With my toddler in India

My toddler is soon going to be 2 - "terrible two" I hear you say! Time has flown like a "rocket" - a word I discovered today she already knows whilst showing her a flash card with a picture of a rocket on it. She has grown up fast - learnt to speak even faster. Like every year, we spent the time between Christmas to well into middle of February in Indian amidst family. This long trip to back home once in a year is a much needed break that just helps to realign our axis and put us back into the zone. As I already mentioned in my previous article, this trip included holiday spent in the foothills of Govardhan parvat, and visits to Krishna janmabhoomi of Mathura and Vrindaban. Trip also included memorable experience to one of the seven wonders of the world - the Taj Mahal.

After this vacation lasting for 5 nights, we spent some family time with my in-laws in the wonderful town of Rishikesh. They showered love on their grand daughter to bits and spoilt her to extremes. However the good thing that happened before we went on the India trip was that she had already started speaking clearly all the words needed on a daily basis. Therefore, managing her had become much easier. Words like "apple", "ball", "water", "thirsty", "food", "sleepy time", "mumma come come", "poo-poo", "standing", "sitting", "slide" etc she could easily speak at 18 months. However the long India trip helped her to built a strong vocabulary in Hindi - so much so that we had the opposite problem by the time we reached London - she had forgotten pretty much everything in English and was able to form complete sentences in Hindi.

The reason she has been able to pick up learning two languages / numbers (1-10) / all basic shapes / all basic colours / alphabets (A-Z with a slight mess up around L to P) all by 21 months of age is because of her style of learning. She would repeat everything she hears multiple times. She would even repeat instructions given to her like "bring the ball" in whichever language before acting on them. Like a robot (as my mother calls her), she first repeats instructions given to her before executing them. And sometimes cleverly also declares her execution of those instructions with correctly amended verbs.

From Rishikesh we went to Delhi to attend a big fat Indian wedding. From dance to drama, from food to fanfare, from rituals to recitations, from creativity to lots of colours, from gorgeous to glittery, the wedding had everything. Toddlers have a way of having fun when they sense fun all around them. They only make fuss when they are bored. With a busy toddler who had lots of people attending her, she was having a blast. When toddlers are busy and active, they eat well, therefore sleep well, therefore play well, get tired and again sleep well - it's a cycle that is not vicious but desirable.

From Delhi we had a flight to catch to Guwahati to attend another wedding on the same day - now from my side of the family - son of my mother's sister. Whilst my toddler was not giving us any problems even after so much of travel, my husband's stomach left no stone unturned to trouble us. It was upset with all the rich food he had been eating. This meant that at the airport he was more attending toilets than us. And this resulted in the ultimate situation - we missed the flight!

It was the morning of 21st of January at Delhi airport that we were supposed to catch the Air India flight to Guwahati departing at 10.15 am. We had hardly slept the night before as we left the wedding past mid-night to reach out hotel for packing. We left for airport quite early, conscious enough that we did not want to miss the flight with a tired toddler. At 8.35am we took our boarding passes. However amidst attempting to feed her breakfast and my husband's frequent toilet trips, somehow we only reached the boarding gate at 10.00am. We had not had any breakfast ourselves, not even a drink. At the boarding gate, the duty manager - a lady whose appearance was rude and condescending to say the least - without even bothering to look at us stated that our flight had already departed. "How could the flight depart at 10 when it's supposed to depart at 10.15?", we asked collecting our breath. It obviously had not departed as we could see the aircraft and she was on the walkie-talkie asking the ground staff to locate our luggage and de-plane them. They had found one of the two suitcases and she was screaming at them for not being able to find the second one. We told her nicely - "Ma'am we realise that we are 5 mins late. Please understand that we have not eaten anything since morning and did not delay willingly. The time you are spending in de-planing our bags, you could instead use that to board us into the aircraft." Obviously she did not listen to us and had made up her mind. She left the counter to physically go down herself and search for our second bag. After spending a few minutes talking to other staff, who were realised were all junior to her and therefore had no powers to over-rule her decision, we were left with no option but to come out of security and reach the airline's baggage check in counter again. The idea was to get a new ticket for a later flight issued.

