The on-again-off-again atheist

Dear Snowflakes, 

I was already an hour late to get home when Sid called to say that AJ was on the door crying "Mahmmamah". He is sick, and as would luck would have it I had some deadlines to manage. I felt so dejected.

But then, as I left work the tram arrived just as I reached the tram stop, as did the train. And all the pedestrian crossings were green! Never in my memory has the public transport of Melbourne been this obliging. I reached home in record time.

Someone somewhere is feeling kind towards me. It is unlikely to be the General Manager of Public Transport Victoria. Could it be ... God?

Love

The on-again-off-again atheist (aka Mumbaikar in Melbourne)

PS: This one's for you, AJ. I hope you always see life through rose-coloured glasses. 

Understanding parenting "Reality Bites" Style

Dear Snowflakes,

One of the most amazing things for me to experience is Chuk-Chuk's increasing vocabulary. She is not-quite-three but every time she uses a new word correctly, I find myself just a little bit stunned. Where did she learn that? I ask myself. Each time.

Today's addition: almost.

I know. I know. What a dorky thing to say. What's there to be stunned over when every not-quite-three girl out there is literally programmed to spout new words at this age?

Nothing. Except that parenthood is all about dorkiness. Every parent since the beginning of human history has had the same experiences. But each parent is programmed to experience them as something unique and stunning.

I guess a good analogy to my life before and after kids is the 90s cult-classic Reality Bites. (Because, you love movies).

Before having kids, I was Ethan Hawke. I would never allow anything to surprise me, shock me, thrill me or hurt me. And post-kids, I've turned into that puppy dog Ben Stiller. For was there ever a more eager line spoken on the silver screen than Stiller's: "Have I crossed some lines on the sands of coolness with you?"

But then again, to understand this transformation, we must revisit that uber-cool question that the magazine editor throws at Ryder: How do you define irony?

The answer: "When the actual meaning is the exact opposite from the literal meaning."

I guess, when it comes to experiencing life with irony then it would mean finding something miserable in the joyful and something joyful in the miserable. Which is why it is so hard to be ironic and a parent. Parenting is hard enough (no, there is nothing joyful about its miseries) without you refusing to experience its little joys wholeheartedly.

I guess as for "irony", I will  leave it for the day Chuk-Chuk throws the word at me.

Love
Mumbaikar in Melbourne
PS: So in the pursuit of uncoolness, here's one for you Chuk-Chuk and AJ (minus the French kissing of course). You both make me so proud.

On poop-filled days and nightclubby nights

Courtesy: http://memebase.cheezburger.com

Dearest Snowflakes, 

I am so glad to hear that you are feeling better.

My life is ho-hum. Somedays, I want to either kill myself or kill Sid. Mostly him.

Today was strange. It started so badly... First I got up with a godawful cough and a pulled chest muscle. Then I landed up putting some of Chook-Chook's soiled clothes (she is toilet training, not very successfully) with all the other washing. The filth! I don't have words to describe it. In my second try, the machine shut down and I was convinced that it was the shit that had clogged the filter.

Then AJ pooped in the water while taking a bath with Chook-Chook. So both kids had to be taken out, cleaned separately and then the bath, toys and the towels had to be washed.

But just when I thought this shit-smeared day was the worst of my life, AJ went to sleep for full four hours, and Chook-Chook turned golden - happily painting, colouring and singing. Then she and I sat in the wintry afternoon sun and popped bubbles of a meter-long bubble wrap for ages. It was bliss.

Sid returned and rescued our washing - it was not shit but one of Chook-Chook's shoe. It was still my fault but not as disgusting.

It is night now and Sid has brought the mattresses into our living room and put up a disco light thing. So we have a trampoline and nightclub all in one here - and the kids are going wild with fun. 

And I am thinking as I write to you - isn't life good?
I hope the mundaneness of my letter doesn't offend you at such a difficult time. Few days encompass the best and worst of parenthood and I wanted to share it with someone. 

