What is in a name?

He was at the age when digging one’s nose in the school grounds was not yet something to be ashamed of. Probably driven by the comfort level this accorded him, one of the boys picked up a frog from a pond, in the fond hope of adopting it as a pet. Pets, as my learning-to-debate daughter will tell you, can serve as great companions. Frogs have more sense than we credit them with, however, and made a swift escape that very night. But by then, he had acquired the name ‘Croaky’ and the name frogged him through college.

One may argue that his actions led folks to croak his name.

I have also seen parents play fiddle with their children’s futures by giving them unique names: Impressive names such as Lionel (changes to Looney) or Fourswarth (forsooth)

But to make a business of this: Maybe, I should just wait and watch to see the name being chosen for this child.

http://moms.popsugar.com/Mom-Lets-Strangers-Name-Her-Baby-5000-28286485?utm_campaign=com_digest&utm_source=com_digest_v4&utm_medium=featured_article

I quote:
Baby Ballot will create a list of baby names based on what’s trending and their sponsored advertisers, then post the final list of names online on March 18. Users worldwide will be able to choose one girl name and one boy name each from the list of names provided until March 22 when voting closes. The name with the most votes for each gender will be the name of Natasha’s future boy or girl.

I hope the collective wisdom of random jobless people on the internet will not lead this child astray.

Lightning in the Butterfly Grove

There is something immensely enjoyable about being around babies I tell you. You ask them the dumbest questions and they buckle down, crease their foreheads in deep thought and give you serious answers. 

“Where is your nose?”
“Where is the car?”
“What did Curious George do?”
“Did you throw the blocks outside?”

The infant son enjoys sitting on my lap and reading stories. There is one he particularly enjoys about an elephant playing hide and seek with his friends. You see, the pages are filled with illustrations of a baby elephant, a zebra, a giraffe and a crocodile. In that book, there is one whole page dedicated to a giraffe. When I get to this complex page, I ask the son “Where is the giraffe?” He sticks out his little index finger at the giraffe and I beam like Einstein’s mother. Pride pouring forth.

The sister watched me carefully as we did the ‘stick-index-finger-in-giraffe’ routine. There was another book that had pictures of animals in it.
“What does a lion do?” He roars impressively every time he sees a tiger or a lion.
“What does a dog do?” He barks (bo-bo) in response.
Just to prove that the man can think about tougher questions, I ask “What does a snake do?” He hisses like one.
WE high-fived, low-fived and fist-bumped in glee.

Finally convinced of his zoological knowledge, the sister took him to the zoo. Aunt and nephew made a great show of it. They packed snacks, milk etc and headed off. Midway through their visit, I got a frantic call from the sister. Apparently, they had stopped in front of the giraffes and she asked him where the giraffes were. The question seemed to excite him quite a bit. He clapped his hands in glee, jumped in excitement, smiled and pointed to a bunch of lions gamboling nearby.

All that effort into the little giraffe book – anyway….

Never one to brood, I decided that what the guy needs is real life exposure. So, we headed out to this almost magical eucalyptus grove that is filled with monarch butterflies during the Winter. While in the grove, we were watching the beautiful butterflies flit past, and I asked my little zoologist “How does a butterfly fly?”.

The fellow pulls on his thinking look, creases his forehead and whips out a model of Lightning McQueen and goes “whiz…whiz…whiz” and demonstrates the flying motion.

Image

One can only hope those butterflies don’t fly the way cars do.

I need a new set of questions.

The Driver’s Spirituality

Somehow my India stories never seem complete without a driver’s story thrown in. So here goes…

Our driver for the day was Shiva or Murugan. Let’s call him Shiva. Shiva was a nice guy. Young-ish. He had a smile on his face and a can-do attitude in his stride. He was told that his duty in the cosmos that day was to take our family to the airport after stopping at a temple enroute. He smiled and nodded. He did not seem like a spiritual person himself but seemed happy to come along.

I told you about how we travel haven’t I? (https://nourishncherish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/the-wedding-aboard-emirates-636-at-3-a-m/)  We had 3 large suitcases that needed to be hoisted atop the car and tied firmly with rope, or 3 large adults to be strapped and hoisted atop the car. Shiva chose the luggage to hoist on the car because he thought the people would be better company in the car. Well..I suppose everyone makes mistakes.

