The charade goes on...

Snapshots of Mimi

2012-01-24T11:09:00.000+08:00

Mimi came out of hospital with jaundice. We ended up having to admit her for a night of phototherapy in hospital and I spent the night on a pull-out couch. I amazed myself being able to do this with the c-section and all. That's motherhood I guess.

Not sure if it's because of the jaundice but Mimi has been an angel baby so far. Feeding peacefully and sleeping easily for hours. I had to wake her up to feed her because the doctors told me I needed to feed her more often to get the jaundice out of her system. It gave me space to rest and recover. However, of late, she has a colicky period of a few hours once a day, generally evening or night. Still much much better than Benji though. Fingers crossed.

Benji's reaction to Mimi was... interesting. The first time he saw her in her bassinet, he was excited. Then she started wailing and he got distressed. After that he was weirded out by her. He tends to be fond of babies but I think she was too alien looking for him. Also every time he saw me carrying her he would yell. It seemed like he was jealous but I couldn't fathom why because he had enough people to pay attention to him. But after the first couple of days he seems to be warming to her. He tend to make grabs for her or try to poke parts of her face so we have to watch him carefully. But now he's learning to be gentler with her and to not get upset when she cries.

Groundhog Day - Mimi's birth story

2012-01-19T20:58:00.001+08:00

[Alternative title: There is no easy way to give birth]

It all began, like with Benji, with some "bloody show", a sign that labour is starting because the mucus plug is coming off. Since with Benji it took a good three or four days for this to result in labour, I was determined not to rush to the hospital this time where I knew they would admit me for observation pointlessly. However, on second thoughts, I figured that since the baby was in breech position, I'd better get myself checked out and besides I had a feeling something was happening.

At 37 weeks, I had not yet decided whether I was going to deliver in a private or public hospital. At 36 weeks, I had pretty much decided on private only to go up to the maternity ward for some foetal monitoring procedure and emerge none too impressed with the less than spacious ward and the noise from the visitors allowed in throughout the day. In addition, there was the private hospital's breastfeeding policy which I knew to be not as encouraging as the public one ironically.

I finally resolved to go private if I could carry Schmoonbee up to the fixed c-section date at 39 weeks but if there was any sign of needing an emergency c-section, I would go public because the cost of an unscheduled procedure would balloon way over a budget I was comfortable with.

While I was pondering these thoughts over the weekend, I was faced with the bloody show on Monday. V was convinced to take a half day off and we trundled down to the public hospital with little fanfare via MTR and minibus.

Anyway, as expected, when I buzzed the labour ward, they insisted on admitting me. A doctor came to do a cervical exam and remembering my awful experience last time, I asked her outright if it was necessary. She got all huffy and said that I had the right to refuse, in a voice that clearly indicated that it would be held against me if I did. She said something on the lines of: "We are only trying to help you and if you don't want our help then why come?" as if cervical exams are the be all and end all of the process of birthing. In contrast was the midwife who coaxed me into it, saying it wouldn't hurt and in the end, it didn't.

That ordeal over, it was determined I was not in labour yet but should be admitted anyway - that being hospital procedure - so I was taken up to the ward. There I was back in familiar surroundings whiling away the hours with the difference from last time being that the nurse told me to let them know as soon as I felt contractions so they could arrange a c-section if need be.

The entire day I felt a tightening sensation that got stronger and somewhat regular but couldn't be called contractions yet. Just like with Benji, I was determined to tell them I wanted to go home the next day. The baby had other plans, however.

At around 3 am, I woke up to pee and when I got back into bed felt a strange pain in my stomach which I attributed to gas, opting to ignore it while plotting my escape from the hospital the next day. Fifteen minutes later, my water broke. A glance at the clock revealed it was 3.50 am, exactly the time Benji had arrived in 2010.

I called a nurse and after ascertaining that I had indeed 'broken membranes', they called a doctor. I reminded them that I had Group B Strep and needed to be started on antibiotics as soon as possible. The doctor took a while to arrive and I was happy that it wasn't the same one from the morning but a very gentle one with great bedside manner. She did another cervical exam and determined I was about one finger dilated and fixed me up with a butterfly needle in my vein. It took a whole hour before they got the antibiotic into me at 5 am. In between, they asked me when I had last eaten - they need a six hour window to do a c-sec ideally.

At some point, the anaesthetologist came and introduced herself (the first and only doctor in the entire system to introduce herself by name) and asked me some questions about my medical history. They gave me some material to read about the kinds of anaesthesia and I had to sign a couple of consent forms.

As I lay about waiting for the OT to be arranged, I started emailing people - my boss, my sister, my friends and finally V, alerting them that it was all happening. V was totally surprised though I wasn't. I had suspected that something was happening and it was unlikely to make it to 39 weeks though I had been hoping for 38.

V arrived and called me though he wasn't allowed into the ward. At 7.30 am, they transferred me to another bed and wheeled me down to the OT. We encountered V en route and he was allowed to come down to the OT with me but had to wait outside. I was relieved when a senior looking doctor took charge of things.

After hooking me up to various IVs (if I remember correctly) and strapping down one arm, the first step was the spinal block. I had some problems curving ideally for them while lying on my side with my big belly and the midwife literally hugged me to her. I flinched when the first injection to numb the area went in but was better for the second.

I felt myself going numb very quickly and this was the most disorienting part. I found myself getting kind of freaked out that that I could not move my legs. I felt like one leg was bent at the knee, though logically it wasn't, and I kept trying to get it to move. To stave off panic, I tried to breathe deeply. I remembered something GB had written in her birth story - "Breathe for your baby" - and I did that.

They had raised a curtain between me and my belly and I could just about feel some pulling and tugging. Literally, 10 minutes after the spinal block took effect I heard a wail and my baby was out. They whisked her away to another room and like with Benji, I followed the sound of her with my eyes. I realised I was crying when the midwife wiped the tears out of my eyes.

Then began another set of pulling and tugging which I assume was the placenta being delivered and me being sutured up. I began to feel nauseous and had a bit of gagging. The anaesthetologist felt this was due to the manipulation around my belly and not the effect of the anaesthetic.

A nurse then brought Mimi all bundled up to me and I kissed her and then she was taken away. All of an hour later, I was out of the OT and in recovery. I felt my nose and eyes itching and began to wonder if I had picked up some superbug in the OT. Later, I would be told itching is a side effect of the anaesthetic. They kept doing cold tests to see if the spinal was subsiding.

Half an hour later, I waved to an anxious looking V in the corridor and he came over and kissed me and then I was taken up to the ward. The whole morning I was alert and excited. The nurses urged me to keep massaging my uterus to help it contract and I also focused on getting my legs to move. V visited me at noon and I chattered non-stop. The nurse actually asked me at one point whether I wasn't feeling sleepy.

Then the fun started. I wanted to pee but didn't want to use a bedpan. Like enemas, I have a thing against bedpans. They told me I needed to try eat something first and check if I felt like vomiting. Since I hadn't felt any nausea, I was confident I'd pass the test. Alas, a mere cracker reduced me to puking. So I was confined to the bed for longer. In the end, they gave me something to help with the pukeyness and at 8 pm, I decided to attempt getting off the bed. A nurse came with a wheelchair to take me to the loo.

That's when the pain of the huge cut in my stomach kicked in. Peeing was agony and the worst was having initiated the process of getting up, I was told I was now free to hobble to the loo on my ownsome. Which unfortunately turned out to be something I needed to do every couple of hours. As the morphine I had been given during the surgery wore off, the pain got worse. It seared and burned when I moved and the Panadol they gave me didn't seem to be working.

The next couple of days were pretty bad in terms of pain.Mimi was in a special care unit because of a kidney issue diagnosed when she was in utero and also because they were unsure they had got the antibiotic for Strep B to me in time. I began to wonder how I was going to hold and breastfeed her. I began to understand what people were talking about when they said that c-sec recoveries are harder than natural birth.

When I compare the two, I'm not sure which one I'd choose. Natural birth was 12 hours or so of horrendous pain. The c-sec was painful for a couple of days after but only when I moved. Definitely, the c-section operation itself was a breeze but the recovery was longer, even given my episistiomy last time. And I didn't really like the sensation of being paralyzed waist-down. So even natural with an epidural might not be a good choice for me.

Luckily, I don't ever have to make that choice again.

Early bird

2012-01-11T13:20:00.001+08:00

After all the discussion, Schmoonbee, now to be called Mimi, decided to make the decision for her indecisive mom and arrived yesterday. My water broke so had to have an emergency c-sec. The c-sec was a breeze but the recovery is a bitch! More on that later. Mimi arrived at 37 weeks 2 days and so is considered full term. At 3.96 kg she weighs a bit more than Benji when he arrived at 39 weeks 2 days. Because she was diagnosed with a dilated kidney in the womb, and also they're not sure they got the strep b medication to me in time, she's under observation in a special care ward. She seems to be thriving and all the results look positive.Can't say the same for me. I'm so glad formula exists because breast feeding right now would break me. Guess there's no easy way to give birth, sob!

Schmoonbee is sitting tight

2012-01-06T12:00:00.002+08:00

I had been feeling that something was a little differentwith my bump this pregnancy and last week I realised why. An ultrasound hasconfirmed that Schmoonbee is sitting on her ass instead of turning upside downas she is supposed in order to come out head first. Personally, I think this isa very sensible approach – I have never quite understood why babies wouldvolunteer to float about upside down for a good three weeks before they emergeinto the world but from a mum’s perspective, of course, thank God they dobecause their big heads take the most effort to push out.

I must confess that this pregnancy I have been overallfeeling quite tired, blah and not very fit and around a month ago, confessed toV that I was pretty sure I had no energy to push Schmoonbee out at all so she would just have to stay in there like an appendage of my body. I hadbeen secretly hoping for a c-section despite knowing that the natural way isbest and all.

Anyway, with Schmoonbee in what is known as breech position-her head is between my ribs and what I think is her hand is kind of around my waist; when shemoves it, I sometimes hold her hand which is very cool – I have the option ofan elective c-section. My sister is convinced that I sent a message toSchmoonbee to not turn, which is nonsense because everyone knows that babies doexactly as they please and noone can order them around with any success.