I hope one day your life is as ordinary as mine - just a little less shit-filled. 

Love
Chatnoir

Supriya Pari Prakash: Or why we decided to give a middle name to our daughter.

It is only your spare name, darling!

I always thought that middle names were silly. They added unnecessary length to the name. They served no real purpose in modern life where our efforts and not our pedigree took us forward. And they sounded pompous. 

In fact, I earned my middle name quite by accident. My 10th grade teacher took it upon herself to tack my Dad’s middle name to mine before sending off the list to the High School Board. My high school degree arrived in the name of Chetna Rao Mahadik instead of a simple Chetna Mahadik. Having insidiously imprinted itself on this critical document of my life, the “Rao” then made its way to all my subsequent degrees, bank accounts and passports. 

Seventeen years on, I am still trying to get rid of it. 

Which is why, when Sid and I started thinking of names for our daughter, a middle name had no place in my plans. 

It was a chance discussion with friends that first got me thinking that middle names made little sense for my generation, but could be critical for my daughters’. 

You see, my daughter belongs to a generation whose life and actions will be imprinted all over the internet. From this blog, to her blogs and whatever other social media that takes over Facebook and twitter: her life, photos, opinions and actions will be played out in public. And with that public life will come the very possible risk of public embarassment. 

I think a lot of my child’s peers will look back at their teenage years and wish that they could somehow distance themselves from those internet words, images and personality attached to their names. And since they'll be unable to change the internet, many of them will change their names instead. 

And frightening as it seems, my daughter could be one of those wanting a new name. 

Taking this possibility into consideration, suddenly a middle name sounded not pompous but practical. It acts as spare name, waiting in reserve if someone found their first name too internet-tainted. If Supriya had an official middle name, a name change would not involve crazy and painful paperwork. It would simply mean dropping her first name, and adopting her middle name for most public purposes. 

So it is that a tiny, innocuous “Pari” made it between the Supriya and Prakash of my daughter’s name. 

And I sincerely hope that she never finds any use for it. 

My 32nd birthday: Or why I have only turned 26 today.

On my 26th birthday - six years ago - I hit rock bottom. 

According to the “plan”, I should have finished my studies, gotten married, travelled a bit, and had my first child by then. Instead, I was still stuck in Mumbai, single as hell, and had been struggling for two years to get a good scholarship to cover a masters somewhere outside of India. Obviously, there was no child in the picture (much to my parent’s relief I might add). 

It was then that I first considered the possibility that I may never get married, never have children, never travel the world and never do that blasted masters in some vague liberal arts subject that I so dearly wanted to do. After all, just because I wanted those things didn’t mean that the Universe in any way felt obliged to give them to me. 

Funnily enough, it was between that birthday and the next that I finally cadged a scholarship to an arts master’s programme, got my first passport stamp (to Switzerland) and most importantly: met Sid. How far could that baby be?

Six years afar it seems. On my 32nd birthday today, I can finally say that yes, I have finished my studies, gotten married, travelled a fair bit, and yes, yes, yes, I am the mother of a two-month old baby girl. 

No wonder, I feel have finally turned 26 today. 


Happy Birthday to me!

Bookered Out: Or I bet Jacobson was not mantelpiece-deprived like me

As Howard Jacobson was accepting his first Man Booker Prize award yesterday for the book The Finkler Question, I was accepting my first polite rejection from the Story Quarterly to whom I had sent a short story for publication.

I don’t blame them. I was destined to fail as a writer. Because I grew-up funny in small town India reading words I couldn’t visualise and seeing things I had no words for.

Howard Jacobson: Bet his was rich with mantelpieces

We spoke Hindi at home, English at school, and a hopeless mix of the two everywhere else, and my book diet was rationed by our school librarian to 12 books a year -- to be chosen out of an exclusively selected pile of Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews. Other than that, there was a Railway Club library entirely built out of the comic books and American paperback thrillers left behind by Railway Officers passing through Dhanbad.

