Life after Birth(ing)

It is the most time consuming learning in life and yet it keeps repeating and no one learns from their friends/families. It comes only with real experience ....of being a parent & the stereotypes of a protective parent.
So when my mom would tell me to go in a group, not to wear certain clothes etc. I would get irritated and brush her off. I always thought she does not trust me but was never able to see her part of the thoughtworld. Especially when we live in a society, where a certain set of species, who look like human, and have the audacity to say that the girl they raped invited them with her clothes or her being alone or some useless superior-lame excuse. I get goose bumps now to think of what my parents would go through on each day. I remember one of the days from my college when my mom was scared like hell.

So I got onto a bus and was sitting on a window seat, when a very rude & crude boy came to share the seat with me. And I felt he was trying to acquire the most part of the seat by hurling me into the corner , to the window. So I shouted at him to sit on another seat and asked the conductor also to help. But the conductor behaved as if he had lost his ears and eyes both. And this guy started abusing me , and calling names. Soon his two more friends joined in as well.

Now I was scared and I asked him to move so that I could get down, but they told the conductor that dare he let me down. I was shit scared and tried again after 15 minutes of their abuse banter, to move out of my seat. This time he let me go and get down. But in the process of moving as fast as I could, my t-shirt got stuck in the bus and when I pulled it, it got torn on the sleeve :(

I just got down and ran to take a taxi back to home, and through the ride I was holding onto my fears and protecting myself from all the eyes that looked at me.

I reached home and when I saw my mom , all that I was holding back internally fell & I broke down. I was crying and hugging her tightly.

And my mom only saw my torn tee, to start imagining what could have gone wrong. When I think of it now, I get scared of what my mom would have gone through in those few moments of my silence and crying.
She was so relieved to hear when I told her the whole story.


Now when I see my son growing up, I get wrecked up so many times and then feel sorry for my parents for telling them that they were over-protective and that they were worrying too much for me.

I am a Ninja Mom now and I do have all the fears and worries that my parents had.

Atlas Shrugged Journey

From the time I started reading this book i have been totally hooked onto it...well to be honest, in the middle i was a bit swayed due to some issues happening at work...but mostly i have been hooked...and today when i am at page 735 read through and lived through the torture and pain of Dagny i am in a trance...a different vision of a world which i dont know if it ever exists on this earth do we need to create one with our own hands...for which i am totally ready
I went for a walk around my apartment area...and there was something enchanting in the deep green woods and the almost calm water, with little wrinkles on water, something that was calling me in, that little red bird or the small fish just under the fist layer of lake water or the gulping sound of the water feeding pipe into swimming pool...i was feeling attracted towards it so much that i had to drag my body away from it not to get lost in those dark places...to my mind they were not dark places and in fact for once i asked my mind that if i let you go there what would you do and the answer was just to gaze the loneliness that glorified creation of God and what i can make of it.
And I could imagine how stories like Harry potter and Alice in wonderland are formed...
That i m sent on this earth to do IT job or to just run a family or to just sleep and read books...there must be something more than this for my purpose of life...i think i might start on that path soon of what is my calling in life...all i m waiting right now is to mark that in stone in my heart and in my mind so that i dont move or lose the path i have thought upon...
May God give me strength to achieve what I aspire for...

X & Y Chromosome

I have started to believe that I am not cut out for an IT job. It really is not getting to be my cup of tea. Either the tea has been over-boiled or it has become too cold to drink.

I want to work into something where get to interact with the actual market rather than interacting with this intelligent machine!

The biggest problem that exists right now, apart from recession, is to take the plunge. The apprehensions and other social responsibilities are a big barrier. Plus our society where women entrepreneurs are not highly encouraged. It is astonishing to see that men in our society are still confused about the skill set of women. Who are the men who shake a leg greater than their respective women. I feel women work more, are more multi-tasking and pick-up things faster.

I was reading this article in the Asia magazine that talked about evolution of a cell into a child, where it said once the baby grows that his Y chromosome becomes active(boy) or inactive (girl). The intelligence, the demeanor, the ability to learn it all starts there. So I think when the leg of X is broken we get Y , which is quite logical to speak for itself that why men behave like they do :)

Summers of 2009

It is such a scorching heat in Mumbai and the moment I step out of home, it feels that I am entering the oven and all set to be baked, considering I am already oiled up due to my skin texture.
Managing life without A.C feels like an alien concept. I remember the times when we were kids and used to work around with coolers & fans only. The moist air of air-coolers was such a delight especially with the smell of cologne thrown in by my dad. Today it looks like we were living in cave man's age. I feel I was born with an AC around me and if someone asks me to move out in sun without an AC vehicle, I just cannot do it. I feel the sun rays will penetrate into my skin and blast me from inside with their heat rays. And the glaring light will blast my eyes and my brain !
Quite strange, but its not just the heat in the physical system of body, but this heat enters our mind and so more heat is experienced among peers as well.
I wish we have rains soon and we could get a whiff of cool breeze in and outside office :)

Congress (I) and Me

My dad has always been a pure Congress I fan. The first time I found out that was when I was in school and it was summer vacation time, so I was at home. In those days there was not a breakout of bees called as News channels with “Breaking news”.

