I should have gone scuba diving....

I think i've gone crazy!!! NO really...How else would you explain madness???

By now the whole world must be knowing about our International airport and the really amazing issues that crop up each time one hears about it...forget going there or driving there but yes....there are issues.

The first issue to hit me...the roads have all been widened.. ( now, tell me....why didn't they think of this earlier...??? ) ...the beautiful grass in the Golf course....has had to shrink up a bit...and somehow..'I can't seem to get the whiff of moist earth and fresh grass smells when I drive past...It is one of my favourite routes to drive on....Last evening while going past, I was talking
on the phone with my husband, trying to co-ordinate something...and ....then after a few minutes, I heard " what happened?" and then I was brought back to earth....I had forgotten I was on the phone and I had to disconnect if I was done with my non-stop talking...I was lost, staring at the green next to me...phone still stuck to the ear...( I don't even want to think what my kids must have thought, while I looked like one 'Mr BEAN' ) ...if my husband hadn't thought to interrupt my train of thoughts...I might have just hung on there looking like an idiot...

This week has been a series of kiddie birthday parties...yes..the whole week...and here I was thinking I needed to get my sons to go out a bit and socialize instead of running like mad men when there's a fire..they seem to have a better life now...but what do you do if you're stuck with this...

My younger son gets invited to a party...where there are strict instructions that only his age kids have been invited ( the older one says..."thank god!!! who would go and sit with these irritating kids, ma"...So before I left to go out on some errand..I left instructions with my younger curly poo, that he was to be in their house only at 5.30 pm and not earlier...the gift was packed and left ready for him to see and take...
Exactly at 5.20 I get a call..." Ma...S is saying I should go to the party...but I don't want to go" I was like huh!!! but why? And he was like " Sai is not invited , i'm not going.. ( what loyalties!!!! ) " I tried convincing him...blaming myself for not being more persistent...and then I said " Ok...at least stay out of the play area...sit at home, till I get back, and then we'll see...how will I tell them that you didnt want to go??? " ( yeah....go ahead and blame me... " but I was stuck in some work...and brains were not thinking...and any mom will know its tough convincing a child from the other end of the phone.. :( ....6.30 pm...I was at home...smiling to myself...'cos I thought I had pulled off a big thing...no tantrums and no phones from downstairs..hehehh, when the bell rang.
Opened to the door to find 3 smiley faces..M, a pretty lil girl dressed in party clothes.., S, the uninvited party crasher...and my curly poo...dressed in the oldest of clothes and sand in his hair, and face and holding something....
A plate full of cake, a' return gift' , and some wafers...and to beat it all he gives me all this and said " I didnt go, A saw us and called us home...so we went and aunty gave us this...I played one game too Ma.. ( and I was supposed to be convinced ! ) ...now take this...i'll just go get my 'appy' and come ." ..and as if to pacify me, he says..".I didnt want to go , Ma...A saw us and called us...we couldn't refuse "

Bwaahhhh...waaah......
I need to hide.....
Now i have 2 more parties to go...one again where my older one doesn't get the invite...not that he's bothered...but...I dread another crazed evening...

I tell you, I should have just gone scuba diving and stayed there underneath.....

Food'ed and cartoon'ed

One would have thought, these IPL matches would have been overdone and walked all over us...yes! it has, but the enthusiasm to watch those matches still hasnt waned. And added to it ,ferrying around my son, for his set of cricket too..but I've loved these 2 months of vacation. Its been fun, slow, easy and hot( yes!!! terribly warm for us people out here...the rains have still not brought the temperatures down! ). Chilling out, meeting friends, partying, watching movies, and all those repeats of the same old cartoons...and oh yes!!!!! meeting my fellow bloggers too...
First I met Ziah...and I have got to to say this woman is a bundle of enthusiasm and so much energy, she makes me feel old and worn out :(, Of course her planning system has gone a lil astray....after she went animal hopping to Bannerghatta National Park.. hehehe...but you meet her and you'll know what I mean...of course her 'Guru' husband, 'The Hells Angel ' also party crashed and I am now back to making excuses for procrastinating again...for not starting work. I know, i know....I should and all....but you know how it is.......
"Its vacation now, I will after the school starts...:D
and then I also did meet the supermom, the pretty Suma of 'thinking aloud', and now she's gone and given me a big complex....:D just joking...but now I know, all the
wedding "ooTa's" , I've been eating and the party food, should now be camouflaged under tents....so am now going to go on a diet, " only blog reading, no eating" ....Been away from blogs for a while, I have to apologize....Its been crazy...but I'm not able to finish reading one full post, in one shot...and then by the time I start all over again....the number of unread blogs go up some
more...waaaahhhhh.....
So please bear with me...while I get back my breath , and get back to all of you....