The problem was that everything I read related to some imaginary world out there with landscapes, terrains, houses, neighbourhoods, foods and clothes that were divorced from most things that surrounded me. I remember spending an entire winter afternoon in our large, bare drawing room staring hard at its every feature trying to figure out if anything fit the description of a mantelpiece. Mantelpieces frequently appeared in the lives of the Famous Five whom I was rather obsessed with. Yet, I had great trouble visualising it. I knew my drawing room had shelves and a cupboard, four walls and a CEMA fluorescent tube light – but nothing that could be a mantelpiece. It sounded grand, M-A-N-T-E-L-P-I-E-C-E, but what was it? What did it really look like? The fat Oxford English Dictionary gave me a hazy idea of shape and form, and the fact that it probably had something to do with fireplaces, but nothing concrete that I could grasp. And there were no google images to rush up to. There was only my imagination, and a hazy, frustrating feeling that I was not trying hard enough.

But how could an eight-year-old visualise something that she had never seen. How could I visualise bacon, mackintoshes, loafers, brogues, macaroons, jodhpurs, loafers, brambles, blueberries, awnings, turrets, gables, attics, and daffodils when I was surrounded by saris, pyjamas, polyester, aubergines, karelas, English broilers, spices, scooters, pigs in gutters and water buffaloes. Slowly, I simply started shutting descriptions out, involving myself more and more with the characters and their internal lives. After all, I could still identify with their anger, surprise, jealousies, envies and joys, if not with their mackintoshes and brogues. I thought that a better solution than the one my best friend Shilpi (or was it Shilpa?) came up with – not read at all.

To make matters worse, there were no texts around me that helped me put into specific words the things that actually formed my visual landscape. Even our school textbooks were filled with stories by English and American writers. There was nothing that described the lives we led in our Indian towns and cities. Was there a specific word to describe the standalone single-storey brick-built apartment block that I lived in? I knew it was different from the row of stone-built single-storey apartments with shared walls that my friend lived in. If there were separate words to distinguish them, I never came across them in either books or real life – they were only ever called buildings. There were bungalows and then there were buildings, nothing in between.

Confused and frustrated by words and descriptions, I simply stopped looking for words to describe the in-betweens. Rooms were rooms, houses were houses, trees were trees, colonies were colonies and chicken curry was chicken curry – if there were in-between features, they existed in the world of my vision, not in words, not on paper, not in stories, and not in novels.

Today, Indian children are more lucky. Google has made the world so much smaller, and Indian authors writing about life in India are increasingly common. But it is too late for me. Mantelpiece deprivation sealed my fate forever. Bet Jacobson never had that problem.

****
 Update: Naresh sent me a link related to a BBC4 documentary talking about Blyton's overpowering effect on so many Indian children. I am glad I wasn't the only one.

Cricket Scandals: Or why I continue believing in sports

Hall of Shame

Sid & I returned from Italy yesterday to all the hullaboloo over the Pakistani Cricket scandal. My first thought, as I glanced at the Daily Mail front page in the airplane, was "Thank God, it was Pakistan and not India." For considering that corruption is a way of life in both countries, it could have just as well been. We too, after all, had a cricket captain Mohammed Azharduddin banned for life from playing the sport for admitting to having fixed three ODI matches. Today, he is an honourable member of the parliament in India.

I stopped watching cricket after it emerged that the South African captain Hansie Cronje and a few others had thrown matches against India in 2000. I had been one of those idiots who had emotionally invested herself heavily in one of those thrown matches, breathlessly hanging on to every ball as it was played. So  when it emerged that the match had been coldly fixed in advance, my relationship with the sport was forever broken. After that, no matter how hard I tried, I could never feel any emotional involvement with the game.

And yet, just as my cynicism towards sports in general was cementing with this lastest scandal, a fellow blogger posted a video on his latest entry that reminded me how - when played right - sports is the closest thing to transendence we will ever feel. With its mix of sweat, blood, talent, dreams, courage and imperceptable chance, it touches something so unbearably human inside us. And the video is not even about a win, it is about a tragic loss: that of the athlete Derek Redmond's in the 1992 Olympics.



