Of This and That

My sister-in-law is expecting a baby girl (they live in the UK) and everyone is very excited because this is the first baby in the in-laws family. A couple of days ago, the mother-in-law was discussing what would be an appropriate gift for us to give the baby, and unsurprisingly, she suggested gold, only to be scoffed at by Nike. She then suggested we could take out a policy in the baby’s name.

“For what?” asked Nike, sounding rather horrified at the suggestion of so much money being spent on a little baby (since baby = vague concept in his mind)

“It will come in useful when the baby grows up and gets married” replied the MIL

Now, if my mum or any of my aunts had said that, I’d have bitten their heads off. But I don’t share that kind of a relationship with my MIL (yet?). So I had to deal with this with tact. I began doubtfully “Marriage? Really...”

My MIL immediately interrupted “Well, okay, not for marriage. But atleast it will come in useful for her higher education”.

I think I may yet make a feminist of my mother-in-law.

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Yesterday, while talking to Dad over the phone, I asked him what Amma and Samee were doing. “They are eating munjulu” says he.

“Ack! Munjulu!” For most people, the best part of the summer is mangoes. For me, it is munjulu. In my head, munjulu are tied up with memories of countless languid, carefree childhood summers spent at my grandparents’ farm.

“Yes. Samee buys two dozen everyday and they polish off the entire two dozen between the two of them. Every day!” he replies, oblivious to the fact that I’m turning green with envy over the phone.

“Nanna, I’m coming to Vizag next weekend” I announce.

Dad is taken aback. “Don’t be silly. Nobody travels 700 kilometres to eat munjulu.”

For now, he has dissuaded me. But one weekend before the summer is over, I am going home, and I am going to gorge on munjulu till I am sick. Ha!

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I have a long commute to work – 90 minutes one way. Which means I spend 3 hours in a day sitting in a car. Sigh! While going to work, I can’t talk to anyone over the phone because all my friends and family would be busy getting ready for work. It’s not so bad on the way back home, because I either talk on the phone or take a nap. But the commute has become so much more bearable ever since I hit upon the solution of listening to audio books. I was sceptical about whether I would enjoy listening to books, but it has been a surprisingly positive experience: I close my eyes and focus on the recording, and then I can imagine what is happening in the book in even more vivid detail, I can pause the recording at interesting moments to reflect upon it.

Unfortunately, the first audiobook I had downloaded was Anne Bronte’s ‘Agnes Grey’. It is a slow, dull, dreary book; and the heroine is so full of overwhelming and needless self-pity, so bloody self-righteous, such a Ms. Goody Two Shoes, so judgemental while pretending not to judge, and generally so boring that I felt like whacking her hard many times through the book. It was rather a test of patience finishing ‘Agnes Grey’. But now I am listening to ‘Anna Karenina’ (been many years since I first read it) and so far, I’ve been enjoying it.

Of course, the voice of the person reading the book also adds to the overall experience. ‘Agnes Grey’ was read by four or five different women, and while I really enjoyed listening to some of them, some voices were just unsuited for the book, and made the listening tedious. For ‘Agnes Grey’, the voices I felt were best suited for the books were soft, young voices with a British accent. By that logic, Anna Karenina should ideally be read by someone with a Russian accent (!) but so far a young lady with an American accent and an expressive manner of reading has made the Anna Karenina experience very enjoyable.

Go to www.librivox.org to listen to and download audiobooks. It’s free and its legal. You can also volunteer to be a reader there. I’m thinking of volunteering too – it sounds interesting and fun!

Out with the Old, In with the New

So the BIG NEWS is that I have joined an NGO! I am working in the India office of a US based public charity which does work in the area of public health. I am handling a very interesting project, and I am extremely excited about the role and the work involved.

So we got back in the first week of February from our South East Asia trip, and it was time for me to get back to a full time job. I was very keen on joining an NGO; even in my previous job, I was working in the development sector, but now I wanted to work on the field. But I’m as materialistic as they come, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to take the pay cut involved (since I was earning millions in my previous job, NOT!). After much agonising, I decided to take the plunge and by mid-Feb I had started applying for NGO jobs.

