To Be a Woman

To be a woman is to be sensitive to another woman.

Since last June when I chose to work as a freelance trainer, & spend more time at home, I’ve had the strange misfortune of being around other ‘aunties’ / housewives. This is a rare species, I tell you. People say, “Woman is woman’s worst enemy”. I second that. And these aunties are the reason.

Ghareloo aunties are so negative about other women, it’s shocking & absolutely disgusting. They will criticize other women indiscriminately, particularly if she is a working woman. Whether it’s her dress, career, life-style, the way she raises her child, everything is put under a cruel scanner. Instead of appreciating her hard work & the fact that she goes out & works to support her family, they bitch around saying,

“Her husband isn’t earning enough I think, so she also has to work”.
Or, “See, how she runs to office. Wonder what attraction is there in her office for her to hurry so?”
If a woman disciplines her child, they say,
“Look, how harsh she’s with the poor child. What kind of mother she is?”
If she lets her child play with the neighborhood children, they are quick to retort, “See, she is not bothered at all where her child goes. She sends her away on the road while she sits like a maharani & watches T.V”

CHEAP! CHEAP! CHEAP! That’s the only thing that comes to my mind. Ah yes…a small letter too!

Dear Shameless Aunties,

Stop belittling other women. They may be imperfect but you are downright dirty. Your own insecurities & unfulfilled desires prompt you to attack them.


You are jealous of them. You envy their independence, their confidence in going out to face the world head on, and their obvious freedom to choose & make their own decisions.

You are stuck in your little world of cooking & cleaning kitchens & bathrooms. You find no escape from your slave-like existence. You grudge others their movement. Your resentment has filled your heart & sullied it.

God save you!

From,
‘Blacklisted’ Women (blacklisted by you)

Mother

Many say a woman is incomplete until she becomes a mother. So someone who can’t conceive is termed ‘barren’. It’s such an archaic, cruel thought. It’s deeply hurtful too; particularly when you equate motherhood to being a biological mother. What does it take to be a mother? A child born out of your own womb? That’s it??????????? HELL NO.

It takes compassion, kindness, forgiving nature & a clean heart to be a mother in the true sense of the word. Look at Mother Earth. Does she discriminate between male or female, black or white, rich or poor, clean or unclean? Most good mothers are like that. My mother was one of them. She only knew to give; to one & all. Her love was not bound by lineage. It was just love; no conditions applied.

On the contrary, I know of mothers who are over-sensitive towards their own offspring but care two hoots for other children, even friends of her own child. They understand & respond to the cries of hunger, pain, despair, & loneliness of their own child but are completely insensitive to similar feelings of another child. How is it that possible?

I am protective of Tanvi, for instance, it pains me when she falls & hurts her knee. I am quick to respond to her every, sweet request. Like when she is hungry & says, “My stomach is flat. See!” Or when she says, “I can’t sleep. Tell me another story”. I’d do the same if her friend or any other child was present. I’d respond to that child the way I respond to Tan; if not with as much love, at least with as much kindness. My logic is: they are little children, they are all the same.

Why do we reserve our love only for our child & treat other children like they were the plague? Some mothers give these infamous “you dirty child, don’t come near my baby” look. Or in a group, they obsess over their child & exhibit complete indifference to another one standing right next to her, maybe wailing in sheer physical pain. It beats me. It is like mothers have these ON & OFF buttons embedded within them. The motherly love is switched ON only & only for her child. The moment there is another child in the vicinity the OFF button is activated.

Pity them! To be loved by a child is God’s way of blessing you. The more the love you receive from them, the more you are blessed. Closer home, I pity my mother-in-law, for she has missed out on the good fortune of being loved by her own blood, her first grand-child. Incidentally, her name is Bhagyalaxmi meaning good fortune!!

What is your Hobby?

Oxford dictionary defines hobby as ‘an activity that you do for pleasure when you are not working’. Does that mean work is not pleasure? Alternatively, can something you do for pleasure also bring in the dough? Can your hobby become your profession & when it does, will it stop being a hobby?!

In school, my classmates had amazing hobbies – collecting coins, stamps, pens, peacock feathers (!), sketching, painting, crochet & so on. Impressed by a philatelist’s album, I tried my hand at collecting rare stamps. A year or two into it & a few ‘Gandhis’, & ‘Rajivs’ later, I stopped going after stamps & switched to coins. After the first few paisa, put a happy end to that too. My coin collection had started resembling a beggar’s bowl.