Derek Redmond - May your tribe increase.

In memory of Satyavrat Redey

My uncle died.

Normally, I wouldn't be so put out for I have a great many number of uncles – Indian family, what to do? But Baba Mama, as we all called him, was one of the precious four I actually cared about. Now I am left with three.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t even my uncle. Technically, he was my father’s uncle, but I appropriated him once I discovered how cool he was.

He was the first in our family to step outside India (he lived in Germany in the 1950s to be exact), first to become an engineer, first to travel around Europe, first to see the Mona Lisa, first to marry a career woman, first to live in an Indian metropolis, first to own a car and take my Dad out for a spin, and the first to get on to the computer and the Internet. Nothing was too new, too radical for him.

But the absolute crowning glory of his achievements was that he offered me my very first glass of wine, red wine.

I was 17 or 18, and guess what did I do? I promptly added ice cubes to it and gulped it down.

I hope he didn’t die thinking that I still drink my wine with ice.

***
To Mami, Vipul and Vaibhavi:

The Dinner Party: Or have I turned into Mrs Dalloway?

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am.

I got up yesterday in a frenzy. It was the day of the dinner, and I hadn’t even got the chicken. And the blender was broken, so I needed to pick one up from Argos.

I knew that the cashews were there, but I wasn’t sure there were enough mushrooms. We had the right number of serving bowls, but I was one frying pan short so I had to make the mushrooms first, and only then get on with the chicken. Sid had scrubbed the bathtub, and had bought the wine and the spinach so that was done. But should I get flowers for the house as well? 

It was at the flowers that the frightening realisation struck me – I had turned into Mrs Dalloway!

Now, Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate Mrs Dalloway is no one’s my literary heroine exactly. The weak, silly, snivelling woman had given up the chance of a life with real love, adventure and the struggles that accompany them for a cushy life organising parties and wondering about flowers in London. 

Ok, so my party was small and informal with only Esther-the-Lawyer and Leo-with-an-Afro (and recently turned free market supporter) coming over. But I was married, jobless in London, and worrying about flowers, mushrooms and the colour of the table mats. Did that mean that I, too, was a weak, silly, snivelling woman? Had I given up on real love, adventure and the accompanying struggles?

The thing is, I grew-up with rather fuzzy ideas about feminism. There was never much discussion about it at home or school, but I picked up enough from popular culture to know that housework – the unholy trinity of cooking, cleaning and washing – was deeply uncool and needed to be avoided at all cost. Of course, there were other elements too – being financially independent, intellectual pursuits, being an equal decision-maker in the relationship. But I determinedly decided that those could only be achieved at the cost of housework. Any man who expected me to cook, clean or wash was not worth my time.

To give credit to my parents – lovely people – they did argue that it was a conveniently lazy form of feminism that I had adopted, but at the end they just shrugged in resignation and let me go ahead with my funny experiments with life.

Sid did not expect me to cook, clean and wash. But once it wasn't expected it of me, I discovered was that I actually enjoyed cooking and cleaning (maybe, not so much washing). I love good food and  a clean house, and the easiest way to get them is to cook and clean yourself. It doesn’t have much to do with either feminism or working, because even during the months that I was working – May, June and July – I would return home looking forward to the next hour in the kitchen. I find chopping therapeutic, I love the whoosh vegetables make when I slide them into the hot oil, and the changing aromas of food as it moves through the different stages of cooking mesmerise me. Most of all, I love eating what I cook. And if I can eat it on a well-laid out table, with nice wine to accompany it, and some flowers in the house – so much the better. 

Yes, I must get a job and be financially independent. (I know I am shortchanging myself there.) But that is mutually independent of cooking and cleaning. I can be a feminist and still love cooking, cleaning, throwing parties and arranging flowers.

And I always leave the dishes for Sid to do at the end. I wonder if Mr Dalloway was as obliging.

