Wisconsin

I am in Marshfield, Wisconsin today.
Its as different as any place could get from where I was born and raised.
There is snow of the quality of freshly whipped buttercream, frosting the whole landscape in a dazzling white.
What I saw of this town on my way to the Hotel is picture perfect. Just the kind of place me and my Anurag would love to visit for a holiday.
Too bad, you are not here honey.
Planning to let the shutterbug in me loose, but the camera aint cooperating.
Hope the dang card format error goes away, so I can atleast show y'all some snippets.

PS: Need to befriend the chef at the restauaunt down there. The best hot chocolate of my life, ever!!

Ring it in

Be warned : the below muddle of thoughts has been penned down at an impossible hour and in a mushy state of mind…

Now that you insist on reading on…
The cabbie who drove me to office this morning, a very nice old man, told me a funny story.
“Back in the sixties, when I lived in a poor neighborhood, there was no much firecrackers. People used to come out in the streets and bang pots ‘n pans together.. ringing in the new year, that’s what they said. We had fun, ringing in the new year that way”
I don’t mean to be rhetorica, but this has been a very special year for me. Special in that weird way which makes you wonder and shudder all at once. Special because there is just a melee of memories, sweet and sour with just the right amount of garam masala thrown in together. Yet there is not one day that can be pulled away, held up to light, examined up close and stamped “Special”. Its exactly the dizzy feeling I get when I try to tell the leaves apart on trees that pass by as we speed away in our car. Everything looks green and pretty and exactly as it should be, but you cant tell the leaves apart.
So as we take a tentative baby step across this finish line of the year that went by, which is also the starting line for yet another journey, I cant help this old fashioned sentimental state of mind. I have realized the value of love, family and of real friends this year and I am not saying this because it’s the right thing to say. I am also watching myself in wonderment as something inside me is mellowing down inexplicably, wondering if that’s what maturity is supposed to be. I am thinking about everyone and everything that’s touched my life so far and I think I am mostly thankful (considering what a whiner I am, that’s a lot).
I have met some truly wonderful, awe inspiring people this year. They aren’t making the headlines anywhere, they are simply going about doing what they do best, in the best way possible. I have also learnt that “that’s not fair” is a ridiculous statement, because the boundaries of fair and no-fair fuse beyond recognition in the times we live. I feel unhappy about the things I have missed doing this year, like telling a friend that they meant the world to me, or calling a cousin just to say Hi. Its taken me some time to realize that none of what anyone does for us matters as much as what we can do for ourselves.
In that sense, I will always remember what the cabbie told me about the pots and pans and ringing in the new year.
No worries if there be no firecrackers… pots and pans, that’s all it takes to ring it in….
Happy new year my dearies and thank you for sticking by me in spite of everything. Hope some of those real dreams you have do come true for you this year, Amen…

Happiness

Happiness has a smell.
To me, it smells of flowing water under a summer sky. It smells of rustling cool leaves, their reflections flowing lazily in that water. It smells of hot stones and floral soap and chattering children and laughing women, as everybody plunges in the shallow but fast running river, splashing crystal globules of cool water under the fire-gold tropical sun.

Happy International Women's Day

I should love to continue the uplifting tone of our previous post for a few more days. I cannot though, because she has been crying. She cried yesterday for the one hour or so she spends with me, and she cried today before she stepped out of my home. I have known her for a year now and I have seen her broke many times before. I have never seen her broken though. She never said before that she wished she were dead, not even when she lost the only man who remembered how she had looked as a child, a ten year old bride. She grieves for him though he had taken to drink and beaten her with a stick reserved for the purpose every night, when he was smashed enough. Her health and that of the other three people of her household is failing rapidly. A teenage son who labors at breaking stones in the killing heat of the Hyderabad afternoon, a daughter who is young enough to be amused with fancy hairpins and works with her mother as a maidservant, a three year old grandson – the only memory of the deceased elder daughter who succumbed to medical negligence in her pregnancy two years ago.

My maid has been crying because all her children are suffering from some ailment or another and she is helpless. Her son has been running high fever for some time now; the doctors say he cannot stand the heat and the strain of such inhuman labor. Her daughter suffers frequent belly cramps, and then she cannot even sit up, much less keep her morning appointments at the several households that wait for their dishes to be cleaned.

They have already pawned all the silver she had saved up for her daughters wedding, which must happen sooner than later, because when you live in a slum where broke men come back home drunken in the nights, a teenage daughter is heavy responsibility.
Yet she says, it’s not about the money, as long as my children are well.

None of them can read or write in any language, thus reducing their chances for any other kind of indoor work next to nil. Every rupee spent on hospital expenses or medicines means a rupee taken away from weekly rations of food and travel fare. They still laughed and joked about many things till last week, not anymore. The burden is too heavy now. Yet they give another dimension to honesty when they hand back my gold earring fished out from below the dresser. Loss of that earring would have meant a little heartache to me, no more. Its value is enough to pay for her daughters pawned silver anklets, which is a shameful reminder of helplessness to her.

