of Europe. I say forced because they were the ones who said they didn't want to go anywhere and that they'd just stay at our place all day and go only to places where we took them.

So they were here initially for about five days, in which they only went out once when we took them. After that, even a visit to the supermarket 100 meters away got them tired. Even a trip to the park closeby was too much for them, and they wanted to come back as soon as we'd reached it.

The woman basically just wants to sit at home, cook and gossip. She doesn't approve of any "serious" conversation, like of her husband's business plans or their child's education. She'd rather just talk all day about her uncles and aunts and cousins and sister-in-law. (She lives in this giant joint family set-up, which I have started finding so incestous. Apparently, there are no fights, and no one is sick of the other and there's no family politics and everyone just minds their own business, despite the fact that they all live together, work together, eat together and pray together. It's a land where love marriages are looked down upon, and the boys are too busy helping with the family business that they don't have time for girlfriends or other "bad habits" like beer.)

So anyway, they stayed with us for about 4 days before they left on their forced Europe tour, and called us from Paris to say that they were missing the comfort of our Geneva home, and all the Indian that his wife had been cooking while they were here. They had pizzas for two meals and are already looking forward to the Indian that they have requested me to prepare when they get back on Sunday.

Good luck to me.

&%@#!!!!????

2011-08-10T11:17:00.006+02:00

The assault on my privacy continues. Every time we speak to him on Skype, there he is taking pictues of The Boy, and in general of us playing with The Boy. (Ever since this webcam option on Skype, one can forget about just talking casually in nightclothes. I even avoid wearing shorts and skirts, that I wouldn't wear infront of my in-laws if they were here.)

And then he posts these pictures on Facebook for the world to see.

He even tags random relatives on them. I think he thinks tagging is for when you want to share a picture with someone. So now my pictures of when I was pregnant and bloated and waddling like a duck, or even now in the most unflattering on angles can be found in other people's albums for the world to see!

I have been most particular about my Facebook privacy settings from the beginning, and block even my "friends of friends" from seeing my pictures and commenting on them.

But now, thanks to this, I see my pictures on the "photos of you" of people I'm not even friends with on Facebook!

The most annoying was when in Delhi he called N and I to his room and showed me my pictures from when I was in school and college. I just turned red with a mixture of rage and embarrassment.

There were pictures, which I remember being from my PERSONAL album, of me wearing very short shorts, pouting into a kiss for N, from a random college dance where we all looked silly etc.

It was like someone had rummaged through my drawer and pulled out my pictures and had now saved them onto HIS computer.

How the hell does one deal with this?

Fending off advice

2011-08-10T10:35:00.002+02:00

The problem with child-rearing techniques is that they're all opinions. And like I said earlier, opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one.

Trouble is, you can't sue anyone for having their opnion or even for trying to impose it on you and your baby.

Because all parenting techniques come pat with a reply, "I raised soandso babies, and my kids turned out just fine!"

First of all, there's really no way for people to completely know whether the now-adults kids have turned out "just fine", as long as they're not raving lunatics.

For instance, my husband and his brother are both brilliant men. While N is a PhD and is pure genius, the little N, his younger brother, follows a close second. They're both very intelligent young men in very different fields.

At another level, they're both completely mad, oftentimes bordering on obsessive compulsive disorder.

They both repeat things. Many times.

They're both obsessive about certain things. And it doesn't even have to be the same thing each time. For instance, when my husband gets down to, say, updating his Facebook once a month, he can sit and update it for hours and hours, making friends with 354 people, adding pictures with long and highly detailed captions and replying to each comment with a personal anecdote etc.

The younger one, on the other hand, used to be an obsessive shopper. Not in terms of a shopaholic, but in terms of being fussy about it.

When he wanted to buy an expensive watch online, he researched for it for months and then came up with two options (both looking exactly the same to me). But when it turned out his first option was not available, it wasn't like he went for his second option, because, well, that was his SECOND option. And decided to do another month-long research for that perfect watch.

Anyway, my point was, you can't argue with an interefering in-law/parent/aunt when they're saying, "I only fed formula to my boys and look how great they've turned out!"

Or, "We only fed babies fruit in our time (no veggies) and look how well they've turned out! You give too many veggies (like that can ever be a wrong thing)."

Or, "At two months, his grandfather took him away from us for a week. And look how well he's turned out!"

Bah!

When crèche is a bad word

2011-08-08T16:52:00.001+02:00

Lunch at my South Indian boss's house yesterday.

He sat on the floor cushions as a benevolant patriarchial lord while all others around him just tried to be polite.

He had the constantly pasted look of, "You're in my house. You will hear me talk."

Every second sentence was origin-related. "You're Chinese; you should be comfortable sitting on the floor." Or, "We're Indian, we're like this only."

One particular sore point was when one of the colleagues was making conversation about having arranged for a babysitter for her two kids that evening, so that she and her husband could do something on their own.

At which he immediately piped up, "In India children do not even hear the word 'babysitter'; they don't know what it means."

"We take our children everywhere. Children are invited everywhere. And in any case, we don't go to places where children are not invited."

"My parents still live with me. When we're in India, they go wherever we go. All my close friends also invite my parents when they invite me. And they come with me. Whoever is in the house -- children, parents -- everyone goes everywhere together."

Well, good for you.

There's just no need to be so obviously judgmental towards the poor lady.

Opinions are like arseholes; everyone has one.

On the other hand.

N's father objects to anyone who uses the word "crèche" as far as his grandson is concerned. "He doesn't go to a crèche. He goes to a playschool."

There's a marked difference, it seems.

The latter means he goes to play. The former means his parents don't have time for him and have left him there for someone else to raise him. Apparently.

When we first used the word "creche" in Delhi, the response we got was of people cutting us off mid-sentence and saying, yes, they know what a crèche is; when the mother doesn't have time to look after her child blah blah blah..

The Boy's been going to a playschool/crèche (they're really the same thing -- what does a small baby do all day other than eat, sleep and, duh, play?) for the past four months or so. He's had a few sicknesses and infections as a result, but nothing that one couldn't handle. Besides, I know his immune system is only getting better as a result of that.

Apart from all that, he has fun there. He sees faces other than that of his parents and has many many little friends to play with twice a week. That's much more than I get to do in sad old Geneva.

Unpleasantness during weekend lunch

2011-08-04T10:48:00.000+02:00

"He would have broken that glass on my head!" she screamed, and then hastily sought the glass out from under the table and kept it away. Then she continued to thrust food into the boy's mouth.

"Let him go to sleep," her husband said, resignedly.

"No! He will eat first. He hasn't eaten anything all day," she insisted, shoving another big biteful into the boy's mouth even as he tried to throw the food out.

"He's eaten enough," the husband intervened and took the boy away.

"This boy is ruining my life. He doesn't give me a minute's peace," she screamed as her husband muscled a wailing son out of the dining room.

A few minutes ago the boy was trying to balance a plastic glass on his head. And doing a very good job of it.

When he tried the same trick with his mum, but with a glass glass this time, as she was bent next to him picking up something from the ground, the plan failed. The boy got a blast from his mum for something that only a minute ago everyone was cheering him on for and telling him what a good balancer he was.

None of this made any sense.

Don't break the baby!

2011-08-02T16:13:00.000+02:00

Poor N, accident prone that he is, and not in as much as hurting himself, but others around him.

When we brought The Boy home from the hospital five days after he was born, the first few hours we had him sleep in his bouncy chair because I was terrified of initially having him sleep on the couch in the daytime, thinking he might slip off.

So there he was all of 2.9 kilos, tiny as a peanut, hands clenched in a fist and held close to his chest.

And every time N crossed him he bumped his foot on the bouncy chair, shaking the chair and the poor baby sleeping in it every single instance.

Then when The Boy was a couple of months old, N dropped tea on him.

It was that time when The Boy was still very still, and didn't wriggle about much when held in the arms. N had relied on this non-wriggling when he held him in his arms, while holding a cup of tea (albeit lukewarm by now) in his hand.

The Boy wriggled and the tea came crashing down.

It was not the heat of the tea but the sudden movement from N that startled The Boy and made him cry.

Recently we were buying a new lighweight stroller for The Boy, and while N and I were testing dozens out, The Boy was happily cruising around holding on to other baby gear.

Till N dropped a standing stroller on The Boy, and the happily-cruising-around baby came crashing down.

And then yesterday N stepped with his knee on The Boy's tiny hand.

Aah, well. Someone's got to learn. And I have a feeling it's not going to be N.

Babies as the enemy

2011-07-28T16:02:00.001+02:00

Is it only in India that babies are given adult characteristics from the day they're born?

At 2 weeks old: See, he's making a face because we're not looking at him.

At 5 weeks old: He's throwing his hands up in the air because he wants to be picked up. I think he's getting spoilt.

At 7 weeks old: You didn't come in and say hi to him, now see you've upset him.

I remember I was telling a friend of mine who's baby is a couple of months younger to mine that babies, even from the time they're tiny, learn to pick up on your stress and anxiety etc. If you fight while you're feeding him (yup, that done) they get stressed by that. And she immediately understood it to be, "yes, they understand everything and then they play you". I was like really? A 3 week old playing you? Into doing what? Feeding him when he's hungry? Cuddling him when he feels like a cuddle? Changing him when he's wet himself? Don't you do that already?

My mum was here till he was about three weeks old, and she was already convinced he was getting spoilt and wanted to be picked up all the time. Turned out, he was just gassy and didn't want to lie on his back all the time, since it made his stomach hurt.

If I had a penny for every time that people have given him adult characteristics from the time he was born till he was six months old, I swear I'd be a millionaire.

Every odd laugh, every change of expression, every wail is studied so intently and then given an adult explanation - oh, he doesn't want to sit on this chair, he wants to sit on THAT chair!

Once I made the mistake of saying (when he was about five months old) he doesn't understand that, he doesn't know where his nose is.

And I was given such a rap on my knuckles, "Don't think that. He's not stupid, you know."

Ya, because a little baby who doesn't yet know the names of his body parts yet, or hasn't learned to speak yet is called stupid. (I will not say who, but someone even called him "mute" because he doesn't speak yet. Great going, people!)

Bah!

Feeding black dogs

2011-07-27T17:04:00.001+02:00

So my mum's really religious, right? Her drama really never ends. She's always getting us to donate towards the cause of the god. Getting new god-clothes made, new jewellery for the tiny idol, donating towards temples, feeding the cow, even feeding a black dog with nary a white hair every Tuesday of the week. (When that dog started growing old, and his hair around the mouth started greying, mum started looking for another black dog with nary a white hair.)

There was this time when my two brothers and their wives went to Mathura with my parents and at the temple the two wives were very freely felt up by pandits who took advantage of the massive crowds that day on the occasion of Janmasthami or something. It was interesting that when my two sisters-in-law came home and told me the story, all they did was bitch about those perve pandits, while when my mum told the story, she conveniently created a blind spot where all pandits were god's men and all they did was help god in blessing the faithfuls.

Anyway.

So she told me recently about this old temple in the small town where my parents live getting renovated. They're making the temple bigger and better, it seems. And she asked me to make a donation. I said, alright, 1500 rupees. And I thought it was a generous amount, since the last time she's asked me to donate towards getting a new tiny jewelled crown for the little Krishna idol that she has at home, and I'd offered 500 rupees, wondering how much it was that these things could cost. Turned out, they cost pretty damn much, and I had to increase my 'paltry' donation to 1000 rupees.

So this time when I offered 1500 rupees, I thought I was being generous. Turned out, I wasn't.

My mum all but gave me a scolding (32 year old, child turning 1 in less than a month and still getting scolded by mum over something like this.) She said people were donating, like, 1 lakh rupees. I told her to go to hell. Emm, not exactly. She said she thought I'd be able to give at least 5000 rupees, since, "by the grace of god" we're doing quite well in life.. and I suggested it was a crazy amount to give for something like renovating a temple.

How is it going to help anyone? I asked.

And again, she was shocked at how someone like her could have given birth to someone like me. And went on to explain how a happy god means happy devotees, and that meant everything in the world. "Don't we like to buy new clothes, do extravagant things for ourselves?" she argued. Doesn't it make us happy? Will it kill you then to do something that made god happy? And here I thought god was happy when we were happy. Wrong again.

Anyway, after a lengthy pointless argument with here in which I was careful never to say out directly that this was a useless cause, I threw my trump card - "N would be really really angry if I gave this much money."

She immediately conceded. Well, if the husband doesn't approve there's nothing much I can possibly do. After all, my sole purpose of being is to please the man who brings home the bacon (even during the months when I was bringing home the bacon and he was just doing his PhD).

My brother's wife claims that once my mum had suggested to her that when my brother comes home stressed after work, she should as his wife.. you know, relieve his stress...ifyouknowwhatimean.

My mum, the uber-orthodox that she is, doesn't even object to my drinking wine at home (and I did make sure I had a glass every day that she was here) because in her head it's all for the parmeshwar, the husband.

Aside: It was interesting to watch N and my mum watch the Mahabharat series when my parents were here last year for the birth of The Boy. While N would watch the episodes with the curiosity and enthusiasm of someone interested in religion as a study of human psychology and of history and society, my mum would be all but wiping her tears when (her favourite) Krishna as much as raised his hand to bless the faithfuls.

The relatives

2011-07-26T15:48:00.000+02:00

1. She would stand literally on The Boy's head while he ate his bread for breakfast and control how much he was putting in his mouth, so that he didn't bite off more than he could chew. (Mostly I just sit around while he eats his bread, and when it seems like he's choking because he's bitten off a big piece, I pat him on the back and that he usually helps. Bread turns soft in the mouth. It's not dried fruit, for instance.) So she would keep removing big pieces from his mouth or keep trying to change the direction of the bread so that he only bit the soft sides. The Boy, meanwhile, would get territorial thinking someone was trying to snatch his breakfast away from him.

2. She would also keep hovering around him as he crawled or tried to pull himself up onto things, constantly covering edges with her hands, or taking him away if he came near an area which she thought was not protected enough. On the other hand, I have baby proofed as much as I can, because I really can't be followed him constantly. So he ate mud from a plant pot the other day, I've kept the plant away where he can't get it. It doesn't mean I wrap my whole house in padding so that he never ever falls or gets hurt. He falls, and he cries, but then he gets up and tries to do the same thing again. You just protect as much as you can without obsessing.

3. She did try to adjust to my baby-raising tactics in the beginning, and then I could see she completely gave up at the end and tried to demark only, like, one square of space in the whole house which she thought was safe for The Boy to play in. She'd keep sitting by his side constantly and pull him back into that sqauare whenever he crawled away. Or when she was not satisfied with even that square, she'd just hold him in her lap so that there wouldn't be any chance of his getting hurt if he was left to ohmygod crawl freely in the house.

4. Oh, and this one literally brought me to tears. She wouldn't let him sleep. She said 'he will sleep when he's tired', and I was like, oh, have you met my boy before? He will not sleep till 11pm, till the time everyone else is asleep and he doesn't have anyone to play with, if you don't make him sleep. And she said, so, what's wrong with that?

I'm just not that kind of woman

2011-07-25T15:52:00.001+02:00

My cleaning lady, who comes in for about three hours once a week, has been asking me to get new bags for the vacuum cleaner. I've had the same vacuum cleaner now for almost two years, and it was only about six months ago when I realised it used bags; and even then I've never ever changed the bag -- nor have I found out where I can buy more.

So now as things in French-speaking Geneva are never easy, I finally went and bought the bags but as it turns out they're not the right size.

The lady has been coming to my house every week for the past, well, five months and I still haven't managed to get new vacuum bags.

Finally, when the house was smelling like feet (it does that when the bags are, like, really really old) N took matters in his own hands and we went together to find vacuum bags. Finally ended up buying a brand new vacuum cleaner.

But then I was left with facing a totally new dilemma. Did I really want to be that kind of woman who buys a brand new vacuum cleaner worth 300 swiss francs when she can't find bags worth 10 francs? (Well, turned out they don't make those bags any more. Apparently the old vacuum cleaner was like the last of its species - I think we bought the cheapest one available at the time, and look what happened to us. But still.) So I tried to convince N to let the lady use the old vacuum cleaner for a couple of weeks more while I cleaned its current feet-smelling bag myself. I don't know why I had to convince him, since he's not around when the lady comes in any case. But I felt I needed to let in someone on my prissy little idea. He thought I was crazy, of course. And immediately took it upon himself to get rid of the old vacuum cleaner, and open the seal on the new one.

Sigh!

I also have never managed to make any sort of lunch for N to take to work. I used to feel guilty about it earlier, when he complained much about the food available in his office. But then one day I just decided it was his thing. It had nothing to do with my capabilities or incapabilities as a wife (especially as a non-working one).

I have recently volunteered to make him a sandwich which he can take for lunch, but I never manage to wake up when he leaves. (Not that I can still see myself making sandwiches first thing in the morning. I get him to make tea on the rare days that I do open my eyes while he's still getting dressed.)

The sandwiches remain a distant promise, even though I have started waking up around 8 every morning when The Boy decides his parents are trying to make him oversleep.

Well. Sigh!

They're here

2011-07-01T15:06:00.002+02:00

If I ever leave N it would be because of his relatives.

What I've learned from Mommyhood

2011-06-21T11:18:00.001+02:00

1. The most important thing in my life right now is health. Mine, N's and most importantly The Boy's. We've had various instances of bad luck in the past 10 months, and they've taught me never to take health for granted. They've also taught me now not to stress about the small stuff. The colds, the coughs, the runny noses. He was in ICU for three days when he was 45 days old. As long as there's no ambulance driving him to the hospital with an oxygen mask on his mouth, we're ok. And in fact even if that happens again, I've learned to just be hopeful that he will come out of it surely and quickly.

2. Plans can change. And it's ok. We've lost hundreds of Swiss Francs this year on cancelled flight tickets. The next morning we were supposed to leave for Berlin, and The Boy got fever the night before. We were all booked for Amsterdam last year December, and I got chicken pox. London was cancelled beginning this year because The Boy got chicken pox. In fact, we've decided not to book through cheap non-refundable airlines any more, just to have the option to be able to cancel a ticket last-minute if something comes up.

3. Never to put an alarm. I wake up when the baby wakes up.

4. Things cannot be perfect any more. Holidays. Suede dresses. Everything will have the baby's imprint on it.

5. Sex will have to wait. There will be times when you'll have to go and feed the baby even as you are in the middle of something. And then you come back and resume. That's just the way it is.

Dead plants society

2011-06-16T09:38:00.001+02:00

I have a bit of a green thumb. Rather, an anti-green thumb, as you will realise by the end of this post.

I used to do a bit of pottering about in my parents' garden when I was quite young. It was only on sunny afternoons when my brothers were not home to play.

When I got married, N and I stayed in an apartment that belonged to his parents in South Delhi. For the first one year we stayed there alone. N's dad had all these bonsai that he'd been collecting and curating for years. And we killed them all.

(What can I say, I read somewhere that in the first year of marriage the amount of sex one has is more than all the sex in the remaining years put together.)

When we were in Mebourne, our friend gifted us a pot of sweet chillies as a welcome present. It was like receiving a pet. I'd never had one of my own before and thought it was too much responsibility. Sure enough, it died a dry death very soon. The friend later said she wished she'd just gifted us a bottle of vodka instead. But she didn't know us too well then.

I had plants in the balcony of our apartment in Delhi when we recently lived there. One week out in the summer while I visited parents in UP and they'd turned to ash when I got back.

In Geneva I have experimented with flowered plants, herbs, even cactus. But every time had the same result. Even with cactus! which like need no attention whatsoever, I'd thought. Not so much. They need sun, even if they don't need to be watered regularly. And we have not even a hint of a balcony in our apartment here. There is sun, but I can't exactly keep the plants on the couch, where the sun does come in. Or on the radiator, which gets ample sunlight throughout the daytime.

I'm going to try and hang some out of my window next. Let's see how that goes.

Sorry if this was too much of a betterhomes&gardens kinda post.

This just sucks

2011-06-15T15:35:00.001+02:00

So it's just Geneva. Not the French, not us, perhaps not even the Swiss in general. Just Geneva.

We've been carrying out an experiment past few months, on whether Geneva is the most horrible, cold (as in hearted, not weather-wise), excluding, non-baby-friendly city there is. Or whether it's just us.

Believe me, during the experiment many such instances came up where it just could have been us. But not any more.

Our Paris holiday has yet again confirmed that Geneva hates people. Especially if they're not Swiss, do not speak French, and many also if they're not the same colour as them.

I have a small baby, as most people reading this blog would have figured out by now. And he's the most friendly, happy, smiley baby there is. In fact, when he and I are out grocery shopping he smiles at even a huge white man with the most massive ass I've seen who's looking at wines. Even if that huge white man with the most massive ass I've seen isn't even looking at The Boy. I tell the boy, what are you smiling at; he's not even looking at you. (Got to keep him grounded from the start.)