The Way We Were

I found this piece of hulking machinery - rather endearingly called a paddle tug - at the National Maritime Museum.

I am not exactly sure why I clicked the picture, except that the machine looked so lovely, outdated and redundant.

Will journalists too become a redundant relic in some museum someday?

Rain in London

It was supposed to have been a miserable day in London - all piss and drizzle all day.

But I was happy. I've always loved the rain. It is not because I spent 15 years in Mumbai where it doesn't just rain -- it pours, storms, floods, leads to utter madness and then we are all let off early from work.

No, it is something in the air when it rains that reacts with my molecules and puts me a good mood, ready to face anything - umbrella wars, traffic jams, water puddles, car splashes, humidity, frizzy hair, and clothes getting plastered to my skin.

Mummy says it is because I was born in Zambia where it rained every day, all 365 days of the year. But Mummy also says I have curly hair because I was born in Zambia. Clearly, Mummy's Zambian theories cannot be trusted.

If anyone has theories about why rains make me happy, feel free to drop a line.

Flash in the pan

I wrote a 150-word story for a flash fiction contest by Mslexia Magazine and then discovered that the deadline is tomorrow. And no, they do not accept email submissions. All submissions are to be sent by post with SAEs.

In my defence, I discovered the magazine today itself.

Anyway, the theme was “harness” and I’ll let my esteemed 17 followers to be the judge.

***
Breathless, Paul felt the walls of the tiny train toilet of the great Indian railways cave in on him. Damn India, damn its hot gassy curries, and damn Emily for insisting on this trek. His stomach was going to explode. And yet, he couldn’t fucking shit.

It is one thing to talk of journeying through India on trains in the candlelit warmth of a Chelsea restaurant. It is another to find yourself precariously squatting on a toilet pot in a thundering train trying hard not to rock over. But Emily couldn’t understand what was the big deal. She bloody loved India!

Paul took a deep breath harnessing the last dregs of strength inside him and started contracting his intestines with all his might. He must keep pushing. He must.

A tiny joke-of-a-turd plopped on to the metal below.

Paul accepted that he and Emily would never make it.

One person's blizzard

One person’s blizzard is another person’s windfall.

Stuck inside cars and buses, most Londoners had every reason to curse yesterday’s unexpected blizzard. But Sid and I, bidding away on furniture at Critereon auction house on Essex Road, could barely contain our glee. Thanks to the blizzard, most dealers couldn’t make it to the auction house and we got all the pieces of furniture we had our eyes on for a reasonable price.

For the last three weekends, we had been religiously attending the auctions – hoping to find some bargains. But thanks to our excellent tastes, whatever we would like would immediately catch the eye of some antique dealer as well. And once they get their beady eyes on something, ordinary wide-eyed couples like us, conscious of the precious pounds jingling in our pockets, stand no chance.

But yesterday, thanks to the blizzard and all the dealers stuck inside their cars, our killing included a pine table with extendable leaves for £5, a wooden rotating bookcase for £20 and beautiful mahogany four-drawer chest of drawer for £50.

May there be many more blizzards in London

***

PS: The blizzard story missing from the newspapers today is how many ankle injuries were reported last night.

PPS: To try your luck at the auction, next time there is a blizzard - visit http://www.criterionauctions.co.uk/.

Hoo Dunnit: Mystery of the missing dinner jacket

Sid in his new dinner jacket

Last weekend, Sid’s office invited us to a Christmas party at a country house hotel at the outskirts of London called Luton Hoo.

Luton Hoo, as a bit of research revealed, is a five-star country manor hotel with 1000 acres of estate land around, an 18 hole golf course, a spa and a history that encompasses over 400 years of aristocratic ownership, parties with the King and Queen in attendance, the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, and a resident ghost – the manor’s previous owner, Nicholas Harold Phillips, committed suicide there and is rumoured to haunt the premises. Luton Hoo promised us luxury and adventure wrapped in one.

It turned out to be an adventure alright.