Of course, having been handed what I was hoping for allalong, I have to second-guess and doubt. The other option offered to me is aprocedure called External Cephalic Version (ECV) where a qualified doctormanually turns the baby from the outside all the while closely monitoring themum and baby. The thing is that this is to be performed at 37 weeks and thereis some risk of it ending up in a c-section anyway because of the baby gettingdistressed, water breaking etc. The hope, of course, is that once baby turnsone can proceed normally with a vaginal birth but what if it doesn’t? I reallydon’t want Schmoonbee out next week.

Whereas an elective c-section, which I know is a majorsurgery etc. (though doesn’t seem quite so major with half the women I knowhaving had one and varying reports on how awful the recovery is), can be scheduledat 39 weeks, giving my baby more time to develop, especially her lungs.

Right now I’m kind of taking the cop-out route and leaningtowards the c-sec. So mums who had one, how was the recovery and if youbreastfed after, how did you go about that? Comment or email me your gruesomestories at thebluebride@gmail.com.

2012-01-05T04:00:00.000+08:00

What these two books have in common is that they are bothabout ghosts and have a storyline that seems cringe-worthy. Twenties Girl is abouta woman in a dead-end job and emotional rut who is haunted by the ghost of her grand-aunt.The Lovely Bones is about a murdered girl watching her family and the man whomurdered her from heaven. Thanks to the amazing talent of the authors, theyactually work.

That’s where the similarity ends though. I won’t sayanything about Twenties Girl except to those Kinsella fans who read the blurb,rolled your eyes and decided to give it a miss, read it. It’s fun and it works.

I sobbed through The Lovely Bones over the Christmasweekend. V told me I shouldn’t be reading stuff that makes me cry; it’s bad forthe baby. I sniffled in response.

Because I feel things so keenly, I avoid picking books andmovies that I know will make me cry. But this one promised smiles through tearsand for once, I decided to take that chance. I’m glad I did. It’s a poignantread but not morose.

I am convinced now more than ever that the death of a childis the worst thing that can happen to a parent. There is no worse fate. How andwhy do you go on in the face of it?

The book is about the effect of a murder on the entirefamily. It is about growing up in the aftermath of tragedy, ironically toldthrough the eyes of a girl who never got to grow up. Because of the murder,there’s an element of suspense. Although the identity of the murderer is knownto the reader right from the start, the suspense lies partly in whether the livingcharacters in the book will figure it out. But more than the suspense relatedto the murder is the suspense about the family and those affected by the murder– how will they live on? What shape will their lives take?

Christmas List – cont.

2011-12-29T18:01:00.001+08:00

Ugg boots: I have always had a soft corner for these. I knowthey are stumpy and ridiculous-looking. But that is the point. And right now Iam stumpy and ridiculous-looking. So what better time to complete the look?

It turns out, however, that I am too cheap to actually buy the real thing, even on discount. Besides, I don't want to spend the earth on a pair of ugly, if comfortable, shoes that I can only use casually (or to work when pregnant because pregnancy excuses everything). So I decided to opt for the fake option, of which there are many around.

Finally, on New Year's Eve, I decided I had had enough to looking ridiculous in ballet flats - my hips and belly are enormous and my jeans - one of two pairs of trousers that fit me - taper off at the bottom (yes, I bought the cheapest maternity jeans I could find) making me look really weird. So, I decided to buy the fake Uggs available in the shops in the mall downstairs. (And I mean literally downstairs... my apartment sits atop a small mall which sits atop an MTR station).

Unfortunately, the lazy ass in one of the shops had decided to close that day. Never mind, I didn't like that guy anyway. My decision made for me, I headed to shop no. 2 for a pair of grey Uggs (or whatever). I had been unsure about whether grey was the way to go but now, well, I had no choice and both V and I agreed that my appearance was much improved by the chunky footwear. All thrilled, I headed home with my new boots.

It seems, however, that I am not destined to own a pair of Uggs (or faux-Uggs). All dressed up for the New Year's Eve do at a friend's place, I slipped on the shoes only to have the elastic clasp snap in my hand. So basically my new boots were broken before I had even worn them, giving a new meaning to breaking them in. Down we went to the shop, only to be told they would exchange but didn't have my size in stock. Bah!

Finally, after doing a round of the mall and finding no other shoes that worked - Chinese people have small feet! - we headed back to the shop and chose another pair of cheap boots. Which I have to say I'm very happy with. They vastly improve my appearance making me wonder why I spent a whole month looking stupid without them.

Resolutions - 4

2011-12-28T16:35:00.000+08:00

This is a typical one. Thou shalt not procrastinate. Themore time I have on my hands, the more I jump from one task to another. I callit multi-tasking but it could well be ADD. I need to make myself finish a taskat work before clicking another window.

Like the religion one, this one is a not a priority. Justsomething to keep in mind. Going by my activities of the past day, however, it's not off to a good start.

Resolutions - 3

2011-12-28T16:32:00.001+08:00

This Christmas I went for Mass after over a year, or has itbeen two? I’m not religious. I pick and choose what parts of religion I want tofollow. For much of my adult life, I have picked Christmas, Easter and the weddingsof friends as my mass-going days. But since Benji, I haven’t done even that.

We didn’t do anything for Christmas this year except go tochurch with Benji. He stayed quiet for some of the singing but tended to wantto run around and V did the needful. This is quite a cliche because in India, you always see the dads running around with the babies while the mums stay inside devoutly bearing the spiritual burden for the family. But it works for us because V cannot actually remember the last time he sat through a whole Mass and I do not see the point of a truncated Mass.

I loved the Mass. As I grew older, I realised that thevalue of Mass for me is in the very things that I used to scorn as a child andwhich adults would tell me was the point – the ritual of it, the sameness, the repetitionof words that have been repeated for time immemorial. There is a peace in that repetitionthat goes beyond the meaning of the words.

Recently, on IHM’s blog, I got embroiled in a big debate onthe ‘benefit of religion for women’. Mainly, I had a lot of time on my handsand got bored with what everyone else seemed to be saying. I find the smugness ofthose who don’t believe as boring as the fervour of those that do. I find thestandard arguments of religion as patriarchy, religion as war-mongering,religion as the source of all evil optimistic at best and unimaginative andstale at worst (or maybe vice versa). I went through that phase in my teens and now I am more respectful of other people’sopinions, even their follies and delusions if one wants to see religion assuch. I agree that religion has propped up patriarchy, that it has been the cause of war - or at least the excuse for it; the cause of war is generally a quest for power. Organised religion is about power but at the individual level it is also about other things and I think it's time we look into those as well.

I believe in the irrational and that everything cannot beexplained. I am not against a good placebo. I am amused by people’s easy acceptance of explanations under thebanner of science that they probably understand even less than religiousexplanations. It seems like a new version of the Emperor’s New Clothes. If it ispeer-reviewed it must be true. And the truth is what we must know, even at thecost of beauty.

Anyway, this is not about religion or science but aboutresolutions. I like sitting in a church occasionally. I like losing myself insongs about good intentions. I like the performance of the ritual and therepetition of it. Why am I not doing this more? So I will. I hope.

Resolutions - 2

2011-12-23T18:08:00.001+08:00

The Chinese are fond of telling spouses thatthey look like each other. What seems like an absurd and possibly offensiveremark to people of other cultures makes perfect sense to the Chinese. Byvirtue of living together for so many years, people begin to resemble oneanother, they say. Looking alike is the end result of a long and strongmarriage. If an entire culture can accept that spouses begin to take on thephysical characteristics of each other, how much more likely is it that spouseswill take each other’s emotional timbre and habits, not just in terms ofadapting to another person but becoming like another person?

How I have changed over the years has begun tointerest me of late because it is so obvious to me that I have changed. I caneven clearly see the changes that are attributable to V, the ones thatliterally are V.

Some of them are for the good:
1. I am moredecisive
2. I am better atnegotiating the corporate workplace, strategizing instead of being idealistic
3. I don't make such a mess of a toilet
4. I will hopefullybe in control of my bank account.
5. I think before Ispeak

And others, not so much. I realised recentlythat I have been playing a kind of emotional tit-for-tat in my marriage. Inorder to demonstrate to V how the things he does that he refuses to change hurtme, I started doing them myself. Some of these ways of responding and beinghave become part of me. The unfortunate thing, though, is that in adopting themI killed some of the best parts of who I was – the empathetic one, the one wholistened, the one who pampered someone who is sick, the easygoing one. UnlikeV, who still has his good points intact, I seem to have lost all of mine. WhatI am left with is a hard, bitter shell of a person. I no longer like who I amand neither does V. And as a strategy, tit-for-tat didn’t work because I don’tthink he got the point anyway.

So I have now decided I have to thaw myself outand unravel some of the habits I’ve formed over the past two years. I have to somehowget back the great things about me I’ve repressed to the point of annihilation inorder to just make a point. It's going to be hard but I think I can do it. Some of those qualities are still there, buried deep down, I just have to practice being them again.

Resolutions

2011-12-23T10:20:00.002+08:00

My birthday has always been a time for me to reflect on where my life is going. But this year I ignored my birthday so New Year is going to serve that purpose. I’ve had a couple of realizations in the past week that I want to put down so I don’t lose sight of them.

Some time ago I wrote this post the point of which was basically how the environment you live in can influence you and how one needs to be vigilant and proactive in not absorbing the worst of the environment around you – and how some environments make that harder than others.

Recently, I have had to face that I have absorbed some not-so-positive things from living in Hong Kong. I have become one of the Impassives – the kind of person that turns a blind eye and doesn’t volunteer help unless asked. A few days ago while getting into the turnstile in the MTR, the woman in front of me dropped her pen and didn’t notice. In my previous life, in India, I would have picked it up and gone after her and given her the pen. I didn’t. I glanced at the pen and then swiped my card and carried on. Granted, at this stage in my pregnancy, it’s a little hard for me to bend over and to run after anyone and then I’d have the hassle of communicating in gestures (because she was clearly not one of the English-speaking ones nor did she look friendly) that she had dropped her pen. But I should have done it. I didn’t because it is so normal in Hong Kong not to. Nobody does it. I decided then and there that I need to make an effort to counteract this tendency to not get involved even in the most minor way.