And truly, people everywhere else that we've been this whole year (that's Spain, London, French Riviera, Italian Riviera, and now most recently Paris) all smile at him whether he's smiling at them or not. Some make funny faces. Some try to make him laugh. Many have told me what a handsome boy I have there. Most say "hi" and "bye" to him in their own language. Some want to pull his cheeks but their old wives warn them away lest we get offended. An Italian aunty offered him a sweet.

And yet, not one of these things has ever happened in Geneva. No one smiles. No one talks. No one makes funny faces. No one stops to coochee-coo the baby.

We have a baby in here, for god's sake!

2011-06-14T14:07:00.001+02:00

I could write about the good stuff -- the wonderful Italian Riviera, the Paris culinary trip -- but I've made it a point to write about the nasty stuff here. And so I will continue with that. All good memories are locked up in my head and I don't need to write them out here to remember them.

The more people I saw standing on Paris bridges, caught in the moment, kissing passionately, the more cynical I got. "Really?" I thought.

I saw this young boy gift his girlfriend flowers and she took them, thanked him and walked away. In the next instant she turned back, ran to him and kissed him. He went away a happy boy.

And I thought, "Oh well, young love. Full of promise and ignorant of reality."

So in our Paris hotel for which we paid a lot of money, the walls were super thin and you could hear The Boy crying all the way to the lift. One night an old-sounding lady was having a huge long orgasm in the next room. We could hear her for a good 10 minutes. (But not a whisper from the guy.) I hadn't seen her or anything, but she sounded old.

Anyway, so I found the whole thing quite "ewww!" and wanted to drown the "noise" out, whereas N wanted to listen in. He thought it was interesting. Whereas I just said in a loud whisper "we have a baby in here, for god's sake!"

And N just kept asking me why I was finding it so ewww and I just couldn't explain why. Neither could I understand how he was finding this anything but ewww.

Why the fuck do people travel? To us?

2011-06-09T09:34:00.003+02:00

Many (unwanted) people coming over to stay with us this summer, and the coincidentally the brief given by one says, "we just want to stay at home", and the other "we'll go wherever you take us". Which brings me to: why the fuck do people travel? Because they can?

This aunt of N's is coming over with her daughter for about 10 days, and the only thing she keeps saying again and again is that she doesn't want to go anywhere, and that she doesn't mind just staying "in one place", QED, our house. If I had as many servants as she, I'd stay put in my house, frankly. If she has to stay at home. Stay in your own home.

I asked her where she might want to go, and suggested she could go to London. And she said she'd been everywhere, and that she wasn't interested in going anywhere this time. Well, if you're going to cook my food and entertain my child while you're here, I wouldn't mind taking a break and going on a holiday myself.

This other guy's coming with his wife and three-year-old kid to "see Europe". Which basically means that he wants to only go to places where he knows someone living there, so that he and his wife and their three-year-old kid can bunk with that person and not pay for the hotel etc. And of course, then showing them around would be that person's responsibility, since they'd technically become their guests. And in return, his wife would cook everyone dinner. Fair deal? He thinks so.

He's trying to do the same thing with us. They're coming for 3 weeks, of which one week he will go to London, and the remaining two weeks they will stay with us in which time he'd want N to take off and take them to places around Geneva.

This is the same couple who's been planning to come to visit us since the time we were in Australia and despite making pots of money, has never actually left the Indian shores. This time they're coming because finally now that their son is 3 years old, he's a slight bit more "manageable" and they can be with him in the same room without needing a servant to take care of him.

There's another aunt of N's who's planning to travel the world for three months, all the way from Europe to America and Canada, and all the way staying at places where they know people, even if the people are so distant that they've never met them before, like the children of their long-lost friends. You know, some 20-year-old staying in a studio apartment, eating leftover pizza for dinner everyday and working in a cut-throat 60-hour work week.

And they haven't even informed us yet that they're coming to our place; we only know from other people.

Oh, did I mention I hate people. ALL people.

Bloody rellies

2011-06-08T16:33:00.001+02:00

I'm seriously thinking of quitting Facebook. I have no idea how suddenly I have so many relatives on my friends-list. I don't even remember adding half of them. Every once a while I go through my list and do an ethnic cleaning, deleting all people I want to have nothing to do with in real life. Yet they send a request to add them right back. Don't they understand that if they're having to add me again and again, it means I'm not_interested in being their f.r.i.e.n.d. Or do they think they've been falling off my list without my knowing? You keep throwing them off, and they just keep trying to get on again and again.. and again.

What's really ticked me off recently is how active some of these relatives are. I don't mind someone I don't quite know being on my friend-list and then not ever showing their face. I can ignore that I even added them once. But these guys, no, they keep fucking poking you and keeping writing all sorts of "hw r u" messages on your wall, and keep personal messaging you every other day asking, "howz life going on".

I mean, these are relatives who know nothing about your life -- what you do, what your husband does, what you eat in a normal meal etc. I would have never discussed a single incident of my life with them. Ever. Yet, here they are, thanks to fucking facebook, asking me every other day how I am and what I've been up to. I usually just reply with a simple and unrevealing, even dismissive, "We're all doing well." But they're back again a couple of days later asking, yet again, how I've been. As if I'm leading such a wild crazy life in this most super exciting city of the world that they think every time they ask me that question, the answer would be different. Even if I was leading such a wild crazy life in this most super exciting city of the world, do they really think I'd tell them?

Anyway, so one of them who calls himself the "oldest in his generation" (as if anyone cares) has started this family group where he's added all these people from my family, even people who don't know I'm on facebook, even people who don't know my last name (as in my husband's last name) and now everyone's fucking inviting me to be their f.r.i.e.n.d. because now they suddenly know I'm around.

But that's still not the point. What's really bugging me is this family group itself. The premise is that it's for all people who are "direct descendants" of my very noble clan. Yes, I believe that was the word used. So I guess no women married into the family, no son of mine, for example. People keep talking about making a family tree and "this time some thought is being given to how to include the daughters-in-law, along with giving details of their place of origin".. like their making a fucking monkey chart. There are people there who take themselves so fucking seriously it makes me want to throw up on their faces.

When I was young these were the people who would enter a room of relatives and then go to each and every one of them to greet them, whereas I'd just do a big general greeting which covered everyone in one go. So they'd be all these cousins of mine prostrating one by one before each of the oldies sitting in a row, whereas I'd already be down to sipping my Rasna.

Anyway, at least I'm out of that family group and sipping my Rasna now (tastes more like tea now).

I am an idiot

2011-05-27T13:54:00.002+02:00

Not only do I not know how to read the 24-hour clock, it seems I also do not anymore know how to read simple dates and numbers.

I have twice now fudged up appointment dates with doctors, one mine and one The Boy's. I saw the date on the reminder slip and thought it was something else. Like, I saw the number as 24.5, and thought it was 25. I have done the same mistake twice. Is this baby brain or what?

I have also recently left my wallet -- money, cards and all -- at the cash counter of my local grocery store. Luckily, I'm in Geneva and someone returned the wallet to Lost and Found but not before emptying out all the cash from it.

Only today, I had a doctor's appointment at the same time as when my cleaning lady was supposed to come for her weekly thing. I told her I'd leave the key in the letterbox, and I even locked the door with my key, only to put it back in my purse and walk off with it.

On another occasion I left the house with N, without my phone or my house keys and while N went to office, I shopped around with The Boy and lounged about in the city, and was only when I came back home after a couple of hours and punched in the building code that I realised I had no keys and no phone. I don't even remember N's number so I couldn't call him and ask him to come, or even inform him that I was coming to his office to pick up his set of keys. I just crossed my fingers and reached N's office (which is a 40-minute tram ride from my house) and thankfully he was there, even if to smile at me sympathetically. (I would have never given him any sympathy had he found himself in such a situation. I'd have rolled my eyes at him till they turned inside out in their sockets. He's the good one. Everyone knows that.)

And I can't put the blame fully on baby brain. I was like this even before the baby.

N and I had gone to Shanghai about five years ago, and I was convinced that my flight was after his, on suchandsuch date, at suchandsuch time. And it was only by chance that N saw my flight tickets and realised that my flight was for that day -- in the next couple of hours, in fact -- and not the next.

And I'm supposed to be the organised one.

Private vs The Dad

2011-05-26T10:09:00.001+02:00

Well, I know I probably shouldn't write this here coz N is going to be raging mad when he reads this and probably ask me to be careful the next time about what I write (because he's a very politically correct husband and can never tell me directly to take something down).

N's dad seems to have a major privacy issue. In that he doesn't know what it's about.

I'm not going to go into ALL the things, but just this one thing and I'm outta here.

So he takes our pictures whenever we talk to him on Skype. He doesn't even tell you that he's taking it now. I just know that when he's telling The Boy to look up, or to stay still, he's taking his picture.

And then he puts them all up on Picasa for the world to see, except that he doesn't know that the world sees it. He's secure in his belief that if I haven't shared the link with anyone, no one will see it. He doesn't seem to be aware of the next button on Picasa web albums that beams in justaboutanyone's pictures to you on the internet, free of cost, free from passwords.

Once he got into this frenzy of scanning ALL POSSIBLE pictures onto his computer. So he dug out all the photo albums at home, and scanned each one of them and sent them across to us. When The Boy was born, his favourite pastime used to be comparing The Boy with all other members of his family. And considering how much The Boy looks like me and my brothers, all he managed to come up with was the shape of his head, which apparently is EXACTLY like N's. Well done.

So anyway, while we were in India he called us excitedly into his room one day and showed us all these pictures on his computer. I was shocked to find so many of my own from when I was in school and college, none of them were with N, and all of them were from what I would call my personal photo albums. There was one of me wearing a bandana and dancing at a college party. Another one of me wearing very short shorts and a hardly there shirt and sitting on the floor with my legs wide apart. And another, probably clicked for N, where I'm staring into the camera and with a sensuous pout.

Asking him to pull down these pictures is a lost battle. You can't just ask something like this in an Indian-Punjabi context where nothing really is private. He won't get what the big deal is, and might just end up feeling hurt in the process. Getting all the hardcopy albums back doesn't make sense, now that all the pictures are all online.

But most importantly, how does one get him to stop?

That horrible horrible holiday

2011-05-25T10:40:00.001+02:00

Right, so about that Easter-weekend which shall never be talked about again.

We left for the French Riviera on Good Friday morning. We were scheduled to arrived at Nice by the late-afternoon-evening, and then start our 4-day exploration of the Mediterranean Sea.

Alas, it was not to be.

The five-hour drive turned into an all-day excursion, with traffic jams all the way from Switzerland through Italy, and we finally reached Nice at 10pm. Day 1 completely wasted in driving.

Day 2 started on a positive note. All the research had been done and places marked as to what we must visit first and where we must stop for lunch etc. And we're parked on the pebbled beach of the Med Sea at Antibes, and the waves are crashing in on us, spraying all over our car window as I give The Boy his lunch. It's suddenly too cold and too rainy to go out into the ocean, even as the huge waves turn into a sea storm right in front of our disappointed eyes.

(An aside: We've done our bit of fighting by then over what the GPS is saying and what I'm saying and with N claiming it's all so confusing with two people talking into his ear, giving him directions and I asking him if he even hears what he says before says it, and if he even knows how ridiculous that sounds. And then I go a bit crazy giving him the various examples of when we're driving on the road outside our apartment but because the Irish guy that speaks from the GPS hasn't said, "you have reached your destination" N keeps going in auto-pilot, even forgetting that we live here.)

Anyway, so we drove to Cannes, hoping the rain would let up there, but no such luck. And we're getting crankier and crankier because the person of right_this_moment that I am, I start getting anxious about how this is what it's going to be throughout our Easter-weekend, and that it's going to keep raining, and it'll be as cold if not colder, and that we'd not be able to see anything, and that as it is everything in Europe is closed for the Easter Sunday and Monday, and that we'd have wasted all this time, money and holiday time in just driving around like crazy people and not being able to chill anywhere.

The next day was much better with a drive to the very rich, very sassy Monaco. We saw some Islamic minarets and a couple of winged sphinx as part of the decor of the uber rich villas on our way. Apparently, James Bond movies are shot along that drive. The weather was great.

But every night ended with the case of the wailing boy. The Boy would be so excited throughout the day that he wouldn't sleep a wink. Then by night he'd be so tired he wouldn't be able to sleep without a lot of crying and screaming. (I don't complain anymore about wailing kids, I look at their parents with a little empathy, and I kiss my little boy in relief -- if he's being good at that moment.) Also, because everything was new even in the hotel room, the baby cot that the hotel had provided us was a complete waste as he would just start crawling about as soon as I lay him in it. As long as we were up in the room, reading, talking, eating dinner, he'd be up too, hoping to be up till the time some action was going on. So we had to put him to sleep between us on our bed, and we'd have to literally press down our palms and elbows on him so that he'd lie still and go to sleep. A couple of times he just woke up because of a noise and started crawling even before he'd opened his eyes. I'm hoping to rent an apartment the next time we travel, so that he can be put in the bedroom while we sit in the livingroom or kitchen, and we don't have to force ourselves to sleep at 10pm.

I swear in those nights I was ready to give up on the fact that he was my flesh and blood, inside of me a mere 8 months ago. I would have given him away to his grandparents in a heartbeat had they been around in those days to ask for him. But The Boy is so damn cute it's hard to totally not-love him even when he's screaming in my ears for hours on end.

World Trade Forum

2011-05-24T01:06:00.001+02:00

I was surfing on my Facebook when I saw this message from N which said, "WTF, soandso, you're in this vid!" It struck me as a singularly odd thing for N to do, because first of all, he would never use the word "vid" for video. He probably doesn't even know what the acronym "WTF" stands for; he probably thinks it's short for World Trade Forum or something. Moreover, he was very unlikely to point out to anyone that he saw them on a video.

Sure enough, as I scrolled down there were several several such messages from him to various friends from his 415-long Facebook friends list.

I concurred he must have opened a spam video which in turn sent off these messages to various people from his account.

In another second there were people writing on his wall saying his account had been hacked, and that they'd received a crazy message from it.

I called him immediately to ask him what he'd done, and if he was even aware he'd shot off a spam to everyone on his friends list.

He of course had no clue. He said yes, he tried to click on a video that someone (whom he DOESN'T know -- didn't his mum teach him not to open videos/emails sent to him by people he DOESN'T know?) had sent him, but it hadn't opened. So he clicked on it a FEW MORE times and then abandoned it.

So I decided to log on to his account and post a status message saying, don't open that video.

He quickly started getting replies from his irritated or joking friends that the damage had been done already (and that they'd also opened the video and therefore set off a chain of spam messages).

When he came home I told him about the status message I'd posted.

He checked his account and I guess one of the messages that drove him crazy was from this random cousin of mine saying, "This for sure is not the way you speak to us..." To me it was clear it was a joke, but not to crazy obsessive people-pleaser having-no-boundaries N, it wasn't.

He asked me if he should write a longer status message (or even personal messages to all the 415 of his friends) explaining that he had actually been sent this bad video which didn't open, and that he hadn't meant to send anything off to anyone, and that he was sorry for spamming everyone unintentionally.

I shut my piehole and told him he could do whatthefuck he wanted.

He said he was just asking because he didn't know what the usual internet etiquette for these things was. I bit my tongue and said I'd already done what the usual internet etiquette for these things was, and that he was free to do whatthefuck he wanted, as earlier suggested.

He decided to send a few emails to a few people who had been equally flummoxed as him by the "vid", and had personal messaged him saying they had not been able to open the "WTF, you're in this vid" link, and that they were wondering what it all meant. They were all poor academic sods like N.

I have little shame in admitting that I snooped around at what N was writing to them, and my earlier analysis of his dismal sense of technology was correct. He thinks WTF means World Trade Forum*.

* Alright, he doesn't think that. But still, he doesn't know wtf it means.

Sick boys, playgroups and a coterie of help

2011-05-23T13:29:00.001+02:00

The Boy has been sick for about 10 days with viral fever. He probably got it from the playgroup which he just started going to. People tell us we better get used to stuff like this, as his immune system is not too strong yet, and meeting other kids and chewing "communal" toys only exacerbates the problem.

The problem of course is not the toys or the infections but the fact that the poor kid has only two people to practice his syllables with all day long, including weekends -- N and me. The fact that we don't know a single other soul in this soulless city never bothered us more than it does now when The Boy clearly needs company other than ours.

People don't even smile at babies on the tram here -- compared with London where they even start telling you about their kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews. Some only smile at him here because he's so obviously grinning at them and calling them to talk to him. You can't ignore a smiling baby. Even when I take him to the park, everyone plays with their own kids. Or some have anyway come in a group and can't be bothered with other people.

So despite his various trysts with infections since he was 45 days old, the playgroup stays, even if it's for a couple of hours a week.

I have recently encountered such extremes as far as creche/playschools are concerned. This one family at The Boy's playgroup apparently left their child there for two weeks while they went on a holiday. This other friend here as well as her husband work full time, while their kid stays in the creche all day.

While on the other hand in India, my niece is two years old and her parents don't send her to a playgroup because her mother doesn't want to be "one of those mothers" who sends their child off to be looked after by someone else. So even though the girl is an only child, and a very social child at that, they still don't send her to a playgroup because, well, she plays with her cousins once in a few months, and that's really enough to be sure that she "doesn't have a problem adjusting with other kids". It's like saying we know she's very capable of making friends on her own, but why get her to do that already.

The argument has been that she has to go to school one day, why force her into a routine and into authority already. That's when learning -- and learning really means anything from learning to share your toys with other kids, learning not to scream at mamma, learning to drink milk from a glass, learning to eat by yourself -- is all seen as a chore. You can use that sort of logic to anything then, and people do. Well, she has to sleep in her own bed all her life, no harm in letting her sleep with us till she's 13. Or, they have to pick up after them all their lives, why make them do it already. The same logic is given for every thing from eating vegetables, to studying, to doing chores, to making their bed, to helping about in the house, to eating with their own hands, to carrying their own bags after school.. to doing an internship during the college summer break.

Oh, something quite controversial happened meanwhile. This friend of mine based in India wrote an article about managing a house with kids, and one of her points was about how she manages her entire coterie of servants -- the live-in maid, the part-time maid, the cook, the driver, the guy who brings the groceries, the boy who irons the clothes etc. etc. And of course she received major flak for it, with commentators based in the West that don't have access to this kind of help giving her grief. She also discussed the whole thing with me.. and it was all so ironical when I had to constantly bite my lip from mentioning the hundreds of chores that I have to do everyday and don't have help for. (If only I had someone who'd make me a cup of tea..)

I mean, you can't crib in a public/international forum that your maid hasn't been coming in and that you're devastated with all the work that's piling up.

People in India do it constantly, as everything just seems to fall apart when the maid doesn't turn up, or when, horror-of-horrors, she takes unplanned leave "claiming" that her kid is sick or something.

I was judged constantly when I was in India by my mother-in-law when I didn't chase after the maid to point out that she'd missed a spot, or when I slept through it when the maid came to sweep the house and do the dishes, or when I wasn't filing a missing persons report if the maid hadn't turned up till 10am.

Even when they visited us here in Geneva, N's mum was constantly cleaning -- mopping, dusting, handwashing the dishes even though we have a perfectly capable dishwasher.

And I knew she was constantly judging me for not doing the same.

Unreasonable standards

2011-05-02T10:45:00.002+02:00

N has been organising the study table for the last three days. Every time I give him a dose of "you don't do anything around the house..there's only so much I can do with a baby in our lives now.. blah blah blah", the next day N goes into overdrive.

Even if he's woken up at like 8.45am and is getting late for work, he still unloads the dishwasher and takes the trash out. He even changes the baby if The Boy is up and plays with him a little before bringing him to me for a feed.

He does this about every thing I point out. The moment I mention, "You're putting on weight", he's off for a run. If I say he's been eating a lot of junk lately and doesn't take care of his health etc, he's eating salads for lunch. If I ask him to tidy up the bedroom, he's off tidying up the bedroom as well as clearing up his cupboard as well as trashing clothes he doesn't wear any more as well as putting the winter clothes away.

N has several of these "New N" moments, where he promises things are going to be different from now. He's going to take care of things in the house more often; he's going to be more organised; he's going to keep his cupboard clean; he's going to keep his papers under control; he's going to get rid of junk he doesn't need and never did... the list really does go on and on.

And all of this lasts as long as his attention span. Which is that of a goldfish.

All he ends up doing more often than not is just create much more mess than already was lying around, and then starts getting entangled the minutiae of things. He overdoes, obviously pitting himself up for failure. He sets such unreachable standards for himself that there's no way he can fulfill them.

All our 3.5 years in Melbourne, N put the alarm for 6am every morning in the hope that he will wake up and study. He perhaps only managed to wake up at 6am a total of four times.

