at last

the Government of India has not only paid lip service of taking responsibility for the horrors that Mumbai went through, but is also re-manning its key posts.
the Home Minister has gone, at last, replaced by the erstwhile Finance Minister, someone known for his 'will do' attitude.
the National Security Advisor has also put in his papers...
at the State level, why should the entire Government be not given marching orders? R R Patil's comments on the tragedy is now history... only if he lost one hair, i am sure, his tone would have been different... and with what authority is he talking about not putting in resignations? we need to invent some adjectives to describe his ilk...
hopefully, we will see a more responsible, tough guys in charge...

and the media too, after being reminded by an eminent film-maker, have now started talking about the people who were affected at VT Station... better late than never...

we just are a patient race, and believe in giving endless chances... is that to cover for our own inaction?

Mumbai, we are with you

the purpose of writing is is not to add anything to what has been going on now for the past 40 hours, the longest duration terror which has struck India and Indian sovereignity.
as usual, the victims are people who did not choose what has happened to them. first time of course, terror has struck the wealthy, though that is by no means any justification of what the terrorists have done.
one common logic that the media (the audio-visual) has been giving is: Mumbai with its resilience will bounce back to normalcy, as it had done post 1993 when the Stock Exchange, the Air India building, and countless other locations were blasted. then happened the 2006 July blast.
and for once, i could not agree more with Shobha De, who left-right-centre blacklisted all the politicians... true, the security expenses of the State exchequer that goes to keep these politicians safe is totally mis-spent. instead more money should be spent in the security of common people.
the role of the media in this entire coverage is not beyond question. while it is for them that the world gets to know what is happening moment to moment, questions remain on the way the coverage is being done. first and foremost, why show these things live? are we not giving banal criminals a place they do not deserve? second, why should top ranking (hierarchically) reporters fly from Delhi to cover in Mumbai, when there are local staff, well trained ones who are there? yes, i am referring to Barkha Dutt.
next is the issue of intelligence. when these terrorists came by boats, what were the Indian Coast Guards doing? and mind you, the Coast Guards are right across the Taj. If one sees a global pattern in what is happening, security in hotels need to be tightened.
what is confusing is: should the cops been more rash and stormed in? obviously, they feared for civilian lives. but what price are we paying for being patient, now that there is news of fresh encounters?
how long more will this whole fiasco last?

is expression the whole of love?

nope... or so i thought.
love is something which is to be understood, felt and cherished, silently, in privacy... this is what my socialisation was all about... my natal family never believed in love which was shown... so bro and i had one of the most down-to-earth upbringings... public hugs and kisses were taboo, nay i do not think, it ever crossed our parents' minds.
privately also, when just with their children, the only expression of affection i recall from Dad was in a coy, but broad smile and softening of his small eyes, behind his glasses. Mom also, now i feel, was too serious in her responsibilites as a homemaker and a mother, so much so that she did not remember to show either of us any affection, except on our birthdays, when she hugged us tight and blessed us.
with this notion of love, i stepped out into a world of my own, with B, 17+ years back.
my marital family belongs to two schools of thought on love. my DIL is a strict Dad, no-love-to-be-shown school. MIL, on the contary, is very expressive with hers for her children and grandchildren, and since her elder son possibly expected a replication of some, if not all traits, of hers in his bi(e)tter half, he got a rude shock, initially.
i was never (and still am not) a hugging, kissing kind, something which if you know me well, you would have known. i hate showing emotions publicly. in that, i strictly carry the torch of my parents.
my love is in the deeds i do... if i feel warmly for a person, it will be evident in my dealings with that person; contrarily, if i feel cold towards someone, i will show it, though, i feel, over time, the latter has mellowed.
today, i tried to rewrite the love-not-to-shown rule about myself... being B's birthday, i decided i will show off my **** for him... so i did cook some things he likes... and who noticed the difference first? not B, who went about the morning like any other Friday, but R, whose big eyes turned bigger... she ran to her Dad and both came together to the kitchen...
B just gave a stingy half-inch smile... i think i have infected him with my love-not-to-be shown bug, but R gave me a hug and tonnes of kisses.
i will try to do this more often, let's see if i can...

flexi hours and we

i have to write this, since i practise it and have all along advocated it... switched jobs in a jiffy, just so that i could work on my terms, not in anything else, but time. i have always felt that i need to decide my work timings, i need to be in command, though i would leave the targets to my employers... so i have always given the logic: you give me the target and the timeframe; let me decide how i want to work around it. and i am, if necessary, available online 24x7 (sounds marketing cliche, i know, though i am not an expert marketeer in any case)
what she says is true and i agree wholeheartedly.
yes, it is a fact that at the end of a tiring day, we feel a little conned... but what else is the go between fixed hours (which may or may not suit us, mothers and homemakers, who take those roles equally seriously), stiff targets and managing our times (which in essence is linked to the timimgs of our children, our spouses, our cooks, et al)?
i have experimented a lot in this domain. i have held jobs, cushy ones, but which required my presence at office for 12 hours. while it suited me fine when we were DINKS (double income no kids) and we were that for a good five years after marriage, once R came along, i was no longer ready to do it... started my working from home, started my poring over proofs at midninght in between feeds and comforting a cranky child...
the result -- i quit with a golden handshake.