ps : OoTa: in kannada, the local language , means food, a meal.

you can catch the details here...

Shelf full of stories!!

Whoever said 'moving houses is fun' should be shot..(that will mean me :( straight in the line of fire...) After so many moves, packing , unpacking....throwing away stuff, giving away stuff, hiding toys away(or else, you'll be titled the devil incarnate by your kids, what else?) so you can give it to some one needy...I think I know how much patience I need in the next couple of months..(please pass on all the patience peoples.... )
When you have children who are poles apart when it comes to their 'keep things neat' attitude, your life can be a roller coaster ride.

Well !! I'm now in the process of deciding how to, what to, where to , which to...throw or give away. I havent moved any bit in that direction. But this morning while I was looking around my house...I was petrified. Forget the kids, I have to handle the monster called 'ME' , my space and my umpteen books.

BOOKS ah!!!

You should know that people are divided into readers and non-readers (wow!! what a terribly new insight !! hehe) Readers are split into newspapers and magazines only ( like my husband) and book-readers( like me :D ) Book readers are now further sent into borrow thy book (not me :( ) and buy thy book (ME!!!!!!) .
Now since I've already gone ahead and done the needful of buying the book, I also happen to fall into the category that cares for books as a physical entity.. how much more heavy can that get :(. Those of us who believe that a house without books , is hardly distinguishable from a Sauna or a wigwam. That is why I worry so much about bookshelves and how they are filled.
Should shelves be adjustable, ( ideal, but time consuming) or should they just sit there...any way, no one gets to changing them regularly. (No wonder the set of World books always occupies the same position on any shelf in any house I move into ?? )
Should I keep them clean behind glass or open to eye, the hand and the air????

Should I keep one space entirely for all the books, or should I just populate all the rooms by spreading them out? Should I keep my children's books accordingly in their individual rooms or should I have a common space? What if I start a war because i've kept one reference book in the other room and they don't share?? Am I going to be held responsible for their fights??
I tried by jotting down where i'll need to put them in...and here goes my fanatical thoughts

1. There must be a shelf in the kitchen, for cookery books. (How else do I explain, why I go and buy them, 'cos they looked so beautiful with all the lovely colored prints of exotic dishes, I might never even make. They surely know how to lure me.... Those dairies where half the things written down in varied coloured pens,(with a few phone numbers too) 'cos I just can't let go of my mom's house tastes, but still end up cooking things that my mother-in-law cooked)



2. A small shelf (ok a huge sack maybe!) for those bathrooms. Ok this is tricky I know. Many people who read extensively in the loo ( my husband....yes, yes) , take in their reading (its mostly newspapers, or the magazines that I subscribe to :) ] and take them out again (more or less damp-smudged or folded out of recognition) Maybe I should ask publishers to start 'water proof series for bathroom reading'. But in the present day, clinical ,apartment bathrooms...i'll be glad if I can even hold the book a lil far apart from my nose.



3. The children's room. Civilzed habits need to be taught ;). We were always told not put the book down open on its face, not to make dog ears to mark out pages...must put the books back in their shelf ( my older son does it very religiously...sometimes to the point of frustration...) So should they be , appetizing to look at ( everything should be...if I need my junior-curly-poo to eat), easy to reach and of course well stocked ( their books get read very fast...have to still learn that art )

4. If the husband is lucky enough to have his own space...wherever it maybe..dressing room, bedside, wardrobe...god knows where,he will do reading ( I can sigh a relief here...I just have to go back to point 2. :D His set will most probably, no, surely ,have just some comics...all at the same time in one place, the last weeks newspaper, and yes, the occassional vogue magazine..he needs some eye candy too.