Of course, I'm the one who has to put up with all this.

Although, to be fair, he's not the only one setting unreasonable standards for himself. I have to confess I do the same very often.

Whenever we go on a holiday, I somehow pack in clothes that I don't wear in Geneva on a regular basis, but I hope to wear during the holiday. (The avid shopper that I am, I justify all the shopping to myself as "making a lifelong wardrobe for myself", where I have various sun dresses, even though there's no sun here most of the year; silk blouses and formal trousers even though I stopped going to an office more than two years ago; various hats for winter, even though I always forget to wear them come winter.) So all the shopping that I've been "collecting" for months come out when we go on a vacation. Unfortunately, I still don't wear it -- often times it's because I've miscalculated the weather at where we're going. Like in this Easter-weekend holiday to the French Riviera which_shall_not_be_mentioned_again, I decided to think ahead a little (since I have so much time on my hands, with absolutely no work coming in from my consultancy job for the past couple of months) and packed in all these skirts and tops to wear on the holiday. It wasn't even one of those where you carry one top that goes with all the skirts, or one skirt that goes with all the tops -- I had sets of tops and skirts only go with each other; and then I never wore any of it because it was fucking raining throughout that long weekend (which it why it shall not be mentioned again).

While on that topic, I'm a horrible vacation packer. I never calculate ahead what I will need, and in my attempt to travel light, I always end up having the wrong combinations or being stuck in the wrong weather than the one I had anticipated. Like this one time I thought I was going on a relaxing, khaki-trousers-white-tops-and-floaters kind of holiday, whereas my friend actually decided to show me the nightlife of the city I was visiting. So I was stuck with all these khaki trousers, white tops and floaters whereas what I desperately needed were some slinky sandals and a short skirt. And I never learn.

Patience, when you don't have a choice

2011-05-01T01:08:00.001+02:00

She said, for the third time that night, "Man, you're so patient!"

I'd just come out from the kids' bedroom after finally putting The Boy to sleep at 11pm.

He just refuses to sleep when we're outside. Too much to take in, too much to explore. Every thing is new. He doesn't want to miss a thing... one of the reasons why I'm not always super excited at going out nowadays.

In any case, going out for me means putting in an extra shift in baby care. Because we're usually out with N's friends (let's face it, I have no friends), I'm usually the one stuck with putting the baby to bed. And he's super excited and finds it against his religion to sleep in any place which is not his cot, my night/day/weekend/long weekend is usually stuck carrying him in a sling with my stole on his face to block out all extra stimulation so that he can go to sleep even while we're outside. Or sitting in the kids' room, as was the case yesterday, for several several minutes trying to put him to sleep and then giving up several times and bringing him outside.

But every time I would come out of that room, she'd say "You're so patient!"

And I'd be like, what else am I supposed to do? Just leave him there so that he starts screaming in a bit and wakes up the other toddler -- your child -- sleeping in the same room?

I guess what she expected was for me to bitch and complain about how difficult raising a baby was, and how my knees hurt and my wrists hurt and sometimes when he screams it's like my eardrums are going to burst, or that I can't go one night without a little bit of baby drama etc etc etc.

But besides the fact that that would all be quite untrue, I quite enjoy my days and nights with The Boy, and it's only very very seldom that things go out of control and I panic and get flustered -- the last such time, for instance, was on our Easter break to the French Riviera (post about that coming up soon).

There's nothing much that I can do if the baby doesn't want to sleep till everyone else nods off, too. There's really no point in getting stressed about a situation I cannot control, and it's not as if he stays up and annoys everyone. He just sits around watching everyone, observing every thing that goes on, and soaking it all up.

Beside, I don't think you can keep a distance between the kids and your nightlife, especially if you're taking the kids with you for this nightout. That would be like keeping a pet lion and then being really surprised if he ate up your goat. Or whatever. You get the picture.

Either one gets a babysitter and then leaves the kids behind, or if you're taking the kids along you've got to be prepared for a scenario where the baby will refuse to sleep at his normal bedtime and want to be up with you and be part of all the grown-up action.

And for this, you've got to be patient.

But for someone to point that out three times in the course of a night, I find that a tad condescending.

The mummy race

2011-04-29T10:52:00.002+02:00

There is nothing that mums like more than criticizing other mums' style of raising kids. Child-rearing is one department where we just go all judgmental, and then look very smug thinking that our way is the best.

There are also mums who are in constant comparison mode, trying to find something in their newborn child which will validate that that child is going to overrun all the insecurities that the mums and dads perhaps had when they were growing up, and who knows, still do.

I constantly read on the babycenter website mums boasting about how their LO (short for Little One) is only a few weeks old and is already sitting, crawling, standing, writing essay-length answers...you get the picture.

Some even pretend to be concerned that LO is only, say, five weeks old and is already trying to hold on to things and push himself up to a standing position. "Should I be worried?" they ask, but really, they just want to boast what a genius their little darling is.

Despite there being no evidence at all that developmental milestones like turning, rolling, sitting, crawling, standing, walking, talking have anything whatsoever to do with whether your child is going to be smart or not, mums continue to have their own little race at how fast their child will get to the finish line. (What finish line?)

N started talking quite late, I'm told. And yet, there's no stopping him now! His friends call him Aaj Tak, "sabse tez". It's completely a different matter that he is the smartest, most genius man that I know.

A new mum friend of mine has started a new mums group on Facebook, where we're all invited to ask questions, raise concerns, discuss the colour of our child's poop etc. so that other experienced mums can comment and give advice.

But advice on what to do and what not to do while bringing up a child is so varied, that while one person swears by, for example, baby walkers that helped their daughter learn to walk, another swears that they're evil and only teach children to walk with support.

So while one mum says to blend and puree everything you give to your 10-month-old, another says NEVER to blend and puree anything for babies because otherwise they just get used to mashed foods (and, what, never eat solid foods ever in their lives?).

There's the more popular/controversial one about talcum powder, and how evil it is as a child breathes in the talc particles that can stick to his lungs. We all grew up with our mums pasting our bums with talcum powder, and there's none of that sticking to our lungs now.

I've had my share of child-rearing advice, too, which I sometimes still find difficult to ignore. When The Boy was about 45 days old, he had a serious case of bronchiolitis that started with a cold and cough. He was given honey mixed with peppercorns and black cardamom then. Later I read you're not supposed to give honey to the child till he's at least 1 year old.

My in-laws also boast of how they mixed a raw egg to their son's milk when he was only a few months old. Again, raw eggs are a complete no-no for their risk of infection. In fact, according to doctors, you need to first give egg yolks at about 9 months, and only after the kid is a year old can you give egg whites.

But on the other hand, doctors and debates also keep changing at the drop of a hat.

While in the 70s-80s in India, giving formula milk to a baby was considered being modern and it was actually thought to be good for the baby, now doctors recommend giving breastmilk for at least a year.

There's now this whole debate on when you should start giving your child solids, and while prominent research still suggests solids can be started by 4 months, and definitely by 6 months, other research vehemently suggest that starting solids before 6 months is actually a crime. Okay, not a crime, but nothing less, too.

Personally, I just go with what I feel is right. I started feeding The Boy solids from 5 months. I plan to breastfeed till he's a year old. I don't use talcum powder, yet I'm not anal about not using it. I don't feed him honey. But I give him pureed fruits, vegetables and meats (Indian doctors apparently never recommend veggies to a baby; all baby diet charts mostly have only fruits on them.)

And I'm crazy judgmental. But you already knew that, right?

Marry only for love

2011-04-28T15:46:00.001+02:00

I've seen some very weird relationships in my life, and they always leave me wondering why is it that women have such low self-esteem that they will go for any jerk that comes their way, as long as the jerk smiles at them and makes them feel like a million bucks for one second - and sometimes not even that.

We'd gone for this car rally back in India a couple of years ago. Nothing like a road journey to get to know other people driving with you more than you want to know them.

This guy wouldn't get out of bed till the girl brought him two cups of tea. She took care of him like he was a child. She literally mothered him. She even carried all the luggage around while he was busy texting on his phone.

This other couple we recently met in London had a very weird equation as well. She had always complained to me about how she was really up to her neck with taking care of her baby, doing the housework, as well as getting back to part-time work. When I met her this time, and met her husband for the first time, I realised why.

He didn't do shit all in the house. We had reached her place at like midnight, and she was up waiting for us. She was up again the next morning at 6 when her son woke up.

She said her husband found it difficult to wake up early in the mornings. She also said, and mind you, not in a complaining manner, that he had only recently started loading and unloading the dishwasher. Apparently, that was the only thing he found manageable as far as housework was concerned. Everything else was too overwhelming.

There was no chemistry between any of these couples. They never held hands, their hands didn't linger on the other's shoulder absently, they never cuddled on the sofa while watching the news.

(There was also this whole thing that we came to know through their friends who were actually joking about it -- they were living in West Hampstead in a furnished apartment and paying through their noses, just to be able to live in that post code. This apartment was way smaller, and way more expensive than the previous one. They were also thinking of buying an apartment, and there was a perfectly decent one within their budget in literally the next street -- it was even closer to the tube station -- but it was not West Hampstead.)

Anyway, so all this really left me wondering why so many women married jerks. Why so many of them married a guy who had "the works" -- an MBA, a well-paying job, great future prospects. It was almost a logical decision -- a guy fills all the criteria on their checklist, what was the reason to not marry him?

London first - this one's not going to be pretty

2011-04-27T17:15:00.001+02:00

So after months of planning and buying the tickets, applying for the visa, getting chicken pox and postponing the tickets, The Boy getting chicken pox and again postponing the tickets, we finally went on what turned out to be the most expensive trip to London.

Had to stay at a friend's place who I'm not really very friendly with, coz the friends we love and always stay with have had a baby and their one-bedroom basement flat doesn't have room now for the three of us. So we stayed in West Hampstead, apparently a much-sought-after part of town.

They had one of those bland, someone-else's-taste serviced apartments. They'd been living in London for about five years, and we even up for a residency now, but had always lived in one of those serviced apartments that have no character or any personality of the person who’s occupying it.

First of all, I was meeting my friend’s husband for the first time, and I have to say he was the most joyless, don’t-care-a-fuck-about-my-wife’s-friends-who’re-crashing-into-my-house kind of person. Although my friend had come and stayed with me in Geneva for a good 4-5 days last year when I was fully bloated eight months pregnant and had to do all the housework because she had a small baby to take care of (fair enough), this guy -- the husband – still seemed to think he was doing us a massive favour my letting us stay in his house for two nights. He hardly spoke to us at first, and when he did speak to N, it was so he could size him up to whether he was of the sort of person he could talk to or not. And from the conversation they were having, I haven’t met a more cynical person in my life. It made even my “unlove” for life seem trivial.

Then, they had like 4 boxes full of toys which they offloaded in front of The Boy, completely over-stimulating the little fellow unnecessarily. Although she explained later they had bought all these toys from the charity shop, because she didn’t believe in spending too much money on toys children will hardly use for a couple of months, tops, I still felt it was too much for a little child to be bombarded with the barrage of toys that my boy was. He’s only used to playing with a few toys at time here, and true to his (and perhaps every child’s) nature he soon ignored them all and went after his real love -- the wires and the shoes.

So there was this one time when I was carrying the boy in the sling and his pram was empty, which N was pushing. And then they realised that their 1.5-year-old kid was getting tired and sleepy and they had thought it unnecessary to carry his stroller along. So they made their 1.5-year-old kid sit in our stroller, while N continued to push it. Neither of them, and I mean the HUSBAND, offered to take the stroller from N and push it since now his kid was sitting in it. I hate it when people do that to nice people.

Coughing kids with runny noses

2011-04-14T17:51:00.002+02:00

What do you do when little kids come to your boy and start coughing in his face while the parents look away?

At the Delhi airport this time while we decided on what to do with our 24 kilos of extra luggage that was going to cost us 34,000 rupees to take, these two kids came to look at the baby, while their parents were busy checking in at another station, not noticing what their kids were doing.

The girl asked me in an Indian language that I couldn't recognise what The Boy's name was, and then what my name was (as if that mattered). And then the girl started coughing into The Boy's face. Her younger brother also started coughing and I realised he was just doing it to copy his older sister. But there was still, I'm sure, although I couldn't see it, a lot of spit and germs flowing around.

The parents looked behind for a moment and the father said, "Oye, no!" and then looked away again.
I found my escape right then and wheeled the pram away from the two coughing children.

This happened to me the second time today. At least this time the guy which this coughing, runny-nosed toddler was conscious enough to take the child away and keep him away.

I was sitting out in the sun for my usual cup of coffee at this literally fly-by-night coffee place near my house -- I mean, this guy has got plastic chairs and tables all stacked up, and a modern tea-stall looking thing which he opens out only when the sun is out -- when this toddler with a runny nose and a dirty milky mouth came to have a look at The Boy who was sitting coolly in his stroller behaving very well. (I've started putting him in a stroller instead of a pram with a bassinet, and that has made things soooo much better. Even though he can't sit unsupported yet and I was afraid he was going to slump, but he doesn't and the seatbelt keeps him in place while the crowds keep him in good spirits.)

So anyway. The kid with the dirty milky mouth came to have a look at The Boy and then started coughing near his face.

Thankfully, the old man who was with the kid called him away and wiped his mouth with a tissue.

The kid returned, albeit with a cleaner mouth, but this time I noticed a runny nose.

But there was nothing I could do about it. The Boy also encouraged the toddler by smiling at him. The toddler got enough encouragement to stroke The Boy's hand, like he'd seen me do earlier.

The Boy started his blah-blah-ba-ba and his grizzling, which the kid found to be very amusing.

The old man (assumingly, the toddler's father) kept saying something to him in French -- I could make out he was telling him to be careful and not get too close. Finally, when the kid just stayed by the pram and, I could see, started getting more and more excited to talk to the baby, the father called him away to sit and watch the baby from a distance. A little crying ensued, but the kid sat protesting in the chair next to his father.

Twiddly thumbs

2011-04-12T18:38:00.002+02:00

After finishing school and just before starting college, a friend found himself involved with several girls he was not really interested in. He and the girls had nothing in common. They were not even his type. And yet, he'd told each one of them at various points that he liked them or even went to the extent of telling one that he was falling in love with them -- albeit a teen infatuation -- when in fact he was clearly not.

I ended up being the mediator in one of these "involvements" and soon realised my friend and the girl involved were extremely different from each other, and had not even met that often to develop any real feelings towards each other etc.

When I asked him why, then, did he tell her he loved her, he said they used to talk on the phone several times a day, and then one day they ran out of anything to say to each other and he ended up telling her he loved her. Just to have something to say. "I have a problem when I have nothing to say," he said.

I, on the other hand, have a problem when my hands have nothing to do. I can't sit idly and, for instance, watch television. I need to constantly keep doing something with my hands. I'm a huge multi-tasker, and cannot function unless I'm doing at least two things at a time. But this only works when the computer is on and in front of me, "tempting" me to switch it on.

This "problem" started when online chats began, and I would multi-task at work while editing a story or making a page. I'd have to be really quick about typing and closing the chat windows, too, so that no one could read from behind me what I was writing.

Anyway, now it seems I can't even just sit and watch TV. If the computer is kept at an eye distance, it sort of "calls out" to me and I am forced to open it and start doodling.

And doodling is all I do. I surf rubbish, play rubbish games, go through old pictures, shop... Even though I have a perfectly legitimate, very important "thing to do" right here on my computer, I sometimes even open this perfectly legitimate, very imporant "thing to do" and yet start doodling in another window.

Even while writing this blog. I usually just write rubbish (for instance, this post) and still get a sense of "having done something" after I publish it. When I can easily be doing the other more meaningful, very imporant writing instead.

I find it impossible, therefore, to watch a movie on the computer. It blocks the possibility of doing anything else on the computer. Leaving my hands free, once again.

Even when we're in a market, I have to hold something in my hands. Now with the pram, I usually hang my purse on the pram bar and then when N is around to push the pram I often find myself with nothing to hold in my hands.

It makes me very edgy.

How a baby changes you

2011-04-08T14:25:00.002+02:00

In a long plastic bag there's a hard plastic box and in that are individually wrapped (in plastic) vanilla buns. The most irritating part of my morning ritual is to unwrap this monstrosity and get angrier and angrier as I go along.

I hate packaging.

Every time N puts a can in the trash bin, I wince. I recycle every week, and set aside paper, cans, glass and plastic bottles everyday to recycle at the end of the week. (Heck, I have probably recycled more clothes than I have worn in my life. But that's another depressing topic altogether which I will never write about. Writing is accepting.)

N always sniggers when I take a bag along, even if we don't plan on buying anything.

But that was all before the baby.

I buy scented plastic bags now. To dispose the diapers in. The diapers themselves are as non-environment friendly it gets.

Sometimes I put a packet of diapers in another recycled plastic bag, which I then put in one of those big black trash bags, which then goes into the even bigger building trash bags.

Tragic.

Well, a baby does change you, no matter how much you try to deny it. I hadn't realised till very recently how much of a routine-driven person I'd become. When we went to India, I was literally like a fish out of water. I forgot to give The Boy any of his recommended vitamins, I forgot to take my vitamin supplements. I think a week before packing for the India trip, I was stressed. All I did was think of the hows and the what-ifs. How will I feed him in the car with my dad-in-law or my dad sitting in the front seat. How will The Boy sleep in the car, when he doesn't like to sleep in either the lap or the arms. How will I drive around with the baby.

Having a baby does change you in ways you can hardly imagine.

For example, you can't just "pop out for a sec". Not to get some milk, or to have a quick haircut. You have to say goodbye to watching films in a movie hall. Of course, you can watch the same films at home downloaded from the internet, but it's not the same as buying popcorn and candy and wasting away a cold Sunday afternoon.

You can't go for your own doctor's appointment without taking the baby with you, which can sometimes get quite tricky if the baby is cranky or sleepy. Every time you're about to step out you have to make sure the baby is fed and changed so that the chances that he will start crying randomly are minimised. You have to make him wear warm clothes and socks, which always irritates him because it's warm inside with the heating and everything. By the time I get to the cap, he's lost it.

But, yeah yeah yeah. He's the cutest thing there is. And I'm not just saying that.

What's in a colour, you asked?

2011-04-07T09:30:00.002+02:00

This African woman in N's office has only has one conversation with me the two times that I've met her: "So you think your boy will grow any darker?"

This was all on the first day that I met her.

"He doesn't seem to have N's colour, he's got more of your colouring. But it keeps changing, you know, till they're a few years old."

And then the next time I met her..

"You should see the ears. The colour that their ears are is the colour they're going to be. I mean the colour of their ears when they were born."

She then took off The Boy's socks and showed me the bit darker portion below the nails, "This is most likely the colour he's going to be."

And all this while I'm just nodding and trying to not tell her, whom I've met for like the second time in my life, that I_DON'T_CARE.

And to think we Indians were obsessed with the colour of our skin!

Too much to ask?

2011-03-30T16:55:00.003+02:00

There is always talk once in a few months about moving back to India, and N going back to his old job as a TV journalist again. And one of reasons I'm always against it all is because I know I will just lose him to a 14-15-hour work day. Plus, now with the baby in the picture, I'm not sure if I'll ever be ready to do all of this all on my own, or worse, with the sole help of the in-laws. (It's a different matter that I already do have to do all of this on my own, N only comes home to help me give the baby a bath and put him to sleep..)

But theoretically, I still have N by my side if, say, the boy gets chicken pox, or if I do. I mean, when the boy was in the hospital for about a week when he was only 45 days old, N was there with us all day, even though his paternity leave was over by then. He was still there ferrying milk and food and fresh clothes for me from home. We slept on the single bed in the hospital room. He snored through the night feedings while I had to wake up. But still, he was there... for me to kick awake if he snored too loudly that I was scared it would wake the baby.

Anyway, so whenever I speak to my sister-in-law about it, she doesn't find anything wrong with a father spending just weekends with the kid. And this time I saw, too. My brother lives in Noida and works in Gurgaon. He is out of the house from 8am to 8, sometimes 9pm. His son barely manages to be up when my brother comes home, and on the rare occasion that he is up, they spend every minute together.

So my brother's wife says it's most normal nowadays for the wife and kids to meet the husband only on weekends. I'd be fooling myself if I wished it any other way.

The thing is, this weekend marriage thing was one of the reasons we left India in the first place to go to Melbourne. We were too busy in India then to spend any time together, and even weekends were spent entertaining friends and catching up with family. If I wanted to go back to that life I'd have agreed to moving to India a long time ago.

Sure, N can go back to working from 8am to 10pm, and then being on the phone with work from 10pm to 2am, and then from 6am till the time he gets to work. And I can do the usual night shift at a newspaper, working from 2pm till whatever time the paper goes to bed. Because you can't raise a kid in India on a single person's salary any more. And The Boy can be looked after by the grandparents. But if they were to raise him, they should have had the baby, not me.