get into another job, specifying clearly that i would be available only between 10 am and 6 pm... the result, i was unable to attend most meetings which were deliberately fixed after 5 pm, to suit the decision-making men in the company (i happened to be the only lady supposed to be attending those meetings)...
the result -- i quit again, moving cities, with B's new job...

the next stint, very rewarding in terms of the things i learnt on the job, but killing since most work started flowing late in the evening, after a full day at work, since i left on time and the refrain was, "you will do it, we know.".
the result -- quit yet again, this time with B's transfer to a new city.

yet another stint starts... again i specify that i am available only on fixed hours of the day, while delivering all the work on time... but the men i work with refuse to understand that while working in a team, there have to be some priorities fixed according to the lady member as well.
the result -- quit to leave the country, with B again.

sit at home for a six months, determined never to look around for a job, but is that possible with me? nope...
find writing work, strictly specifying that i am available only in the mornings...
this arrangement continues, but R has grown up, she can manage herself to an extent, though bouts of being ignored, periods of attention deficit happens. and her quote of the week is, "you love the comp more than you love me."... so to deal with that, i am hugging her tight, but a part of my mind is on the Cover Story i am supposed to put in today...

to be honest, however, i am largely satisfied with flexi hours. yes, there are taxing times. yes, we do tend to work more. yes, i too feel over-worked and over-taxed (i am working all weekends, in the evenings, sometimes in the nights), but i call the shots when it comes to my time, my home, despite minor adjustments, carried on fine. that, however, is possible because of the fantastic team i am a part of. most of us are women who have children, some are expecting... but we are pulling it off... with perfect understanding, perfect poise and balance, much to the chagrin of many.

my time obsession

this is one strong obsession i have and try as i have might, i have not been able to change it... it is in my upbringing. Mom and Dad always insisted for both of us that if we had to be in a place at a particular time, we had to be before time.
now in our respective professional lives, bro and I are misfits in some cases, correct in some others.
in 99 out of 100 cases (why not 100, i will explain down), we are correct... so in many conferences, i show up just a while after the organisers, while the other journos are either caught in traffic or in some other assignment.
today, when i called up Georgetown University at the nick of 1 pm, the time they are supposed to open and could renew my books, i was thrilled...someone is really following the clock, i mused.
and i insist the same with cab drivers, with R, B of course... and when a colleague who came home one evening and narrated the harangues i had with cabbies, B was cool and replied, "if city cabbies have such a tough time, you can imagine my plight."
but when i was five minutes delayed in a meeting this week, because of traffic (and the fact that in flat 40 minutes, i had to run to the pharmacy for R who came home with fever and B was in a meeting, not to be disturbed) and received a little less than double-didgit calls in exactly 30 minutes, my heart broke on two counts: one, i had done what i hate others do, make people wait; two, i had missed the record of being the super hyper human on the planet.
while i will take care about the first and will try harder to be before time in any meeting, be it an oil & gas conference that i am covering or a luxury house which is opening a new outlet, i am not sure what i can do for the latter. may be, in my next life, i will write for my own magazine, till then will have to grin and bear.

wilful exclusion???

yes, certainly. if after being in the region for four years, one just does not know the language, s/he deserves to be excluded.
after many conferences, meetings that address only the Arab media, leaving the English out just as one would treat furniture or flower pots, i have vowed to learn the language... but have not moved my little finger... so i deserve to be left out.
yesterday, one more conference at the soon-to-be-opened Museaum of Islamic Art, one more instance of reminding the likes of me that we were just present, but did not count...
it started right at the entry, where the security took away my ID card (for many of us, that card represents us, a number with a photograph), handed a Visitor Pass... i hung on to that piece of paper and after getting stuck in at least four different points of security check, landed at the venue, which had been shifted from where i knew it was being held...
for once, in a long long while, i felt i was on foreign soil... there were none who spoke English... every soul was Arabic speaking, so all my desperate efforts at communicating were falling on deaf ears, with a small, staccato phrase, "mafi english."
to top it all, the security who was escorting me from one wing of the huge building to the other, thought i looked like some Chinese or Japanese...
ok, i thought... may be...
but while at the Conference, it was painful to be excluded... messages were only being translated on request... but the speakers could not only speak English, they were good at it... and that was evident when a prominent TV journo insisted to speak in English since her channel is telecast in many English speaking countries.
so where do we, who represent just the local circulating press, stand? any idea???