Yesterday, on the MTR, the seat next to me freed up and a little boy sat down while his mother stood in front of him. Then the seat on the other side of me freed up. In India, I would move up so the mother and son could sit together. People in Hong Kong don’t do this. It’s not their problem. But this time I moved. Such a small thing and yet, I had become a person who would not consider even the most minor inconvenience to myself.

Living in Hong Kong has perils for me because I am naturally anti-social. I am very comfortable moving among people who don’t make eye-contact, who don’t indulge in the usual pleasantries, who don’t interfere in other people’s lives. But even I know that in indulging in this kind of behaviour there is a line one crosses after which one becomes a society of automatons. The faces of people on the MTR are not only impassive they look dull and unhappy. I realised I don’t want to be one of them. So I must force myself to react, to smile, to catch people’s eye, to wish my neighbours good morning.

That’s my first resolution for the coming year. When out on the street, be the nice one.

I am turning into a Smug Married

2011-12-20T11:00:00.002+08:00

For me, the epitome of the Smug Married is Magda in Bridget Jones’s Diary (because, of course, my life is patterned on that book) and I think I am turning into her. [Why, though, does Magda have such an ugly name? Then, again, Bridget it hardly ideal either so maybe there is no nomenclature discrimination against Smug Marrieds here and I am just being over-sensitive.]

Anyway, there is this scene in BJD where Bridge is on the phone with Magda and she keeps punctuating the conversation with such exclamations as “in the potty!” (addressed to her child, who is obviously running around diaperless and ready to deposit a turd on the carpet… well, obvious to other SMs anyway). And then, on the weekend, I did just that. Was talking to a friend on the phone about such adult and intellectual stuff as why art is good for the soul and suddenly started hissing “not there, not there!” and other directions at Benji who was trying to open a cabinet in the bathroom while my friend tried to make sense of it all. The weird thing is she didn’t actually get that I was talking to Benji and said “oh, you mean not in Hong Kong” thereby proving how big the gulf between SMs and Singletons really is (though she is not actually single but just ‘no kids’). An SM would immediately know that the “not there” was meant for the kid and not part of the conversation. Finally, in typical Magda-esque fashion the conversation ended with baby wailing and SM cutting off friend mid-sentence with promises to call later which, of course, never materialise.

Then later in the playroom I almost had a fight with a four year old. The playroom in our building is overrun by badly-behaved children (yes, I know, this is a typical SM statement) who are unfazed by the presence of adults (not their parents) watching their selfishness in horror. So, there’s this area in the playroom with toys for babies but the older kids keep taking the toys out of the area and holing them up somewhere where the babies cannot find them. On Sunday, when we entered, this group of older kids had a huge pile of toys in a tub and Benji saw it and waddled over. This little girl screeched at him and then looked at me defiantly. I gave her a tremendous glare and was ready to do battle but then decided to take Benji away as there were only two toys in her pile; the other kids had grabbed and run away with the others. But generally, I was on the verge of taking her to task. V went “Were you just going to fight with a four-year-old?” and I was like “Yes!”

On the subject of the playroom, it is interesting and sometimes heartbreaking to watch the dynamics between the kids. I see kids being mean to other kids and there’s nothing one can do. One wonders whether one would prefer one’s kid to be the bully or the bullied.

At around six months, Benji started making a beeline for other kids’ toys. Basically, he wanted to check out what they were doing. I noticed this with a lot of the baby boys his age…not so much the girls. My policy is that I don’t let Benji grab another kid’s toy but if the parents are open to it, I’d like to see if the two play together (which sometimes, though rarely, happens). If another kid comes for Benji’s toy, I don’t rush to his defense. I wait to see what happens. Benji is generally ok (in fact more interested) if some other kid is showing interest in his toy but if that kid tries to grab his toy, he doesn’t take it lying down and has been known to grab his toy back… which I’m pretty relieved about.

V and I were watching some older kids being mean to a little girl and I said “would you rather your kid be the bullier or the bullied” and he gestured to Benji who was yelling and protesting because I had just put something out of his reach and was like “Do you really think he’s going to be the bullied?”

Christmas list

2011-12-17T02:50:00.004+08:00

In my old age, birthday gifts went out of the window and Christmas gifts even more so. However, one can want and indulge oneself, can't one? So here's what I want/need for Christmas:

1. Body lotion: Instead of just picking one already, I am researching this as if it's my PhD thesis. V keeps saying - how about this one? And I will maddeningly shake my head and say - Hmmm, I don't know. Yes, it has come to a stage where my husband is taking an interest in my choice of moisturiser. The thing is, I'm torn between going the cheapad route and getting one of the drugstore ones in a decent flavour (do lotions have a flavour?) such as Vaseline, Jergens and the like (which I know are perfectly decent) or the ultra-luxe route, blowing a tonne of money on a smallish bottle (but hey, I deserve it, right? right?). This is, of course, part of my personality which I blame on being a Libran. The middle route does not seem to exist. Or does it? Show me the middle route someone! Complicate my life further with your body lotion suggestions. Yes, I'm asking. Keep in mind that I don't have super-dry skin but it is winter so can't be ultra-light either.

2. Diary/Planner: I need one for the New Year and can't seem to just pick one. I've seen some decent options but somehow none of them are calling to me or seem to satisfy my desire for book coverings that are quirky but not cute. (Out of desperation?) I'm leaning towards Moleskin, which I have always considered overpriced and boring. But there's a Hong Kong which has all the street names listed so one could just point to it when in a taxi. Though, do I really want to add one more thing to my already overloaded bag? Then, I'm distracted by this Moleskin baby planner that lets you write down the baby's health stuff etc. I like the concept but wondering if: a) I will use it b) It is possible to find one in a less boring avatar. But back to planner. Why do I even need one? Why not just use Outlook or Google's Planner and be done with it? Well, because I like writing things down ok. I like buying notebooks and at least this one will be somewhat used. Now if only I could go ahead and pick one. Instead, what's going to happen is that I will land up in a stationary shop with V and he will say - just get this. And I will acquiese and land up with something satisfactory but a little disappointing.

Ok, I wrote quite a lot about absolutely nothing but hey, I have a stuffy nose and I cannot sleep and waking up at 2 am has become a tradition of late.

Update: I bought the moisturiser. Crabtree and Evelyn Jojoba Oil. There was a 50% discount plus V was like "just buy it". Ended up having a fight with him though, over whether one should buy a lavender moisturiser or not. What I really wanted to buy, though, was this from L'Occitane. Maybe I will. Probably not though - I am feeling frugal. I have decided L'Occitane is my bodycare brand to covet, like Furla used to be my bag brand.

Winter blues

2011-12-14T14:50:00.001+08:00

I have decided. I hate winter.

Questions such as “Are you morning, afternoon or evening person?” or “Are you a summer or winter person?” have always stumped me. I have been unable to decide. Until now. Now I have conclusively decided on the latter at least. I am NOT a winter person. Does this make me a summer person?–The jury’s still out.

I realize now that the reason I had no clarity on this before can be blamed on growing up in Bombay. This great metropolis doesn’t really have a winter. Sure, we donned sweaters and sat around under blankets, shivering pleasurably and commenting on how cold it had got. But the temperature was in the mid-to-late 20s. Can this be counted as winter? I think not.

Thus, proper winter in Hong Kong, where the temperature hovers between 8 and 14 degrees, was something of an awakening. Okay, you’re probably smirking if you grew up in Wisconsin or Sweden or the like. Though I’ve noticed that people who grew up in these wintery climes seemed to have acquired heaters in Hong Kong while the likes of us from Bombayish weather profiles tried not to be wusses and spent at least a couple of winters braving the cold sans technology till we wizened up. Similarly, the lack of experience of winter can make it a novel experience initially, thereby dulling the full realization of one’s antipathy towards it.

And what may be the reasons for this antipathy?

The biggest, I would say, is bunching of clothing. By this I refer to the phenomenon whereby, necessitated by the cold, one has to wear a thickish long-sleeved sweater with a coat on top. Inevitably, the sleeves of the sweater will get bunched up in the arms of the coat, a VERY uncomfortable way of being. One may try inserting one’s genetically-gifted long fingers into the sleeve and prodding the bunched up inner clothing downward but this is never successful, especially if attempted with the left hand on the right sleeve. Thus, sometimes one ends up with one bunched up sleeve and one acceptable one and the asymmetry can drive you mad.

Try performing these upper-body contortions when pregnant and you’ll know why I’m particularly annoyed this winter.

Worse, this can also happen with long-sleeved pajama tops and fleece cardigans so you spend your entire evening twitching on the couch until you finally give up, fling off offending cardigan and crawl under a blanket in a huff, not quite warm and cozy and dreading the moment you have to get up to pee. Again, being pregnant, prospect of finding onself, uncardiganed and freezing, in toilet in middle of night, is multiplied manifold.

In addition to bunched up sleeves, one is also compelled to wear these appendages, and sometimes gloves, shuffling down the street like a clotheshorse gone mad, unable to grasp anything properly and generally disoriented. Then, try adding a baby bump into the mix.

The only good thing about winter is boots and being pregnant means that I cannot wear them because: a) I cannot bend down to zip them up b) I have sneaking suspicion calves are too fat to fit into them, a depression I am not willing to risk by trying them on. Thus, I am destined to wear ballet flat and black socks (because white socks and black shoes would be too Michael Jackson), making me appear like a little old lady.

And, of course, this being Hong Kong winter just swoops down on one literally overnight, killing one’s sinuses or inflaming one’s tonsils. It’s not just the cold but the fact that humidity drops from the crazy but constant 95% to suddenly 45%, an abrupt dryness only Superman could withstand. Even if one managed to avoid cold/cough/sore throat/flu for that one night, the next day in the MTR with everyone coughing and blowing their noses will do the trick.

God I’m grumpy. Gah!

Labour is hard

2011-12-09T04:14:00.003+08:00

Since I’m pregnant and on baby forums a lot, I hear a lot of stuff along the lines of this article. That birth can be a natural, empowered process. That there is too much fear out there. That there is too much medicalisation of what is essentially a “natural” process.