Fortunately, things moved very quickly, and within two weeks I had a job offer. And it was a role I was very keen to work on. And so I said yes. The cherry on the cake was that the salary was much better that what I had been preparing myself for. Once that was final, we went off to Rajasthan for a holiday, came back to Bangalore, and after two lovely weeks in Bangalore, moved to Hyderabad in time for Ugadi and my joining date.

And that brings us to the bad news. The office is in Hyderabad. A week ago, we packed bag and baggage, and moved to Hyderabad. The bad news isn’t that I’m moving to Hyderabad, the bad news is that I have to leave Bangalore. I’ve lived for four years in Hyderabad and it’s a city I’m very familiar with and very comfortable in. A city I have very fond memories of. It means Nike and I are both closer to our families. It means I can now spend more time with some of my closest friends. In many ways, moving to Hyderabad is a good thing – and yet, I pine for Bangalore!

Without realising it, Bangalore has become home for me now. Vizag is, and always will, be home for me first and foremost. But Bangalore was home too. And I’m going to miss the lovely weather, the billions of wonderful weekend getaways, the quirky things to do in the city, the sense of laidbackness, my friends, my familiar haunts, that indefinable spirit of the city. I will, however, NOT miss the auto-wallahs. I;m also disappointed that I have had to move out before the Metro finally started - all that traffic and headache I withstood staunchly, thinking of a future in which I zip around in the Metro - and now I don't get the fruits of my labour. Gah!

Maybe if I was moving to a city I had never lived in before, like Delhi or Bombay, the excitement of living in a new city might have overshadowed the sorrow of leaving Bangalore. But there is no excitement at moving back to a familiar old place like Hyderabad, and so there is much sorrow at leaving Bangalore. Some of my happiest years have been in Bangalore – almost all my memories and associations of the city are incredibly happy ones – and it makes it so much harder to let go of a place that has given me so much love and joy.

People talk about how Bangalore has no ‘character’ when compared to older cities like Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras or Hyderabad. And I have to reluctantly agree with them. Yet, there is something in that city that slowly, slowly, sneaks upon you and makes you think ‘this is home’. It’s a very comfortable city, a city that graciously lets you be, a city that lets you become a part of it without you having to make any effort whatsoever to fit in. I’m convinced that once one gets used to living in Bangalore, it is going to be very difficult to move to any other major Indian city – life will get that much tougher.

Okay, now I’ve gone and made myself all sad and misty-eyed and nostalgic about Bangalore! I’m going to end this post here before I talk myself into buying tickets to head off to Bangalore this weekend. Ciao!

Catching Up

So I’ve been pretty busy in the last two odd months that I’ve not posted. First, there was the exam to prepare for.  Those two months I had to prepare before the exam – they were two of the most miserable months I’ve had in recent years. The first one month was spent in a state of panic – “Oh my god! There is so much to study! I’m never going to finish this syllabus”. This state of panic led to a general sense of misery, which led to eating a lot of ice cream to cheer myself up, which led to a cold, which led to headache. It was a vicious cycle, dear reader, a very vicious cycle.

After a month of this, I told myself firmly that nothing was worth my happiness and health. And so what did I do? I more or less gave up on the preparation. No one can say I do things in half-measure, eh? But this didn’t lead to happiness and health either. Because when I told family and friends that I wasn’t preparing seriously, they would go “Yeah, we know, that’s what you always say, but you’ll get through, we believe in you”. This touching, but unfortunately misplaced, belief in my academic abilities led to guilt. So then guilt – ice cream – cold – headache.....you get the drift, right?

Anyway, those two miserable months finally got over, though I didn’t think they ever would. The weather in Bangalore was fantastic, there was just that light nip in the air to indicate that winter was starting. And oh, it was festival time too, what with Vinakaya Chaturthi and Dussera and Deepavali. And through all this I wallowed in my misery. See, my life is actually very smooth and easy and problem free – its quite the perfect life actually – and so when I come across even the slightest little bump, I make a big deal out of it and behave as if the world is coming to an end.

So anyway, the exams finally, finally got over, and brought an end to my misery. I went home to Vizag for a week after that. This time, Nike came and stayed the whole week too – this was the first time he was spending so much time at home – he’d come only once before, and then for just 2-3 days – so I was excited that he would get a taste of life at my home.