However God and luck was on our side that day. Our mistake was honest and genuine. So when close to Air India's counter I decided to first go and talk to the Air India supervisor in an attempt to see if anything could be done. The frequency of flights to Guwahati from Delhi is very limited, and the wedding we were due to attend in Guwahati would be missed if we boarded any later flight. Due to that lady's insistence to de-plane our luggage, that aircraft had missed their 10.15 take off slot. Additionally, due to the dry run happening for Republic day celebrations on 26th Jan, the run way had been temporarily shut down until 12. I gently told the supervisor - "Sir, we are travelling with a toddler, have had nothing to eat since morning. The aircraft we were due to fly in has still not taken off. Your duty manager at the gate was rude and unfair to us. I hope you can help us by sending us back on the same aircraft". He spoke to her in front of us and asked her to take us back into the same aircraft. He issued us with new boarding passes and asked us to rush back to the same gate. By this time the dry run had finished and the flight was ready to take off. It finally took off at 11.30 am - with us of course - as was supposed to be the case!

It was a short visit to Guwahati but one which left imprints for years to come. The amount of love you can sometimes feel from relatives you have not met in a while make you realise that although we have now more ways to stay connected, we are actually less connected than before!

We returned to United Kingdom with a toddler who was not only spoilt for choices but also one who was used to staying busy with all the attention showered on her. This plus the cold weather of February made the settling back into routined life quite fun and challenging!

The Taj Mahal - An Ode to Magnificence

If one word can describe the Taj Mahal, that would be Magnificent.

Like every eager traveller visiting Taj, one of the seven wonders of the world, was a prized opportunity, something that I was looking forward to very excitedly. Although unlike other fellow travellers who would probably wake up early in the morning to catch a glimpse of the Taj in the early morning orange sunlight, I chose to visit the Taj like an ordinary tourist on an ordinary day (30/12/15) at an ordinary time (1pm).

The visit to the Taj was part of a 5 day tour of the neighbouring areas devoured with Krishna bhakti - Vrindaban, Mathura, Gokul, Nand Gaon, Barsana and Govardhan. We stayed at Shree Radhe Vasundhara Resort in Govardhan. It's a collection of luxury cottages all beautifully designed located at the foothills of Govardhan parvat - slightly outside though from the main towns of Vrindaban and Mathura. The stay was amazing and few places like Nidhi van in Vrindaban and Tatiya Sthan in Mathura were dipping in Radhe Krishna bhakti.

Amidst this backdrop, the visit to Taj felt like a pilgrimage to a temple which epitomises love and separation in the modern world - a story that resonates closely with the life with Krishna and Radha.

From the car park to the Taj entrance, the journey was made on the back of a camel - already an excitement for my 19 month old who had only seen camels in books thus far. Right at the car park, we hired a photographer and a tour guide - both to stay with us for the entire part of the journey clicking memorable pictures and imparting valuable knowledge about its history.

As I queued to enter the Royal Gate, it was that feeling of impatience which made it impossible to wait anymore to see how the first glimpse of Taj would feel. I started conjuring up permutations and combinations of all possible feelings concluding the analysis with two outcomes - it will either be a total wow coupled with a sudden gush of immense love for my life partner or a complete disaster concluding it as being overrated by the worldly people.

The moment came when I was standing facing the Taj - my mind just went blank. All that I had conjured up had disappeared and the only word that seemed to have remained in my vocabulary was Magnificient. I stood there spell bound - in the slight misty afternoon, the white Taj stood brilliantly unfazed by the 80 thousand people that visited it that day.

Although we did enter the Taj like any ordinary tourist, we did not exit it alike. Inside the Taj whilst we were admiring it's beauty from the sides (yet to have entered the actual tomb), we met a few people responsible for Taj's security. Their work mainly starts when all tourists are gone and the premises have been vacated. Therefore they had some time to get into a chat with us.
 