I'd never want N to be just one of those fathers who showed up on weekends and spoiled the child with their guilt at not being there everyday.

This one person we know in India who works in a news channel, his daughter calls him by his name. She's seven now, and they say only now things have started getting better between the father and daughter. The daughter was ill once, and after the mother also collapsed taking care of her, the father had no option but to step in. The daughter apparently told her mother, "Why couldn't you have married another papa? This one doesn't even know what medicines I'm supposed to have. Why couldn't you have married someone like my grandfather; at least he knows how to cook and take care of me." Of course, it's all a big joke.

But an absent father is not a joke at all.

Plus, I'm just not the sort of person who's going to do this all by myself. I need at least the guy to be around every night to tuck The Boy in his bed and read him a story book. Notionally, at least. I need the guy's phone to not ring constantly with a "breaking news" emergency when I'm trying to discuss, say, a PTA meeting with him.

Maybe I will have to do all these things by myself, eventually. But it's the principle of it.

Maybe I'm expecting too much out of life. But I've been known to expect a lot from life, and then... get it. So I'm going to take my chances this time too.

Can't catch a break

2011-03-29T15:36:00.002+02:00

I've had a pretty rough week with the boy. Just as he was getting used to not having so many people around to play with him after we returned from the India trip, N also left on a work trip. So he was just stuck with watching my face all day and all night, and I've pretty sure he got sick of it quite soon.

When N was away and the boy was really really out of control at times -- I would try to put him to sleep for like 45 minutes sometimes and he would be up the moment I left the room and caught my breath -- I did get upset with him sometimes, but then the moment I saw his face, I knew I wasn't really upset with him; there was nothing much he could do to be better. He was in trouble and he was trying to tell me something.

So although I knew that taking him for walks would help -- even the weather has been delicious -- but it's such a project to take him out.

I have to first carry the pram down the steps, because even though our house is on the ground floor, there are still some steps leading to it. And it's not the stroller kind yet, because The Boy can't sit on his own yet. It's the one with the bassinet.

I have to then come back and dress him in a sweater and jacket and socks and a hat, which really irritates him and soon enough he's cranky and irritated at being piled up with extra clothes that make his movement restrictive.

After all this preparation, he lies in the pram for like five minutes, after which he wants to be picked up and shown the world around. So I end up carrying him in the sling and pushing the pram. It's not as much fun.

When we get back home, I have to do the whole picking-up-the-baby-first-then-carrying-the-pram-up-the-stairs thing.

In addition, I also have some groceries etc. by now, which also have to be carried up etc.

No wonder my wrists and knees have been aching for the past seven months.

But the reason why I'm writing this post is not to complain about the lifting and walking. I just can't seem to catch a break.

N's back from his work trip, but he's still quite busy with office, and the thousand other things he does alongside, and I just feel bad asking him to do anything when he gets back home after work.

Sometimes I don't even have the time to get him a cup of tea before I have to ask him to help me bathe the baby and put him to sleep, before I go and make dinner.

So I'm thinking of getting a baby sitter who will help me in the mornings. She can do all the boring stuff like dress him and change his diaper and give him his breakfast in the morning, and perhaps help me with some cutting and chopping and also loading and unloading the dishwasher, which tops my list of hateful things that I have to do each morning. And then I can take him out to the park for a walk. Doesn't sound too bad.

Desi on tour

2011-03-28T20:55:00.002+02:00

Why is it that most men who come to live in my house as guests/friends of my husband's mostly are just plain weird? Forget about expecting to put the lid of the pot down, most of them can't even aim and shoot in the loo -- and this is when they're NOT drunk. One can't imagine what they do after. And what is it with people who just rinse a glass with plain water after they've drunk from it? And then mix it with all the other clean glasses? What if I just rinsed their plate with plain water after they'd eaten from it, and then stacked it back for use the next time?

This guy who's staying with us now is also a complete bhaiyya character, comes from a small town (which of course I have nothing against - I come from a small town myself) but then only talks as if he was born in a discotheque. He's come for a Europe tour, and his only concern through the tour is where the disc is. I would still not judge had he shown similar enthusiasm about going to a pub, after all one gets to know a lot about a city and its people just sitting at pubs, even whether you have company or not. But this character clearly just wants to sit in a discotheque and stare at women dancing.

And they're generally the most racist of the lot, passing generalisations about the white man as being dumb and racist. He told us in the most offended way how, when he was in Milan, he told the front desk guy he didn't like the room. Not, it was small or dirty or not what he'd been promised etc. Just that he didn't like it. So the guy at the front desk suggested he should have booked in a 4-star hotel then, instead of a 3-star one. And this fellow was really really offended.

They don't carry your luggage into the room, he complained. They don't give you anything complimentary. Yet, they expect the highest standards of service when they arrive in India.

To me it just seemed the usual class issue. I have paid for a service, and that makes you my servant. Till you're not bending over backwards to serve me, I will tell everyone else in the world that you're a racist.

This fellow's also from that category of men who're looking to, well, boink a white woman. Even if they have to pay for it. In fact, the assumption is that he will pay for it, perhaps because he knows he can't get it otherwise.

So he took N with him to the redlight area here, and asked him to ask the women about their price etc. But perhaps was too embarrassed with N being around that he decided not to do anything about it that day. But then did say that he plans to "get some action" when he goes to Amsterdam, or if he doesn't, then he'll definitely do it in Geneva. Seemed like one flag that he had to pin in Europe. I haven't dared to ask him how that went.

Too anal?

2011-03-26T22:12:00.003+01:00

This ex-colleague in Delhi has had a baby a couple of months after me, and I met her this time with her baby. So she had a bunch of really really weird things to say about her new role as a mum. Apparently, her mother-in-law was feeding the four-month-old baby jaggery (gur), and when this girl suggested it wasn't such a good idea, the mother-in-law started doing it on the sly; and then once caught acted belligerent, saying she's been doing it all along and that she wasn't going to stop just because the mother of the child had some new-fangled "modern" ideas of how babies are brought up.

But the thing was, this girl was not saying it in a complaining manner.. I mean, I would have been really really upset when retelling such a story. When my in-laws gave The Boy formula milk one morning even though I was in the house and perfectly disposed for feeding -- and formula is only like the last-option milk -- I was really really upset, and had to finally have a conversation about it with them.

But this girl was saying it in the manner of.. "how silly!". That's it.

She also said her mother-in-law tries to keep the baby close to her all the time, so that the baby gets used to her smell, and not the mother's. I was like, "She does WHAT!!?"

But no, the way this fact, too, was told was as a "whatever!"

She also said that her husband had shaved off the baby's head himself, again at four months, when the baby's soft spot on the head was not filled yet. I mean, forget about the fucking soft spot on the head, he put the damn razor himself on his four-month-old baby girl. Even the most experienced barbers sometimes refuse to shave a baby's head at that age, babies are so wriggly at the time.

But hearing the casual way in which these factoids were revealed really got me thinking. Could it be that I'm too anal about these things? Maybe I've lived away far too long. But seriously, my dad-in-law giving The Boy a small ber to "chew on" while he held it's twig in his hand so that the ber is not swallowed? A very bad idea, according to me. Believe me, if I was retelling that story, I would have been mad.

I had such a crisis this time with my mum, who says child-raising books written in the west are meant for children in the west, not for Indians. "I raised you through my natural maternal instincts, not after reading some books." She's distressed that The Boy sleeps in his own room, and says he will not have as strong an attachment to me as other (Indian) kids (to their parents).

Also, every time I tried to put the baby down for a nap, she would start playing with him, and then say, "see, he's not sleepy.. don't force him.." which would have been fine, except that I know his pattern, I know the signs he gives when he's sleepy. And not only because I've read in books to look out for them, but that he'd be sleepy like 30 seconds after she stopped playing with him, and she too would say, "now he's sleepy". Right.

Nervous no more

2011-03-23T23:28:00.002+01:00

I've been with N for 14 years now, which is almost all of my adult life. And in such a scenario, I have often felt I'm too dependent on him. That's how it plays in my head. He often calls me his Hanuman -- I always need that extra push before I do something.

And I usually get nervous as soon as I hear a new idea that isn't mine. A classic example of this was when N and I were having coffee with N's publisher; they were discussing N's new book which he was still writing, and I was just pigging out on the cremé bruléé. N had finished writing more than half of the book, but his publisher wanted him to now write it in a totally different style. And I could tell, the more she described to him how she wanted it written, the more excited he got thinking how he was going to tackle it, the more nervous I got. The only thing going through my head was, "How the hell is he going to do all this now?"

Anyway, that was besides the point.

So as N left for Bangladesh on a work trip last week, I got really nervous before he left. How am I going to bathe The Boy on my own (he's really really wriggly now)? Who's going to take out the trash? But that's where I stopped.

Even though I had nervous breakdowns on two separate days -- The Boy just wouldn't stop screaming in my ear (he's recently learned to scream and tries to test it all the time just to see my reaction), plus he's growing up and gets bored of just seeing one person's face all day etc. -- I still realised that I probably would have had them even if N came home in the evening. I also realised that I do most of the work in my house, from buying the groceries to paying the bill, making dinner, taking care of The Boy. Probably the only two things he helps me with on a daily basis is bathing the baby, and taking out the trash.

Even the one thing that was supposed to be his forte -- filling forms and writing official/job-related documents -- I have now officially mastered. I might still not be the champion of filling forms, but seriously, who wants to be that? But I am capable of, say, taking the baby to the doctor, even when the lift isn't working and the doctor's office is on the fourth floor; carrying the baby in a sling for longer than N; taking the pram down the dozen flight of steps leading up to our apartment; bringing the pram up the dozen flights of steps leading up to our apartment (believe me, it's tougher); applying for mine as well as The Boy's UK visa; holding baby in my arms while applying for mine as well as The Boy's UK visa; and sitting The Boy in my lap as they did the stupid biometrics thing for the visa.

Only saying.

N, are you listening? I don't even need you to take out the trash anymore.

Havelis, pots and prams

2011-03-18T19:27:00.006+01:00

I'm going to not write about all the bad memories of the India trip, the confusion, the politics, the double-standards, the ridiculousness.. so that when I read this blog when I'm like 52 there might just be a possibility that I've forgotten all that and only remember the good stuff a.k.a. Shekhawati.

We drove down tragically potholed roads, not for a short stretch of, say, 30-40 km, but all the fucking way to Jhunjhunu district in Rajasthan. I was carrying even like a huge pot for sterlising The Boy's bottle in the off-chance that I give him a bottle, because the sterlising tablets that I had bought in Geneva and taken with me to Delhi were of course not to be found when required. Of course, neither the bottles, the baby formula nor the big pot for boiling water was used, because it was relatively convenient for me to feed The Boy on my own. (More about this at the end...)

[It being our first long trip with The Boy, we carried everything he owned to India. Almost all his clothes, a big bag of diapers (to tide us through till we bought new ones there), milk bottles, jars of baby food which I hardly used there, wet wipes, non-wet wipes (never used), his sling (used once), his pram (and since he's not sitting yet, he has that bassinet-attached pram, not the lighter, more compact stroller which is used for older children).. Even though the pram did help us at airports a little (at least till the gate of the plane, but not of course during the stopovers), we realised quickly how it was a bad idea to have carried it all the way. It came out bent out of shape at the Delhi terminal, and the jokers at Qatar Airways tried to convince us "but, there's no physical damage, sir. Show us where the damage is and we'll lodge your complaint". Thankfully, N was at his impatient best, and I was quite surprised that he stood and fought with them for over an hour, while they tried to get us to go away by making us wait for over an hour and claiming they couldn't see what was wrong with the pram even though the two front wheels had stopped working and the whole damn thing was bent out of shape. Apparently, till the thing is not broken into two pieces they don't consider it a "physical damage".]

So, the hotel at Baggar was quite interesting. It was an old haveli converted into a heritage hotel. The food was Rajasthani, vegetarian fare, which the Punjabis among us turned their noses up at, and ate only yellow dal and palak paneer.

There were as many as 170 havelis in one small town like Mandawa. Only a few that charged a small entry fee were ones that had been taken care of. The rest all were in various stages of dilapitation. Their rich owners were now settled in places like Gurgaon, Noida and Bombay, and their next generations could hardly be bothered. I wouldn't blame them. Located just about 230 kilometers from Delhi, getting to Jhunjhunu itself took about 7.5 hours on the hardly-there roads. It was almost as if the state government didn't want you to get there.

So the havelis continue to lie almost in ruins. Anyone can walk in and peep inside. The insides are full of musty smells and poor locals setting shop of Rajasthani artefacts to lure the unsuspecting foreigner who might stumble in. Although I suspect there aren't many unsuspecting foreigners stumbling by. It is big cities of Rajasthan, like Jaipur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer, that catch the foreigner's imagination. It helps that they're well marketed, although there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation there. The Shekhawati region, on the other hand, is the lesser known region of Rajasthan, dotted with these havelis that are more like open-air art exhibitions.

The Boy, meanwhile, was at his curious best, sleeping only when he was exhausted. I was worried for him on the plane ride into Delhi, because he didn't get a bassinet on the flight and the poor thing was tired and cranky throughout, and yet because there was activity going on around him, couldn't sleep lest he miss something. But he took India in his stride, meeting constantly with new people and shutting down when he'd had enough.

I think having a baby has made me more of a worrier. I worry about the little things. I don't want him uncomfortable. I want him to have at least a few permanent things around him, things he recognises and is familiar with, so that when I'm not with him he still knows he's in safe hands. I remember the first time he started sucking his thumb when we were in Gran Canaria. It was his time to feed, but the way he chewed that thumb of his, it was almost like he was substituting his milk with that; and I did feel a little insecure then. One does tend to think of the adsurd sometimes: what if he's happy just sucking his thumb and doesn't need his milk any more. Well, the thumb-sucking got intense in India. I guess babies have their own survival instincts.

*Yes, about the breastfeeding issue. I'm sure if I wasn't as determined as I am to breastfeed him till he's one year old, I would have given up on the idea months ago. Here's some of the response I've got since he was a month old:

1. You can't be serious!

2. No alcohol? Really?

3. Of course you're not going to carry on till that long, are you?

4. There possibly can't be enough milk.

5. (After six months..) There possibly can't be enough milk.

6. I don't think he's getting enough. You just take him in for 5 minutes, and he's done?

7. Such a big boy drinks a whole bottle of milk. There possibly can't be enough.

8. He'll get too used to it, and it'll be impossible to get him off it after a while.

9. They start understanding things a lot more when they're about 6 months old. He should be completely weaned off breastmilk by then.

10. When his teeth come in, you'll find it impossible to feed him. You should start giving him the bottle.

11. Powder milk is better for him. It will make him sleep through the night. He will become healthier. It will solve all his colic issues. Only mother's milk cannot be enough.

Even the people who actually support breastfeeding, like my mother, keep insisting I should eat this and that because there clearly isn't enough.

Even though The Boy is clearly a healthy, happy baby. Touch wood.

Despise the other

2011-01-24T18:55:00.002+01:00

I recently managed to catch this amazing new reality show on Indian TV called Maa Exchange. It's an Indian take-off on Wife Swap USA where wives/mothers are "exchanged" and are supposed to go and take care of the other's family for a couple of weeks. They're supposed to spend the first few days observing the lifestyle of their new family, and then after a certain number of days impose their own rules about how that family should live in the coming few days.

Wife Swap USA usually pair off extremes from one end of the spectrum with the other. Like in the one I saw recently, they had switched wives/mothers from one family that was a conservative Christian with one that was a Liberal Christian. The former had six kids because "The Lord said, procreate!", the wife saw her role in life was that of a "helpmate" in that she was only there to serve and to help her husband, who was a MAN. She and the daughters in that family did all the "womanly" chores of cleaning and cooking while the son took care of the yard and putting the garbage away etc -- MAN jobs. The kids were home-schooled so that they stayed as far away from the outside corrupt world as possible, and the girls' aim in life was to become well-serving housewives who would in turn be their husbands' "helpmates". The husband said on camera that he had led a very sinful life and that he did not want his kids to lead that sort of life. Hence, these rules.

In the other family, which were Liberal Christians, the woman was the breadwinner while the husband (a triple MA and a PhD in Theology) stayed home and looked after the kids. Their two daughters were also being brought up to understand that the world today is no different for a woman than it is for a man; and that they really could achieve whatever they wanted in life.

Anyway, cut to Maa Exchange. One is a relatively rich, well-off family, where the kids make their rooms and help out in the housework. Their mother is very particular about the house's cleanliness and the family's diet, and encourages them to eat healthy and do yoga in the morning. While the other family proclaims loudly on camera that rules are for those living in jails and in boarding schools. The kids mostly eat samosas and vada-pao for dinner, the wife has several teeth missing (not that anyone points this out) and every member in their family is fat and rude.

During the Maa Exchange, when the two wives switch lives for about a week and go and live in the other's house, the fat family is extremely rude and constantly CONSTANTLY arguing and fighting and making fun of the wife who's staying at their house. They are offended when she cleans their house (albeit rather obsessively) and say they have the cleanest loo they have ever see or that they cleaned the kitchen during Diwali, why do they have to do it now etc. When the woman throws away a sack full of rotten potatoes from their kitchen, the husband says they must have rot during her stay (of four days). When she throws away smelly and rotten stuff from their fridge, again the husband says she must have put all the rotten stuff there in the first place just to show on camera how dirty they are.

The fat daughter wants to be an actress when she grows up, but says she will not move an inch to lose weight till she's 18, and only then will she start working towards becoming an actress. Even when the exchanged wife encourages her to dance in order to lose weight, she does not see the need for it even though dance, I would think, is the basic skill one must have for becoming a heroine in Bollywood. The father, too, is against teaching the children any skills or rules, saying they will learn everything automatically when they grow up. The father is most obnoxious when talking to the exchanged wife, and is constantly trying to pick up a fight. Seeing him, even the kids behave the same way, and make faces behind her while pretending to do yoga.

In Wife Swap USA, there is almost always a breakthrough where each family learns something or the other, no matter how small, from the exchange wife -- mostly it is spending more time with their children, putting up rules for children, eating healthy or spending more time enjoying each other's company. However, in the desi version, like all things Indian, no one learns anything other than how stupid the "other" style of living is. At the end of the episode that I saw, both wives returned smug and thankful that what they do in their family is better -- whether it is their obsessive cleaning, or the no rules approach; and the "other" is shit.

We didn't need a reality show to tell us that we think we're great and everyone else can go fuck themselves.

Does it really mean that much to you?

2011-01-19T12:34:00.002+01:00

Case 1
I have a cousin whose daughter has been raised by the grandmother since the little girl was born. The little girl is now two years old, and my cousin and her husband (the parents) still live in a different house than their daughter.

The cousin is not a working mother; she's currently taking a professional course. The husband, meanwhile, works night shifts. This cousin feels that she cannot look after the child on her own while her husband is away at work. She says sometimes there's no electricity late at night and she gets flustrered with a small child. The solution: give her to grandma.

So now the grandmother has been taking care of the child practically ever since she was born. The mother comes in in the evening to "meet" the child, and then goes home to make food for her husband. The husband, meanwhile, only meets the child on weekends.

I'm afraid this whole situation has "judge me!" written all over it.

The grandmother, whenever anyone goes to see her, is always complaining that she's now too old to take care of such a young child. She says she's constantly tired and feels she has aged a great deal in the past few months.

Case 2
A friend of mine living in small town recently had a baby boy. Her husband wasn't exactly keen on having a baby; he's not a baby person. So when I asked her how he was doing as far as bonding with the baby was concerned, she said there's been no time or opportunity for it.

The baby obviously didn't do much else but sleep in the first couple of months, and the servants took care of changing him and bathing him etc.

The friend is back to work now, while her sister-in-law who lives next door takes care of the baby as well as her own newborn child. Apparently, one evening when this friend came home from work, she started talking to her child as if she was his aunt. She asked him how his day had been, and that his "aunt" was back from work now etc etc. And then suddenly she realised this was her own child, and wondered aloud why she was talking to him as if she was his aunt.

Case 3
My friend joined work when her daughter was 3 months old. She has a HUGE apartment in Bangkok, and both she and her husband work in corporate settings, collect art and go on exotic holidays. She has full time help in Bangkok, and she has had grandparents or aunts coming in to help with the child all this while. The child is now 6 months old, and this is the first time the friend and her husband are alone with the baby now. They're at their wits end now on how to take care of the baby. She says she's thinking of getting the grandparents over again soon.

Case 4
There's another girl here who has a two-year-old, plus she's having another baby anytime now; and says she will come down to working 80% after she has the second baby. I wonder if she's even earning enough to provide for childcare for both her kids.