Coming from India where birth is actually as ‘natural’ as it gets for most women, I have a less rosy view. The majority of women in India have no choice but to go natural and give birth in a non-medical set-up. The result is our appalling infant and maternal mortality rate.

I know I’m courting controversy here. I just wish the propounders of this natural philosophy would qualify what they mean by ‘natural’ and how ‘natural’ they are recommending. There is an assumption that they are only speaking to people in the developed world where natural would be assisted in your own home in hopefully sterile conditions with midwife and hopefully attendant medical equipment standing by and the option of calling an ambulance if anything goes wrong. Wish they would say so.

For every bit of research that comes up about current medical practice is not ideal, I wish they would have an explanation from those in favour of that practice on why they are continuing with it. Instead, all we hear are polarized views. For example, someone recently posted research on why doctors should wait before cutting the chord. What I’d like is for this very useful piece of information to be weighed up against research which tells us the benefits of not waiting to cut the chord. And then let us decide.

Similarly, there’s research on how inducing labour by drugs generally leads to use of more drugs (epidurals) and sometimes c-sections. But the articles I read concerning this research don’t square off against other research which justifies the current practice of inducing if contractions aren’t regular 12 hours after water has broken to prevent infection.

At the time of labour, one must be able to trust one’s doctor – who one assumes has read both sets of research – to make the right decision. That is what the doctor is for. That is why the doctor comes in to take a decision if there are deviations from the standard delivery. Yes, we need to empower ourselves with information and ask questions. And the doctors should answer them, which doesn’t happen enough. But sometimes there is no black and white answer and someone has to take a call. If you want it to be you to take a call going against the doctor’s advice, then do you waive the right to blame the doctor if something goes wrong?

I also have a problem with this nothing-to-fear and empowerment rhetoric. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to have a pain-free labour. One may be able to control this pain through breathing, meditation or medication. Regardless, there will be pain. To fear pain is a human instinct. Isn’t that the most ‘natural’ reaction? Why fight it? Why this fear of fear?I’d rather acknowledge that I’m afraid than pretend I’m not. To fear something doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t face it. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” Why not teach women to be courageous instead of telling them not to be afraid?

I hear so much about how images in the media make women afraid of labour. Actually, I feel the images in the media provide a very hunky-dory view of what labour is. It is far more gruesome and generally a longer process than the images in the media. I hear very few detailed accounts of labour and that’s why I appreciate when birth stories are shared.

[Read GB's birth story here, R's Mom's here and mine here]

I don’t find these stories to be scaremongering. I found them useful to have a realistic picture of what lies ahead. I was lucky that my sister gave me as honest a description of the process of labour and the kind of pain to expect before I went in. I’m also glad that through my sister I got more than an inkling of how hard the first three months of being a mom are.

Frankly, I’d rather know the worst case scenario and prepare for it mentally. That’s me. There are people for whom putting a positive spin on things works. I’m not one of them. I’d rather call a spade a spade.

I didn’t find labour particularly empowering or beautiful. Of course, for some women it might be. But I don’t see why it should be. All this talk about empowerment sounds like a PR exercise.

For me the aim was and will be to get my baby out into the world safely. This was not one of those ‘the journey is more important than the destination’ trips. I didn’t want to linger to smell the roses or savour the process. It was brutal and if there was an easier way I’d love to take it. People eulogizing about labour sounds to me like women who say their period is a privilege because it allows them to have babies. Right, but if you could have a baby without sitting on a pile of blood and cramping every month wouldn’t you rather? Is there anything empowering about a period?

Yes, it is empowering to know what you can withstand. But I would hope one choose ‘natural’ labour because it is generally the healthy choice for mother and child and not to test the limits of one’s pain tolerance or to be empowered. Having a baby is like running a marathon but it’s not the same.

My problem with all this talk of empowerment and beauty in childbirth is that it will work for only those women who need to talk up an experience, who need to see the positive in it. And for some women, expecting labour to be a rosy experience is going to end in nothing but tears and disappointment and a sense that they weren’t good enough because they didn’t enjoy it. Many of us are okay with it being the pain in the ass and thereabouts that it is, given that we have no choice in the matter, and would rather not call it anything else. This does not in any way prevent us from choosing to go through it or being awestruck by the beauty and miracle that our babies are when they do arrive.

Many mes

2011-12-07T10:36:00.004+08:00

The Compulsive Confessor had this post where she makes a reference to the older hers. It’s so well written that I’m going to have to quote her on this:

What happens to old personalities? Do we fold them up and put them away among mothballs? Where are the mes that used to be? Maybe, like an onion, if I kept peeling layer after layer of myself off, I'd find the original me, the me I began with. On the other hand, the me that lurks closer to the surface is who I am now, for better or for worse, my personality has formed, and it's hard to break yourself of it.

I also feel that around the time I hit 30 my personality had formed. I’m more confident in my own skin, not as adaptable as I used to be, more hard-edged. It’s the physical things like not drinking as much, going to bed earlier, not being comfortable in any bed but my own. But also the more intangible ones – not hanging about on the edge of a party, speaking up and yet talking less overall, not just going along with everyone else’s plan, making decisions and sticking to them, digging my heels in, being even less bothered what people think.

I think back to the older mes. As a young child I was reticent, almost friendless in school, and yet, talkative and cheerful around a chosen few. By the time, I hit secondary school, I managed to find my niche, never popular but not a complete nobody either, on the fringes of the popular, one of the smart but not completely geeky (I hope) ones.

In college I gained confidence , I discovered what I was passionate about and what I was good at (literature and writing) but I was still sort of on the edge of the party, a little socially awkward. My first boyfriend changed all that. I blossomed in the knowledge that someone could be so head over heels in love with me. It gave me a place from which to be myself. There were boys competing over me, granted boys from a very limited circle but I learnt what it was like to be the object of desire and it’s a sweet lesson to learn.

In my early 20s, I came into my own. I discovered my career and I discovered I was attractive to people beyond the small circle of my school friends and my building. I had always been guarded and cynical socially; suddenly, I just decided to let go. I’d take the lead in making conversation – I hated social niceties so I dispensed with them most often. If someone asked me ‘how are you?’, I told them how I was really. It had a surprising effect but it worked because they stopped saying superficial things to me as well. I’ve never been a great dancer but I didn’t care anymore. I flirted and I was flirted with everywhere I went. I would probably never be the centre of the party but I was no longer cringing in the corners any more. I was reveling in who I was and other people liked it too.

Well, most people. One of my close friends told me that she thought I had changed for the worse. That I seemed frantic and over-dramatic. Other people have told me I’m a drama queen . I think I’m more a person who likes to live in a story than an absolute drama queen. I’m too low maintenance to be a diva. But I do like a good turn of phrase. And I was very restless then and maybe people who were used to me being the sedate one weren’t prepared for this new more out-there me.

Things calmed down when I met V. I was living a fairytale and I played the role of princess. I allowed myself to be the dependent one, to be led by the hand. Ever since my first boyfriend, I’ve been pampered by the men in my life and by now, I saw it as my due. This might have been obnoxious but I can honestly say I gave as much as I got. Probably more. I toned down my public personality, I was no longer on the prowl. I met a lot of completely new people in a completely new cities and I realised I had lost the mojo of sociability somewhat. Nevertheless, I purred a lot.

What happens after happy-ever-after though? Things changed and I changed. First, I blazed like a meteor in a fury of drama – this time I was truly dramatic, more crazy and wild and violent than I knew I could be, a side of me only V saw because he was the object of it all. Then one day, I burned out.

Through it all, there have been things that have never changed. Since my earliest days to today, I’m cynical but a dreamer with an idealistic streak. I love a good argument, to play devils advocate, to see both sides of the coin almost endlessly. Yet, I like to get to the heart of the matter. I dislike the superficial and so I will never be the most social of people.

The past few years have seen me somewhat come full circle. I have folded more into myself. I’m more guarded about my feelings, about laying it all out there for people. I think before I speak. I am less confident of my reading of people and situations. Professionally, I strategise. Socially, I have less and less to say by way of polite conversation, sometimes I am literally tongue-tied, a blank. Being a mother has given me less time for other people and more focused on priorities.

In many of these things, but not all, I have been influenced by V who I realise is so like the old me. Only, he’s a guy and that is quite possibly a natural state for a guy to be. And he can rise to the occasion when the superficial is called for. I’m not sure about me – I still have a very feminine urge to lay it all out there - but with time and discipline, restraint has become almost natural and anyway, it’s a falling back into an old self.

So, what have your past personalities been? Where have they gone? Or have you always been the same?

PS: Read about MinCat's metamorphosis here.

Cousins and siblings

2011-12-06T11:04:00.005+08:00

My sister visited last week. It’s the first time I’m seeing my niece after holding her as a newborn last year and the first time my sister is meeting Benji ever. The past five days have been interesting.

My niece is my sister’s tail. She follows her everywhere saying “Mamma”. If my sister goes into the loo she stands outside and bangs on the door. She needs to keep checking that both her parents are around and gets agitated if they’re not – but she’s more clingy about my sister. It’s strange because back home she’s in daycare and is fine without them. My mum says my sister was exactly like this so it’s history repeating itself.
She is obsessed with Elmo. I have Sesame Street songs running in a loop inside my head now.
Unfortunately, she didn’t take to Benji at all. She yelled if he came near her. My sis made a great effort to get her to interact with him but she wasn’t keen at all. Again, this is strange for a daycare kid but my sister said that in general, she’s not very social, especially with other kids. Benji, on the other hand, was her one-man fan club. He kept shouting out to her. He wanted in on whatever she was doing. If she was eating, he’d eat. I told him I sadly couldn’t manufacture an elder sister for him, but hopefully he’ll be as enthusiastic about the baby when it comes.
The niece is prone to meltdowns, which were exacerbated by having done three places in two weeks and the proximity of Benji. It gave me a taste of what it’s going to be like having two babies in the house at the same time. One starts crying, then the other starts crying because the first one is crying, and so on in a loop.
I am also dreading Benji getting into the ‘carry me’ phase. How do parents do it – carry a heavy child and walk long distances? Muscles just develop, I guess. I experienced that when Benji was a newborn but a toddler is so much heavier. Benji has sort of started walking - only in the playroom where the surface of the ground seems to suit him - so I'm hoping his fascination with walking will buy us some time.
Children have personalities that are independent of anything their parents might try to do to influence them. Now that I can see parenting firsthand as those close to me have babies, I roll my eyes more and more when people give other people unsolicited advice on parenting. Most of the time these people stress – often smugly – what worked for them. The fact is that these tried-and-tested methods will not work for every child because every child is different. If it worked for you, you’re lucky that the formula fit. That’s all. It doesn’t make you a great parent or someone else a bad parent. Yes, there are parents that don’t correct their kids at all. But all around me I see parents who are trying their best and are at a loss about how to cope with the individual needs and personality quirks of their child. I am more sympathetic to parents now.
The difference in parenting styles between my sis and me is a surprise. I would have expected me to be the strict one, the one trying to teach my child new things. Instead, I am the laissez-faire parent and my sister, the softie, lays down the law quite often. This might also be because I have help and she doesn’t. I can allow the children to make a mess because I do not have to do everything myself like she does. It’s quite possible that my “let them be” will come back to bite me in the ass also. Time will tell.
I realised that my sis and I have different perceptions of us growing up. She made a reference to tensions I didn't have any idea existed. We didn't continue that conversation but I'm curious.