I began to worry that I had no hobby to boast of before friends. All I did, after & away from school, was garden. I liked the texture of soil on my hand. I liked putting seeds & saplings into the ground, making a mound of earth around it, sprinkling water & then, every day, bending over, & waiting patiently for the first burst of life to appear. The first sprout of leaf is so delicate, tender & exquisitely beautiful. It was my reward.

But gardening wasn’t a ‘cool’ hobby. There were girls whose hobby was cooking (eeeww) & they made it look cool. I wanted to elevate gardening to the cool status too but I wasn’t good with words. I could not articulate my love for it. So, in school, I’d go for the ‘safe’ option: What’s your hobby? Reading. It never attracted any criticism or even an attention. It was a harmless hobby!

A decade later, all those reams of A4 sheets that went into printing my resume carried the following lines:
Hobbies: Movies, Theatre, Travelling, Reading

I like doing all of these – whether it is travelling to a new place, reading a book, watching a theatrical performance or even a movie. It makes me happy. It satiates my thirst for constant entertainment. It stays with me long after the activity is over.

But none of these require any effort on my part; only money :)! Blogging, I can safely say, is my first ever ‘real’ hobby. It is therapeutic in some strange ways & I am doing it with great zeal. And coming at age 33 this is quite something, I must say.

An Important Question

I remember in school one of the most important & dreaded questions that your wise teachers threw at you was:

“What is your aim in life?”
At the time, I was completely clueless about the answer.

The other ‘brainy’ students of my class never failed to amaze me. They always knew they either wanted to cut or build; be a doctor or an engineer. How smart, I thought. Why was I not sure of what I wanted to do AFTER I GREW UP? [What is that? Like you weren’t growing then!?]

‘Engineer’ was associated with being a math geek & since I have always had an unmatched record of “just pass” in math, I knew better than to go for ‘engineer’ as an answer for this life defining question.

I liked & scored well in biology. I had also cut up a few mice in my class 11 & 12 science lab. Slicing human flesh shouldn’t be that hard, I reasoned. After all, they train you to do that for four long years. I assumed I could be a doctor.

All the wannabe docs (short for doctor) & engines (?!? What’s the short for engineer?) sounded intelligent. I didn’t want to come across too stupid. It was, like my life depended on the right answer to this question. Being used to objective type questions & multiple answers, you learn to choose the best amongst the worst! Since “doctor” was the most popular choice, I thought that would be the ‘correct’ answer.

Whenever anybody asked me THE question, I always said, with great humility in my voice, ‘I want to be a doctor & serve the society’. If people prodded further, I would also add the heavy-duty, well-rehearsed, emotion drenched line: “I want to serve poor people & treat poor patients for free”.

Elders believed my words. They had faith in me!

Mother of all Autobiographies

I have read biographies of Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson & Adolf Hitler.

Found Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ too complex;
liked only Jackson’s. Was bored to death by Hillary’s; there was so little of her heart & soul in it, it was almost like a brochure she wanted to use to aid her political career or maybe one of the many intellectual adornments that would suit her present Secretary of State office. The autobiography I enjoyed the most continues to remain Protima Bedi’s “Timepass”. I read it way back in 2001 when a colleague of mine - Sudhir from 4C Learning – gave it to me. Nine years on & nothing has come close to what I felt when I read that highly controversial book. I couldn’t keep the book down & read it start to end with great fervor. Years later, I visited her dance village Nrityagram in Hesaraghatta to relive the experience. What remains with me, to this day, is her absolute honesty.
I haven’t been able to get my hands on that book again. I don’t know if I would feel the same passion I felt on that first read. Maybe now, I would look at it differently. I may even detest it. You never know! Reading & rereading of a book lend themselves to wholly new experiences of the writing. But what will remain with the book is the way she looked at herself. Her life, relationships, mistakes, & achievements everything was etched with complete truthfulness. To be so candid requires chutzpah.

Asha Parekh in an interview had said she wouldn’t attempt an autobiography because there were a few skeletons in her cupboard she wouldn’t want the world to know. True. It isn’t easy being so truthful, that too in print, about one’s life, the people we loved or hated & the circumstances in which we grew & lived. Your life is connected to so many people that writing about yourself would mean writing about them. The repercussions outweigh the reasons for writing. It requires a great deal of fearlessness. Most of us are scared; me included.

20th Aug 2011

PS: This post was written in 2010. I've bought a copy of Protima's Timepass recently & intend to never part with it (unlike my normal practice of giving away the books i've read & reread & reread).