The family is generally genial and noisy and out-performing each other in the talking department, but this trip had it all stripped.

Now, imagine a broadway show where the cast introduction is bound to start and 2 major characters are missing because they were off visiting their uncle, who’d graciously offered to take them on a grand-tour of his new office parking lot. Backstage meanwhile, tempers run high…scripts are modified in the last minute to blend the introduction without the parking lot tourist characters, hoping against hope that they would make it in time for their real character scenes. Then, just a minute before the curtain goes up, the characters arrive and the whole cast shouts at them for being late. Not only that, tempers are running high because the script-writer has been ticked off for not being quick enough at redrafting the whole play without these characters, the orchestra is being told to cut out songs about these two characters and add extra ones about random characters instead and the percussionist had a few things to say to the drummer about this and all in all, melee reigned in the circus tent.

That was the scene back at the old home. The brother-in-law and sister-in-law went a-visiting somebody, got held up and came back bitingly late. Meanwhile, things were heating up to baking capacity nicely inside the home. An injudicious remark here and a callous remark there was enough to set some tempers going. The remaining were taken care of by the lack of electricity. Let’s just say that by the time the family piled into the car, the atmosphere was icy. Poor Shiva the driver watched the scene for a while and then decided that he couldn’t bear the quiet anymore and switched on a movie to keep his sanity.

It didn’t help that Shiva did not have rope on his person to tie the suitcases up and we had scrambled for rope at the last minute. The father-in-law kept kindly pointing out to him every 3 miles or so about the benefits of any driver keeping rope with him. Shiva might have been okay with the 3 minute reminders if it wasn’t interspersed with 2 minute reminders to ask somebody for directions. (I had my reservations on the driver-keeping-rope-handy theory – Shiva looked ready to hang himself, and readymade rope would not help matters, would they? )

All in all, he decided to trust to a greater power and switched on a movie about two elephants(one mad and the other not quite) and a bunch of lovers. The movie that Shiva had banked on to raise our spirits was doing its job at a snail’s pace. Jokes were eliciting a grunt every now and then, and the coldness in the car was melting. Once when I commented about how wonderful the songs were, Shiva said that they were the best part of the movie, since it was a tragic one and we’d all be pulling our tissues by the time the movie ended.

To everyone’s stupendous relief, the car rolled to a stop in front of the right temple, and the temple was open after all. Not only that, there was a huge elephant. Now call that uncanny. The temple elephant was decorated beautifully. In a moment, the family’s mood lightened. The children were awe-struck by the elephant and went in turns with their affectionate grand-father to touch him.

Image

A short visit inside the temple and the family was miraculously back to being the gregarious-guffawing-silly_jokes lot.

If anything were to convince Shiva about what God really meant to people’s hearts the question was amply answered for him that day. A turning point in his life. I mean look at the facts:

Input: Morose, quiet, brooding family
Output: g-g-sj lot

To make matters worse, when we piled back into the car and the movie came on again; it tried its best to get us to turn on the hosepipes, but nothing happened. We laughed at the misery in the movie and called the director a dumb fellow for whatever he was doing.

Shiva either thinks that we are a family to gains love and laughter by going to temples, or thinks of us as potential clients to some excellent mental health hospitals he has heard of.

The Wedding Aboard Emirates 636 at 3 a.m.

It all started the day we were leaving India. I had spent all day the previous day packing everything we owned into the large suitcases. There is something charming about weighing international baggage to see if a packet of sambar powder would fit in the first 13 times you do it.  After the 17th time this happened, I lost patience.

The previous day had morphed into the day we were leaving and I was still doing the pack-dance. I sighed a loud sigh. Loud enough for the considerate and well-intentioned husband to abandon all pretense at not-hearing. He was nominated to finish packing before he could flee the premises on a flimsy context. He did.

Our plans are always simple. For instance, if we have to go from home to the airport, our plan is:
1) Go to a temple that is an hour and a half away from the airport in a south easterly direction.
2) After the temple visit, go to a guesthouse that is an hour away in the eest westerly direction. Change.
3) Proceed to airport that is an hour away in a northern southerly direction.
See?