5.Passages and landings ( oh oh...I don't have them...no stairs inside! ) so one down....are for seldom-wanted but can't throw away books. Just because I got it as a consolation prize in my school days or his father gifted it to him when he went away on a trip for the first time...no matter that the book has been read so many time over even by the roaches that were present in some of the houses..







6.Read somewhere that the dining area also makes a good space for books...the dictionary ( so that we can correct our kids stat, and what else do I do with the millions of Oxford dictionaries???...)questions can be answered on the spot...but houses now being so huge that the distance from the dining to the farthest bookshelf in the bedroom could be just a few couple of feet away..I can strike that out, and moreover its always a race to finish meals anyway.



It would be easy to multiply the list of dilemnas with which any normal bookish person faces. But at the end of it all, I know ,The more books are handled and used ( by loving though grubby hands ) the less dusting, artificial attention they need. Neglect a book and it wilts visibly. We all know what that means???



How about this????


But at the end of it all...I would want my house which says 'Come on in' and not 'All hope abandon, ye, who enter here'.

For all you MOMS!

So ,the weekend passed and all us, 'feel good moms', had a blast...why? You would think? 'Cos no one remembered it was 'Mother's Day' and none wished us :(. We were 4 moms sitting there sulking....but never felt any less happy. We were , only too much. The weekend had been a great stress reliever. And what more does a mom want other than to see her kids happy and playing with their friends, no tantrums, food polished off frequently. Dads, lounging around, no deadlines being spoken of...It was a truly a great Mother's day for all of us. It wasn't planned that way , so it was fun.


And while we were there...we even got to see other creations ....a beautiful one at that. It was a tailor bird's nest. And to our surprise, the lil one was still inside, all eyes closed and cuddled up in the small cosy space. The kids were too excited and would not leave their side.Clicked some pictures, and here they are...not great quality...what do you expect when the pictures are from my cellphone, and there's too much excitement around ..





I logged on today after the lovely weekend...and read Preethi's scrap, and she was sulking happily, ( we all know, her family loves her and so do we :) )..when I thought I'd put this poem out, that I had written, and thought this was a good time when the whole melodrama of the special day has died down...and this goes out to all the mothers out here..

Ma!!
The one word, that can bring forth
The cooing when her baby was born
The silly songs she sang while,
diapers that were changed on and on

The smile she held on
even though the world around her rolled on:
The one who remembers all baby's feeds
and even the family's around her.

She says she is tired
but she doesn't know what she says
she is still seen in all spaces
And walking around in a daze

Eat your vegetables, she says
yuck! tomatoes...the son says!
she makes Ravan look like a mouse
But she's all marshmallow inside.

The tomatoes are there,
pureed and camouflaged
Eat he must, and he will
Or else, he'll be grounded.

'Take the jacket, its gonna rain', she said
Oh! mom! Its so bright and sunny, you're crazy
And walks out with just a shirt trying to dare
and sure as she said, it pours and pours
through the rainbows and thunderous roars.

She's bony, not as the other mom's are
But when sonny needs a hug
The warmth and love hidden in there
envelops and fills, and spreads through all.

What does she get, when she stays
Long after the bus has gone
waving her hands, to the small little hands.
Until she can't see them no more
Eyes still glossy with unshed tears.

She's the one who makes us feel
the world is still beautiful
Don't worry at all
Your momma's there
She'll kiss evil, good bye after all.

song-o-'algia

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Dhitang dhitang bole by Hemant mukherjee.
Now 25 or so years later, I come to know it was a popular song by Hemanta Mukherjee, and not some song that our school teachers had got from divine interventions..