A Rich Life

I just finished reading Khushwant Singh’s “Women & Men in My Life’ an autobiographical recollection of the people he met, loved & parted ways with. The varied jobs he held from being a lawyer to a journalist to a bureaucrat to a writer & the diverse set of people he knew, from film makers to journalists to ministers to writers to socialites & therefore the different experiences he had. What a life.

One day, when I am old, I too would want to look back on my own life with pride & satisfaction, on a life well-lived; a life fully experienced & enjoyed. Not one where you’ve spent a lifetime buying & hording gadgets, cars, land & jewels; but a life that is colored by a series of completely different, once in a lifetime experiences; a life where I have ticked off most of the items on my “Things to Do before I Die” list.

My wish list includes: I want to scuba dive & snorkel. As for travelling, among Indian cities, I want to visit Rajasthan & Calcutta; among foreign cities, I dream of Scotland.


Also, love to visit at least one SNOW place (Kashmir/Switzerland/any other). My earliest recollection of snow was the image of Madhu playing in the snow from Roja. The beautiful track “Yeh Haseen Wadiyaan” hasn’t erased from my memory.

I also want to learn photography & speak at least 1 foreign language particularly German. I want to work for a newspaper, however briefly & in whatever capacity. I want to learn salsa & perform on stage. Want to work for an NGO in the area of child care.

I want to act in a play with a professional theatre group. At the very least, even if I’m the prop, say the lamp-post by the side, I think I wouldn’t mind!

I want to watch live a film crew shoot a complete scene. I want to handle at least one PR (Public Relations) assignment. I would love to watch an Opera. Want to teach in a nursery school – once, briefly.

I want to go on a Cruise & know what it feels like. I want to go to Ananda Resort at the foot of the Himalayas & experience their surreal spa treatments.

It sounds difficult, almost impossible. With the pressures of daily living & the struggle for sustenance & survival, somewhere along the way, priorities change, our desires take a backseat & we submit ourselves to the flow of life. 10 hours of work & 2 hours of commuting 6 days a week 26 days a month zaps that little spark of life within. Living becomes a vicious cycle of 1 salary day & 29 ‘dry’ days!

Yercaud

Among the 4 lovely hill stations I’ve visited: Kodaikanal, Yercaud, Kandy (in Sri Lanka) and Ooty, my favorite remains Yercaud, a quaint little town in Salem, Tamil Nadu. I had bought a Motorola handset & got a holiday voucher of 2 Nights 3 Days free accommodation worth Rs 10,000/- with the purchase. We used that to go to Yercaud for my birthday in Feb’08.

As a family, that was our 1st train journey. Tan was just 1 & half years old. Both Sathya & she were super excited. It was Bangalore – Coimbatore express. We alighted in salem & took a bus to reach Yercaud. But we reached the town in the middle of the cold night & there was no transport to take us onward to our resort. We spent the night in a hotel called “Hotel Select”. When we woke up in the morning, we were on top of this beautiful hillock.
Hotel industry sells off rooms with the amusing tags: sea-view, hill-view, ocean-view, pool-view, sunset-view. Such rooms are priced differently. Ours was a hill-view room with a small kitchen. We used to open our eyes to the rise of the sun right outside our window over the top of the tree-lined hills and the deep valley below. The hills surrounding us from all sides & the village at the foot of the valley were breathtaking. At night, while the town went to bed by 7 p. m (or so it seemed), the stars came out in millions to light up the sky.
In the evenings, we used to walk a mile or two from the resort, Tan perched happily on Sathya’s shoulders calling out to the other monkeys & the stray dogs. We took an instant liking to the peaceful, deserted place, interrupted only by the constant chirping of birds & busy squirrels scurrying past. Yercaud is called the poor man’s Ooty. It has the regular tourist traps: the waterfalls, the Dolphin nose, the botanical garden, the caves, the plantations & so on. But I feel the real beauty of the place lies in its unobtrusiveness. You feel free to explore the place on your own, away from prying eyes & you sure want to make the most of it. I remember, Tan & I, sleeping on the road with brightly colored, wild flowers behind our ears posing for the camera. Yercaud is extra special to me because that was the 1st time ever father – daughter bonded. He finally spent time with his child; talking, playing & completely being with her. I’ve fond memories of that. Places become dear to our hearts not because of their ‘tourist value’ but because the place evokes some great times spent with family or friends. That’s why sometimes the most mundane of places can suddenly seem like the best place on earth. Simply because you had someone you loved to share that with.

(That must also be why GOA remains the most frequented & the most cherished place in India.
Friends + Goa * holiday = Unforgettable moments # A BLAST)