The thing is
These mothers who have gone back to work after having a baby say they had no other choice, whether financially or career-wise. If you don't go back when your baby's a couple of months old, you lose out on growth opportunites at work, people start thinking you're not serious about your job, and your career path goes pretty much downhill from there.

But I'm yet to be convinced that joining work when your baby is only a few months old is such a good idea for people who are otherwise financially well off.

It is sure to end the breastfeeding, for one. You can't possibly hope to breastfeed your baby, even if you're expressing milk, once you start working full time. You'll end up pumping milk almost all day in office if that was the case. Also, if you're working full time it's more than an eight-hour job. Under ideal circumstances you're out of the house for AT LEAST 10 hours, and considering you and your baby have to sleep as well, it hardly leaves you with any quality or quantity time with the child.

Also, I do believe that in some respects quantity time IS quality time when babies are small. In the first few months when babies are not aware of anything other than their own needs, when they see one person always being there for them when they cry, when they're hungry, when they're sleepy, when they're cold -- they start forming a bond with that person. They start getting the confidence that this person will be there to take care of me whenever I need. This confidence, I feel, is very important for a child who's just a few months old.

There's basically no politically correct way to say these things. But my personal opinion is that a child needs his mommy till he's at least four or five months old. Maybe not on a full time basis -- I mean, there's much to be gained by sending a child to playschool where he interacts with other kids his age, sees people other than his parents -- but as a primary caregiver, definitely.

Not crazy about this whole independence thing right now

2011-01-11T15:12:00.004+01:00

We moved The Boy to his room today. He's a little over four months. They say if you want a child to eventually sleep in his own room, you gotta move him to it when he's around 3-4 months, or he won't take kindly to it if you try to do it later.

I have one memory as a child of a lot of crying and begging for my parents to let me sleep with them just this one night, but my parents had stood their ground and I was, I felt at the time, banished to my room. But the fact is that if I have memory of this incident, I was probably nowhere between three and four months. In fact, I have no memory of sleeping in my own room at all when I was small. In fact, when I go to my parents' house, I still sleep with my mother; of course, the twist is that my dad sleeps in the other room now when I'm there. (He almost looks forward to it.)

Yet, whenever N has mentioned previously to my mother (as he has done ever so often, much to my irritation) that we will move The Boy to his room after he's three months old, my mother has completely freaked. Although she'll never admit it to N; she indulges him much too much -- or is literally scared to upset him. In India it is sacrilege to suggest such a thing. We're comfortable with whacking children when they're naughty, but this damn thing? How can you?!

But after N and I had set up The Boy's cot in his room, I couldn't help but feel a little pinch in my heart. Although he sleeps through the night, I just like having him around next to me in my room. Before I go to sleep I like to stand near his cot, hands joined together behind my back, and peer at his face, his cheek hanging, mouth slightly open as he lies sprawled on his stomach, stirring slightly because babies move around a lot in their sleep. Sometimes when he hears my voice he wakes up and then demands to be fed; almost like, "now that my milk truck is here, I might as well make use of it". At times he wakes up when we get to the bedroom. He then lifts his head up like a submarine out on a mission, turns to look at us and tries to make eye contact. We have to then ignore him and quickly switch off the light and pretend to be asleep. He calls out for a little bit and then, on not getting any response, goes back to sleep. Most times he wakes up before me in the morning -- when N is getting ready for work -- and starts calling me to feed him. He patiently goes on with his "aaa" and "ooo" till I give up sleep and get him into my bed with me.

N asked me then if I wanted him to be independent when he grew up. "Well, this would be his first step in the direction." And for a teeny-tiny second I wanted to shake my head in a "no" and keep The Boy close to my chest.

Common sense, Mommy

2011-01-10T13:06:00.003+01:00

The Boy is down with chicken pox. Well, he's not down anymore. He's quite up and about, touch wood, squealing every moment that he plays with his toys. The wonder that is babies! He squeals with the same delight every time I put him in front of that toy, as if it's the first time he's seeing it.

Why don't more people write or speak about how wonderful it is to raise kids? Why have I always met parents who are sleep-deprived and cribbing about their kids; some say it gets better after they're 6 months old, while others confirm you'd be ready to pull your hair out by the time they're six years old?

The Boy has been an absolute delight, touch wood. I still haven't had to give up on my sleep, and everyone knows how much I love my sleep. In fact, I've started worrying that I'm making him sleep too much, because while my beauty sleep finally finishes when I get out of bed at noon, his continues throughout the day, after each feeding-playing-squealing session. I haven't disappeared from active social networking life (refer to Zuma Blitz story). I'm getting back to working from home soon. My boobs are doing fine, despite all the overuse six times a day etc. I'm back to wearing my old clothes. I've been back to wearing them since he was two months old. I'm back to shopping for new clothes since he was two months old. We've gone on our first holiday -- not meeting the parents back in India, mind you, a proper holiday with beach and sun and stuff.

Whereas each of these things are considered a milestone as far as other mums I've heard from over the years are concerned. They always seem to either be cribbing about not being able to/not having done either of the above, or they seem to have just resigned to the idea of not being able to/not having done either of the above. But when you do point out to them how easy it's been since the baby came, they suddenly eat their words and agree with you and start telling you the opposite things about their children than they have been all this while.

When he first got chicken pox, I got a call from a friend in Delhi asking about it. He said, "So how is he? Does he keep crying all the time (because of the pox)?" He had said it in a very matter-of-fact way. In the sense of not really asking whether The Boy cried all day, but that if it bothered me that he cried all day. The assumption was that he would be crying all day. And I just found it so weird that someone should expect a baby will keep crying all day for any reason.

Yes, it took me about 3 months to figure out what the various cries were all about -- hungry, sleepy, stomach ache. (Once he cried in irritation when we were visiting someone and she had lit scented candles in her house.) Sure, he cried a lot more when he was younger, I think mainly because of stomach problems. But by now I have figured out when he needs what, and if you make sure his needs are taken care of timely, there are days...weeks even when he doesn't cry at all.

I'm sure my friend would reason I have a low-maintenance child, and sure I do in many ways, but I'd prefer to give credit to common sense, mostly.

This girl who came to stay with us for a few days would pick The Boy up every time he cried. She would try to distract him, play with him, make funny faces, throw him up in the air, etc. And look at me funny when I said he's crying because he wants to sleep. The Boy mostly cried at the time when being put to bed, because he'd be tired (I'd have caught him yawning a couple of times before I put him in his cot) but didn't want to sleep because he thought things in the living room were much more exciting. I would keep patting him as he would wail and wail with his eyes closed, and then finally, quite abruptly, just doze off in the same position that he was crying. And all the while I was doing this, I would sense the girl judging me, thinking I was making the baby cry and clearly forcing him to sleep when he was not sleepy at all.

In India crying is associated with either that the baby is hungry or that he wants to be picked up. I would come out of my room having fed The Boy, and he'd sometimes start crying because of whatever reason (he was mainly colicky when he was little), and mother-in-law would ask, "Do you think he's hungry?"

Note to self: Stop gloating.

Blitz personality

2011-01-09T11:56:00.003+01:00

I have been playing this game on Facebook called Zuma Blitz. Not only do I play it, like, 24x7, I have also started logging on from N's Facebook login and playing it from his side!

The thing is, you get a certain number of lives in Zuma Blitz. As you get better at the game, the game decides how many lives you get, and what is the interval during which your lives get regenerated. I'm at the level now where my lives get regenerated every 6 minutes 15 seconds. But a game lasts 1 minute. So considering a life is lost every time the 1-minute game is played, I'm out of lives in like less than five minutes. Anyway, so I'm SO hooked that I go on to N's login each time my lives are over and play from his lives. I even managed to score the highest score of the week from his login, and now I'm spending all day trying to beat that highest score from MY login. It's all gone WAY out of control.

The modern traditionalists

2010-12-26T23:36:00.001+01:00

What do you say to a person who insists and argues that Vikram Seth first wrote his Suitable Boy in Hindi? "I tried to read this English version," she said, "but I couldn't go on after about 10 pages. This is the translated version na, that's why it's not that good. My friend told me the original Hindi book is wayyy better."

This girl falls in the same category as the python couple we used to know in Melbourne where, again, the girl was bragging to N that she had read the Arthashastra when she was 10 or something, but has now forgotten what it was all about. She was the same girl who, when I mentioned it was the 60th (was it?) year since the holocaust, had said, "Holocaust?" When I threw in some words like Hitler, Second World War, 6 million Jews, she said, "Oh, I knew there was someone called Hitler, but I didn't know he was so bad!"

Again, the same girl who had said just as Melbourne was hosting the previous Commonwealth Games, "This Commonwealth is that only.. common+wealth, isn't it? Countries that have common wealths." And she didn't even put a question mark after that. It was as if she was just confirming with us what she already knew to be true.

Meanwhile both she and her husband had given us blank looks on the words "Mangal Pande" and "1857" when we first met them and mentioned we were really waiting for the film on Mangal Pande. And later (because we really tried but couldn't get rid of them) the guy had looked at N's bookshelf, seen the series The History of Sikhs and asked, "Tell me one thing, these Sikhs...these sardars... where did they come from?" Like they're some sort of extra-terrestrials who've landed here from some other planet.

Again, same guy who asked N, "Tell me one thing. How did these Britishers rule India for so many years? Where were all these Ashokas and Shivajis and all?"

There just seems to be this whole generation of "young Indians" who are so thick in the head it isn't even funny and who think they're so smart that it's scary. Whenever two people discuss anything that was in the news recently (which wasn't Bollywood, for example) their eyes just glaze over and some of them even interrupt and say, "Kya boring baatein kar rahe ho yaar! Let's talk about something fun."

I think the worst part about them is their cockiness and confidence. I mean, you're so stupid that you don't even know when to shut your mouth, when to stop talking crap and when to know that what you're saying is so stupid.

Also, many of this urban youth in India has access to certain clothes labels, certain films, a certain culture, it's really very difficult nowadays to see the package and know what's inside.

I overheard at Milan when we'd gone there: one very chic Indian girl announcing to her group of other very chic and smart-looking young Indians, "I really want to do a mata darshan now. That's the next thing on my travel agenda."

I mean, the categories...the line between modernity and tradition is so thin now that it takes a little bit more insight and interaction to realise what the person is all about.

This girl who came to stay with us over the past few days (the Vikram Seth arguer) was a perfect example of this.

She works in France. She lives alone there and teaches English to French kids. These facts immediately urge you to create a certain picture of her...of a certain kind of girl she might be. You think, or rather I think, that she sounds like an independent, adventurous sort of girl who's capable of taking care of herself, is liberal-minded, and is generally smart and open in her outlook.

Then she starts picking up her fiancé's plate after he'd finished like it was her job to pick up after him, and making him tea every couple of hours while he sat all day playing on his iPad. She starts making these aloo parathas as if she's been making them for the past 15 years. She says her mother has trained her for everything (i.e. marriage), and that she has been cooking since she was in class 9. (I tell her my mother also tried to train me for marriage by making me cook breakfast every Sunday, but I refused and protested and therefore never learned any cooking till after I got married. She says she was also the same as far as the refusal and protestation was concerned, but clearly her expert hands on the tava tell another story.)

She says she doesn't eat seafood because it smells (a very previous generation Punjabi thing to say). She also says she only likes eating Indian food. She doesn't drink, not even socially, because she claims she can't hold her drink and gets violent when she's "drunk" and starts hitting people, known or unknown to her.

And by now I'm all confused about whether she's a modern woman living and working in a foreign country, cruising through a foreign language (which N and I have tried and abandoned after many many tries) or whether she's just a traditional bloody Punjabi girl.

Maybe there's a new class of people who have adapted the two very different worlds of modernity and traditionalism and combined them to make this "nouveau youth". This class of people who reads Chetan Bhagat or Indian chicklits and thinks Vikram Seth writes originally in Hindi.

The cynic

2010-12-25T20:47:00.004+01:00

I told N the other day I didn't trust people who trusted too easily. I thought they were naive and stupid. N called me childishly cynical.

So we were living in Bombay two years ago and we'd gone for a walk late at night after dinner. When we came back the key to our apartment didn't work. It was a really old apartment in Bandra and a really old key, and somehow it just didn't work even though only a while ago we had used it to lock the door.

We went downstairs where a few autowallas slept at night in their autos or waited for late night passengers, and asked them if they knew any keymaker who would be open at this time. The fellow offered to give the key a try himself and came with us with a couple of other fellows. They all tried but the key just didn't work.

We went downstairs again to see what else we could do and another auto guy drove to us wondering if we needed a ride. This guy said he knew someone who had a shop near Totos, and offered to take us there. He also assured us that if the shop was closed he knew where the fellow lived and that he could take us there.

The shop was closed but his mobile number was written on the shutter. N called him from his phone, but that fellow couldn't understand what he was saying. So the auto guy spoke to him and told him in half Hindi half Marathi that we were very nice people and that we needed help, and if he could come round with us to our apartment and open the door for us. We'd take him to the apartment in the auto. The fellow agreed and told us to wait for him.

N offered the auto guy a cigarette while we waited.

The fellow, a young kid carrying his "key kit", had to make a new key for us when we reached home. He also wanted N to write him a note saying he had asked him to open our door for us, because he said his profession was just that if the cops saw him with his kit late at night they stopped him and harassed him assuming he was helping someone with a robbery.

He took 100 rupees for the job. He said it cost this much because it was 1 o'clock at night.

My reaction to when we were happily inside our house: now all the auto wallas downstairs know where we live and know how to break into our house.

Day 1 at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria

2010-12-23T01:36:00.005+01:00

We were off to a terrible start. The signs leading to it were ominous from the beginning. I was stressed about travelling with The Boy for the very first time. Having packed almost ALL of his clothes, I was still wondering about other scary details:

What happens if he does his big weekly poop and we're on the beach or somewhere more inconvenient and can't change him, and all the poop spreads over his back and reaches up to his neck like it usually does in these weekly events?

What happens if you're not allowed to wash and dry clothes in the hotel room?

What happens if we're on the beach or are travelling in the car and he can't sleep and keeps crying?

What happens if I have to feed him when we're on the road or in a public place, and he suddenly develops an intolerance for blankets or shawls over his face?

What happens if he just can't stand the airplane or the air pressure and wails his head off, or the recommended feeding during landing and takeoff doesn't work?

Our flight to Las Palmas was booked from Zurich, since there are no flights to the island from this godforsaken city of Geneva. We were thinking of driving to Zurich at night to be in time for the 8am flight. But the car broke down a few days earlier, and because it was the holiday season we were considered lucky that they even took our car in for repairs. But we were told the next day that the car won't be ready before the New Year. In any case there was always chance of snow and N wasn't sure that we should drive to Zurich that late at night with The Boy.

So we took the last train out from Geneva that reached Zurich at 11.30pm. Our check-in was not before 5am but we figured we'd scout the airport shops all night, breaking frequently for coffee or drinks. In case that The Boy isn't able to sleep through the airport shopping, we'd check into one of their night rooms for a snooze.

Turns out you can only get the night rooms if you have a boarding pass.

I didn't understand why I would want to take a snooze AFTER I got my boarding pass, because it usually doesn't take more than a couple of hours between getting the boarding pass and boarding the flight. But it seems the snoozing rooms at the airport were only for in-transit passengers. If you came by train from another city, your only option was to book into one of the (expensive) hotels nearby.

We looked at the prices in one of these nearby hotels for one night, plus considered the hassle of taking a taxi to and from the hotel, and thought of skipping it altogether. We thought we'd stick to our late-night shopping plan and then just settle down somewhere for a small nap. We could always sleep on the flight. As long as The Boy had a comfortable, familiar place to sleep in the form of his pram, we were ready to rough it out a bit.

Turns out the airport was closed. All shops and restaurants...everything was shut for the night. (Which is why we in Asia have to open our airports through the night, by the way, and service flights coming from and going to Western countries, like Switzerland, that refuse to welcome flights after 10pm.)

Not only that, all the "comfy" snoozing benches were taken.

We sat at the Radisson resto-pub for a bit while N had a red curry and beer and I downed a bottle of coke, but then we got into this really nasty debate/discussion and on the spur of the moment decided to "get out of here". Had we stayed on, we'd have atleast had a comfortable place to sit while we waited.

So anyway, there was no decent place to sit, let alone nap, throughout the airport, and if there was (which there was, as we found out later) we didn't find it then.

I hardly slept for a total of ten minutes, while N, who can clearly sleep anywhere and in any position, slept for a lot more. The Boy didn't do too badly and slept in his pram till the airport was quiet and dark.

He was an angel during the flight and fed quietly and slept quietly through it, playing momentarily with N and then feeding and sleeping again in my lap.

Meanwhile our first day in Gran Canaria has been spent mainly sleeping and relaxing, but I'm really glad we're here. It's a nice hotel and we have a large room with a balcony and a view of the pools. I'm thrilled with the all-inclusive package deal we booked. It means we don't have to think twice before having that champagne or indulging in that butterscotch frosting cake.

The place seems to be filled with old people and sagging skin, however, (I mean, there are old men using walkers, for god's sake!) and much too much flesh than I would care to see on an 80-year-old.

While these things would have bothered us before The Boy, they somehow don't now. I'm just happy to be in a warm place where getting out of the house doesn't mean you have to wear like 20 layers of clothes and still freeze your ass off when you step out. I'm glad to be out of the house and away from that godforsaken city of nothing. I'm happy to have a literally zero-maintenance child who can fall asleep anywhere and in as much noise, as long as you let him cry it out a little bit before, and as long as his mamma's with him.

PS: For the first time also, when the flight took off and did like a major tip to change directions in the sky, I was genuinely scared to look out the window. I guess thinking of death isn't just a vain act any more.

Demystifying the relative

2010-12-13T16:54:00.005+01:00

It's so difficult to sometimes see a person beyond what you already know of them.

I have several relatives whom I only meet like once a year when I go to my parents' place. I have known these people since I was a kid, and meet them once a year or so. Yet I don't even know what some of them do.

It's especially true with the wives of my cousins. They call me "ji" even though they're like way older than me. They all wear sarees or expensive embroidered suits every time I meet them, and appear to be perfect daughters-in-law -- you'll mostly find them in the kitchen and they all lurrrve kids. Beyond what I know through my parents about them (which is basically only where they're from -- that too I've mostly forgotten) I never bothered to ask them, for example, what they've studied or whether they have any siblings etc.

One of them had lived in the US for years and came back and settled in Delhi with the kids and with a serious American accent. N asked her whether she liked being back in India or if she missed living in the US. It was the first time someone had "de-relativised" a sister-in-law, and I felt sort of ashamed that I hadn't had the politeness to do such a thing myself. (Not that I went on a rampage of "know your relative" either after that. Most of the time I still don't bother asking what their kids do, how old they are, or even what their names are. The thing is, I'm already supposed to know these things, but I always forget and am then too embarrassed to ask again.)

Anyway, so the shoe was on the other foot recently. A cousin sister of mine was visiting Geneva with her husband, who had some business at the ILO here. This was when I was still pregnant with The Boy. We spoke on the phone, and she did not show any signs of knowing that I was pregnant, i.e. she did not congratulate me, therefore I assumed she did not know yet. We went to meet her at her hotel, and when she opened the door of her room I stood in front of her in all my pregnant glory, but she still didn't say anything, and this time pretended as if she already knew. But still no congrats.

I understood that by this time she probably thought it was too late to congratulate me because she'd spoken to me on the phone several times. Plus, she probably didn't say anything when I turned up at her door like that because she wanted to pretend as if she already knew. She was probably too embarrassed that she hadn't said anything yet, that she didn't say anything still.

Anyway, so we called them home for dinner, and they were ridiculously late, but she had been calling me throughout and saying they'd be late because her husband was stuck in a conference. When they arrived, her husband did the normal person thing of apologising for being late and commenting on our lovely home, while she just flopped herself on the sofa and wailed about how her head hurt. I was just a little cousin sister who did not have to be apologised to.

Even as we ate dinner, her husband did all the polite things of complimenting me on the food, asking N about his work etc. while the lady just made some comments about how the food HAD to be good since I was from her family blah blah.

There was this funny incident at the end when we went to drop them back to their hotel where they'd brought this bottle of wine for us and in all that hooha of getting late they'd forgotten it in their hotel room. While the husband gave us the bottle, the wife tried to keep the bag in which the bottle was kept with her for use later!

Tasty dish ya game finish!

2010-12-13T02:32:00.002+01:00

Since a few years after I got married I have had an interest in cooking. It could have been that N is so fond of eating and is so generous with his compliments that I have always loved to try out new meals which we enjoy together, or that when we were in Melbourne and we mostly had non-Indians over for meals who, again, were extremely generous with their compliments (I remember one being "everyone's just quietened since the food arrived" which was in fact said twice in the same context) that encouraged me to cook.