When plans are made, strategies are not far behind. Napolean could take a correspondence course from us. The able general may have moved his troops from France to Russia and back fighting some wars along the way, but I doubt he could have loaded the suitcases onto the top rack of a car, tied it with rope and loaded the troops into the car before transporting them to a temple enroute to an airport. It would have him stumped.

The large suitcases were all loaded and tied onto the car. The children were counted and loaded inside the car. I hollered to make sure the hand baggage was not tied on to the top and then the whole family piled in and we took off. I don’t know why this is, but the temple we were visiting insists on women wearing sarees and men wearing dhotis. The husband smartly tied his dhoti over his pants and deemed himself ready. The last time I’d tried to wear a saree on my salwar kameez, I was rapped on my knuckles and told that any pant-like garment was not allowed. So, I was relying on step 2 in our plan to change into something comfortable before the flight.

We stopped at the guest house to change. It was hot and the infant in my arms was having fun with my saree. He kept playing peek-a-boo in it. I was holding onto the garment quite gingerly. The husband thrust the hand carry suitcase in my infant-free arm and then bounded off indecently behind some banana chips that were being fried half a mile away.

I haven’t really talked to men of the desert, but I suppose they must feel a sense of relief when they see an oasis. My senses were similar. Silk sarees are extremely hot and uncomfortable. I clutched the suitcase and opened it with longing. At first sight, I could not find any clothes for me or the daughter or the son. So I looked again. Nothing. I gasped and tried everything. Closing and re-opening to see if I’d missed the goods in a poor angle of light or something. Still nothing.

The husband walked in with a smile on his face. My look must have unnerved him for he came and asked me to eat chips and “chill”. Hot though I was, I asked him icily where our clothes were.
“There!” he said.
“Where?” I said.
“Just there – under the bed sheet!” he says. Why a man should pack a bed sheet in our hand-carry suitcase I still don’t know.
I pulled out a nightie. “You mean this?” I ask. Sheep could have detected the sarcasm, but the husband ignored it.
“Yes!”

flight
He was serious. That was the garment he had for me. A nightie. One of those barrel-like pillowcase shaped garments that are so popular as night wear in India. I gasped. Even by my lax standards of dressing, I could hardly travel abroad in a nightie. I gulped and swallowed a hundred times and asked about the children’s clothes. There was nothing in that department either. He had 4 vests of his, 2 pairs of his jeans, some towels and bedsheets in there. Also the camera. I could hardly wrap the daughter in a towel!

For those of you who wondered why the daughter and I were dressed like the Emirates Flight leaving at 3 a.m in the morning was to host a dear one’s wedding: that’s why.

Sigh!

The Orange Torn Balloon

I’ve always liked balloons and my children seem to like them too. Our local Traders Joe has balloons that they dole out to kids. I almost always pick one up for the kids and can then be seen chasing the balloon for at least a few feet in the parking lot because of one of the following goofy reasons:
(a) I thought the balloon was inside the car before closing the door, when it really wasn’t
(or)
(b)the daughter opened the other door through which it floated out
(or)
(c)some such bloomer.
In any case, I had no idea my liking balloons in general would permeate to the extent of my hobnobbing with torn balloons for several hours every other day.

Since I don’t mind exposing my many idiosyncrasies on this blog, I shall tell you what I was doing one evening.
I walked into a room full of serious minded people. You know folks frowning with deep lines of concentration etched on their faces. There was Ms. Dont-Disturb-Me, Mr. No-eye-contact , Mrs Dopey and Mr Smiley all minding their business of the day.

I took off my shoes and planted myself on the floor. I first sat on the mat, but then shifted my butt to the dirty carpet instead. The freshly laundered pant of mine shuddered a bit, but I ignored it.

I pulled an orange colored torn balloon fastened to a chair’s leg toward myself and heaved and ho-ed like no man has heaved a torn balloon before. Mrs Dopey gave me a wince and turned back to what she was doing, while Mr Smiley was a bit taken aback. At one point, the balloon even made funny noises against my skin. You know one of those sounds like a dinosaur playing with whistles (the kind that are handed out in children’s parties).