Baby in the looking glass

2011-11-28T11:13:00.004+08:00

This post on Women’s Web and a comment that linked to this article got me thinking about the sexual politics of Facebook profile pictures.

The Women’s Web post is about women using their husband’s Facebook accounts instead of their own* and the article linked to in the comment is about women using photographs of their children as their Facebook profile photo.

I have always found the idea of using my child’s photograph as my profile picture fairly nauseating. It seemed to me to quite clearly declare that my child had taken over my identity. For the same reason, although I’m married, I’ve never have had a Facebook photo with my husband. I wanted my Facebook identity to be just me. V never used a picture of both of us as his profile photo either – he has used the same one of himself since the beginning.

But when I began looking through my earlier profile photos, I realised I did once have a baby replacing my image as the profile photo. That was when my sister’s baby was born. I was so overcome with emotion that day, I think the birth of that child was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in my life. I’ve never had my own child up as my Facebook photo, though, ironically. But since Benji was born, almost all my profile photos have been with him with the exception of one, in which I’m with my niece.

What’s in a Facebook photo anyway? Well, it’s now generally accepted that Facebook is where we not only interact socially online but also where we project a certain image of ourselves. What we put up on Facebook – photos, status messages, links, wall posts – are a specially curated image of ourselves, what’s we’d like other people to think we are and possibly what we end up believing we are in some cases. Hence, often when people take a photo of you these days and it turns out nicely they go “oh Facebook photo”. Generally, this is a particular kind of image – one in which one looks good, of course, but also one in which one looks like one is having fun, part of the vibrant, hip, fun Facebook world. Hence, a lot of people’s Facebook photos (apart from the nostalgic/horrendous days-gone-by ones) are of them out and about, doing interesting stuff, partying etc.

So what do my Facebook profile photos say about me? Clearly that since my child was born, he’s a big part of my life. He occupies at least half of a space (the profile picture box) that was earlier devoted to exclusively me. This might reflect that he has taken over half my life.

And what do the profile photos of women who use their baby’s image instead of their own say about them? That their baby has taken over their entire life maybe. That they equate their whole identity with that of their child, just like it seems like I equate at least half of my identity with that of my child.

This seems to turn off a lot of people, and I admit I was one of them. But when I think about it – so what? So what if at this point in my life, I have allowed my child to take over half of my life? It is a fact that right now I am half mother and half everything-else. And I am happy this way. The thing that gives me a great deal of joy is my son just as that summer my niece captivated me and one year a reunion at a friends wedding in Goa inspired a whole group of us to post a very similar image of our group of girlies partying it up.

There are many people whose Facebook photos almost entirely consist of images of them living it up, partying etc. Somehow this doesn’t seem to elicit much comment. It is kind of understood that these are the kind of photos to be posted on Facebook. What conclusions might one draw about these people? That their lives are exclusively dedicated to partying? Why is that more palatable than a woman whose life seems to be dedicated to her child?

In a similar vein, why the lamentation about women who talk only about their children? Again, I’m one of those that was and is probably still bored by too much talk about children. I am careful not to do this myself. But a lot of people drone on about a lot of other things – how much they drank last night, for example. This doesn’t seem to draw the same amount of aversion.

Maybe because the feminist in us balks at the idea of women going back to those days when their lives had to be dedicated to their children. But I think we’ve come far along enough since then to not panic anymore.

First, not every woman is replacing their self-image with that of their babies. So if some women are doing it, just as some seem to exclusively post images of themselves drunk or in bikinis, that’s okay, right?

Just because a woman seems to be saying her identity has fused with that of her child, now, doesn’t mean it will be so for all eternity. It may be a phase they are going through – generally in new motherhood – and maybe five or 10 years down the line, they’ll begin posting the drunken photos that seem so much in demand again or something else entirely.

Moreover, the Facebook image is a selective one. I don’t believe that those people who exclusively post images of themselves partying are actually only about partying. Neither is it true that just because I never have my husband in my profile photos he is not an important part of my life. So why assume that a woman’s Facebook image is all she is just because she has a lot of baby photos there? Our actual lives may be very different from the ones we project on Facebook.

What’s interesting to me is why we project the selves we do on Facebook. Why do certain people want to project themselves as the party type? Why do I want to stress that I’m me, even though I’m married – avoiding a profile photo with my husband at all costs but ok with profile photos with other people (my baby, niece, friends etc.)? Why am I less defensive about my image being co-opted with that of my baby but not that of my husband?

For me, this is more interesting that saying – oh dear, another woman obsessed with her baby.

*I probably more eeked out by the idea of women using their husband's FB account rather than getting one for themselves. Though maybe they're just not that into FB or don't want to create an account for practical reasons (one of my colleagues had a stalker, for example). I am even more eeked out by people who start sending you combined Christmas greetings from them and their boyfriend almost as soon as they start dating and people who create a joint email account as soon as they get married and then only get that one. I mean, really, why? What if I want to send you an email that I don't want your husband to read?

Things I want to incorporate into my life but cannot be bothered

2011-11-24T17:52:00.003+08:00

Scarves. Was having this discussion with Curly about how I miss wearing Indian clothes in HK and that Indian-print stoles might be a way to incorporate those textiles into my wardrobe. I was surprised to discover that she too thought scarves/stoles are too much trouble. Scarves or stoles are just so pwetty and I always end up buying them but except for the ones that get used as a shawl in office – and that tends to be one that gets used ragged – they either sit in my closet or I wear them and then they get abandoned after a couple of hours. Also, I don’t know how to tie/drape them properly so that they don’t look like this knotted lump that feels like a noose. The difference between Curly and me though is that I am fine with a dupatta if wearing a salwar kameez (but the kameez has to be long and not a kurti, if it’s a short kurta, the dupatta is more like to get discarded, not sure why) but Curly says she ends up abandoning dupattas as well. So while there is no hope for Curly in this regard, my ability with dupattas might indicate that there is a glimmer of hope for me. I’m not counting on it though.

Barbeques: These are one of those fun things that one is supposed to enjoy. However, I realised I just don’t. I don’t get the point of standing over coals waving a paper to get the fire started and then hanging around getting the food to cook at the end of which the food is just so so. Unless, it’s Indian tandoori stuff in which case it is yummy but it is yummy if you ordered it in also, probably more so. Maybe it’s because I’m not into cooking. The problem is that if it’s a barbeque, then everyone is expected to pitch in and help. If not, one poor sod gets stuck turning the food around. Inevitably there aren’t enough also, or there is too much of one thing, some things undercooked, some burnt. I’m sure there is some point to the whole exercise; I just don’t get it.Actually I kind of feel this way about hot pot as well. Clearly I'm a lazy eater. I don't like cooking while eating.

On belonging

2011-11-23T11:38:00.005+08:00

V and I are in the throes of an on-and-off argument on whether to move back to India (at some point) or not. He wants to, me not so much.

His reasons, as I understand them, are partly self-centred – he does not want to keep working in the banking industry forever, with children the stress of keeping them in school here would require him to keep striving. And partly to do with what he claims to be the welfare of the children – a greater sense of belonging, growing up surrounded by family etc.

My reasons for not wanting to move are more practical – we have a relatively stress-free life here, leaving us with time to enjoy each other, our children and life. I can earn more money here with less effort than I would in India. Now that I have a child and another on the way I value safety even more. Lingering somewhere at the back of my mind is the thought that having been presented with the choice of living in a safe city, if I moved back to India and something violent happened to my children, I would never forgive V or myself.

Yes, the big thing we give up on living abroad is extended family. I have begun to wonder, though, whether the wonders of extended family are worth the stress that the immediate family would be under living in India, a stress that you will only be aware of if you have lived outside India and moved back.

And then there’s belonging. The one thing that niggles me about Hong Kong is the inability to belong. Racially, one is an outsider, and not an outsider from the preferred white-skinned race. One will always face a subtle racial tension and this is a barrier that cannot be really overcome, just ignored. One way of integrating is linguistically; one of the reasons expat remain always slightly removed from Chinese society is the inability to speak Cantonese, a difficult but not impossible language to learn.

The irony is that I don’t speak any Indian language comfortably either. Linguistically, I am as much an outsider in India as I am in Hong Kong. I have always contended that I belong in India because I have roots there, I am ethnically Indian, I have the whole background of India in my bones.

But do I? I have also always felt a certain amount of foreignness even while I was in India and adult enough to be aware of it. Part of it is because Goan culture, especially the lifestyle of Goans outside Goa, is so Westernised. I grew up with so many Western cultural references. Part of that is speaking only English and a difficulty picking up Indian languages. With English as one’s mother tongue, always a source of some confusion, and only the barest bones of Hindi available, one is always slightly cut off from the masses on the street. And being from a minority religion, once one steps out of the world of Christian educational institutions, puts one in an increasingly insecure space politically; the slight fear that one of these days the communalists might come knocking at your door.