There was even a time in Melbourne when if someone were to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up I'd have said a chef. (But then of course I saw Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and becoming a chef became a distant dream.)

Even though over the years I have started experimenting a little less and now stick to my usual of Italian once a week, Chinese one a week, Indian twice a week and eating out the rest of the time schedule, my love for cooking and my interest in trying something new every time I watch Jamie or Nigella or Kylie on TV has remained.

And then came Masterchef India.

During the initial selection round I telling N wistfully how if we'd been in India I'd have definitely auditioned for it. (Like I would have for the Amazing Race had we been living in the US.) But the first serious challenge that the contestants had to go through, and I was suddenly aware what a sea of difference there was between my tiny aspirations of being a cook and what the competition out there was.

They had a booty of ingredients, some of which they had never seen or heard of before. There was the world's hottest red chilly (apparently 400 times hotter than the average one; it could be touched or handled only while wearing gloves), there were some green tomatoes (no idea how they're any different from the usual red ones), there was some coconut, melon seeds, some rice flour and raw papaya. They had to prepare a dish within an hour using these ingredients. To prepare something with ingredients one had never even seen before, forget about tasting and knowing how to use and in what quantity, was according to me a damn tough job! I mean, what the hell do you make with a raw papaya?

I realised then that I was quite a traditionalist when it came to food, even though I'd believed otherwise for a few years. I guess I came from very traditional homes -- both my mum and mother-in-law mainly make Indian at home, their experimentation only going to the extent of baked vegetables and Indian Chinese -- and I thought the amount I'd gone ahead of them in terms of the variety of foods that I ate and made at home was a huge step forward. The first time that I was away from home I'd tried so many different things -- fish cakes, gnocchi, sushi, crabs, mince pies -- that itself was a huge leap forward for me.

But watching that one episode made me realise how wrong I was, and how little I knew.

The show has been an eye-opener of sorts for me, and yet it's not a cooking show. It doesn't inspire me to try any of the dishes they make, because it's a level that I can't even aspire to reach with my food channel inspired cooking. (And I will kill anyone who reads this and says, "really? you thought so? I've been watching that show and thinking, eh! that's child's play! I could cook better than that.")

Yet on another note, the contestants on that show are either told to be or are genuinely so awestruck. They have this one episode at the property of a "king" in Rajasthan, and the pomp and show attached with it, with host Akshay Kumar trying to build up the "king" and his royal ass so much that for a moment one really wonders whether that whole thing of abolishing monarchy from India 60 years ago was true or did I just dream all that up? Even the prize for the winner of that particular challenge was that their dish would become the royal dish at the "king's" kitchen from then on (to be eaten by WHOM, Iwanttoknow? the "king's" 1000 non-existent royal subjects?) The way the contestants go on saying how thrilled they are to be doing this and how wonderful everything is, it's just irritating. It's like they are being fed all the time by the programme people "be grateful" "be grateful" "be grateful".

They had this Chinese challenge and the set was decorated with Chinese lanterns (that's ALL!) and this one girl actually said, "when we reached the kitchen we thought we'd reached China or Japan or something.."! I mean, Chinese lanterns are representative of a country that has over a billion people living in it? C'MON! It's like draping a saree over a wall and saying, "Welcome to India!"

The chefs behave as if they are like the last word on food. While hosts of western food shows, who I'm sure are also chefs somewhere or the other in the world and have written various books on the matter, urge you to be creative with your creations... don't let what's written in the book bind you (unless it's a baking recipe, in which case you pretty much have to follow the measurements down to the T) let what's in your fridge run your imagination. But in this show, the chefs are downright militant about the cuts, the proportions, the ingredients and even the presentation. If you don't have brinjals or aubergines in your Thai green curry, apparently your dish is rubbish! Like the other day I was watching Ramsay's Best Restaurant, where the winner of the show had made risotto out of not rice but potatoes chopped into tiny tiny pieces. They won for their innovation and their risk taking. I guess those guys would have been asked to go home first in this show! Well, I guess it's NOT a cooking show, but rather a search for a master chef which makes them behave so strictly about what goes where.

But I like the challenges they put up in various episodes. You have to eat a dish and guess like the 24 ingredients that are in it. One of them tasted for like a fifth time, mulled over her spoon and said, "salt!" You also have to copy a professional chef and cook shoulder to shoulder with him, matching him on his speed, presentation etc. You have to make pasta or noodles from scratch, using a pasta/noodle maker. They had to make macaroons once... none of them had ever seen or tasted macaroons before, or knew what they were made of. They had to cook at a dhaba once over bhattis, and make rotis in a tandoor!

The other show I have managed to catch just once on TV is the Million Pound Drop, which also I lurrrve, even though I have seen it only once. But it was addictive that first time I saw it. Will write more soon on another TV show which crossed the limits of ridiculousness in my dictionary.

PS: Pox getting better. Just hoping the boy doesn't get it. He's too cute to be sick. Plus, it won't give him immunity yet, so I would want that he have it when he can build some antibodies from it and make sure it doesn't happen again. But one doesn't get everything one wants.

The pox still lives in Geneva

2010-12-10T17:27:00.003+01:00

Well, so I have chicken pox now. It's been something or the other this year. And the boy's doctor is certain that if I have it, he's also going to get it. He's not even four months old yet. My poor baby.

Meanwhile, I have pox marks all over the place, even in places whose names if I mention I will start receiving ads for adult content.

N was in India on work when I started feeling ill and didn't know what was happening. I would wake up with chills and a body ache everyday and feel weepy. But a paracetamol later and it would all get okay. But as soon as the effect of the medication would wear off, the chills and aches would be back. I was even overdressing the boy in lots of warm clothes thinking the heating was not working properly and that's why the chills late in the evening and early in the morning.

I also had a blister on my tongue for which I started taking b-complex capsules, only to realise the next morning I was getting what I thought at the time was a rash on my face and my scalp. I thought I was having an allergic reaction to my self-medication.

But when N walked in through the door, saw me and the first he asked was whether I had chicken pox. And I was still finding it all quite ridiculous. I mean, I am almost 32 years old. How could I be having chicken pox? In fact I was going to have an anti-allergic, so convinced was I that this was just an allergic reaction to some medication.

But N insisted that we go to the doc. and sure enough, chicken pox it was.

We'd been to visit N's colleague two weeks ago and her two-year-old son got chicken pox the next day. We were very worried about our boy having caught it, and got his doctor to even write out a prescription for it already, so that we have stocked up on the medication if he gets it over the weekend and all pharmacies are closed (Geneva!). But I never thought I might get it too.

I still wasn't thinking much of it, and was in fact more worried that our planned trip to Amsterdam the coming weekend was going to go waste, and I even told N that he should go (it was a test though, and I would have been really upset if he HAD gone leaving me alone to take care of my itchy self as well as the boy).

But the spots came in thick and heavy throughout that day, and one above my lip even burst while I was asleep and formed like this bloody dark brown line on my upper lip, which quite resembled a half moustache. N woke up in the morning the next day and warned me about it, hoping I wouldn't get too shocked when I looked at myself in the mirror.

He came back early from work and had bought lots of itch-busting foods like oranges and kiwis and yoghurt. And drew me up a warm bath with apple cider vinegar and some chamomile tea bags tossed into the water, which has, believe me, been a godsend. I don't itch for a good couple of hours after I have those baths.

Of course we're both worried about the boy now. It'll be the worst if he gets it too. He's been through enough already in his short life.

Plus we have an all-inclusive holiday booked in Spain for Christmas this month, and it would be a bummer to miss that too :(

Mamma's here

2010-10-04T00:56:00.004+02:00

I had never thought the first post I would write after August 19 would be like this. After the delirious few days, I'd even started writing out a draft post that went on to describe the joy of having a little person come entirely out of me (albeit with much thrashing and pounding, as usually happens in a Caesarean section). But I'm sitting here at home today while the one boy I've been fixated with for the past 45 days is in ICU.

He has broncilitis, which is different from bronchitis, and will be in the ICU for 2 or 3 days.

We returned home because one, the hospital is thankfully right next door, and secondly, there was pretty much nothing we could do there as they wouldn't let us stay in the ICU and also they advised that I should recover from my flu and be fully ready to take care of him when he gets okay.

It's been a weird few hours since I got home. Not only do I have an acute case of 'baby brain', where it's taking me ages to type simple sentences and I keep making hundreds of mistakes while typing, which if I didn't have the delete button at my disposal I would have been in trouble. There's just so much emptiness around me it's hard to ignore. I want to wake N up and ask him if we didn't just dream up the last 45 days; do we really have a baby. But then the picture of him lying in that ventilator, millions of tubes inserted to his tiny wrists and nose, looking so small and vulnerable, comes to me and I know none of it has been a dream. That at least he's here.

I was using the breast pump, as advised by the doctor, so that my milk supply doesn't suffer, and I was remembering that N and I commented how the boy sucks faster than the machine; what a happy chomper he is, holding on to mommy's breast like his life depended on it -- eyes closed as if he was doing some great meditation.

When he learned to move his head about a little bit, he was fascinated just lifting his head and looking up, not necessarily because there was anything interesting to look up at, but only because he could. I would be trying to feed him and he would be too distracted looking at the photographs on the walls.

N and his dad first took him to the doctor today. I didn't go because I'm still recovering from a horrible flu. But then everything suddenly happened very quickly, and next thing I knew I was being told they're giving him oxygen and that they'd be keeping him at the hospital overnight. When I reached the hospital they were just bringing him in from an x-ray. I didn't notice this, but N's dad told me later, the way the boy's eyes lit up when he saw me, the way he started moving his hands and feet about and the way he looked into my eyes and tried as if to say something.. I'm crying while writing this.. I've heard this three times, and all three times it has brought tears to my eyes.

The last sex

2010-08-13T13:36:00.001+02:00

I have never had sex for a "purpose".. till last night. Yup, pretty keen on having the baby out now (I just wanted him to be out before my parents got in, but they get in tomorrow morning, so there goes..), and have been trying all sorts of "home remedies" for the purpose -- kiwi fruit, pineapple, walks, and finally, sex. It's really uncomfortable at this time, and takes some bit of maneuvering since I find moving about in bed specially uncomfortable.

But the point is, nothing's happened so far and I can't help thinking if it wasn't just N's ruse to get me to have sex one last time before I go into sexual hibernation.

Petty, petty me...

2010-08-10T10:51:00.001+02:00

...but aah it feels so good to be petty sometimes!

In-laws have been predicting since I got pregnant that I will pop not in August as the doctor said, but in July, or even June. They seem to think that the Swiss doctor here has got her dates wrong, and that for Indians a pregnancy doesn't last that long. (Of course, no medical basis for any of this.)

When they came to visit in April, my crazy mother-in-law literally wanted to place a bet, in true Punjabi style, saying "you're also here, I'm also here, we'll soon see who's right", while I rolled my eyes and looked at father-in-law for solace. (Even though he was "predicting" the same stuff, at least he wasn't quite as ostentatious.)

When June-end, July came I started getting a little worried, especially since N was away for about a week, and his office had planned to send him away even more that time, thinking what if the prediction came true. What if I popped like a month earlier than I was supposed to, and then I wouldn't be ready at all! (Little was I to know that I wouldn't be "ready" even 10 days before the due date.)

What bothered me even more one day was that not only had they made this silly prediction without any basis, they were even sharing it with others. So once when we called N's aunt sometime in July, she mentioned that father-in-law had told her I was going to pop in July. That, somehow, made me even more angry!

But this month, when it's already 10 days in August, and the boy is not showing any enthusiasm at entering the world yet, and everyday I am getting more and more frustrated at why he doesn't want to come out yet, I really can't help gloating at the fact that my son is already on my side!

N claims sarcastically that he's very pleased for me. Of course, he doesn't know what it really means to win.

Lazy parents = lazy kid

2010-08-09T14:36:00.001+02:00

He's not even TRYING to come out yet.

And their shit don't stink

2010-08-06T02:45:00.002+02:00

Remember the girl who popped her boob out in front of a room full of people, albeit to feed her baby, and then continued to make him crap on her feet in the same room full of people, who were either too mortified (like me) or too fascinated with the process to leave? Well, I met her sister.

She lives in London and came to visit with her eight-month-old son. We had been friends in college, but had like one common friend who brought us all together. After college, I stayed only in touch with that one common friend, letting all others (like this one who now lives in London) slip by.

Anyway.

So as soon as she entered, she look off her baby's diaper, and heaved a sigh of relief for the child, suggesting that at least the poor thing doesn't have to be caged in a diaper anymore.

I was still unsure of the situation when we moved to my living room. It was only when the boy stood up with pee tricking down his leg did I actually get the situation. She said nonchalantly, 'You don't mind, do you? You'd better get used to piss in your floors in any case', suggesting of course that I'd have the same sort of scenario when my baby comes.

Over the course of the 4-5 days that she stayed, I witnessed all things that I had, inexplicably, already witnessed over time in India, with different families that had children -- the child being made to pee in the wash basin as the mother made shhh-shhh noises, the second guessing when he'll want to take a crap and then rushing the moment the mother felt he was "putting pressure", the never making him wear a diaper at home and then only wiping the piss off the floor with the soiled nappy...

As soon as the woman left for London, despite my state at the time of being 36 weeks pregnant, I was on all fours mopping, and cleaning, and disinfecting.

I mean, I'm fond of the kid, but really, are we living in a village that he doesn't need to wear underwear appropriate for a child who hasn't yet been toilet trained? I mean, sure, do what you wish in your own house, I won't come there to judge you; but in my house shouldn't you just TRY to live like a normal human being and not one who thinks babies pissing all over the place is no deal?

If your child had been any older, wouldn't you have been super embarrassed had been peed in the bed or in the wash basin, for that matter? How does it make it better because your child is not yet one? Is his pee not pee yet?

I was telling her about how when my nephew was a year and a half, we caught him poking around someone else's shit. And she wasn't grossed out that he was dealing in shit, but that it was someone else's shit, which apparently is much worse news than if he was playing with his own crap. 'You never know what that other child has eaten, and what's in his shit. It might have worms and stuff,' she said, nose upturned. And since when does some shit become better than another? So it's fine if I eat my crap?

Growing pains

2010-08-04T14:37:00.001+02:00

I don't think I can even explain this whole 'whether the baby is growing enough or not' thing that has taken place in the past few weeks.

My doctor has been measuring the baby, and has been quite satisfied with the growth, saying he's growing about 100gm a week. Yet, she sent me for a growth doppler, which was where everything seemed to have gone awry. There was one conflicting result, but the doppler guys swore there couldn't have been any mistake - this is a zero-error country, apparently.

So while my doctor has gone on leave, and the replacement doctor is the nervous kind, she saw me yesterday and said she might have to induce labour in a day or two.

I completely freaked out.

It was the first time I realised that this baby is supposed to come out. It's not just an accessory that I buy all my new clothes around. It's not just someone who's been responsible for my weight gain, and has been giving me heartburn all this while. Not just someone I've been buying doll-sized clothes for. He WILL come out. Kicking and screaming, and potentially make my life a complete hell the first few months (the first six, I'm told).

It seems by this time most women are so uncomfortable -- and in general start getting tired of being pregnant all the time -- that they start looking forward, and even getting slightly anxious, to when the baby will come out. Maybe that's why my doctor, too, has just assumed I want this over with as soon as possible.

But, frankly, I've had a decent time these last nine months. In fact, I understand that this is possibly the best time of my life, considering what follows... Am I to be blamed, then, to want a little more time to myself before the madness begins? (Although I think people get all offended and judgmental when I say that.)

I'll tell you why I'm not ready

2010-08-03T11:56:00.001+02:00

- I'm expecting all these packages to be delivered home. It's one of the main reasons why I stick around at home nowadays.. so that I can sign for the packages when they arrive.

- I'm not done with all the chores. In fact, I'm not even close. I have to make meals and freeze them, I have to go and register at a creche, I have to wash the baby's clothes and make his cot.. I have to figure out how to use the damn pram.

- My Mommy doesn't get here for another 10 days.

- I'm having the kitchen fixed, who will get that done if I'm at the hospital?

- And most importantly, I signed up for a certain number of days. Why do they give you a date when they're never going to stick by it? I was told August 19, it's only the 3rd today.

There is CLEARLY no time to have this baby yet.

Up above the world so high

2010-08-02T10:49:00.001+02:00

I'm convinced there's a very mean guy sitting up in the sky and watching this heavily pregnant woman and torturing her.

I spent an hour assembling a mini table fan yesterday, sitting in the heat of the guestroom. And I just got stuck at the last step. I must have struggled with that last step itself for about 50 minutes.

And of course, as I do under these circumstances, I kept getting angrier and angrier at N, who was supposed to do this BEFORE he went on his stupid conference (leaving his heavily pregnant wife alone for the week, might I add).

But I had to do it because my friend was coming from London the next day with her little boy, and of course I didn't want them to sleep in the heat.

Then finally N called just as I was at the end of my struggle, and was thinking of violently dumping the damn fan on someone's head. Of course I didn't burst into tears as soon as he called -- I just seem to have lost my capability of doing so, amazingly in these last few weeks of pregnancy; I'm sure it'll all roll out after the delivery -- but I WAS very tired and helpless by the time. SO he advised that I fuck the damn thing and go to sleep, and that when my friend comes the next day, I can just ask her to do it herself. She wouldn't mind. I agreed and went to sleep.

Guess how much time it took me to fix it this morning? Correct, less than 5 minutes.

I'm watching you, mean man up in the sky. Pregnant lady judges you.

Are you going to eat that?

2010-07-30T13:23:00.001+02:00

I think halal is like the most hypocritical way to go. A more humane way of killing the animal? Yeah, KILLING it before you EAT it.

This pretty weird woman in Melbourne went on and on one day about how she preferred her chicken to be organic. What was strange to me was that she wasn't saying she preferred organic because of HER health (which is why I prefer organic - at least I know I'm not eating artificial hormones through a chicken) but she was making the argument for the health of the CHICKEN. Yes, what they feed them before KILLING them so that she could EAT them.

It was a whole genre of argument that didn't make any sense to me at all.

She's also one of those people who at one point claimed she was a vegetarian except for when she eats seafood. Just because it doesn't walk doesn't mean it isn't a living and breathing being.

My take is just that if you're eating an animal at the end of the day, why try and make excuses for it? "Oh, we try not to hurt it too much before KILLING it so that we can EAT it." "We make sure it doesn't suffer much before it DIES for our EATING pleasure." "We want to ensure the poor thing isn't cooped up in a cage and can instead run around freely in a farm and eat healthy grains before we KILL it so that we can EAT it." (It's like feeding a bakra before the halal; you're not feeding it because you want to give the bakra a good time one last day before he dies. You're doing it to get a good juicy quality of meat! Call a spade a spade, people!)

I'd agree if you made this last argument for your health, in the sense of eating a healthy chicken, and not one that has been chemically altered, but to make the argument for the chicken's health is just bizarre. What do you care about it's health before it became your DINNER? You killed it any way so that it can appear on your plate.

Make up your mind, you morons!

High teas and other such stuff

2010-07-29T16:33:00.001+02:00

So I went for this "high tea" with two middle-aged ladies, and one 80-year-old lady.

It was N's boss's wife who called to ask, while N's away for a week (at this crucial time in my life, might I add) if I was doing fine. After some polite conversations, she suggested we could meet if I was feeling well enough.

Knowing such a suggestion never really leads to anything, I said "oh yeah sure!" And next thing I know she's actually telling me she, her mother and a friend of hers are going for "high tea" to this fancy-schmancy hotel in Geneva. And she was asking me if I would like to join them. What choice did I really have than to say, "sure, that sounds great!"

The hotel was wonderfully expensive, overlooking the lake and the Jet d'Eau, Geneva's (man-made) landmark. The tea was Earl Grey, and the stuff to eat was stylishly miniature versions of sandwiches, scones, cakes etc., all kept on those three-tiered serving platters that you usually see in such settings. All very delightful (for a one-time go, especially when I wasn't paying!).

And conversation was relatively easy, too. When you have a person in your belly, conversation does flow relatively easily.

Children, since before they're born, are great ice-breakers. If the other person's interested in listening and even contributing, one can go on and on about them, and no meaningful exchanges are quite required. In fact, I finally don't feel guilty about having nothing to say to my brothers (we're an awkward bunch who grew up talking about stars and galaxies and other such inane things, and never discussed any real issues). Whenever we're stuck in the same room, we talk about their children. It keeps the conversation flowing, as well as it sort of gives us a common topic of interest to discuss.

However, this one wasn't as bad as that. We didn't just discuss my bump though. In fact, we did quite little of that. But among the topics we did discuss were the two looming parental visits (both mine and N's); pregnancy advice and old wives tales from India; language issues where I informed them I'd just stopped learning French and that I just didn't think I would EVER learn it (it's too hard!), while they talked about how at least one of them knew at least FIVE languages.

