All in a weekend..

Saturday .....

Couple 1: Young, married for maybe 4 years, one baby. Arranged marriage...Can't stand each other. Can't live with each other..pursuing their own lives. Child too small to understand implications.

Couple 2: Beautiful couple...about to begin life as a family, dealing with a fatal blow life offered them...she- trying to pick up pieces of that dream she saw fall apart a few months ago!

Couple 3: "Fell in love at 15, married at 19" couple. Married for about 15 years, now handling a bitter seperation and dirt throwing that is getting muckier than mumbai sewers...teenage daughter caught in between....and who has not smiled in months now.

You want to have a life..and throw it away for something smaller, something as insignificant as ego....

You have a life built over years, and tear it apart by trodding over your loved one's and harassing them...

You want to have a life, and work for it, and life plays spoilsport and brings you back to square one, but this time, with added responsibility and fewer resources...

Somedays the whole world seems to be conspiring against people who just want to have normal lives...

Times when one almost feels guilty for having a fairly normal life....

Sunday....

Couple 4: The girl who walked out of an abusive relationship.. her baby who cried for years together in memory.

The guy- best friend, who pulled the girl to the shores and turned her back into the swan she really is...and became papa to the baby. Who persevered months together to convince the girl and her parents to give him a chance.

Her ringing laughter makes me realize that life does not always happen to be a failed test...sometimes, it is that dream that one gets to live...

Work's worth

That time of the year has come and gone. The time of appraisals/ reviews and all the drama associated with it.

A few years ago, i lived that life. Work was defined by the numbers on the scoreboard. Did i make it, or not? and life was a stress test, that built up from december on..and ended in explosions in early april.

Can't complain, they have not been bad. But the very thought of having to to go through this process was very undesirable! I made it through well, every year, made money, earned increments, but none of them left a smile on my face.

The last 3 years have been different. I work , stretch deadlines, slog to finish work, leave late at times, but never because i was asked to. There is never a score board to fill, nor a target to cross for the incentive. Nothing to stir up the non competitive soul in me. But surprisingly, it works!!

I do it for myself. For my practice and the client who pays money that runs this small firm that i am a part of. I have had no formal appraisal/ review in 3 years. Everyone knows what each of us do. Excel sheets need not be filed to proclaim what is already known.

In an exceptionally bad year that we left behind us, we all took a salary cut without a wink. And did not brood over it for even a minute. There were extreme lows for a small firm like us , but we sailed through. There were times when morale was low, some of out senior talent left us, and we were ready to kill people.

But then, all this is forgotten, when the person that matters , she of very few words, sits next to you on a beach, and says " You did great, and not just today. All through last year. Thank you for having faith".

For me, that was my appraisal, and it meant so much more than the data that any excel sheet could ever get out.

Sometimes, one line judges our "work's worth". This one appraisal, made me smile.

Yearly summer musings

Summer is here. In a very, "you cannot ignore me" way. I hate bombay summers. The humidity , the sweat, and the sun that tries to pierce a hole through my skin and get under it. No fun!

I think with age, one's intolerance increases. I do not recollect ever disliking any seasons as a child, summer in particular.

Apart from the fact that it was vacations, there were a lot more associated to summer...

-Waking up in the morning enjoying the last cool breezes before the sun bore down...

- Enjoy that summery smell- hay heating up, and the leaves drying out.

-Shifting with the shadows , sitting guard over the drying vathal/ kondattam's, and blaming the birds for the one's that get eaten in the process..

- expertly catching the mangoes that dad used to drop down from the top most branches.

- Walk 3 km to the river to take a bath. That river, where one has to lie down horizontally to wet the torso.

- Catch fish with towels, put them in horlicks bottles and get them home as pets.

- Bury the poor fishes the next day in a grave dug by all cousins, and decorated them with flowers. Mourn for the fish one day, and get back catching more fish that evening:-)

- Look forward to the day the palm fruits get harvested, chill them, eat them, and catch a cold.

- Feed all visiting cousins tonnes of jackfruit and realize their stomach could not handle it!

- Fight for the space on the cool black floor on a summer afternoon.

- Wind up on the favourite mango tree with a book, and the radio for company. A raw mango with salt and chilli powder on the side. Bliss!

- Compete with mom to make the longest strand of jasmine in the evening...

- Lying down under the clear starry sky and listen to all the elders talking, the dog trying to push us off the cot periodically.

- Tracking the clouds, predicting rains and waiting for them eagerly!

I wonder what happened to summer, my summer? I wonder if anyone anywhere is having so much fun during summer anymore?

I hope someday, my son understands what summer meant to me.