do i have quirks?

yes, it is an endless list... and as this colleague says, there cannot be universal quirks... what is quirky for one, could seem perfectly normal in the other...
here are mine:

1. my addiction for music... some tunes, some songs give me a high, so much so that i go on tuning them on, to the point that i loathe them after a point of time. while writing this too, i am on an old ABBA number.
2. my love for wine... the idea of being high on wine excites me more than the actual wine since i tend to fall asleep after a while.
3. i still smell R though she is almost a teen. i still ask her who she loves the most, in the fond hope that she takes my name, though she studiously avoids giving an answer.
4. i cannot sleep without a book beside my pillow. it could be just be a para that i read while in bed, but the book has to sleep with me.
5. i enjoy one person's company the most, apart from B: myself and can spend hours with just her.
6. remember the birthdays, anniversaries, the kids' birthdays of all in the wider family, including first cousins and silently expect that they reciprocate mine, knowing fully well that they will not.
7. expect that B will wake up early and make me cup of steaming tea in bed.
8. i love to sleep and sleep and sleep.

life, why art thou so difficult?

i hate to whine. i hate whiners.
i love life. i love to live. and i love to live mostly on my terms.
therein lies the reason why i have difficulty in gulping a lot of things, swallowing terms set by others, though most of the time i work out a middle ground between what i want and what someone else says... but there are instances when i even wholly accept what the other person wants, if reason is better there.
but this one is different... this challenge is unique and to that extent more difficult. it is the first time in life that this is happening... naturally, with every first time, you dither, you are unsure, you are groping, you are looking for a way out, you are thinking how to react, you are weighing your reactions, you are responding, you are negotiating (covertly and overtly, with words, with gestures, with the way you look or stare), you are conscious of every word you say (aware that you are judged every single time)... and there are many more subconscious processes that your mind is engaged in.
it is in view of this, that i have not been here... i have come and gone... not stayed on, not elaborated, not felt like talking. my silence means my mind has been preoccupied...
today, a while back when i opened the edit post menu, i saw seven drafts that i have saved over the past one week... and believe me, i did not feel like continuing on even a single one of those...
i am dealing with questions, some of which are below, and i know that this test is mine alone, that i will have to figure out all the answers myself, that there are no second chances, that it is only the future that will let me know the correctness/incorrectness of the choices i make now, that i need to be patient and pleasantly so, that i cannot show that i am worried, that i need to behave normally...
1. what do you do when your child starts contradicting you on every single thing -- from food to dress to friends to how she is/should be occupied?
2. what do you do when she questions you relentlessly?
3. what do you do when she, though not very openly, shows that your opinion does not count, that it is useless?
4. what do you do when you know that though she does not say it, she is not taking you seriously?
5. what is the magic wand that will lead us out of this state? more love/less love; more time/less time; more space/less space; more freedom/less freedom; more concern/less concern... most important, how much is more? and how much is less?
till date, i have dealt with life more rationally than emotionally. i have tried to keep a balance between the head and the heart. i have found my own way out, my own answers to most questions in life.
hope this will be no exception.

PS: if someone reads this post with just the previous one, they could have doubts on my sanity... but such i guess is life.