Yet I pulled on the torn balloon till I could tear it no more, and looked up hopefully at Ms Dont-Disturb-Me. She merely passed the buck to Mr No-eye-contact. I sat there feeling dumber and smaller by the minute. After all, which adult sits on the floor pulling strands of balloon from chair-ends in a room full of people engaged in activities not involving pulling balloons? Huh?

After what seemed like hours, but was in fact only several minutes, I was invited to lie down and the old ankle received a wonderful massage.

The physiotherapy session was coming to an end. Hopefully I can get to using the pretty blue torn balloon one day…blue balloons have always fascinated me. Even torn ones.Image

 

How do we …. ?

I read ‘The Life of Pi’ a few years ago and recommended the book to everyone I knew. So, one can imagine how I felt when I asked the husband to accompany me to watch the movie. Excited is the word. We drank tea, bought the nachos and the coke. All set for a good cry in other words. Before I proceed, I want to disclose that I am not the ideal audience for a tear-jerker rookie director. That is: if a director is testing to see whether he has appealed to the cry- factor enough, he would do really badly to use me as a test.I cried for Finding Nemo. That fish, Marlin, cried less at being reunited with his son Nemo, than I did.

So, when I say I was prepared for the movie, I mean the tea, nachos, coke and a small tissue packet with me for just this occasion. I was ready. What I did not know was that I am complete wuss! While I never imagined myself striding into a battlefield and bravely fighting the troops single-handedly, I did not think I would run from the theatre gasping for air in less than an hour. I lasted 45 minutes in the theatre.

Deep thinking afterward made me realise that it was the feeling of helplessness that crushed me. In the story, the protagonist is stuck on a boat with a vicious tiger for company. Not knowing when the tiger would pounce, not knowing whether sleep would overcome him, not being at peace for even a moment. The constant fear throbbing in the movie was too much for me. I had read the book, and yet the visual medium affected me very badly.

I thought of how people live in these circumstances. I thought of battered women whose life is about fear. Then, I read something that made my blood boil. That made me shout in outrage.
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/saffron-women-inside-the-rss-womens-wing-596730.html

How is one supposed to change the fabric of society if women who have the capacity to influence and empower other women advocate this? This is coming from RSS women’s wing and I quote (I am cringing even while pasting this):

The reporter quotes twenty-something Sharda from Jabalpur:

I turn to Sharda from Jabalpur. In her late twenties, Sharda has been a whole timer for five years. She tells me that apart from the shakhas, the Samiti also counsels women in their respective areas. There is a manual that is followed. When I ask her, “What advice would you give to a victim of wife beating?” she answers, “Don’t parents admonish their children for misbehaviour? Just as a child must adjust to his/her parents, so must a wife act keeping in mind her husband’s moods and must avoid irritating him. Only this can keep the family together.” Similarly, divorce is also a non option for women. She says, “Our task is to keep the family together, not break it. We tell the women to adjust. Sometimes, we try counsel the husband too.”

How does one stop this?

How do we empower girls to feel that this nonsense is unacceptable?
How do we educate the boys that equality leads to happiness?

How do we … ?

Talk into a skull?

I’d heard a few months ago that the nephew was going to take part in the "Young Entrepreneur’s Contest". Among other things, this meant his team of 4 could learn the basics of sourcing, inventory, estimation, accounting etc. As part of the contest, they were meant to set up a stall in Dubai and man the booth. I was agog with excitement and much to his embarrassment insisted on seeing photos of him dressed up in a suit and standing in his booth.

He refused point-blank and allowed a photograph of himself to be taken at home and sent to quieten his aunt. I goggled and sent him an SMS that he probably hid from his cool teenage friends about how grown-up he looks and all that. Another aunt of his tramped up to his booth to encourage the young entrepreneur. This aunt took ‘Aunt-pride’ to a new level. She lived locally and gathered all her friends and extended family and arrived early in order to make them buy stuff from her nephew’s stall. She kept pulling him out from the crowd and gushed about how proud she was of her little boy and how tall and dashing her young entrepeneur looked. He said the upshot of the whole thing was that, the busload of people who accompanied this aunt bought a lot of things they did not need and ‘helped business along’.