Found my marbles

I think after losing all that sleep and endless worrying, i have found my marbles. I think i'll take things as they come and live with it. No more fretting.

A lot of you wrote to me and said- " it will all work out eventually". I am great believer.

Thank you all:-)

Justifying decisions

Now that her departure has been decided and plans made,

i keep losing sleep over what we will do in the coming days/months

On plan it all sounds very simple...wake up, clockwork. Drop kid at daycare, pick him up in the evening, clockwork, and crash.

That clockwork part, is scaring the shit out of me. With 2 hrs of one way travel everyday, i am wondering if it is a sensible idea at all!

But then, this had to happen, someday or other.

----Another year and V will be six. I'd rather has starts now when he still has friends around at the same place...

----I could be selfish and keep her for another 5 years, health not mattering. But i would have to live with that thought everyday.

----What if she falls ill? I doubt her family / general public at home will take kindly to that fact..

---- I am pulling V from a very comfortable life and forcing him to spend his days with a couple of other kids- much like putting a day schooler into a boarding school.

---Maybe he will finally start eating lunch/ food without coercion, hoping peer pressure would work.

---He will learn to share his space with other kids and co exist. As of now, he is the undisputed king/ owner of all things in his vicinity. Perils of being a single child.

It was a decision waiting to happen and now is when it is happening.

Sometimes, i wonder who am i justifying all this to?

Maybe just myself.

Parenting lesson # 2785

Kids ask questions..One's that test your creativity , reasoning, and sanity.

Some wisdom gathered over the past year show that....

--These questions are most likely-very real, very basic and very uncomfortable at times.

--One realizes that the reply, what ever it may be- needs to be cleverly answered. Chances are, 99.99% of time, it will get told to visitors in great enthusiasm along with " Mama/ papa told me this"

-- The same questions can be asked to you repeatedly, under different circumstances- it is just a ploy devised by 2ft tall people to understand how stable his/ her parents are. You change one word in the reply-- and they will point it out to you.

--You never get brownie points for answering any question related to school based knowledge. The teacher is always right, and you are wrong-- come what may!!

-- Most of the philosophical questions in life arise, just when you have got into the bathroom and shut the door. They love hearing us reply " why can't i be 8 yrs old for my next birthday " being shouted over the noises of ablusion!

--Never, never answer a question absent mindedly. You will end up hearing a lot of " but you told me it's ok? "

And most important of all...

- Never tell them your age. Even.under.duress.

Half of our housing society, all our friends and relatives, a flight full of people to delhi , all school mates, all teachers , the guy who sells bread/ eggs, our vegetable seller, his doctor, the waiters at his favourite restaurant- everyone knows how old me and TB are!!!

That phrase " what was i thinking when i decided to have a kid?" sounds very logical at times like these....

Why am i doing this?

Come this may, and we will take a huge step in our life.

V's nanny returns to her native place for good. In simple terms, it can be described as a " blow below the belt". Now starts the worry of - finding a daycare that will take in V while both if us are away for work. Not exactly what we want to do, but very less choice in there.

I am fairly sure she will want to stay back for a while more if we really push her, or maybe even suggest it, and it is not going to be easy to manage work/ home/ kid...but then --The decision of letting her move on has been made, her family informed and appraised.

So why exactly are we doing this???I kept asking myself this question ..and in my mind...

This is why we need to do it.

• Her age is catching up. V is getting more active, her agility is failing. Her general health i better than average, but her age worries me.And age related problems have started showing up. About time for her to spend time with her family, and not with us.
• She came to us with an initial decision of staying till V was 3 and then stayed on, because- she could not stay without him. So the next 2 years happened. Now she feels that V's dependency on he is reducing. Which is - true. They move on. They need less of us to do things. She finds that difficult to accept and discourages him from doing things on his own. Not good in the long run.
• I think me and TB are growing complacent. We have someone else take care of V's small things on a daily basis. In these formative years,parents need to be around for children to learn from them and grow. V sees more of her, and learns a lot from her. Ideally we would like that he learns from his parents.
• On a selfish note, not having someone live in the house 24 hours a day will also give us some " we" time and live as we please.
• And at a very secretive, personal level, i harbour the hope that i might just quit and stay at home for a while and just be a mom and wife. Practically very unwise, buy hey! it's my hope.

Writing all this down was easy. The road ahead is not. I have a feeling i just asked my way to hell.The problem with all such exalted predictions is that they come true, and come back to bite in our butt!

But this had to happen someday. Better now than later! I need a lot of prayers, and a way forward.

In my usual style, i shall procrastinate till April!