Not too bad, actually. In fact, I might treat my parents to some "high tea" when they come. It reminds me of the time N and I had taken his parents to Bukhara for dinner, and N's mother was particularly mindful of finishing every last morsel on her plate as well as in the serving bowls. The bill, at the end, wasn't much (only Rs 6000 for the four of us for a fantastic meal - the dal makhni truly lived up to its legendary standard) but it was just the idea of eating at a five-star hotel.. everything just became more reverred because apparently we were paying for it with our "hard earned money".

Or even the time when we'd gone to Ashoka Hotel for some tea and samosa, when Ashoka's like almost pathetic in it's decor and feel etc. But N's mum was so conscious of eating that samosa we forcefully ordered for her, she almost couldn't digest it. And then was greatly disappointed when it wasn't "worth the money" we paid for it. Of course, her expectation was that when you pay like 100 rupees for a samosa, which you can otherwise get for 20 rupees (TWO for 20, actually), it better be worth 100 rupees.

This concept was of course magnified a 100 times when she came to visit us in Geneva in April. She was feeding us one egg less, or putting less tomato in the rajma, because "everything's so expensive here" and bought with our "hard-earned money". Most of the time when we were just going on day trips, she packed food for themselves, and refused to even drink tea at a cafe, but at times when we had no option (or when we insisted) to eat out, she'd refuse to order for herself, always saying her stomach was upset, or that she wasn't hungry at all. And then when we force-ordered a pizza for her, she'd try to, again, finish every morsel of it even though she was almost feeling sick with eating so much! Heh!

Screwing with your mind

2010-07-28T12:33:00.001+02:00

One of the most disconcerting things you see (rather hear) around here is when an Indian talks either only in a south Indian language, or in French! It's like they've bypassed an entire language system -- the English language. They even count in French!

The guy who fixed up the (technically illegal in our building) cable for us is one such person. He speaks only Tamil and French. So explaining anything to him is like a pain in the ass. He never knows who we are when we call, because obviously he doesn't remember our names, only probably remembers our faces when we open the door for him. And to describe a technical fault to him over the phone takes AGES! Plus, he lives in Lausanne, which is like totally another city 50 kilometers away.

And yet he's quite typically Indian in that he never commits to a date. Even when you can get him to agree on a date, you can't be sure that he'll turn up on that date. Sometimes he'll fix a date, and then call a couple of days before that to ask if we're home, saying he's in town and that he could come and fix the cable then. Except that when he does call, it's usually the weekend, and we're out. So again, we don't know whether he'll come again on the date that we'd originally fixed with him, or that this was our only chance to get him over.

Then, he never comes on time -- when he says 3pm, he'll be here anywhere between 5 and 7 pm.

He takes really really long to fix anything. And for him to tell us what went wrong with the cable, and what we need to do to keep it from going wrong again, is quite another story.

But you know what's a worse mind-phuck than an Indian who speaks French? A Chinese who only speaks French! Oh yeah, that totally fucks up your brain, when they don't (can't, in fact) say Kung-Pao Chicken, but instead say poulet something-something, and then say something completely unrecognisable for Singapore noodles! How screwed up is that?

Walk it off

2010-07-27T13:38:00.002+02:00

Don't some people just take this walking while touristing thing a little too seriously? I guess they want to keep their holiday weight off by at least walking while holidaying, even if it is with a beer in their hands.

I had a friend once walk from my house in Thornbury, Melbourne, all the way to the city. Now, just because it takes half an hour on the tram doesn't mean it takes half an hour walking. It took him more than an hour to reach my office. But I understood his spirit.

I overheard here one guy who'd just got off a flight from somewhere, backpack and everything, asking at the airport whether he could just walk to the city instead of taking the train. Even though it takes like 10 minutes by train, a train is still a train. It'll take you, like, an hour to walk somewhere where a train just takes 10 minutes.

Even when N and I first came to Geneva as tourists, we walked, like, all OVER the place. We went and sat on these steps next to the lake and bathed ourselves in the April sun, drank beers, stared at the sailboats cruising along the lake etc. and we still haven't been able to find those steps because we've just never walked that much since we moved here!

Bread it is!

2010-07-26T07:22:00.001+02:00

Indians never have a sense of the rest of the world. They live most of their lives thinking it's just them in the world, except maybe the Americans and the Brits, both of who just come under the broad category of "Westerner".

When my mother-in-law was here in April, she probably saw so many white people for the first time in her life, and therefore, sort of, "studied" them quite closely. What they ate, what they shopped, what they wore. So at most occasions when we were out in public, it was almost impossible to control her staring intently at other people around us because she didn't just steal a quick glance, which is what most people who're even slightly interested or disturbed with something/someone else might do. She just sat/stood almost turned completely towards that person, and would just keep looking at them with a fixed gaze, yet all the time pretending that she was actually thinking something else, therefore not "technically" focusing on them.

We were at a supermarket in Italy one day, and I caught her staring at breathing distance behind this girl who was looking at some hair colouring products. I don't know why she was doing that -- was she trying to "get into her shoes" -- but it was so awkward to see her standing at almost touching distance from that girl, and literally breathing down her neck, when she didn't even have to buy any hair products. (I still haven't been able to get my head around this one.)

So after her visit she was convinced "people here" ate mostly bread. Or boiled vegetables. And, oh yes, desserts of all kinds. Chocolates. Ice-creams. What have you.

No matter how much we tried to explain to her how it worked here, you can't really get past someone who's already convinced of something. In any case, what does the rest of the world think Indians eat? Curry! What else?

There was actually this incident with my MIL and her friend sat down my brother-in-law's Bulgarian girlfriend and asked her, "So bete, what do you eat at your home?" As she explained to them that they ate a lot of breads, and cheese, and meats etc. the two ladies' eyes just glazed over, till they finally nodded and inferred, "Bread!"

So MIL actually announced proudly here one day to me that "waise, whatever you say about the rest of the world, Indian food is the best". I foolishly get agitated at statements like these and try to show her perhaps another point of view, but, like I said, I'm foolish.

Also, after staying here a month and seeing perhaps a large number of people who just run during their lunch break, or cycle to work etc., and most people who are generally fit as against most Indians (men with paunches and women with tyres around their stomach) she again was ready to pass a general comment, saying "We (as in Indians) are more hard workers than people here".

This, she said (and I understood that) because she thinks life in India is tough. And perhaps for her it is too. She goes to office by bus, after making lunch for herself and her husband. Comes back by bus and then gets cracking in the kitchen again for dinner. Weekends are "cleaning days", where she stands on top of the kitchen counter and cleans the exhaust fan, or climbs a chair to clean the living room fans etc.

It's a different matter that even though she can have the "luxury" or taking an auto to work, or just paying the cleaning guy a little extra to dust the fans etc, she doesn't. She also doesn't trust dhobis and washing machines. So weekends are also spent washing clothes by hand in the day time, and ironing them by hand in the evenings. Anyway, she's a different kettle of fish.

So she came here and understood that people here, because they have to do everything themselves - cook, clean, wash clothes, dust etc - they have invented various gadgets that will do those things for you much more easily than you having to do them yourself. Therefore the washing machines, the dryers, the dishwashers, the vaccum cleaners, even the mop with a big handle so you don't have to bend. The chopped tomatoes, or the tomato pastes, the milk in cartons or bottles that doesn't have to be boiled before drinking. And so on. All of which, in a way, she's impressed with, envious of, and at the same time, doesn't approve of.

Therefore, she concluded after a month in Geneva, that people here don't really have to do much themselves. And that we in India have much more running around to do.

I guess she's right, too, in some ways.

Not too bad myself

2010-07-22T11:33:00.001+02:00

I started working on my novel again (well, I worked on it for like a day this week.. but still). It's something I've been writing for, well, five years, since I was in Melbourne. And finally it's happened in the last year that whenever I read it now (I'm like in my fifth draft or something) I like what I read. I read other novels like Shashi Deshpande etc. and think mine's not too bad.

The problem with a lot of Indian writing "in this genre" is that it's either too old or it's just way too bizarre to connect to.

With "too old" I mean, you know, the kind where there's always a small town with a big bungalow, and there's always way too many characters, and characters called Appa or Thamma.. or whatever else, and the thoughts are old, and the society is old.. the entire feel of the book is as if it's written by a really old person, which is actually true in most cases.

For instance, I recently read Shashi Deshpande's In the Country of Deceit, and it had such a slow pace and a non-urban feel to it. The characters feel like they're from the 70s. The main character, Devayani, is like 26 years old, going on 27, and is forever referred to (as well as refers to herself) as almost 30. Since when did 26 go from being in your mid-20s and therefore young, hip, happening, with the world at your feet... to being almost 30? The book, including it's author, all the characters as well as Devayani herself seem to believe she's way past the "marry by" date, and constantly refers to herself as a "spinster" - that's a word I haven't heard since convent school!

And this book came out like two years ago!

So she has an affair with an older man, that'a fine, but the characterisation of the man is so... manly! I can almost see the hair sprouting out of his ears.. eww! He's in his 40s and a police (IPS) officer, which instantly gave me the sense of constant sweatiness.. yuck!

I guess what I'm saying is that roles and genders are very defined in that book, for instance. The man is a ground worker, tough and the one who fixes things, while the woman, even though she lives alone in the small town, is feminine and wears sarees all the time, and somewhere always thinks of herself in terms of "fate". Like, "if it was in my fate, I would meet a man and get married etc etc.".. although she doesn't quite say it that way. So in the end when, at 27, she again finds herself alone, there is still no hope of her getting married or even thinking of falling in love. She's just resigned to her "fate", and is happy with her sad-ass apprentice job (no thirst for career is another theme that seemed so 70s to me).

And the other category, "the bizarre". Well, I have said enough about it to let me get disturbed by it again by writing about it. A majority of single women in India are NOT looking for a quick lay, let me just specify. They're NOT always making headway in their career by sleeping with the boss. They're not running around in stilettos wearing sexy sarees and fasting during Karvachauth even though they don't even have a boyfriend.

Or maybe they are.. but I don't think there're enough of them to write books about.

This Sex and the City kind of a lifestyle hasn't exactly taken off in India yet.. and those who actually live this kind of a lifestyle are usually too dumb to write about it. So they shouldn't.

Anyway, the point I was making was: I think there is space in Indian literature for a mature woman's novel. Something that comes between the overt seriousness and conservatism of one genre, and the fuck me by night brazenness of the other. Someone who doesn't necessarily write about the life of a single "gal", the incessant looking for "Mr Right", the parties, the high life that is actually only accessible to a select few.

I only hope now I can fill that space. Or at least have the balls to just finish what I've started.

Anything can happen

2010-07-21T11:53:00.001+02:00

S tried for years to have a baby, but kept miss-carrying them. Finally, when she was pregnant again, she took all baby book advice so seriously that when it says you should try and sleep on your left, she actually put barriers behind her so that she wouldn't roll over to any other position while she was sleeping.

N lost her baby boy when she was 7 months pregnant. One moment she was heavily (and happily) pregnant, and the next moment she wasn't. And the worst part about it was when all the relatives kept coming to ask what had happened and how it happened etc.

And then finally, my dear Michelle died due to "complications during child birth". She, as well as her newborn son, Charlie. I still don't know what the damn complications were; I don't know either her husband too well, nor did we have many friends in common whom I can ask. But she was the one who had made my life more than bearable in Melbourne. She was such a perfect friend. It still hurts to see her listed as one of my friends on Facebook. I sometimes get messages from Facebook advising me to reconnect with her and send her a message etc. It will be her birthday in the end of August, as Facebook has already listed out for me. But how do you delete someone from your Facebook when they pass away? Or how do you stay friends?

Whenever I even as much as hint at these things, N doesn't even let me finish my sentence. I am never to speak of such things, he says. But they happened. Not to strangers, or on the news. They happened to people we know. We are friends with. ALL of them I'm very close to.

Just saying.

Coincidences

2010-07-20T22:20:00.002+02:00

This has been such a crazily coincidental few days for me, TV-wise. It seems every film, every TV show I've seen in these last three days has had to do with people having babies. Agreed, watching the Back-Up Plan (J Lo, crap) was my choice, but besides that I watched Frasier (the one where Roz finds out she's pregnant) and then the Sex and the City episode where Miranda's boy is getting christened. Weird, huh?

What scares me the most...

2010-07-15T15:12:00.001+02:00

... about having a baby (although it's now too late for this, I realise) is the fear of losing my husband.

I have become a completely doting wife since we moved to Geneva, considering there's little else for me to do here for the first time in my life. And for the first time, too, I'm actually enjoying it.

It's not the things I do for him -- when we were in Australia I used to cook more often, arrange his cupboard, etc. which now, ironically, I don't do any more -- but it's this sense of wanting to spend more and more time with him. He's busy now, while I'm not, which makes him so much more desirable!

And that is what I fear I will lose when we have the baby. I will be busy, perhaps unhappy at various points. And because I will be tired, and he will be busy with office, we will not be able to talk about things. And when that happens -- for it has happened before -- things go downhill till one day they just have to be fixed. We've been lucky that we've had the time, and the inclination, to fix things till now. But what if things are just left to lie. Then they don't remain an "issue" any more, and something that's not an "issue" will never get solved.

The same way couples, siblings, friends grow apart till too much water has flown under the bridge to put things right again.

I know a couple who has two kids, and all four of them sleep on the same bed each night.

When children come, mothers inevitably spend more time looking after them than they do after the husband. It's just the nature of raising children. They need more attention than a 32 year old man whom you think is perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

I'm afraid of being that mother/wife. I'm afraid I will abandon N for the first few years, and then another few, and then another...till it gets too late to fix things back to how they were.

We are both so dependent on each other, have been since college. Agreed, there have been times when one has "drifted", but the intensity with which we have come out of each trying time/situation, has only proved to me that we are both crazy about each other. No, perhaps there's no one like us. And every time we meet people, watch couples, interact with others, our assurance in our own relationship becomes even more cemented. And we always thank our stars, count our blessings, think of the possibility/probability of meeting your exact match in this world of 6 billion people.

I don't want that spoiled.

Peck, peck, peck...

2010-07-12T09:10:00.001+02:00

From the baby book:

"Around the fifth month of pregnancy, the 'nesting' instinct can set in. This is an uncontrollable urge to clean one's house brought on by a desire to prepare a nest for the new baby, to tie up loose ends of old projects and to organize your world.

"Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently. Women have reported throwing away perfectly good sheets and towels because they felt the strong need to have 'brand new, clean' sheets and towels in their home. They have also reported doing things like taking apart the knobs on kitchen cupboards, just so they could disinfect the screws attached to the knobs. Women have discussed taking on cleaning their entire house, armed with a toothbrush. There seems to be no end to the lengths a nesting mother will go to prepare for her upcoming arrival."

In the past week I have:

- Vaccumed almost everyday
- Run the laundry
- Scrubbed the carpets, even though I could have just vaccumed them
- Ironed dozens of N's shirts even though he kept insisting he was perfectly capable of doing them himself
- Organised kitchen cupboard
- Organised fridge
- Organised bathroom
- Fretted almost every day about not being organised enough to buy everything baby will need in the first couple of months (how much can an 8 pound baby really need?)

Pregnancy update 3.0

2010-07-06T00:01:00.000+02:00

If I say in every post that I'm growing bigger by the day, it would get boring. But of course, that doesn't change the fact. People offer me their seat now on buses and trams, at least most of the time. I'm THAT pregnant. Well, it IS my eighth month. My belly is taut and I have to check in the mirror to see if my pubic hair is still around, my hands and feet are swollen and I've had to take off my wedding ring, any dark lines on my body are even darker, my veins are bulging and my hair looks fantastic.

Don't think I'm terrified any more though. Not at the moment at least. Lots of do. My "appointment diary" is full of doctor's appointments, hospital tours and prenatal classes.

I sleep all day, watch TV and play computer games. Don't know if I'll miss this life or be glad that this really slow and unproductive phase will be over soon. Reading all the baby books is getting me pretty confident, thankfully.

There are times I'm excited about the baby, but, well, I know me, how excited can I really get? Friend who had her baby only last week has been busy informing the world about the "bundle of joy" and her "little angel"... but I'm just not that kind of person.

Blogging and sex

2010-06-24T12:50:00.000+02:00

Blogging is like sex after marriage. You do most of it in the first year. Things only go downhill from there.

Mere paas Ma hai

2010-06-21T13:05:00.001+02:00

The more I watch Everybody Loves Raymond, the more frustrated I get watching it. Am I losing my sense of humour? Earlier it used to be Marie, the mother-in-law, who reminded me of mine, and how she constantly criticises, and how they're constantly over, making a mess, judging, throwing their routine off etc. They drove their car into Ray's house once, breaking the living room wall etc. Right into their house. And Frank, the father-in-law, refused to pay for the damages. I also started getting irritated at Ray's constant laziness and the fact that he never wants to do anything around the house. It was shocking, sometimes, how much he got away with, and how Debra forgave him all the time.

Anyway, one interesting thing about the show has been the relationship between the mother and son, Marie and Raymond. Once he went to get some validation about his being a manly man (yes, from his mother), and his mother told him he was a very manly man and that she was saying that not because she was his mother, but because she, too, was a woman. He freaked out and ran away, thankfully.

Another time he came home from work, and assumed it was Debra in the kitchen, and started talking about the terrible day he'd had at work. But of course, it was his mother in the kitchen who didn't think to correct. She came over and started giving him a neck massage as he told his story. And whatdoyouknow he started getting horny, and thought he was pulling "Debra's" hand to kiss, but actually it was his mother's! Again, he fled.

But their relationship has often made me think of relationships that mothers often forge with their sons, especially when the sons are still young. In India, many women feel a sense of completeness around their sons.. "Now I'm a complete woman" sort of a thing. Often, they feel let down by their husbands and find solace in their sons. Hell, Bollywood has always depicted such intimate bonding between mother and son, where the wife/girlfriend always plays the second wheel.

So and so has kissed her son on the mouth since he was a baby. Now the son is five years ago, and so and so still continues to kiss him on the mouth in the privacy of their home, but when the son, the child that he still is, tries to do that when they're over for dinner at someone else's house, so and so obviously feels embarrassed. She once blushingly told me how her son embarrassed her in front of some people when he bit her on the lip. She also related various stories of when she was breastfeeding him, and I again detected a blush and couldn't help feeling damn uncomfortable. She's always asking him whom he will marry when he grows up and one can see her blush like a bride when he says, "Mamma!"

Perhaps many women see their sons, this male that they have created, as the perfect male. There was probably tonnes they wanted to change in their husbands when they married them, but over the years they've realised that you can't really change another human being. So now they're stuck with a man who has magnified flaws that she cannot do anything about. Therefore they pin their hopes on this son, the one that has come out of her, and think he will/should have none of the flaws that the husband has. The son will be the kind of a male that she has wanted all these years.

He will not come home late from work and get on the computer as soon as he arrives, leaving her to eat her dinner alone. He will not stay up till late at night watching science fiction films, while she sleeps next to him exhausted from the day's work.

In fact, it's the son who sleeps next to her now, while the husband sleeps in the other room. The excuse: the son won't/can't sleep without the mother, and he takes way too much space now for three people to be sleeping on the same bed. He also keeps rotating as he sleeping, throwing punches at his sleeping father.

Something wrong with this picture?

Kids, eh!

2010-06-18T14:47:00.003+02:00

I want to know what it is with "kids" nowadays. We went to visit an older cousin and her husband recently who were visiting Geneva, and while we were sipping tea in their hotel room, they received a call from their 25-year-old daughter who works in the travel industry and lives in Delhi with them. The 25-year-old daughter was complaining that the Tata Sky wasn't working, and wanted to ask her parents, who were sitting in Geneva, on an international call, what she should do.

Another instance was when these people from work - husband, wife and their 14-year-old daughter - came over to our place for dinner, and as we sat at the dining table for dinner, there was much surprise and encouragement when the 14-year-old started serving herself. There was a great sense of wonder from the father that the 14-year-old was now able to serve herself, and didn't need her mother to do it for her. Of course, they let her only serve one spoon of the rice, after which the mother immediately came to her rescue as a sort of a pat on her back for having done at least that much.

This trend sometimes starts when the kid is as young as one, when they want to eat on their own but the mothers don't let them, fearing the food will only fall to the floor and the child will create a mess. I have a friend who feeds her 6-year-old with her hands, saying "it's just quicker this way", and less messy, of course.

N has a cousin whom we've been observing since she was a little kid. Now she's almost 21, and some of the things she's been allowed, almost encouraged, to do have been shocking. She was in class 6 and we were taking her out for lunch when her mother asked her (right in front of us) whether she'd been to the loo before she left, "because you'll want to go as soon as you're out of the house".