When asked about the whole experience, he looked visibly grateful that the young entrepreneur’s contest was over and behind them. I was excited to learn that they’d made decent profits, and learnt that it is ‘quite hard to bargain with Chinese traders’. He went on to say "We pretty much landed up buying more than we wanted from these people chitthi. They reverse bargained us!".

The conversation was going well till my sister came and shoved something hideous at my face. I recoiled in horror, yelped "GAAAA!"  and toppled out of my chair. Hardly the thing that folks fling in your face when one is admiring the young entrepreneur, what?

I told her so, and she said that the thing she had showed me was what she was forced to ‘buy’ from their son’s stall, since they wanted to reduce inventory and the Chinese trader who sold them that refused to take it back. I totally identified with the Chinese trader (although, why he procured it in the first place beats me)

This is what it is. Just in case the message is too subtle, it is a skull phone, and when the phone rings, the eye sockets glow red or blue or something.

skull1

Why on this earth, one would buy a phone that resembles a skull beats me. Oh! The horror of picking up the receiver when it rings.

skull2

I just let the nephew know what I thought of his skull phone when he told me that they had procured 4 pieces of it and 3 of them had been sold. I can’t imagine anybody willingly spending money on that kind of thing, but again, what do I know? I would have predicted 0 as the number for skull phones.

"Chitthi! Relax – we all have one in here you know?" he said sagely and pointed to his head.

Wise words from a profitable entrepreneur indeed, but I still made him put the phone away from sight.

Chitthi: Aunt

The Knee Scooter

I have always been a loving aunt and have prided myself in the fact that I love being around children. This time, the nephews and nieces seemed extra nice around me. At first, I deluded myself into believing that they were sympathetic towards me and my broken leg. But it turns out that while they love their aunt like an aunt, they loved my knee scooter better than any toy they’ve seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knee_scooter

scootk

I often muse on our purpose on this Earth. I wonder how we will know whether what we make of our lives is meaningful or not. The knee scooter has provided me with deep philosophical answers.

You see? This simple aid has been a boon of sorts. I broke my foot a few months ago and am still hobbling around on a boot(cast). I was advised the use of crutches to not put any weight at all on the foot. My resolve to bear the injury stoically crumbled faster than some dried up cookies on my counter-top. Three days into using the crutches, I found myself weeping at the hopelessness of it all. My arms hurt from the crutches and I could not run behind my toddler baby to get simple things done. That is when one of the children in my neighborhood came and told me about this knee scooter. A contraption that can be used to move around without putting any weight on the foot. The husband got me access to one quickly enough and I must say, I whooped with joy!

The knee scooter was amazing and helped me perform most of my duties as normally as possible. In fact, I even undertook a trip to India and Dubai using it. Many people thought me nuts. In fact, my own family thought I’d become a salted walnut. I realized that it is not easy to travel halfway across the globe with a toddler in tow when one’s foot is broken. Most people would have cancelled without a second thought. Well…I am not most people, and went anyway (with some ‘subtle’ encouragement from the husband and daughter of course).

knee 1

I tried to find the inventor of the knee scooter, but it is not easy to find. Nevertheless, the person (or team) who invented it, or even helped conceptualize it in one way or the other, has led a purposeful life. The beauty of it is that they may not even know it. It is not a very popular contraption. The medical team at the hospital I got treated in did not tell me about it. They gave me crutches. If doctors tell their patients about knee scooters, patients could try to obtain one on their own even if insurance doesn’t cover the cost for it.

While I was scooting my way in Dubai one day, a Doctor came up to me and introduced himself as an Emergency Physician. He’d noticed my boot and asked me what I was using to move along. When I told him all about the knee scooter, I was surprised to hear that he had not seen one like it. He vowed to make enquiries to make knee scooters available for patients in the Middle East. To me, that one conversation was well worth the trip.

That and the large number of people who saw me forge ahead with a knee scooter. I hope they will remember seeing something that alleviated a person’s distress with a broken foot. If my trip abroad can help even a few people with foot injuries, I think the trip was a success. An unconventional one maybe, but a successful one.

Santa Followed Us!