I had a lovely time at home. During the day, while Nike worked, I went out and met friends. In the evenings I pottered around the house. And dinner time and later was family time. Every time I’m home, the days just fly by. I had so many plans for this week I was going to be home, but none of them got done, and I don’t remember what I did either, because the days just pleasantly merged into one another.

Well, we went to Hyderabad from Vizag, and from there commenced our Grand Trip. What Grand Trip, you ask? I wanted to do a whole post about it, dramatically announcing the Grand Trip. Instead, I end up doing it at the end of a rambling post about nothing! Huh! Anyway. So like I said, Nike and I are now on our Grand Trip. The GT is a two and a half month trip across South East Asia. In these two and a half months, we will be spending time in Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia.

It’s been 10 days since we set out, and right now, we are in the Philippines, where we will be till the end of the month before we head out to Thailand. We've been having a fantastic time so far. Maybe another day, I will do a post on how and why we are doing this. But for now, let me just say it’s our way of celebrating one wonderful year of being married (our first wedding anniversary is this Thursday!). 

Till then, bahala na!

Home!

This week I did (seeing as I am typing this post just a few hours before I am going to go back to Bangalore) a short trip home for my mother’s 50^th birthday. My visit was a complete surprise for her, and as I opened the door, she just stood agape at the threshold, completely taken by surprise. That was so worth it!

I took an overnight train to Hyderabad and then Pinni and I flew down to Vizag. We reached a day before her birthday and surprised her. The day of her birthday was spent cleaning up the house and making arrangements for the surprise dinner party we threw for her. It wasn’t much of a surprise considering how we were cleaning, not an activity you would otherwise catch Samee and me doing for love or for money. But it was a good party, with most close friends and family there, good food, lots of laughter.

I bought her a stove as a birthday gift. I can’t help but wince at the thought of buying her such a boring gift, especially because she doesn’t even like to cook, but that is all she wanted (which I could afford) so I gave in gracefully (ahem!) and bought it.

The day after the party, the whole gang headed out to the farmhouse. It was raining throughout, and the farm was a brilliant green, looking fresh and lovely. We then headed out for a trek to some nearby caves. By this time, the raining was coming down quite heavily, and we voted in favour of doing the trek even if it meant getting drenched. But the heavy rain became a torrential downpour, and even the drive became a pain because of the low visibility so we turned back to a grandmother’s house close by, where we hung around chatting and playing with their incredibly adorable one month old puppy.

After we reached home, we had Ash and Sim over for a while. Ash and I have been friends for over 15 years now. But then, that is part of the charm of growing up in a place like Vizag.....it’s a city where everyone knows everyone, and it’s difficult to not become friends when you end up running into each other everywhere; suddenly you stop and look back and you realise that even though you’ve left home long ago, and gone and made many more friends, some of your dearest friends remain the ones you’ve known all your life.

My friend the Scottish Muscleman (SM) came home too, and after we saw off Mahi and Buns at the bus stop, we went for a long drive by the beach. SM was in low spirits, and he passed them on to me too, so we ended up discussing topics which just depressed both of us. Once he dropped me home, Samee snapped at me while I bore her attitude with calm and patience (truly!), and then went and cribbed to Ma about it, who of course grabbed the opportunity to muse aloud at length on the ills of our generation.

But Sravan served me a huge scoop of Strawberry icecream, and as I type this post while my cousins and (currently) hateful⃰  sister play cards next to me, I feel awful about having to leave tomorrow. It’s like this EVERY SINGLE TIME I come home. I don’t have it in me to leave the day I’m initially supposed to so I inevitably end up postponing my departure by a few days. This time though I decided to stay firm (also, there are no tickets available for the next one week :-p ).

So I’m off tomorrow, and I will see you on the other side of the journey soon. Have a good weekend!

⃰Whattodo! My sister and I have this love-hate relationship. As do most sisters. No?

Already, I feel so guilty about hating her in this post that I want to declare my undying love for her and give her my new pink shoes; though I actually wont of course.....they are PINK shoes!

Sigh! I should have just wished for a brother. Would have made everything a lot less complicated.