As the main course was being laid out, the waitress stumbled behind Sid as she was serving the guest next to him, coughed an apology and quickly disappeared. In turn, Sid felt a warmth trickle down his back. Our pretty waitress hadn’t just stumbled, she had also managed to pour most of the beef sauce in the plate she held down Sid’s hand-tailored dinner jacket. We had a situation – a 6-ft Californian left with a steak without sauce, a vegetarian Hindu with beef sauce trickling down his dinner jacket and a culprit waitress nowhere to be found.

Sid immediately raised an alarm, and the head waiter – our saviour no 1 called Bobby – took charge. He sent Sid’s jacket to the laundry, got him a replacement for the night and assured us that we would open our eyes the next morning to a freshly laundered, stain-free dinner jacket.

Of course, it wasn’t there the next morning. It was still missing as we were checking out. The night staff at the laundry had left, and the morning staff hadn’t heard of any wayward, beef-stained dinner jackets from the night.

Determined not to lose our cool, we asked them to locate the lost jacket while we took a stroll around the verdant 1000 acres of Luton Hoo’s parkland.

After an hour and half of freezing walk, we got a call from our saviour no 2 called Gareth. The jacket had been located. We rushed back, only to be told that the stain hadn’t come off, the jacket needed to be dry-cleaned, the dry-cleaner would only open on Monday, so could we pretty please leave our address, and they will definitely courier the dry-cleaned jacket by Friday.

In protest, we insisted they dry-clean the pants as well, left our address at the reception, drank the complimentary coffee, and headed back.

It is Friday today, and no courier has come knocking on our doors.

We are now expecting a call from our saviour no 3, who we are sure will be called Nicholas Harold Phillips, Luton Hoo's resident ghost.

***
PS: Yes, of course, I am married to Sean Connery.

Intergalactic promises!

Sir Richard Branson has finally unveiled the Virgin Galactic Spaceship that will make space tourism possible – stick that, NASA.

I wonder if he will remember his promise made to my friend Iain Ball to save him a seat on the maiden intergalactic flight.

Funny, how six degrees of separation works in this world. Who would think that Branson would only be one acquaintance removed from little Miss Me? But Branson knows my former employer Smiti Ruia well enough to come visiting the Paprika Media office in Mumbai, shaking hands with each one of us part-star struck, part ironical staff of the Time Out Mumbai magazine. It was then that my friend and colleague Iain had made his jesting request. On his part, the flamboyant Mr Branson had seemed somewhat embarrassed, shy and tongue-tied – and taking Ball’s request seriously had sincerely said “Of course, I’ll keep it in mind.”

I wonder then, if Ball has received his complimentary ticket as yet or not.

Pitch perfect

Little-Miss-Me in London found herself at a “Pitching To Editors” workshop today. It was being conducted by Susan Grossman, a cuddly warm 50-something former journalist who has digressed into mentoring budding writers paddling wildly in London’s media ocean. The workshop was part-therapy for unsure writers and part hard facts on how to eke out a living as a freelancer: who pays what, for what kind of stories, how to find and approach them and – yummiest of all – how to get as much financial mileage as possible out of a single story idea.

Who else lost their way to the workshop? A former foreign correspondent for NYT, a current City AM editor, a cookbook writer, a fiction writer, a former Metro writer, a freelance sub-editor, a few working journalists, and a sweet Japanese lady who was bored of lunching at Harvey Nichols and wanted to do something constructive with her life. Ironically, she took away the prize for the best, funniest story idea of us all.

Moral of the story: If I play my cards correctly, I can make approximately £800 on one good story idea. That is more than a penny to my thoughts.
***
To find more on Susan Grossman’s workshops, visit her website.

rocket science?

Me: The onions go into the pot, S. It is not rocket science, you know.
S: Don't rocket science me. I've done rocket science. This is tougher!

And the onions never made it into the pot....

Marrying an aerospace engineer means some well-loved phrases can go into the rubbish bin.

****
Butt...Seriously: http://ow.ly/k3Yd