I don’t know what to feel. Giving her some money to tide the times over is always an option. It makes me feel gracious too. But when that money is gone, and the little child falls sick with Chikunguniya, she will be worse off than now because she still has a remnants of pride that wouldnt allow her to borrow anymore from me.
I don’t know how this will change. I have been thinking a lot about her now a days.
Let me know if you have any “teach them to fish” ideas.
In the meanwhile let’s celebrate the international women’s day.

Congratulations!!

Are you one of those people, who forward emails full of pumping feel-goodism such as “the only thing worse than an unfinished job is a job never started”? It feels so good to tell people to go out and catch their dreams, because isn’t that just what we have been waiting to do? We occasionally stare at the flat screen monitors in office and dream about the day when we will have arrived!
How exactly, we aren’t sure; we are still waiting for a few things that need sorting out first - marriage, a car, a house, a better workplace, anything. We lie down late in the night after watching some movie, which we have probably seen at least three times before, simply because they push it to our TV at prime time and we dont care anymore. Sometimes, before sleep takes over, we uneasily remember that little boy or girl who once confidently stood up and said “when I grow up I will be so and so!” and wonder, whatever happened in the meanwhile!

So when we come across this bizarre couple who have been crazy enough to decide that, everything else can wait, but not the dream, we tend to follow them closely. Especially when the dreamer is a girl. Especially when the dream entails quitting a plush job to invest twenty four months of her life for cracking one of the toughest competitive exams. Especially when, the other spouse builds a solid net of protection around this girl so that none of jeering or worried calls for sanity from well meaning relatives bump her off course. Together they toil through one milestone after another, as though a single entity, all the while dreaming the same dream.

Then one day, which couldn’t have come sooner, what with the countless nervous visits to the website, the results are out.

You know what the results are, when you look at the man, whose ebullience has somehow deified gravity, so he hovers slightly above ground. Then you know, what really a pay off is. There is no need to stop and wonder, what if, the result had been different? These two people would have still been heroes, don’t you agree? For heroism in our times lies in keeping our dreams alive.

I am not sure how big an impact the Women’s Quota bill would have on the women of this country. I am not sure whether there will be ever an acceptance for stay at home dads. I am very sure that the day there are more couples like these, the need for Women’s Day celebrations would have been obsolete.

Congratulations Niyati and Paresh!! We need our heroes…

Happy Holi

Happy Holi, dears.

Let the evil and ugly within ourselves be tossed into purifying fires. Cleaning the slates once in a while is what our times need the most.

A hurtful relationship that makes you brood or a cunning plan to outdo your colleague, let is pass through the cleansing fire once. I am sure it will make us better people.

Tomorrow, we will colour the world in the anticpation of Spring!

I bow down to thee

Of late I have been catching up on reading quite a bit. Thats the one thing I never get enough of. Every time I think about all the wise and beautiful things that have been written over the ages by so many gifted architects of our shared culture of humanity, I feel as if time is running out. After all, there will be only so may years and so many days and so many hours that I will have to enjoy this bounty, and there is too much I have to catch up on.
Every now and then I stumble upon a gem hidden in the clutter of the world wide web. I am not sure why I wasn't aware of this remarkable piece of writing earlier, but I am so glad I found it.
It is by Joyce Maynard, written when when she was 18.

I am thankful, I discovered it.

Here is an excerpt:

Every generation thinks it's special - my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-30's are special because they knew the Red Scare of Korea, Chuck Berry and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were adolescents), when being a teen-ager was still fun. And I - I am 18, caught in the middle. Mine is the generation of unfulfilled expectations. "When you're older," my mother promised, "you can wear lipstick." But when the time came, of course, lipstick wasn't being worn. "When we're big, we'll dance like that, " my friends and I whispered, watching Chubby Checker twist on "American Bandstand." But we inherited no dance steps, ours was a limp, formless shrug to watered-down music that rarely made the feet tap. "Just wait till we can vote," I said, bursting with 10-year-old fervor, ready to fast, freeze, march and die for peace and freedom as Joan Baez, barefoot, sang "We Shall Overcome." Well, now we can vote, and we're old enough to attend rallies and knock on doors and wave placards, and suddenly it doesn't seem to matter any more.

My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted. (What was a space shot to us, except an hour cut from Social Studies to gather before a TV in the gym as Cape Canaveral counted down?) The first to grow up with TV. My sister was 8 when we got our set, so to her it seemed magic and always somewhat foreign. She had known books already and would never really replace them. But for me, the TV set was, like the kitchen sink and the telephone, a fact of life.


Go read the rest here:
http://joycemaynard.com/Joyce_Maynard/E__18_looks_back.html

Thank You Joyce!