It's not just on paper

Photo courtesy: www.nosweatshakespeare.com Back in 2012, during my sister’s wedding party, we played a fun game – Words of Wisdom . All the guests were given blank paper chits and sketch pens to write down messages for the married couple. The messages needed to be thoughts that would enable the couple to navigate their life together. We received many wise messages, but the one that bagged the prize came from my maternal grandmother – someone we dearly loved and lost later, in 2016. She wrote, “ Life is a comedy of errors. ” Back then, she won the prize but the message truly landed home for me many years later. As a carefree college-going person, I didn't fully understand this description of life. Let’s just say I was too naïve, and she was too wise. Looking back, while we knew of some of the struggles in her life, maybe there were countless internal battles that she never exposed us to. Perhaps that was the 'comedy of errors' she was referring to. Cut to today.  Life has un...

Photo Courtesy: www.nature.com I have a hunch. A solid one. Something which others don’t believe. Something which most of the times, even I don’t believe. But it’s proved its existence once too many times. Especially, when things are about to go south, when things don’t seem just right, when things are not going to work out in the long run. Like a conversation that feels slightly off, a decision that carries a weight I can’t explain, a circumstance which looks fine on the surface but doesn’t feel right underneath. It’s like the Murphy’s law is embedded within me – thinking of possibilities of things that could go wrong based on subtle but clear patterns – at the subconscious level. Nothing concrete to argue about. Just enough to notice and worry about. How does this guide me through life? It prompts. It nudges. Sometimes, it insists. I mention it casually to others, almost testing it out loud, and they dismiss it like it’s nothing. I let their certainty override mine. It feels...

Make me a man for a week , Let me feel what Freedom feels. Let me have guilt-free rough hands and hairy legs, Let my grooming tools be scissors and blades. Make me a man for a week, For there is only one life and here I am - a woman.  Not ever knowing what dominance feels like, Nor having a natural right to call the shots.  And if it can't be done on this earth, Then make a man in Heaven. And bestow upon me wisdom, Like you did on the first man Adam.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for women.  But haven't we seen and been through so much agony! If only I got to be a man for a change, I'd know how carefree life can be!

Photo Credit: www.teacherspayteachers We have all grown up learning our nursery rhymes like verses of the Bible, unquestioning about their implied meaning and subtle reinforcement of conservative social structures - like the role of each parent in the family and the family's primary provider aka the father.  "Hush, little baby, don't say a word. Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird.  And if that mockingbird won't sing, Papa's gonna buy you a diamond ring." Notice how the baby is being soothed by promises of all the lovely things that 'papa' will buy for him/her.  While in most Indian families, it is mostly the mother who soothes a wailing child. Imagine the mother singing this to her baby, glorifying papa dearest and with nil reference to the mother who is painstakingly pacifying the child.  The next example is of the very famous and loved nursery rhyme - The Wheels on The Bus Go Round and Round. In this one, when the baby goes 'Wa Wa Wa', th...

It's that time of my life, when the tables have turned for me. A few years ago my parents would be hunting for good colleges and speaking to the Principals to assess if the institute was a good fit. Now, with my little one getting ready for formal schooling, it's my turn to hop around town looking for a good and reputed school for my son to study in! While Mumbai is flooded with schools, a vast majority of them offer the state education curriculum i.e. Secondary School Certificate. This board of education is governed by the state of Maharashtra and is also the board from which I completed my own schooling.  Since my graduation from school, many rules have changed in the SSC board and the curriculum too always had a reputation of being 'easier' compared to the other two prominent education boards - ICSE and CBSE.  ICSE schools were by far the most popular schools in Mumbai. However, they were also slightly premium and intellectual for the ordinary student. CBSE schools, ...

Rambo Circus in action despite a small audience Circus is in town! Back in the day, come December, the newspaper front page ads would scream 'Circus is in town'. However, now the scene has changed completely. No advertisements or billboards announcing the arrival of the circus.  Since the rise of 'digital' advertising platforms, the ads have been shifted to YouTube and Google search.  What triggered my thought of looking for a circus in Mumbai, was actually a billboard titled Cirkus. Not knowing that Cirkus was actually a Bollywood movie, I searched online and learned about it to my disappointment.  Then I wondered if there was an actual circus that I could take my son to and rummaged through my faint memories of circus names and came up with two popular ones - Rambo and Jumbo.  I searched for Jumbo circus and saw nothing. Then I typed Rambo Circus and there it was - a website which announced that the circus was in town only for the next two days. Then, the team wou...

Simba and Nala Insta filter by The Lion King If you're having a hard time pacifying your toddler when s(he) is wailing or irritable, try this trick which I myself discovered only yesterday! I was sitting idle with my mobile phone in my hand and my son was lurking around, picking up his toys which he had scattered across the floor. I started scrolling the Instagram feed and accidentally swiped left which opened up my front camera to record an Instagram story. Being a novice to Instagram stories myself, I started exploring the range of filters available on Insta.  My son too got interested to explore this new feature along with me. And then we hit upon the eureka filter - Kitten by Instagram. This filter instantly put two little furry ears and a furry and frisky nose onto my face. Looking at this, my son was ecstatic!  He's at a stage where the names of animals and their sounds are enough to get him excited and energized. He started screaming cat, cat.. I thought that this was a...

Photo Courtesy: World Economic Forum Come year 2020 and the Entire World, yes, the entire world is under the grip of Novel Coronavirus and its subsequent disease of Covid-19. As a precautionary measure to contain the spread of this human-to-human transmitted disease without a known cure, many countries including India took the harsh but necessary measure to impose a Nation-wide Lockdown. While we are all too familiar with the on-goings that we see on prime-time news, which includes the horrific plight of the daily wage workers in India desperate to return to their homes amid an unending lockdown period, there are number of unique everyday problems that we could not have anticipated hadn't there been a lockdown of such a sort. Here's a lowdown on some of those Real Everyday Problems amid the Covid Lockdown 2020 - 1. TODDLERS & CHILDREN Who would have imagined that the hardest chore for a mother would be to keep her bursting-with-energy toddler occup...

A hometown wedding. This is a magical statement which raises the adrenaline levels in most Indians by a hundred folds or so. For me, it surely was exciting to prepare for and attend a relative’s wedding- shopping, dressing, socializing, making merry and the like. But the excitement to visit my hometown Surat wasn’t as much as it should have been. Reasons could be as under- 1. Surat is geographically so close to Mumbai that I consider it less of a hometown and more of a backyard 2. Despite this clear advantage, I have visited Surat less than 5 times for durations less than 10 days (very unlike a typical Indian hometown vacation)  3. Being a Mumbaikar, I carried the false perception that if you’re a Mumbai loyalist, you cannot like or appreciate any other city. So now, when I did backpack and set out for this “hometown” wedding, I didn’t quite anticipate just how much was in store.  Gujarat in a train All aboard the Gujju Mail ...