R's Mummy and R

below is what i feel about the most important role in my life...
i still have doubts on my mothering skills though it is 26 days short of 13 full years... and let me tell you also that R was neither an accident, nor an after thought... she was planned and timed, when my parents and B's had almost given up all hopes of their first grandchild...
my first reaction to this bundle of joy was insecurity... how could i understand when she is hungry? when sleepy? when in colic? how do i know how much to feed her? what do i do in case of a high fever? or when she does not pass stool? or vomits? or goes into a dehydration?... all related to creature comforts, all when she was hours, days, weeks, months and till two years old...
this stage passed... passed with days and nights of back-breaking effort, more so because we were alone without any family help, first-time parents, had to commute one-and-a-half hours each way to work and back, kept busy schedules at work, all this while the lady entrusted with her care at home while we were away at work, decided to leave, so enter the day care, and the big G rearing its head every day when we dropped her off, and she said, "bye" for 10 hours with a tear drop in each eye and a pout on her lips... my heart broke every day... but i could not bring myself to resign from a cushy job at Mumbai and later at Kolkata...
gradually, when we shifted to Kolkata and R began her play school, the challenge for me was to keep her mind occupied, teach her the difference between a y and a w, teach her social skills, read to her at night (i did that from the time she was barely a year old) so that she slept with dreams straight out of books...
then started formal school... change of routine from her play school, and the associated newness... by then, she had her friends and their moms became my friends (this process still continues)...
then came Delhi, change again... R struggled with Hindi with me... had new friends in her new school and all along when her friends said, "you look like your Mom," she relayed that to me with a twinkle in the eye... and one day told her friend, "obviously, because i was in her tummy for 248 days" (the mother of this friend recounted the count later over coffee!!)...
at this stage, she once told B, "i look like her, but my skin is like you, see the dots,"... an effort to humour B, lest her father feels left out...
Kolkata again... change again, new school again, this time a new board too... R looked tired at times with these frequent changes... but i learnt adjustment from her... that she is a silent kind with the habit of keeping things to herself i knew now...
enter Muscat... struggle less, because i was with her at home for six months at a stretch... new friends, new board, new country, new language, Arabic... but remarkable versatility
to Doha... she is 11... getting mature in logic, but knows how to negotiate and when not to, reads like us, incessantly, shows a mind of her own, with strong arguments at times... still dependent on me, i love that though B feels i am putting her in a handicap...
in fact, R renewed my faith in life when Dad left and left suddenly... she is the one who comforted me with her tiny hands whenever i became wistful... she pulled me back from a huge bout of depression, her kisses and hugs tell me that i am important, her eyes can spot a slight change of look or expression on my face, she is the one who cries when i am travelling on work, and it is she who takes me back home every single day... the entire structure of my day and night is wound according to her day.
never have i identified more with anyone else and she has shown me what my parents have done for me... so that i love them ever more.

words and words

some instances of what i do not understand and most of these are very frequently used, cliche as they say:

1. the big picture: of what? and why big? why not small?
2. think tank: outside the tank does not think?
3. middle of nowhere: if it is nowhere, how can there be a middle?
4. shape of things to come: how is that possible?
5. dust settles: does it?
6. read between the lines: is there anything?
7. think outside the box: which one?
8. go nowhere: same as 3
9. heart of gold: possible?
10.hand over fist: can't be visualised
11. as luck would have it: why not plain luckily?

... more later, perhaps.

the last day, perhaps...

of a world with a White US President... and that's really really rewriting history for a number of reasons, about which a little later.
right now, my mind goes back to my student days in college, when as part of our major curriculum, we had to study the US constitution and one of the most difficult to engage topics at that stage was the Presidential elections... how the popular votes and the electoral college votes work to get someone elected or knocked out... remember the controversy over George Bush's second term in 2004?
anyhow, today the whole world is gazing at the US... it will be good to have a refreshing change... Obama, for one, has brought about a major change in the way the whole campaign has been conducted. many watchers have compared him to John Kennedy and the whiff of fresh air that the latter had brought about, in his brief term before his assassination.
Obama, unlike Kennedy, has fought it every inch, first against a formidable rival within his own party and now more against Bush rather than McCain since the Americans see a Republican re-election as nothing but continuation of the many international (Iraq, the foremost) and national (economy in shambles, which stole the show in the last few weeks) blunders that Bush has done on over the past eight years...
while he has these blunders on his favour, he has his colour against him... and that is not an easy thing to overcome, going by the fact that there are no past preceedents... the only reference that colour has had in the American context is negative, though with the coverage of the campaign, the Presidential debates and the polls which consistently has suggested Obama leading by no matter how slim a margin, it is by now clear that he has relaid the length that colour can set for him, transgressed the erstwhile boundary and the marginalisation on the basis of colour... this itself is a big big leap... and if American media reports are to be taken word for word, it has clearly branded Obama as someone who has given the nation a new way of looking at life... not only has he based his campaign on the theme of change, he also has a definite agenda when he talks about the US economy, though it will mean less outsourcing to cheaper labour hubs like India or protectionist trade policies...
we just need to see whether Americans are sane enough to buy that worldview...

how much do children share with parents?

depends on how much they are allowed to share, period. the child, when born, is a tabula rasa... it is us, the parents, who give them a shape, a state of mind, set largely by the contours of allowable behaviour that we set for them. in setting this parameter, we are driven by our own experiences... and there are two ways of reacting to our own framework... the more common reaction is to redo what we faced, trangress the limits we faced and set more space for the child to operate in. this is the outcome of our own unmet wishes, our way of rebelling against the cramped space we may have got as children; the other is to ditto what we have gone through as children and is an ideal case scenario since most of us tend to have assessments on what we faced as children and what could have been better had our parents been a little different...
whichever route we take, there is bound to be rethinking, at least periodically and many a times, we set the rope tighter for our child(ren) or give them more space.
the child(ren), like sponges, take in and absorb from every single experience, every single encounter... and each moment a small line is created on her/his/their minds...
so every censure they face, every condemnation of their action that we do, leaves an impression on their minds and will affect their next line of action...