They came to visit us in Melbourne, she was 16 and had a boyfriend. Firstly, her father treated the whole boyfriend situation very weirdly, and kept saying, "ladki ko lovaria ho gaya hai" (just a very crude way of saying his daughter was in love). Then they treated her as if she was porcelain doll who couldn't be expected to even lift her hand, and that the parents would be only too happy to do it for her.

When she wanted a glass of water, the father got up and brought it to her. When the toast was burning, she called for the parents to "do something about it!" She wanted her mother to open her suitcase, and lay out her clothes for her. And when, so as not to look too bad in front of N and me, she had to try and open the suitcase herself, her father gave her kudos when she only managed to put the suitcase on the bed ("that's great work for today, now I'll take it from here," he rushed).

There's yet another cousin who's always wanted to be spoon-fed as far as her education and career have been concerned, so much so that she now expects it as her right that people will find internships etc. for her.

These people don't know how to work on computers, even though they've been privileged enough to own computers literally since they could crawl. When they have to write papers or presentations (be it for college or internship purposes), again, they expect others to write it for them.

With the one who's 21, her father mediates between her and the boyfriend, and calls him whenever they have a fight, asking the boy for an explanation. Often when she doesn't pick up her boyfriend's calls, the fellow calls on her dad's number and asks to speak to her!

She's been seeing this fellow since she was 17 or 18, and it's her father who's been pushing her to eventually marry the guy. Imagine the heartbreak and the blame game if things don't work out!

Seriously, I don't know whether to blame the parents for spoiling the children, or the now grown-up children for not even having an iota of an independent streak.

Public displays

2010-06-16T18:21:00.003+02:00

Too many people nowadays living their life through social networks. A few examples that come to mind:

1. People expressing grief through their status messages. This girl's younger brother died in a bike accident. She wrote RIP *Brother's name* as her status message, and then went on to write day after day about how she couldn't believe this had happened and that she was having such a hard time coping etc. In fact, she broke the news to her friends and acquaintances on Facebook itself.

2. Many pregnant women discussing the ins and outs of their pregnancy through social networks, posting pictures of themselves and the ultrasounds of their yet unborn babies for the benefit of family, friends, co-workers, bosses, people they haven't been in touch with for 20 years, people they only added because they got an invite, people they have never ever talked to but worked in the same office with a long long time ago etc. It's like, "I don't remember who you are and have definitely never spoken to you, but here's a picture of me and my baby bump. Five more months to go!"

3. People who recently have their heart broken go to various lengths at explaining how much they hurt, where all, and how often. They also go ahead and write poems and song lyrics etc in their status bar. While acquaintances just "hide" them so that the messages stop crowding their news feed, friends, I'm sure, are placed in a very awkward spot and can only say things like, "take heart" or "this too will pass" or "don't worry, be happy" etc. I actually know this guy who wrote a very very sad status message, saying how this girl had completely ripped his heart out and that he was almost suicidal with the heartbreak, and NO ONE commented. NO one asked him if he was okay. NO one told him to take heart, and that things would turn around etc. Heh!

4. People who, when travelling, make it a point to live their vacation through Facebook. Before going out they'd write something like, "Melbourne! Here I come. Looking forward to exploring the city", and then at the end of the day they'd come straight back to their hotel room and post pictures of their day. As if friends are sitting at the edge of their seats wondering how each moment of their vacation is going. When we say, "Tell us how it went. Post lots of pictures!" we don't actually mean that you in fact take a break from your vacationing and post pictures. And stop posting pictures of yourself in a bikini. Don't you know someone can photoshop your half-body and post it somewhere inappropriate where your boss might find it? What world do you live in?

There's actually this guy (same as in eg. 3, the one who got his heart broken.. quite a loser actually) who's got like a city by city album going, where even he visits like a dozen cities in a week, and then poses all alone in the pictures (probably asks strangers to click them), and posts them on Facebook. It serves as a proof that he went to such and such place. Heh!

The language of hair

2010-06-15T00:57:00.003+02:00

One good thing about living in a country where they speak a foreign language is that you don't have to have useless conversations with hair dressers. They can't bully you into selling you anything. Even if they judge your hair, and want to tell you that "honey, if you don't own a hair dryer you should kill yourself," they can't. They can't comment on your faded roots. Or ask you which year it was that you last got a haircut. Or even, where DID you get that last haircut from.

Once in Melbourne as I sat on the big chair in front of the mirror at a salon, I explained to the girl who was to cut my hair to remove the bulk a little bit. My hair is too dry and puffs up, I explained. And I could immediately sense she wanted to nod vigorously at the "too dry" part, and even shot off saying, "As soon as you walked in I looked at your hair and thought... no, no, I didn't think anything. I didn't even see you actually till I saw you..." she went on. People can be so stupid. I mean, I was the customer, for god's sake. Needless to say, I never went back.

So, there's none of that in a foreign language country. The most she can do is smile at you off and on, and continue with her job, and keep gesturing if what she's doing is okay. And I can sit blissfully lost in my thoughts. No pressure to have a polite conversation with someone I'm never going to see again, and basically don't care about beyond the fact that she shouldn't mess up my hair.

This time in India when the guy at Madonna asked me where I lived, and I said Geneva, straight came the coffee and the biscuits. Not bad.

However, I went for a head massage at the same place and the oil smelled like coconut oil, even though I had asked for, and paid for, an olive oil massage.

The first time N went for a haircut in Geneva the guy completely messed his hair up. He cut it so short, N feared he had almost turned bald. He whined about it almost for a week. And then guess what he did the next time. He went back to the same guy. In fact, he's never been anywhere else since! He's a very strange man, I've always believed that.

Rattle not

2010-06-13T22:52:00.002+02:00

I have realised again and again that there's very little in this world that really rattles me. Although I am a person who overreacts in a heartbeat, I get over things pretty quickly. Well, most things at least. (Honestly, there's just one niggling problem in my life that, unfortunately, will only end if I get a divorce...and no, I'm not talking about N.)

For instance, this gestational diabetes thing. It really combined two of my worst weaknesses. My absolute love for sweets, and my absolute fear of needles. Now I have sugarless tea. I've had one gelato in the three weeks since this thing was diagnosed, even though it's like 30 degrees here. I have't touched a chocolate in this land of Swiss chocolates. And I have to bloody prick myself with a needle four times a day to record my blood sugar. Oh, and did I mention, I have always hated the sight of blood being drawn out of me. Whenever I have had an injection or a test, I look the other way.

Yet, I don't think it's been difficult on me. In fact, I don't mind the poking at all, nor the non eating of the sweets. It's not as if I stand by the chocolate shop and drool thinking about what could have been. I'm fine. I got over it.

So the other day I was speaking to this friend who's recently had a baby. She was with me in college, a year junior, and she was the sort of person I liked. Cool, calm and collected. Heads on her shoulders kind of person. She lives in London now with her husband and has a six month old.

Although everything she told me about the last six months I already knew -- the labour, the sleepless nights for the next six months, the fact that they get more and more attention-seeking as they grow older and you find you can't get anything done without them wailing for something or the other every few minutes, the challenge of breastfeeding, plus the fact that she cried for three straight days after the delivery and laid much emphasis on having people around (other new moms, support groups, etc.) for comfort and company otherwise there's a chance you might go cukooo with an infant that takes up all your time and day -- I got rattled for about 48 hours.

Before I knew it I was panicking, or as close that I can get to panicking, and I was getting convinced that I'm all alone in this and that this has been a terrible idea. And that now I'm just stuck.

But I spoke to N and to my brother's wife over the phone, and from what I understand, it's all about the right attitude. I do hope I have the right one when the time comes.

Update 2.0

2010-06-11T17:20:00.004+02:00

I am growing bigger by the day. N sometimes comments that I'm looking bigger than I did the previous day, which is complete bullshit because there's no possible way to calculate that (it's like watching grass grow), but it does make me relook in the mirror.

I have shopped like crazy in the past month...for myself, not for the baby. Something about the change of season reminds me every season that I have nothing to wear, yet again. But all the lovely summer sandals that I have bought for myself are getting difficult to wear even though they're flats, because I'm more and more in need of padding on my feet, otherwise I feel they're swelling by the second.

We went to Milan, which was great, but I get tired now more often now, and the problem of never choosing the right clothes for vacation pictures persisted. I'm showing too much cleavage, too much bump and too much leg for a pregnant woman.

N's never-together Indian colleague recently found out she was pregnant with her second baby, and her German husband is not very pleased, it seems. Did they not discuss it beforehand? Apparently, he was only "half on board" with the whole thing. He already has two children from his previous marriage, and it seems he's having problems with the oldest son. Plus, he and the Indian colleague have a 1.5 year old son. They both work full time, and travel a lot for work. I don't know how they manage with the one they already have. Now it seems they're fighting all the time about this new situation.

I don't trust people who're nice to strangers. Especially those who're nice on a constant basis. The ALWAYS nice to strangers. How can you constantly, at least once a day, try to please people you'll never see again? Just trying to maintain peace and harmony with people you live with or interact with everyday is so difficult.

Addictions

2010-06-01T22:02:00.002+02:00

Watched a film the other day on the True Movies channel, apparently based on a true story, that actually justified compulsive sleeping around (or sex addiction). It even went on to use scientific lingo, and had a psychologist talk about 'chemical locha' in the brain to justify it and term it 'sex addiction'.

Like a drug addiction, the psychologist explained, sex addiction too can be caused by some cross-wiring in the brain, and therefore like drug addicts, sex addicts too know not what they do.

What he didn't explain was how you can compare a drug that is known to directly (physically) hit some part of the brain and basically make it dead/numb after hitting that part over and over again, to sex which doesn't numb any part of the brain whatsoever. Yes, there are hormones known to be released after an orgasm that go to your brain and make you feel ecstatic or happy and even numb for a second or so, but no way do those hormones have any long-lasting impact on your brain. Not like people who have more orgasms are always on a high or something.

It’s like saying what drug addicts do after being under the influence should also be justifiable. They can go and rob a house or stab someone to death for money to finance their drug habit, and they would be sent not to prison but to therapy for it?

Wonder what they're going to justify next? Murder? Rape? Oh, he’s addicted to seeing someone die, so please pity him, sympathise with him, send him for counselling...but do not punish him for it. These Americans and their justifications for everything in life. Just shifting responsibility to anyone but themselves.

On the upside, there was a hilarious South Park episode the other day on sex addicts.

No table for two for us

2010-05-24T23:11:00.001+02:00

Getting back from work yesterday I was pretty much starving and N and I decided to get takeaway. Stopped by at this Indian restaurant while walking home, and decided to pop in.

When we stepped in there was literally no one there, and the hostess got us to sit at a table for two while we ordered the takeaway and waited.
Soon, people started coming in for dinner but only about 25% of the place was occupied.

By this time I had already noticed that the hostess was not happy that we were still hanging around for our takeaway, keeping a table that she thought potentially converted into wasted space = wasted money. She kept saying to the cooks, 'Take away first, please get the takeaway ready first...' because she obviously wanted us to be out of the restaurant as soon as possible.

This couple came in to have dinner at the restaurant, and the hostess turns to us and says, 'You're sitting on their table. It had been reserved for them.'

Some quick French was spoken between the couple and the hostess, as N and I, confused, scrambled to our feet. Finally the hostess said she would seat them somewhere else and that we could continue to sit.

But the thing was, she had sat us there first. We were in fact ready to stand and wait for our order, like people ordering takeaway are often expected to do. There was no 'Reserved' sign on the table. And worst, the restaurant was only like 25% full, as I mentioned earlier, and there were enough tables for two empty around us. In fact, there was no other couple in the entire restaurant; there were only groups of threes or more. Moreover, it didn't look like a much coveted table either, being quite close to the kitchen door, and to the reception table.

But I also want to ask here: Am I paying any less for takeaway that I'm getting this kind of service? Apart from not being able to charge us service tax, there's really no difference in what I would have paid sitting down.

They just lost interest in us as soon as we said takeaway, and literally wanted us out as soon as they could get our food ready. Just because they don't have any arrangement for people ordering takeaway -- for instance, even some chairs thrown around for people in our position as we wait -- doesn't mean that we can get shifted around or made to feel as if we were taking up someone's precious space and time.

And worst of all, the food was good. So we might just have to go back there. I'm calling beforehand and ordering, and getting N to pick up the food. No waiting at a table for two.

Sweet, sweet life

2010-05-20T16:05:00.001+02:00

So the doctor called the other day to say that my blood sugar levels were high, and that to confirm or rule out the possibility of gestational diabetes, I should get another test done.

I call N and he hears, 'I have gestational diabetes.'

He calls up his parents and they hear, 'She has gestational diabetes.'

I start getting calls from N and his parents saying to start exercising and to stop eating sweets.

I scream at mother in law, 'I DON'T HAVE DIABETES YET!'

The whole thing obviously gets blown way out of proportion, especially when it hasn't yet been confirmed (or denied) that I have gestational diabetes.

In any case, from what I've read on the net, gestational diabetes is not at all like regular diabetes. Although (if I'm found to have it) I have to follow the same precautions as I would if I had regular diabetes, this one will most likely go away after the baby is born, and will most likely not get transferred to the baby.

What I might have is a 'fat' baby, where his face and shoulders would have put on some weight, and he might have difficulty coming out of me through the natural route and therefore I might have to have a Cesaerian. Worst case scenario.

I might (just might) be over-simplifying this, but I don't want to know what's the real worse that can happen because I will then assume that that's what's going to happen.

I also realised that the screaming at mother-in-law, and then later at night, at N was due to the fact that even I understood that 'I now have gestational diabetes' and that I would have to leave my most favourite food in the world. Sweet food.

Somewhere in some corner of my mine I was always fearful I was going to get it because my dad has it. But I was never prepared to have it this soon. (Not that I have it yet.)

Sometimes I eat less regular food just so that I can have a bigger helping of dessert. And I always ALWAYS have to have something sweet after my meal, even if it's something as tragic as a tic-tac. I have been keeping a track since yesterday how much sweet I eat in a day, and it pretty much figures in every meal.

- Milk with Hershey's chocolate syrup in the morning
- Toast with honey
- Or cereal with sugar AND honey
- A bar of chocolate every time I go in to work... which is almost every day this week
- Strawberries with cream with dessert after dinner

But then I'm pregnant! If I can't eat whatever I want now, while I still have an excuse to get fat, what's the point of it all any way? No chocolates, cold drinks, juices and no GELATO! I'd really rather die.

PS: This just in. Seems I do have it. Like I said before, I'd rather just die.

Nothing changes

2010-05-19T16:41:00.001+02:00

So J is a heavy smoker and M actually changed flatmates once because the fellow smoked too much. And guess what, J and M met in London, fell in love, got married, and after all these years are still much in love while J continues to smoke.

N and I thought, well, that will surely be a sore point in their marriage. But whenever we see her bringing him breakfast in bed and learning to cook only so that he didn't have to, hugging him lovingly and holding his hand when they'd been apart a few hours, that theory went out the window.

And then we thought, she'll change him. She'll get him to quit smoking. But then one day, listening to someone else's story, M screamed passionately, 'How can a person ever try to change another person???'

And that was that to our hopes of her trying to get him to quit.

Hope they live happily ever after. Touch wood.

PS: Recently realised N had an addiction too. His irrational, illogical, almost childish desire to get back to TV. Can't say if I'm relieved to find he's got his weaknesses too or saddened that it's for something as stupid as his career in TV which he has already left twice because he was so unhappy with it.

Odd people, odd posts

2010-05-18T14:34:00.004+02:00

I was told recently that I should move to London given my intolerance with people. I decided to take that as a compliment.

This girl I used to just-about know in school has befriended me on Orkut and on Facebook. She's really changed the way she looked in school, which attracted me to go to her profile and through her photo album etc, which I wouldn't have bothered to do otherwise.

This was a few months ago, and there's nothing really that I can put my finger on but I have already boxed her. I think I put her in a box as soon as I read her CV which she had posted, by the way, on a website with only_her_name_on_it.com.

Again, the CV had nothing in it that took my particular interest, but that was just it...she was 31 years old, claiming to be a journalist and yet she had nothing on the CV that jumped out to grab my attention.

Now, I'm not saying she should have worked for CNN to hold my interest, but apart from doing some freelance gigs and now working for a college newspaper, she seems only talk and fancy words. I mean, I always thought college newspapers were run by college students, innit?

But if you ever come across her blog, not that I'm ever going to give that out, you might be lulled into thinking she's some sort of a big shot, with sections like Blog Schedule where she explains why she doesn't blog on weekends; she has 'ads' on her page and you can become a 'member' to her blog and she also has a lable called 'copyright' at the end of her page, which I have never dared to venture towards.

And predictably, her posts almost always read like spam. 'How to keep it together at work', 'why office meetings are not such a bad idea', or 'how to ask your boss for a raise without looking like an ass', etc. In short, things that Cosmo magazines keep churning out month after month about stuff its readers already know and don't care about just because they want to be seen as a 'complete woman's magazine' that talks not just about sex and orgasms but also about 'serious' stuff like what topics to discuss near the office water cooler. And yet, the only secret they're always divulging is to 'be confident', 'dress confident', 'walk confident'. Gee!

What prompted me specifically to write this post was something I read on her blog recently, and believe me I do keep going back just to see what I find odd and jarring this time.

On the 'occasion' of Mother's Day she had done a post on her mom. Fair enough. But what was really really odd was that she had done it in two parts. And like all interesting little stories meant to rouse public's interest, at a very crucial stage in her mother's life she had cut off the story and ended it with a line to the effect of 'If you want to know what happens next, come back for more tomorrow'.

What a perfectly odd thing to do for your mother! And what a public way of sharing something that could have been quite touching and rather private.

I mean, yes, blogging itself is the opposite of privacy, but it's not without rules. I mean, so many times you write purposely for your readers, while other times you just write because you want to. Because that's the only way you know how to express what's inside you. Because you know you can't say those things out loud to someone.

And I would have thought an ode to one's mother on Mum's Day would have been one of those personal things you might write on your blog not because you want to parade her life in front of your dedicated readers or spice it up by dividing it in two parts, but just because you probably love her and can't write it all in a card. But to cut your mom's private life into two and market it to your readers in such a way? A bit harsh, I'd say.

(An aside: Her living in the US makes things even more interesting. In the sense that it's quite typical of the US, isn't it, to find someone who actually doesn't nothing substantial but has learned so well the art of selling that it's no longer necessary what that person is selling, as long as the packaging is attractive.)

Pregnancy myths

2010-05-17T13:21:00.001+02:00

I have noticed how some theories/myths about pregnancy become scary stories that get told from generation to generation, from one pregnant woman to another.

I was reading a comment one day on the internet -- this was in the days when I was still reading comments on the internet, because after this particular one I stopped reading stuff on the net and just stuck to my baby books -- where this woman actually said she lost her baby because she was sitting on the floor and playing cards and bending forward all the time to pick up cards during the game, and she thought the pressure that bending forward was causing to her jeans was what was responsible for her losing the baby a few days later.

One hears other bizarre things like no flying during pregnancy, and people actually try and give very scientific reasons for this one.

My mother and others in my family had a list of things I shouldn't eat that included papaya (a very famous no-no among Indians, perhaps because India's a hot country [but no similar ban is imposed on mangoes or rice, which are also hot foods], but the theory goes completely out of the window in the colder climes of Switzerland), vinegar, mayonnaise (because of the vinegar in it) or any kinds of Chinese sauces like soy sauce, oyster sauce etc. because they were all supposed to have been fermented. Wonder how the billion plus Chinese population is born on their heavy diet of Chinese food! In fact, I was told to only eat Indian food because it's the healthiest and most nutritious!

There was one in N's family where his aunt had claimed her uterus just fell open one day because she had been driving too often. (Unbelievable to think what the difference between driving a car and sitting in a car as a passenger could be. After all, you're not actually pushing the car into motion.) Alternatively, I found it much safer to drive myself in India rather than depend on cabs, especially after one ride I took from Gurgaon to South Delhi with the cabbie trying to wear a shirt as well as talk on the phone while driving like a crazy maniac.

Then there was one I heard today about climbing stairs, and especially stairs that spiraled all the way to the top.

Surprisingly, it's also sometimes doctors that perpetuate these myths, and give them certain validity.

For instance doctors that advice 'bed rest' at some point or the other during pregnancy, whereas modern doctors say there's nothing to show that a bed rest actually does anything useful for your pregnancy other than gives you a chance to just rest more than you were likely to and generally take things easy.

My sister in law who had her son after years of trying was absolutely anal at following all the advice to the tee, in as much as taking the 'try and sleep on your left' advice so seriously that she put up all these barriers to her right just to never let herself even turn towards her right while sleeping. As if!