My mom was expecting my brother that time and she was also asleep and dad was getting ready for office as his office bus used to come at 7 AM.

So when our door bell rang I rushed to get milk from outside and the milk man told me “Hey little girl did you hear the news, Rajiv Gandhi has been killed”. I was too young to react to that; all that I could do that time was pick up the newspaper and went back into the house with the milk packets. And while I handed the news paper to my dad, I told him the breaking news.

My dad was shocked and absolutely still. He was such an ardent fan of him that he had named me after Rajiv Gandhi's daughter (So you can imagine). And hearing this news he just stopped all his routine and sat with a thud on the sofa. He switched on TV and picked news paper simultaneously. The news had not been published in the paper. So with an optimistic streak he told me it must be a rumor, after all what does a milkman know of all this. But I could see his eyes were wet already.
The TV channel broke the news and he was so moved that he did not talk to us at all. He got ready and left for office.

All I remember of that day is seeing my dad’s eyes wet and his sad face upon hearing the news. And thats how I am related to Congress I :)

Back To School

Every morning at 7:30 am I used to catch my school bus for the school and after rounds of picking up students, lots of chitter - chatter, bus rivalry talks, grabbing the window seat turn wise and giving a seating place to my younger sister, we would reach school at 8.30 am.

I used to enjoy every bit of that journey, except when the bus used to pass a lane before reaching school. There was nothing scary about the lane in the literal sense. It wasn't dark at all and there was hardly anyone that could be seen that time. But I used to feel uncomfortable in that lane, only in the super cold Delhi winters. Reason for that was an old man.

An old man used to be in that area around that time at a fixed point with a big box by his side. He was a cobbler. Sometimes I had seen him carrying it on his head , while other times sitting at a fixed place.
One day our school bus broke down and I saw his whole routine , while waiting for our backup bus to arrive. I noticed how he meticulously spread the tools out of his box, on a neat piece of cloth. He arranged his tools and few pairs of shoes. He did a small prayer with incense sticks and sat tight waiting in anticipation for people to stop and avail his services.

Each day, especially during winters, I used to feel saddened to see him that he is working so hard in the early hours of the morning, may be to feed his family the basic meals. Or to get his daughters married, which is a herculean task in India, especially for poor people. Or to get medicines for his ailing family. Don't know which thought of mine was the right one, but they all flashed through my mind each time I saw him. Each one making me sad further.

Back to my present schedule in Delhi, I still leave at 7.30 am in the morning to catch my cab for office starting at 8.30 am. My route has changed and all my activities have converged into one activity of keeping silent. No thrill of catching the window seat and definitely no good feeling of giving seat to my younger sister, but one thing has remained constant. I can see many old men like that one, struggling in the winter mornings to start their work, walking on the road with heavy burdens.

Though I do not get sad after seeing them now. Either my emotions have died or now I do not care about such things, or may be I have realized the hard facts of a day to day living...

I am glad that I have joined the online blogging community and today, on the first working day of 2008, I have got the opportunity to post on it too.
This post is about my christmas vacation in Himachal Pradesh with my husband Vikrant. We started our trip on 20th December 2007 by the Kalka shatabadi, scheduled at 5.30 p.m from New Delhi Railway Station. My father-in-law came to drop us to the station and we had met him in C.P. I was quite thrilled as we were going for a vacation after a long time, for a long time. The train journey was as usual except that the guy sitting next to us was asked to get up from his seat by a girl who thought that the seat belonged to her. And, she had claimed that without seeing her ticket :) , and when that guy showed her the ticket, she went back to check hers, to realize that her seat number was 67 and not 64.
We reached Kalka at 9:30 P.M sharp and all I could see around was people sleeping on the station, near the platform, on benches, near booking window. But one thing was common, they all were sleeping in a shrunken hurdled posture, with mostly black blankets and they all slept in bunches. It was quite cold that night.
We tried to check the time-table for the next morning's train to Simla, but someone smiled and informed us, with a whiff of impossibility, that its booking starts at 2.30 A.M in the morning. Got a cab and fixed him for next morning :)
On reaching the hotel, the receptionist said that he has no information of our reservation, and pheww, this is what I was waiting for. Vikrant opened his cell phone browser and downloaded the reservation email. The receptionist gave us a very respectful look, as we were (to him) quite tech savvy.
With that we entered our room, only to be welcomed by a huge spidey! With a few moments of scaring each other, we locked the spider in the wardrobe of the room and got ready to munch some home cooked food we had got packed with us. It was blissful to eat that food and we retired to the bed with that blissful feeling.