It was in the early 80's...and all I can remember are white and red-striped saree clad girls giggling away, while the man friday from the make up market, sweaty shirt, and oily hair, went about his school duty of slapping on, the same coloured powder, wet with wet sponge, and the same horrendous red lipstick, expertly ignorant ( note that, he would be brought in form the erstwhile Prabhat Kalavidaru )of the varied coloured faces he was pasting it on.


Heard this song, and suddenly went into a trance...Not that latest Goan kind of trance... :) ..That trance of course is different where you remember a host of things very unrelated to this post...The kind i'm talking of, is the one that transports you to a world that had seen better days, or maybe sepia days...We had danced to this song while in school for some inter-school dance competition....
Some songs do that to me. A song can remind me of the day I had danced to it while in kindergarten..( oh yes!!! I remember the 1re cone icecreams too that we would get in the school tuck shops on friday!! ) or maybe even the time where I had stayed put in the bathroom, because I got stuck on one line and for the life of me, couldn't remember the next few lines...it was the non-cellphone days, so couldn't even call up and get the much needed bath- finisher from my trusted friends (don't we all have at least one of them...)


The trippy numbers some takes me to the times when we had performed as a group from our colony for some organisation. I remember , the place "Town Hall" It was very prestigious, then, when we would say I danced there or sang or whatever there...remember the time we put alta on our feet , mandatory for those school dances, those endless hours we sat and made jewels out of think ropes and silver foil. My school had insisted on giving us the much needed art-hobby, timepass inspirations, from our school days itself...all accessories have to be handmade...no renting out stuff or buying...pffftt... so we would sit for hours, ( of course very thrilled on having missed some boring History classes) using glue...the very authentic maida paste...yucks...it would always stink after a while I remember. And our fingers all dirty and pichky....no match for the present day fevicol, and gluesticks....with their varied fragrances.
Then there were those days, where if we girls had to dress up as a boy in some play or a dance, we had to customarily wear a beard and a moustache...poor guys, they would look more sissier than us 'boys' . And to think they were already squirming in their half pants for having been railroaded into performing along with 'girls'...snigger , snigger....the very same guys grew up and followed the girls around later, is a different story.


Those were the days, when we would get that sneak preview into our hallowed teachers dancing to show us those difficult steps...now when I look back I realise they were just as human as we were...so why shouldnt they have danced? But you know how it is the teacher -student equation..
Isn't it strange how we put 'roles' onto different people? And they just cannot step out of line, or else they'll be gossiped all over the campus..

It helped us bond, with our teachers, our friends...yes, even those smarty pants who would refuse to share their 'chole bathures'...in exchange for the very boring chapathi sabji or better still ,curd rice..with the small pickle twinkling on top...(was that vadu manga, that my friend brought every single day???)

I still can go back to those days to the last minute of our school day, we had to sing the prayer song...it went something like this..." At the end of **shift our feet behind with half closed eyes**, just kneel and...**hold onto the chair** pray. Thank you Lord...**lift the chair** for my work and **place it upside down**... play, I'll...**on the table...while bending down without moving our heads down......and moving to the end of the row...so that we are the first to be out of the door...gosh!! ( and dumb as were, we would actually think that the teachers wouldn't know...huh!!!! innocence! )
oh yes!!! those were fun times....
But we grew up and our songs changed from precious Lords, and dance songs- mmm, I think the song "dus gayo paapi bichua...may not have ever wanted to stay that long being danced upon as much as it were in school events ( some outsorced from folk, country, villages) to more filmy numbers, la bollywood ishtyle...then some of those soppy rock songs...

Till date the song 'hungry eyes' from the movie Dirty Dancing only reminds me of the terrace top grooving in the wee hours of a misty morning in a friend's house,while eating bread and butter, and some leftover cheese macaroni, but never the actual song from the film. But i'd like that image to remain..cos "Those were the days ..." and it leaves a smile, like a whisper.
Songs are many...and if I start...I must just get stuck and then chew my own brains up 'cos I'll just have to forget some line, somewhere, and then start haunting the rest of you out here..
Has any song like this transported you back to somewhere, that can just bring on the 'sigh' now??? Let me know...who knows we might just have crossed paths somewhere

Angries?? Punch me!!