Chats with these security personnel ranged a wide variety of topics - politics, corruption, history, religion etc. We all just simply enjoyed the conversations and kept it going - whilst obviously our tour guide kept nudging us to go. The memories of these conversations will stay with us for a long time to come.

The visit to the insides of the Tomb actually makes you appreciate the magnificence of the Taj. The stones embellished are real gem stones. The marble used is a special Sungmarmar - white transparent marble which is quite expensive and rarely available these days. On throwing light at them, the light passes through these stones and lit them up. To see a building as huge as Taj built using a stone as expensive as that leaves you agasht at the amount of wealth India had at some point. The Mughal invasions and later on the British rule left India weak and poor.

Taj reminds you of the grand Indian history. It is a celebration of the magnificient country India was - the golden bird as one poet rightly called it.

Cockroach Theory - by Sundar Pichai

I normally don't post something written / spoken by somebody else in my blog. But just read the below on Facebook and it struck an immediate chord. Cannot be better said than this -

Cockroach Theory 
A beautiful speech by Sundar Pichai - an IIT-MIT Alumnus :
The cockroach theory for self development

At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew from somewhere and sat on a lady.

She started screaming out of fear.

With a panic stricken face and trembling voice, she started jumping, with both her hands desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach.

Her reaction was contagious, as everyone in her group also got panicky.

The lady finally managed to push the cockroach away but ...it landed on another lady in the group.

Now, it was the turn of the other lady in the group to continue the drama.

The waiter rushed forward to their rescue.

In the relay of throwing, the cockroach next fell upon the waiter.

The waiter stood firm, composed himself and observed the behavior of the cockroach on his shirt.

When he was confident enough, he grabbed it with his fingers and threw it out of the restaurant.

Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, the antenna of my mind picked up a few thoughts and started wondering, was the cockroach responsible for their histrionic behavior?

If so, then why was the waiter not disturbed?

He handled it near to perfection, without any chaos.

It is not the cockroach, but the inability of those people to handle the disturbance caused by the cockroach, that disturbed the ladies.

I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it's my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me.

It's not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it's my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story:

I understood, I should not react in life.
I should always respond.

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of.

A beautiful way to understand............LIFE.

Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life..

He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right..!!

A stranger to my toddler

This post is dedicated to a friend of mine who inspired me to write again, to write a lot, to write to express myself, to write because at least he cares to read!

It has been a while (two years he reminds me) that we had not met. However even though we were meeting after such a long time, it did not feel even a bit formal. With a cranky 18 month old (who did not have her afternoon nap), I was all preoccupied trying to satisfy her high demands for attention. To make matters worse, she did not look immediately comfortable with him being around – stranger anxiety. She was seeing him for the first time, occupying her personal space – her home. He figured out the trick to make her comfortable around him is to ignore her, not give her the attention which upon getting she reacts with a bad “dry cry” as his girlfriend remarked! He instead played beautiful synthesiser for her without looking directly into her eyes. She would stare at him from the corner of her eyes admiring him for the beautiful music, but then he had not done enough yet for her to openly give a nod of acceptance.

We spoke about a gamut of things. It is so amazing to see that even after such a long time we could just talk about a wide range of things with great élan – be it the IS, the somehow-managing-to-come-together Greek economy, of course my writing which he has become a fan of, babies and work-life balance, their career and plans ahead, dreams and aspirations and the upcoming holiday plans. Really so much packed into the less than a couple of hours they stayed at our place along with a not-so-happy toddler around. Just shows how much we are in sync with each other to be able to fit in that much content.

People often say that birds of the same feather flock together. However, here is an example where we belong to completely different cultures arising out of completely different geographies – in every sense – appearance, food, language, faith. What binds us is the fact that we are just human beings who are good natured with strong values. We are mentally on the same platform which means that we could be done with talking about topics within minutes. I don’t get this level of comfort even when talking to many people of my own herd. There is so much of talk about radicalism in this world where we are reaching out to kill others because they don't belong to our herd, but then the question is how far does it have to go before it ends. For now the criteria is religion, tomorrow the criteria will be attire, language, food, dreams, everything. Are we only going to stop when we all become robots - exact replicas of each other with no brains to have any divergence of thoughts. At that stage the only way to end ourselves will be to press the self-destruct button on our robotic motherboards. 

