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Showing posts from 2010

My experiments with stereotyping

Well that’s what I love doing….stereotype. Gives me a pleasure of knowing that I have an edge over others in knowing someone…so yes I can know any one’s  characters based on   the   name, the place   they   came from etc   etc. This beside the fact that the fundamental law of Life Sciences   state   that “Biology is a science of exceptions”….Wait a minute nobody said anything about anthropology …so well I   think I can happily stereotype every human being without violating any laws. Did I just say I can?   Unconditional apologies to everyone.   I have realized through the passage of   years that   every one of us like to do our own study of human races based on the experiences we have. This gives all of   us   the power to understand the whole community, an area and sometimes a whole nation based on the experience with a few individuals. So when   we   meet someone with the same credentials of community, religion or area the experience takes precedence over every thing else. Everybody

Transitions

Sometime back, my sister was explaining to me the various problems of being a girl. You know the problems of adjusting and sacrificing that girls have to do continually through their lives. I thought, she was talking of some bygone century. But as I was to know later, she, as usual was right. I had heard this many times from many ladies that they will never want to have a girl child, not because they were prejudiced, but they will never like to see their own child go through so much pain as they have gone through. Naïve as I was, I always thought that maybe they are having a tough time. But after marriage and taking over the responsibilities of one’s own house, I could see what they meant.  It meant from being fed, you now have to be the feeder …..not only on time but with quality and within the budget. And the responsibility does not stop there. You not only have to take care of the food but also all the living and non-living things in the house. I was the youngest member in the

Mother's day

When I hear the word mother, I recollect a docile woman, getting up first in the house, getting me ready for school, working in the kitchen most of the times, dressing me up for the parties and telling me stories during the afternoon naps. A woman who liked to write down all the recipes she could get. A woman who liked to knit sweaters for us. She taught me my first alphabet and was my first music teacher. But as we grew up, somewhere she was the one who would bear the brunt of our anger for many things. If she wanted to talk to us and we were studying, we will just say “please don’t disturb”. When we went to college and she would ask 10 times in 3 minutes if we had food or not, we would tell her not to repeat the same thing again and again and she still did. We would scold her for being too friendly with strangers but she would be friends to everyone in the building. There are her morning walk friends , the temple friends, the friends in the shop .. and I am not sure who else…. I am

The misery of the unorderly couple

Yes we are the odd balls out. We never plan....or let’s say we plan, but none of them works. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for an imperfect planner. And this lack of planning or organization or order is reflected in all the aspects of our life. For the starters, I was the one in the family to whom every elder in the house will look at, roll their eyes and say “What’s going to happen to her? With no plan, no organization, no discipline, what will she do in her life? What will happen after marriage etc etc “.They have a reason to say so. I had a near perfect sibling and father who are neat, organized in everything that they do. A mother, who is organized in whatever she likes to do. In this family of organized people, I was the odd one out. For instance, my set of documents as compared to my sister’s would always turn out to be random. While I will order the set each time I open it, on reopening they always seemed to be cluttered. A stack of clothes- that I will arrange for half an ho

Another feather in the unstable life

So here I was, standing in the queue to go to New York. I still cannot believe I was doing this. A part of me was horrified, another part resigned to the situation, still another angry, one part sad etc etc.…. Yes I think I (or any girl) can divide themselves into so many parts (and more) at the same time for the same reason. Now here’s the story of why exactly I was standing in that line. Some 8 months back, I took the vows of marriage which I think includes being with the husband till "death do us apart". I am really not sure what other clauses were included in the fine print that the pundit said for over two hours during the ceremony. I was more interested in finding out if every friend/relative who had come liked the food or not. The fire, the fasting plus Sanskrit didn’t help much either. Plus we had a deadline to meet, to finish everything before the hall closes. In short, who cares what the pundit was saying. Anyways, marriage over, next two months went in shoppin

Of paradoxes, ironies and anti-thesis

All three words remind me of a different era in school when we were learning figures of speech. The grammatical areas in the brain have been numbed with the increasing use of a polluted form of the language. Suddenly I feel those areas being rejuvenated with the hope that I will be making an effort to justify their use in the real sense. But, at the outset, let me admit I am no grammar enthusiast to give this a remote try. Yes but I do want to write on the curious similarities I find in the world we live in and these figures of speech. 1) The person who makes a building, can he ever own a house like that(realistically)? 2) Everywhere (read the Vedas for example) it is said that service to the society is greatest. But the people who provide services to the society or a person(the roadside barber or the cleaner) are not considered the greatest people. 3) Clothes are for based on weather. However, the hotter places have the culture to cover up the body whereas the colder on