The phone rang for the umpteenth time, and she ignored it. It was happening for the last few days. She was upset and stressed. Her husband was trying to apologize and make things better, but here she was holding a grudge against him for something he had done years ago...she was not able to forget or forgive.
"You have hurt me so much in the last few years....so, you have no right to be happy now. I am going to make your life miserable" is what she thought and what she wanted.

Can an individual be responsible for his emotions? I feel , the responsibility lies in the individual himself. Why should one let their feelings on another. Anger can be destructive. Have you ever felt the need to hold a grudge against another? When you analyse it, you realise the solution lies in your own hands.

Let go, and then you'll find yourself at peace. Irrational thoughts are crazy making! They keep us in victim mode and chaos. What can you control....your own thoughts and actions. What you assume is only what you assume. Assumptions may or may not be true. There may be other reasons why things happen. Jumping to conclusions is another form of making an assumption and acting on it as if it were true.

Some people live so much in the hurts of the past that they do not realize that another person has changed or is trying to change. They keep an old version of the person in their mind. Sometimes people do change, so do an update in your mind about them. Life is too short to hold something against another person.

Bringing up old issues from the past during an argument, which diverts the argument into old unresolved hurts and pain while avoiding the current issue. 'You have been doing this to me for years. Last year, you did this to hurt me so, I must bring it up again and again.' This way of fighting brings in every thing but the kitchen sink and your main door to be angry about.

Happiness in life can be achieved when you learn to break into your negative thinking. Mistakes in the way you think causes depression, helplessness and anger, keeping you from being at peace.We all have irrational thoughts, which keep us caught in anger and neurotic behavior. Mistaken beliefs are beliefs and defenses we build up and replay with anger so we do not have to know the truth about our self. Is it true? When one imposes rigid expectations on themselves, other people, and the world because of their beliefs, they are likely to experience unnecessary emotional distress.

Blaming others is a way of life for some people. If you hear yourself continually saying, 'It's not fair!' then you are focusing on the negative instead of going into problem solving. Much of life really isn't fair! So what? Keeping score of mistakes from others and dwelling on them creates an environment of hurt and suspicion. Having a list of 'shoulds' for the partner, which are inconsistent with his or her personality, will undermine a relationship. Focusing on unfairness keeps them caught in anger, resentment and grudges. (Hey, life frequently is unfair, but focusing on it only makes you more miserable!)

Holding a grudge , fans the negative thoughts and anger. Are we trying to protect ourselves from hurt by grudging someone? No one can make you feel anything. Your feelings are entirely your own.

As the saying by Kahil Gibran goes, 'If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?'

Swalpa adjust maaDi!

Nimma mane hathra, maLe bantha? (did it rain near your house? )
Thats an oft repeated question out here.

Summer's been fantastic in Bangalore...no doubts about it. It makes us look like fools half the time. What would you say, if my car zooms into this slick tarred, dry, scorched road ,looking like a cat has been dragged into the muddy puddle...
Yes, that is my Bengaluru for you? You'd think i'm joking, or i've run my car thru the carwash and the muddy ground.
It happened while I was driving back from picking up my son. Thundershowers threatened me so sincerely...you would think I'd panic...nah...
I know them only too well...they were just warning me that at the end of the road, it was raining, and raining cats and dogs...and some trees too...

Strange but true.
I remember while in school, we would wear our raincoats, get drenched in the rain, get into the bus, and hold onto the bags for dear life, worrying about how to explain the wet uniforms to our mother, inspite of having the raincoat on!!! But what do we see when we get down...dry, earth. No signs of rain..
How do you expect our mom's to even remotely believe us?????

Its been playing these games the last few days..."rain in the 15th cross brought down 3 sampige trees, while the erstwhile 18th cross maami's were drying out their papads, making use of the summer shine, to store up for the year ahead :("
And you say, life is boring!!??

For all those who are suffering from the 'oh!! so hot! summer here', there are a few tips put out by bikerdude here...check it out