I don't want to live behind such a world for my daughter to grow up into. I want her to feel even more comfortable than me mixing with people from different backgrounds, different lineages. The only way to a successful livelihood is by having the openness in your heart and mind and appreciation for everybody. We may have our favourites, but that should purely be based on compatibility of thoughts - not on the basis of parameters that humans have created, including religion. 

By the end of the almost two hours, the friend was no more a strange to my daughter - but somebody she was comfortable to share her toys with. I am sure she would love to meet him the next time he shows up, including being keen to show him her keyboard skills!

Life Moves On for Zara

I know Zara since childhood. She has been a coy girl blushing out at every small remark about anything related to her. She is a nice person who is completely in love with human kind in general, and she can never harm anybody. The motto of her life has been to bring smiles to as many faces as possible. She loves the small little things in life, she loves playing around with her younger brother, and she enjoys playing the doll game with me. We have grown up together, so I know her each emotion, her each unspoken gesture so well by now. If she ever falls in love with a guy, I am sure she does not need to tell me that, I will be able to read her.

And thats what I have recently come to know. Looking at her facial expressions when I spotted her with a guy last evening, I was certain that she was madly in love with him. He seemed to be one of those decent guys, those take-home-to-mumma kind of guy. So I felt quite happy for her. But then all that seems to be glittering is not gold. There are complications in human emotions. She is totally in love with the guy, but doesn't seeem to be too comfortable telling him how she feels about him.There is something that stops her from being that intimate and comfortable with him. She told me all these after a lot of pestering yesterday late in the night when she was in my house for the usual after-dinner talks that we share! She tried to conceal it as much as she could but then I finally had my way. There is something we share between us that compels us not to lie to each other. We know each other's secrets. Secrets we would never dare telling the world (including our parents) but to only each other. 

She told me everything about her feeling for this guy. Obviously I knew about her meeting him in college a couple of years back and of the general conversations she had with him. But I did not anticipate for it to have gone this far. All those chit-chats always just gave me a feeling that they are classmates and that he is a decent boy who just loves talking. Lot of girls in the class seemed to have a liking for him. He was academically very bright and enjoyed spending time talking to girls during breaks between classes. I was shocked to see my dear friend to have fallen for him so badly - just through those small break time conversations! But the fact that she took two long years to decide if it was actually love or just infatuation, meant that I needed to consider the situation quite seriously.

She opened up to me to reveal that those break time conversations had also at times gone to the extent of going for movies on days when the teachers did not turn up or classes were sparse. Although they would go for such movies as a gang which would include other girls and Zara being one of them. She would spend most of her time watching him over the shoulder of the girl sitting next to him instead of the movie. The joy on his face, the smiles and laughter coming from him would make her enjoy the movie. She also revealed how once on way back from the movies to the college, they struggled to find a cab. They all had to walk down and she walked behind him with another girl. They were all chit-chatting, but her thoughts were fixated on moving between checking out the sides of his eyes and his well-shaped buts.

As Zara was telling me each  and every detail of his love for him - all I could see was how her infatuation towards him was gradually turning into an obsession. She was getting pulled into him like a magnet, whilst I felt that probably he had no idea about all this. Yesterday when for the first time I saw them together outside an ice-cream parlour, what I missed out on seeing was that the other girls who would also hang out together with the two of them were inside the parlour getting their ice-creams. Zara did not want one and the guy was the first one to get his so they both were outside waiting for the others to join. However, whilst the guy was busy attacking his ice-cream, I noticed Zara's eyes staring his lips and his tongue coming out to lick the cream. Their was a faint smile on her face, a happiness coming from standing so close to him. This whole setting of the two of them together, smile on Zara's face, him enjoying the ice-cream, painted a picture that they were a couple - although it was in reality far from that. I confronted Zara with the direct question of whether she had spoken to him about how she felt about him. As anticipated Zara replied in the negative.