Here is wishing all of you a wonderful new year! For those of you who noticed the quiet blog, I have been offline on a trip to India and the Middle East for the past few weeks. The daughter was sick with worry about whether Santa would know where to find her, since she was to be away during Christmas. She left letters and cookies under the tree in our home in the US (‘Just in case’ she says!) But she need not have worried. We knew a manager who worked at one of Santa’s factories and arranged for Santa to drop his presents off for the children halfway across the globe in our hallway in Chennai.

You know? If I were Santa, I’d be quite flustered with all the last minute changes that he had to deal with last year.

1) The lists changed in the last minute. For a whole month, there was something on there, and then the day we were leaving for India, a new list appeared with a bunch of cookies. I had to physically ban the milk, since we were scheduled to be away for over 3 weeks. ("Huh? I Changed my mind" – the daughter shrugs her shoulders when quizzed about the change in list contents!) IF I were Santa, I would have stuck around and shrugged my shoulder too, but he didn’t. He was very accommodative of requests procuring items from the local markets at short notice.

2) The location changed. There was a large Christmas tree with an updated list and a post script saying, "Santa: We will be in Chennai for Christmas for this year." I mean. What?

A number of questions arose in my mind. First of all India is ahead of us in timing. So, technically, by the time he read the note and zipped past time-zones, he would already have been late, but he wasn’t!

7849331-silhouette-of-santa-and-a-reindeers-flying-in-moon

The daughter and her cousins spent all afternoon on 24th cutting up pieces of paper and coloring them to be Christmas tree and decorating them with stickers and bindis. Santa behaved admirably and left the gifts for them under make-shift paper trees that made for endless days of fun.

Happy New Year!

 

(Image from Google Search)

The Ugly Sweater Party

In an effort to snap out of all the melancholy that set has set in, in the past week with brutal incidents and heavy reading, I looked for news other than the shooting and the gruesome and the inconsiderate. What drew my eyes was sadly this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/doomsday-phobia-grows-china-december-21-2012-mayan-apocalypse_n_2292136.html?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

My nerves are weak I tell you. They can’t take the brunt anymore. 2012 was supposed to be the year. 12-12-12 was a huge anti-climax for those who fervently believed the Mayans and that Earth would vanish in a huge apocalypse. Now, these scary samaritans are going after 21st Dec as doomsday.

In the meanwhile, office parties and the holiday season is setting in like every other year. I love the holiday season in general. I usually get in the Yule-tide spirit and can be found ho-ho-ho-ing with my children in a fashion that has Santa drawing up his training programs on ‘Correct Laughing Techniques’. But does any of that make me cringe at laughing? Far from it. I draw inspiration from all the finger-pointing, keep a firm upper chin and continue smiling through the holidays.

I like themed parties in general, but this one went too far in my opinion. Everywhere I turned at work, there were these huge signs posted in purple.

JOIN US AT THE HOLIDAY PARTY

Event Dress Themes – Ugly Sweater!!!

Get in the holiday spirit by wearing an ugly sweater to work!

Bing something like this on me and my brain stores it somewhere for processing later on. I walked in to the office the other day, and there was a lady wearing a sweater I would positively recoil at if I saw it in a store. The sweater had large multi-coloured squares on it. Brown, yellow, mustard competed with pink, cream and red. Each box had a different pattern on it. You know the snowman and the mapel leaf and the snowflake and such.

ugly sweater

Naturally, the fertile mind that mine is put two and two together and I asked her, "Oh! Is today the Ugly Sweater Christmas party?"
"No! That is not for another 2 days." she said. Clearly, this was one of her better looking sweaters that I slandered.

She pouted a bit and then sat there not saying a thing. All this not talking was making me quite uncomfortable.

"Oh! You were wearing a very Christmas-y sweater, so, I thought today was the Wear-your-Christmas-sweater-to-work-party." I finished meekly. But there was no denying that she had read the same sign up and down the office too and my attempt to water down "Christmas sweater" for "Ugly sweater" was not much of a success.

I muttered "Nice bright sweater!" and beat the retreat before I had the acorns plucked from her sweater and thrown at me.

Sigh! Next time, please just say Christmas Party won’t you?!