I have never been detached from the street, which I consider to be the ‘real’ of any place, but if I am honest, I never quite fit in on the street in India. My inability to converse in the language of the street excludes me. I will always be a little bit the outsider. In Hyderabad, I was actually asked which country I was from and told that I looked like a foreigner, even when dressed in a salwar kameez. I probably had more in common with expat Indians than Indians in India.

And that brings me to my current epiphany. Sometimes it’s easier to be a foreigner in a foreign land than a foreigner in your homeland.

(Or maybe all this is just to rationalise my fear of rocking the boat.)

Observations from the weekend

2011-11-21T14:47:00.002+08:00

A friend of V’s from Bangalore stayed with us over the weekend. I had only met him a couple of times vaguely at parties so he was pretty much a stranger when he arrived but he’s the voluble sort and so really liked him.

Mainly, though, I’m surprised at how enthusiastic these 30-something single guys are with babies. I noticed it with two of V’s other friends. They want to hold the baby, play with the baby, take photos of the baby… if the baby is reluctant, they back off and try again. There is no social pressure on men to bond with babies, and there is noone around to impress but us. Their interest seems genuine. It is endearing to watch.

* * *

On Sundays, in the absence of our helper, we have started going on little excursions with Benji. He’s easier to manage in a pram, amused by things he hasn’t seen before.

This time we went to Lei Yuen Mun, a fishing village that I didn’t realize was just one MTR stop away. It’s like another world. You wind your way through a labyrinth of seafood restaurants to emerge into the silence of an actual village, the kind you would call a wadi in Bombay. There were even rough looking dogs roaming around at will.

V wants to buy a house there. “I’m really a villager, aren’t I?” he said. “Yes,” replied this girl in whose bones the city lives.

* * *

Breaking up is hard to do

2011-11-17T12:10:00.000+08:00

Last night, was watching an as-usual hilarious rerun of Seinfeld in which Jerry has this childhood friend he can’t stand who keeps calling him up and George is urging him to ‘break up’ with the friend. Jerry points out that there’s no precedent for breaking up with friends. You can’t do the usual ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ shtick.

It got me thinking. Guys get a lot of flak for trying to wiggle out of the break up. I remember a friend who wanted to break up with a girl and who was like: “So, you’re saying I can’t email or sms?” And I was like: “No! If you’re in the same city you have to tell her face to face. Even if you’re not, you have to at least do a phone call.” I think he went with email though after a bit of soul-searching (though inexplicably he is now married to that girl). Most guys, due to a hatred of confrontation, would rather just drift off, stop calling etc. and hope the girl gets the picture. But this is generally not considered to be the done thing.

How come, then, it’s acceptable with friendships? Drifting, not calling, generally phasing out a person is exactly how friendships end. And I’m not talking about when it just happens like that. Sometimes it’s deliberately done. I’ve had it done to me by a very close friend and it was very painful. I told her so a couple of years later when we reunited and she admitted she had been horrible. I admitted that I understood it because I’ve done the same (in fact I’m currently doing it to her) but that it still felt shitty. But normally, this conversation never happens, the one drifted away from eventually gets the message (unlike Jerry’s friend) and the driftee is relieved of the burden of the friendship.

Recently, I was faced with an old friendship that seemed to have outlived itself. I had nothing in common with this person anymore and worse, she was actively getting on my nerves every time we did catch up. She had said something super-hurtful to me (well, I thought it was) and that was possibly feeding into the aggravation that her newfound personality was causing me. Or possibly her newfound personality was what had caused her to say the hurtful thing. Either way, I was tempted to call it quits. I was dissuaded from doing so by another neutral friend who felt that a) confrontations do no good b) old friends should be held on to.

Well, in a world in which most people don’t really give a shit, it does seem wasteful to discard a person who actually makes an effort to keep the friendship alive. Plus it’s hard to give up on someone you’ve known for a decade. So I'm hanging on.

But it does beg the question – why don’t we break up with friends. Why don’t we sit down with people with whom we think the friendship has run it’s course and have The Conversation? Well, because as guys have known all along, confrontations can be messy and as one honest bloke I was dating once told me “we like to keep the door open just in case”. I get that. But why is this behaviour acceptable in friendships but not romantic relationships?

Have you ever broken up with a friend?

Dear husbands, placid wives

2011-11-15T17:37:00.001+08:00

It is ever so common to hear women speaking of their husbands’ incompetence in the home. They complain how their husbands don’t help at home, don’t help with the children etc. These women are women like me, educated, financially independent, living in nuclear families etc. Their tone is one of exasperation but not anger.

I am puzzled about why they are not angry.

If my husband left most of the housework to me, didn’t help at all with the baby, routinely offered to help and then messed up and said “you do it”, I would be very pissed off.

Newsflash ladies. If you give someone a choice to do nothing except what suits them and pick up the flak, they won’t turn you down.

I know this well because I am quite incompetent myself. My cooking skills are dismal. I avoid opening letters from the bank. I don’t know my way around a toolbox. I cannot operate my own washing machine.

However, when I have no choice in the matter, I rise to the occasion if not admirably then at least passably. When we didn’t have a helper and the husband was away, I eventually learnt how to cook, even if it was terrible spaghetti that I could barely bear to eat. I need to write down step-by-step how the washing machine operates but really, it is not rocket science. I will never be great at money management but yes, I can file my own taxes and get bank work done eventually. I discovered how to change lightbulbs.

The point is there is no reason husbands cannot do most work around the house, including caring for the baby. Women were not born with some mommy switch that told us how to rock the baby to sleep or change a diaper. We learnt through trial and error and simply having no choice.

So why can’t husbands learn too? Sure, there will be some things you are good at and some things he is good at and the work can be divided. And it may not be divided exactly equally but at least somewhat equally.

And if that is not the case, I don’t see what there is to tsk tsk about. It is just bloody unfair and why are women putting up with it? I would be very ashamed and embarrassed to be made such a doormat of and would not be broadcasting it in terms of such indulgence.

Mind your language

2011-11-14T15:53:00.001+08:00

On a Hong Kong parenting forum, there was an interesting discussion going on putting one’s native English-speaking kid in a Chinese-language school. The idea fascinates me for a number of reasons.

In Hong Kong, one can get by perfectly well speaking only English. However, one will always remain an expat. A huge number of things happen only in Cantonese and a huge number of people feel comfortable speaking only in that language. I have attempted to learn Cantonese in a class twice and made some progress but time does not permit me to pursue it. The foreigners who can read and speak Cantonese fluently, and a huge number of these are Indians and Pakistanis (or as they called here, South Asians), studied in Chinese-medium schools. They speak like natives and the idea of my son babbling away like them warms the cockles of my heart.

The other advantage of a Chinese-medium school is that the kids that the fees are cheaper. This would not only be easier on my pocket, but would give my child the opportunity to mix with children from a range of backgrounds, rather than just children whose parents can afford the high English-medium school fees.

However, a child in a school where the medium of instruction is not their first one is harder on the child and the parent. Unlike the other kids, my child would not immediately understand what the teacher or his classmates are saying. He would find it harder to make friends because of the language barrier. As he picks up the language, these hurdles would disappear but many children have a hard time adjusting to going to school itself. As a parent, I would not be able to help with his homework, join PTA meetings or understand school circulars. I would have to rely on tutors to help my child after school – this would continue even in the later years when kids might ordinarily be able to manage their homework themselves and also schedule homework time at their convenience.

The rewards are fluency in a language that is really hard to otherwise pick up. But is it worth the extra effort both by my child and me?

In India, there are many children whose first language is not English who are sent to English schools. I’m sure they would face some of the same hurdles that my child and I would face were I to enroll him in a Cantonese school. Granted, they would not face a racial divide and there would be many more children that would converse in their native language during the break (though I can’t recall that many kids speaking even in Hindi during the break at my school). The benefit of fluency in English is so great that this would seem worthwhile, especially for children like my helper’s son in India where speaking English might be his (and the family’s) only ticket out of blue collar jobs and poverty.

Many Chinese-speaking parents here in HK are also keen to send their kids to English-medium schools. Some of them have started speaking to their children in English at home when they are not that fluent themselves. Not sure how I feel about this. Definitely fluency in English opens doors to career advancement. But there are more jobs around in Hong Kong that require fluency in Chinese than in English, though of course fluency in English will take you to a higher level. So a person could build on English skills in later life, though one might argue they would rarely reach native fluency.

Anyway, why do I find it easier to deal with the idea of children in English-medium schools when English is not their native language but not the same for Chinese-medium schools? Is it because, Chinese, while a great bonus to know, can still be got by without?

In which case, the extra language becomes like any other extra skill. Like piano, swimming, art or any of those extras that parents these days seem determined to expose their children to. I am not against them but I don’t think need them essential.

One parent argued that sure, learning in a language different from your own is not easy, but we underestimate what kids are capable of and that we should be pushing them unless we can see that we are making them unhappy. I’m not sure where I stand. I am intrigued by the idea of fluency in another language – but school is not an extra class than can be easily dropped or substituted. It’s a whole day thing, apart from the fact that if a child is not getting along in the system finding another school place is hard. If fluency in Cantonese is not essential, then why not build on it as an extra class?

On the other hand, there’s the idea of my son babbling away in Cantonese that I just can’t get over. Hmmm.

Of swans and ducks

2011-11-11T12:08:00.003+08:00

Ramya’s comment on this post articulated something I have been thinking about since yesterday. Living in India, one might be forced to make moral compromises one might not have to make elsewhere. I would argue that making these compromises does not make one a bad person as long as one can honestly say one has tried one’s best to do the right thing.

Thus, one is not expected to be a swan – which I think is a tall order – but to just be the best duck one can be. That is, if you can accept that you are never going to be a swan, and not hate the duck looking back at you when you into the mirror (as Ramya puts it – to live with your choices). Then again, the person who leaves is not a swan either; just a duck in a cleaner pond.

I have not read the Mahabharata fully but one thing that struck me from what I did read is the contextual attitude to morality. The right thing to do for you might be the wrong thing for someone else. This is different from the more binary Western attitude to right and wrong. But even in the Bible, there are shades of gray – “Let one who has never sinned cast the first stone” and “give to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s”.