Obviously as a friend I want to help Zara, so I could not possibly tell her how stupid she has turned herself into. I had a plan instead - a plan to help Zara confess her one sided love to him. A plan for him to hopefully fall in love with her too. This story will be continued here... as Zara's life moves on...

Journey of being a working mother

We recently went on a trip to Blackpool. This has to be one of the most memorable trips I have had so far. The first proper trip on our own with our new born who is soon going to be all of 15 months. Really time has flown so quickly that I have lost track of what all it entailed. The last clear memories are of the last day at work with the cake, the speeches and the card with lots of scribbles wishing good luck. And the uneasy feeling of what is there to come. After I said good bye to work to embark on a new journey of motherhood - life has been on a roller coaster ride, memories of which are now gradually fading already. Just within a week of bidding adieu to work, I delivered a little princess.

As seamless and joyful were the 9 months of pregnancy, my delivery was equally straightforward. Obviously at that time it did feel like the most arduous experience, one I vouched I will never tread on again. But with the passage of time and having heard of other more painful stories, my discomfort seemed minimalistic. My life was getting filled up with the joyous feeling of being a mother. The first three months are the toughest in terms of raising a child. From being someone who learnt everything from how to hold a baby to changing nappies in an antenatal class, I was gradually becoming a mother - one who knows how to breast feed, is able to understand and differentiate between the various baby cries, make baby burp and wee and poo, sooth her to sleep etc. It is hard work, but unlike corporate hard work where rewards are quantified at the end of the year, nature of reward here is quite different - instantaneous gratification felt at an emotional level.

The 6 months following the most difficult first 3 months were very easy - I went back to India to my parents with my new born and had the comforts and support of family back home. These 6 months flew as if in 6 hours - one of the best periods of my life. My mother was taking care of my daughter and I was taking care of the rest - which included getting 2 hours of body massage every day, getting involved and sorting out any teething issues in my father's business, renovating the house to prepare for my brother's wedding and finally actually attending the Indian wedding. It had everything I could have wished for. Before coming back to London, we decided to go for a short trip to the south of India, covering Chennai, Vellore and Pondicherry. Although exciting in its own way, it was a good lesson on how to take care of a baby on our own. This was the first time we were on our own with our 9 month old daughter and don't think we did a very good job. She fell sick, she became very weak as we did not feed her enough and was taking strong antibiotics. So much so that when my mother saw my daughter only for a night before leaving India to come to London, she got too worried about how frail she had become. In a night, whatever she could, she did to bring my daughter back to normal - this included giving her something to eat every hour or so. We just had not done a good job with regards to her food.

Coming back to London with a 9 month old with the experience and lesson learnt from the Chennai trip meant that we were better prepared and did not take anything for granted. After some initial hiccups I managed to find an amazing child minder who helped us out with taking her regular care. We started very gradually, a couple of hours initially going up to a full day in her 11th month. Once settled in with her, I started exploring joining back to work. I did not want any sudden changes in lifestyle - either for my daughter or for myself. Therefore getting back to work was also in a phased manner including moving my daughter away from breastfeeding to bottle feeding. I wanted to make sure that she was more independent and that I could trust somebody to take care of her when I am at work.

Life since then has been quite routined. She goes to the childminder Mondays to Thursdays and I take Fridays off (a clever tactic I used to not use up all my maternity leaves in one go, but spread them over throughout the year by taking a day off in the week and spending with the little one). Going back to work has been a brilliant feeling after a long hiatus. New and increased challenges have kept me busy so far. I have a busy day at work and busy evenings at home with the little one. I do sometimes miss not having the me-time, but then when I see the smile on her face for no reason or an un-demanded hug from her, all such wants disappear and I feel like spending each and every moment of my conscious self with her.