The idea, I guess, is to live thoughtfully. To really choose instead of succumbing to the status quo. Even if one chooses to succumb to the status quo, to do so after challenging oneself to take the harder path. And yes, to not beat oneself up if one succumbs but just to keep trying to be better.

Siblings

2011-11-10T12:12:00.000+08:00

My love of reality TV plus my love of food (but not cooking it) has me hooked onto the Masterchef series. Yesterday, I caught an episode of Junior Masterchef in which the final two were being decided. I haven’t watched the whole Junior series but from what I seen, I was touched by the friendliness and supportiveness of the kids towards each other, apart from their incredible culinary skills. Contrast this with the adult version (which I also enjoy) where everyone is always bitching and backbiting.

In this episode, the judges had to choose one kid out of three to go into the final round and of them, two were sisters. The girl chosen was one of the sisters and the two girls – the winner and the one not selected – were both in tears and gave each other a huge hug. Then, the judges asked the two girls who were not selected to share their favourite moments on the competition. The other girl who wasn’t selected was nine years old, the youngest one in the competition, and she gave a very sweet answer which I can’t remember. Then, it was the turn of the sister who lost. She said: “My best moment was now, watching my sister go into the final two.”

That is what it is to be a sister. More happy that your sister won even if it means that you lost.

To be, or not, in India

2011-11-09T12:49:00.004+08:00

Some time ago I read this piece (which I’m sure many of you have already read and reacted to). I then read the comments which for once were quite coherent and interesting, except then they became repetitive so then I stopped because, well, there were 17 pages of them. Anyway, the gist of the comments were:

“Go back from whence (I really wanted to say ‘whence’) you came, stupid NRI-type, we don’t need you!”
“I identify with the author.” I think all these commenters were people who had lived abroad for at least a while; noone who had never lived outside India held this view (though I didn’t read all 17 pages of comments).
“Be the change you want to see.”

Entertaining as the 1-type comments were, after a point there’s only so much of that you can take. I found 2. and 3. more interesting.

In principle I agree with 3. A truly great person would be the “swan in dirty water”, as one commenter said quoting scripture. Agree we should all aspire to this.

In practice, though, most of us are not cut out to be the swan. Not all of us are cut out to fight that battle. Is life supposed to be throwing ourselves into battle anyway? Most of us just want to get on with it, without being called upon to change the world at every turn. Even those on whose behalf we are supposed to be fighting the battle would probably say that if they had a choice they would rather not be in the battle but sitting somewhere in a tent having lunch.

And living in India (which has many benefits, family being the primary one) is a bit like going to battle, more so the less money you have. This might be something that resonates only with those who have stepped out of the country. But unless you are inured to its ways – and you have to step out of India to not get inured to its ways – India challenges you morally in ways that you wouldn’t encounter if you lived in some other places.

For example, where I live, I am not confronted with the sight of children begging and compelled to choose every day whether I give them money and support the begging network, give them food (which they often don’t want) or give them nothing and if they get irritated and smack or scratch me (which has happened), deal with the emotions of anger at a child in a very helpless position and struggle with hating the sin and not the sinner. I don’t have to choose whether to bribe someone (and I maintain that there are instances where paying a bribe can be matter more serious than just making one’s life easier) or not. I don’t have to push someone to get ahead or risk just standing there and never getting into the train. I don’t have to walk around elbows out, suspicious of every man while reminding myself that all men are not like that, only most of them. Etc.

India makes you deal with these things every day. On the one hand, this is good. It’s good to be bitchslapped by the reality in which the vast majority live and forced to deal with it. Sometimes I wish Hong Kong commuters could be sent to a Mumbai station for a crash course in real life. I find it irritating when people from other cities in India sneer at the slums in Mumbai and say how dirty it is. For me the slums are the lives of masses of people, why should they be swept under the carpet unless their lives no longer necessitate that kind of living?

But living with the dirt created by slum-dwellers is not easy. Living with a daily shove (or catfight, or guy masturbating down your back) to get into the train is not what anyone would choose. Choosing to face that reality every day (if you have a choice) is not a no-brainer.

Yes, great (and I don’t mean this sarcastically) are the people who sail through this reality like swans, smiling beatifically at the begging child who just grabbed their bag or/and even better volunteering at a charity. Great are those who, faced with the prospect of their daughter’s body being carved up ruthlessly in a government morgue, decide not to pay the demanded bribe. I don’t know any Indian woman who manages to walk the streets without a degree of watchfulness.

Great are these people and yet, can anyone be blamed for finding the facing up to these challenges every day exhausting and wanting an out? I wonder how many of those who recommend ‘being the change’ are actually being the change themselves. This is not to deny that there are some who really are the swans, and to them, yay that people like you exist.

But, for example, how exactly do you get into a Mumbai local in peak hours without pushing? I think many have just made their peace with the struggle and some resent being told they are struggling or that somewhere it is possible to not struggle. Instead, they say, I am in some sort of valiant struggle when really, what you are in is a daily shove to get into the train. And that daily shove does something to you just as becoming the kind of person who can stare away from a begging child without a reaction does something to you.

I also find the join-an-NGO suggestion ludicrous. Not everyone is cut out for social work. The solution to society’s problems is not for everyone to join an NGO.

I do think that everyone should try to do their bit in their own lives – whether in India or anywhere else. But India just makes doing the right thing more challenging than doing the right thing anywhere else. And that, I think, was all he was trying to say.

At the risk of being accused of orientalism, it actually reminds me of Heart of Darkness. Going into India, is like Marlow’s journey and you confront the vision of turning into Kurt. Sometimes, like Marlow did, you need to get out. That might make you weak but it also makes you human.

PS: Of all things, I was impressed by a post by Chetan Bhagat. I think the way people in India treat their household help is illustrative of many things, most obviously because the household help brings the realities of India right into one’s home. One of things that that rubbed people the wrong way was the inevitability in Sumegh’s attitude to the help. That said, I am impressed by Bhagat’s dogged pursuit of his welfarist attitude and if they can afford it, which a lot of India now can, they could take a leaf out his book on what it means to be fair to their household help.

Psst: After Sumegh's comment I have deleted the part about his driver's son since it appears I misunderstood.

A few good men

2011-11-08T08:30:00.000+08:00

I've grumbled about, and continue to be riled by, the selfishness of people in the MTR. But sometimes nice things happen:

Like when I got into a really crowded train - no hope for a seat of course - and an old man looked at me very sternly and pointed to the handrail, indicating that I should hold it. It's rare that Hong Kong people care enough to interfere but clearly he could not bear the thought of heavily pregnant me stumbling in the train if it jerked. It reminded me of how the aunties in the trains in Bombay would give us a earful sometimes after we did something risky like jump into the moving train at the last moment.

Or when this guy who got into the train before me, spotted an empty seat, went and stood in front of it to guard it and then gestured to me to come sit there.

I'm going to try and focus on these good people instead of letting my blood boil over the callous ones.

Me Me Me

2011-11-04T09:34:00.001+08:00

To my surprise, Blogadda contacted me for an interview. If you haven't had enough of me already, go read about me here.

Magazine Rack

2011-11-01T08:20:00.001+08:00

I didn't get a book list to my mum in time, but asked her to bring me as copies of the Indian edition of Vogue and Cosmo. My dad ended up buying me Vogue, Cosmo, Elle ("I know she likes this one" my dad told my mum) and Femina ("tell her she should read Indian titles as well"). I've been pigging out on them and marveling at how much value for money they are in comparison to their foreign counterparts.

Here's a short comparison:

Elle: I started out with this one and was a bit disappointed with the content. Basically, pages and pages of layouts with clothes on a theme. I like clothes but I like there to be some editorial too. I went back to it later and discovered there were some nice articles but basically the layout is poor. The articles were only text which made me skip right past them. Weird that I'm fine with only-text in books but not magazines.

Femina: Pretty good with at least a decent number of articles to read. Don't know why they had the interesting people stories at the back. Both Elle and Femina had so many ads and sometimes it was hard to tell which was an ad and which was fashion editorial.

Vogue: This was the anniversary edition, as heavy as a Bible. But so beautiful with every page worth stopping on. The fashion layouts were as good as some of the international editions I've seen. The theme was cinema and the articles were decent; not as well written as the British and American Vogues but good overall. It came with a trend report that surprised me in being inspirational. I'm going to hang on to that one for a long time. Vogue had a decent number of ads too but somehow they weren't as intrusive as in Elle and Femina. Maybe because they got a lot of two-page ads and where there were one-page ads, they were so different from the adjacent editorial it was easy to distinguish.

Cosmo: Started off liking the list format they've got going (5 Top ...) but it started to get tiring after a while, especially such pieces as 50 Things to Revisit or some such. However, I really enjoyed their beauty sections because beauty tips in point form work for me. As usual there was the 'how-to-improve-your-sex-life' piece which I didn't even bother reading. Not much substance here but good time-pass.

Verdict: Definitely getting Vogue and Femina next time, Cosmo is a maybe, and Elle a definite no.

Any other mags published in India you'd recommend?

Overall, these magazines , especially the Vogue trend booklet, really inspired me and made me want to put together my look more carefully. This will have to wait until I can actually fit into clothes that do not look like a sack.

I am also reading The Beautiful Fall, about the parallel careers of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Largerfeld (gifted to me by Curly) and feeling similarly inspired to be beautiful instead of blah.

Historical Detective Fiction

2011-10-27T04:59:00.000+08:00

I recently read two books set in eras gone by and woven around a murder. Both were really good:

The Fig Eater

I generally enjoy reading books which use a work of art as a starting point to paint a picture of a particular period. This book was a little different – the motif it weaves itself around is Freud’s famous case study about Dora.

As always, I wanted to know more about the inspiration behind the book and now want to read the Dora case study in the original. From what I’ve read up on it, it seems both gripping and a little crazy.

Set in Vienna, the writing style is as painterly as that of the books based on art. It is also a murder mystery and it amazed me how the writer managed to keep a sense of quietude while describing quite gory elements, including the forerunners of today’s forensic techniques.

The meticulous rationalism of the Inspector’s investigation is nicely contrasted with the superstitious and magical explorations of wife. I realised that magical realism is a way of dealing with very sad situations by somehow making them marvelous and thereby lighter. I guess this is the way magic works in real life too.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pearson

Set in Restoration England, the book is postmodern in its questioning of 'the truth'. The story is told from four points of view, each revealing how human being percieve the truth their way. Apart from the mystery aspect, like The Fig Eater, there's a lot of interesting science with many of the characters famous and marginal historical figures known for the scientific experiments and discoveries. Contrasting with the scientific spirit of the age is the extreme moralism and religious turmoil. The end is really surprising and a bit of a spiritual epiphany as well.

Staying put

2011-10-26T18:45:00.003+08:00

I can't remember the last time I took leave and sat at home doing nothing at all. Not for the last five years at least - leave in Hong Kong meant going somewhere, doing something, not a day to be wasted.

This - staying in the city, not going to work, with no agenda at all - is quite a novel experience. And turning out to be a pleasant one. My mum visiting, and my decision not to go back to India again this year - was the catalyst. So far so good.

We do some small outing every day, generally an excursion for Benji. Day 1, we went to the zoo. This being Hong Kong it turned out to be quite the upward trek. Ostensibly this was for Benji but I think everyone realised it was really me who was desperate to see the monkeys. The zoo in Hong Kong is not large - just a few enclosures with different kind of monkeys, an aviary, a reptile area. But it was good enough for me - I was amazed and thrilled by the dexterity of the gibbons and the power of the orangutans - and Benji seemed to think he was a monkey himself, letting out high-pitched squeals in their direction.

Day 2 we went to lunch with a couple of friends to Ruby Tuesday, a child-friendly restaurant that Benji behaves reasonably well in. If V and I can eat our meal without too much fuss from Benji we consider it a success.

Day 3 I had my appointment at the public hospital. They insisted on testing me for infection yet again even though I insisted I wouldn't take antibiotics even if I turned out positive. They also scheduled a free scan for me - the baby's kidney is slightly dilated, something I am determined not to panic about since there is nothing I can do - which I'm happy about.

Day 4, I headed for a much-needed haircut and then we all went for a Sichuan dinner, rounded off with a trip to the Indian store to buy provisions. It was buzzing more than usual due to Diwali with people picking up last minute stuff I guess. (Happy Diwali to everyone).

Today, we took Benji to the beach. It turned out to be a more secluded beach than I expected and since none of us, except Benji, had taken our suits, we just let him play in the water. After initially being a bit cautious, he loved it and when we took him out tried to keep running back in. He wasn't thrilled by the sand but loved the waves and splashing. We earned many incredulous looks from old Chinese men who were there for their routine swims; one of them even wagged a disapproving finger at V. I thought we could have lunch there but all there was was a little shop selling drinks so we hopped on the only bus out of there and had lunch at a streetside place.

In between we've been taking long strolls with Benji, generally spending a lot of time with him and vegging about. He's taken to my mum and crawls after her a lot. It's been so relaxing and I wonder why we never did this before.

Today is my birthday

2011-10-18T11:43:00.001+08:00

Unlike years past, I had no sense of anticipation whatsoever and kept forgetting it was coming up. Thankfully, I had reminders yesterday:

My colleague called to book me for a team lunch
My sister-in-law called and said “did I miss your birthday”?
My husband cuddled me this morning and said “Happy Birthday”

For once in my life I do not want to do anything about my birthday. I’ve even forgotten how old I am – which probably means I’m pretty old. I don’t mean any of this in a morose way. I’ve never been one for big birthday celebrations but this year I found myself unbothered about marking the day in any particular way, and I decided to go with that. I have not even done the usual meaning-of-life self-reflection that usually happens on D-Day.

I do have a feeling of wellness from a very good weekend. Curly was in Hong Kong and I had such a thoroughly-good catch up with her over the weekend that I am both happy and wanting more girly interaction. I wish you were here longer Curly and I wish I wasn’t so tired and could have pranced about with you more. Still, I think we did well by sleeping at 2.30 am instead of 11 pm as we thought we would and Benji made sure we got up early.

I also had a safe-for-pregnancy massage that did wonders for mind and body. I went to a really good spa and I was so glad that I chose a spa environment rather than one of the more functional mum-to-be centres. I started breathing slower the moment they showed me into the ‘grooming room’ and I put on my plush robe and then settled down with a glass of cool lemon water and a magazine. The therapy room was all dim light, muted tones and pleasant aromas and the massage was great.

I had a number of spiritual epiphanies just reclining there with the therapist working on my legs, the gist of which is: 1. I am so lucky 2. I need to connect with Schmoonbee more because I am so blasé about this pregnancy, I kind of forget sometimes there’s really a person in there 3. I need to remember that V needs fuss too.

Spas really work for me. They really help me de-stress and think profound thoughts and I know it’s all superficial and I should really be communing with nature or something but this is easier (though more expensive) and it works.

I resolved to spend five minutes every morning breathing deeply and bonding with Schmoonbee. Ended up playing with Benji instead. Oh well.

Maybe attachment is a good thing

2011-10-14T04:16:00.000+08:00

I am a hoarder. I have always been attached to things. I get this from my grandmother whose capacity for holding onto stuff has only got worse as she enters her late 90s. In abject terror of turning into my grandmother – and since general wisdom says declutter – I started to force myself to THROW THINGS AWAY. However, I still have souvenirs such as letters, sketches, precious objects dating back to when I was very young. I try to prune that overflowing memory box though, a project somewhat conveniently curtailed by just upping and moving to another country leaving my mother to fret over the drawers of space I still occupy in her house.

Sample conversation:

Me: How rude! What do you mean make space? I’m still your daughter no?

Mother: *rolls eyes* But dad wants this for his computer stuff. Ok, next time.

Grandmother: For God’s sake, clear the drawer. I want that drawer!

Mother: *hissing at me* Don’t give her the drawer. She’ll just put plastic bags in it.

Anyway, this article on beloved childhood toys and objects, made me remember. Also, when reading about sleep training for Benji, Kim Robinson encourages attachment for a lovey – a blanket or toy that the baby feels attached to. Unfortunately, Benji only feels attached to his pacifier which is what Robinson warns against.

But I had a number of loveys growing up:

Billy: My almost-flat very stained baby pillow was my first lovey and one I clung to a fair bit. Not sure what happened to Billy. I think he was flattened beyond rescue into a square piece of cloth.

Penny: My beloved first doll. She was a talkie, except the talkie part of her got broken and her hair which I assume was once smooth became choir-like from me giving her a shampoo bath. I cannot actually remember playing with Penny in her unbroken-smooth haired phase (though there is one picture of me holding her when she was beautiful). Penny was like the older sister to all my other toys and characterized by a kind and wise expression.

Sammy: Was my sister’s counterpart to Penny, her first doll, a baby doll. Sammy was the kind you could feed water through the mouth and she would pee. Unfortunately, we got a little ambitious and tried to feed Sammy a Glucose biscuit paste so she would poo too. I think the poo came out once. Thereafter Sammy was blocked. However, she was still beloved. There is one memorable photograph of me threatening to throw Sammy overboard when my sis and I were sailing on the ship with my dad.

Bear Bear: Our first teddy bear. I say “our” because although I was the one to throw the tantrum for this bear, he kind of became my sister’s. We had done a trip to Dubai where my cousins had these massive stuffed bears that I was in love with. My aunt kept telling us to pick one and take it. However, in the end, I think my cousins didn’t really want to part with any of their bears. We had to do a short trip out of the country for visa reasons and when my aunt and uncle picked us up from the airport, they had Bear Bear with them. He wasn’t as massive as my cousins’ bears but he quickly became our favourite. He had a sailor suit so we called him SailorTed (I think there was a cartoon called Superted) but most often he went naked and under the name Bear Bear. He was the kind of bear you could confide all your secrets to and became the big brother of our toy cupboard, a male counterpart of Penny.

Sealo: Sealo was sea lion (we were really inventive with the names of our toys, weren’t we?) acquired at great expense at a market in Malaysia. My parents wanted to buy us shoes but I spotted Sealo and absolutely demanded that I wanted her instead of the shoes. The thing is she was really expensive but I literally went ape-shit on my parents. I sulked, I cried, I refused to try on shoes. In the end, they bought Sealo. And guess what, she is still alive and the stupid shoes (which they bought anyway) were probably outgrown in six months. Parents, sometimes your children really do know better. Sealo was the baby of our toy chest and needed a lot of attention. Her favourite position was to be held under the armit for warmth.

We had many other toys, of course, but these were the ones that really stayed in our hearts. When I was in college, I suggested that my mum give them away. I was concerned because none of the kids I knew seemed to treat their toys with much affection or love. I wanted to find good homes for my babies even as I tried to be sensible and not cling onto them. Surprisingly, my sister rescued Bear Bear and Sealo and they remain at her house in the US. I am probably going to ask her to give me Sealo so I can pass her on to my kids. Penny, Sammy and all the others were passed on to an orphanage where I hope they became treasured friends of individual kids like they were to us.

My mum also saved some other toys – our Fisherprice telephone, a pullalong turtle and a pig that had to be assembled. It is amazing to see my niece playing with them.

5. Blankie: Around the time I was 12, someone gifted my grandmother a pink quilt which she decided she didn’t like (she is extremely finicky about quilts) and she passed it on to me. This became Blankie, an adolescent’s version of a safety blanket. How many illnesses – and hangovers – has Blankie seen me through? Blankie awaits me at the foot of the bed every time I go back home for a visit. Blankie is a reminder that there is always a safe place waiting for me in my parent’s home.

What was your lovey growing up?

Snips and snails and puppy dog tails

2011-10-10T12:03:00.001+08:00

All those posts about little girls, but what about my little boy? Feminism has done a lot towards bending gender norms to allow girls more freedom and flexibility but it’s only more recently that masculinity – often seen as the standard to aspire to – has come under scrutiny.

The social structure empowers men over women, and a good deal of women’s emancipation has been about the struggle to equal the power balance. But the social structure also severely restricts men in ways that seem trivial but are probably not so. My question with all things trivial is – if they are so trivial, why so much ado about them?

Why such negative reactions, for example, to parents who might decide to not stick to the traditional gender norms and to let their children decide? Let me summarise for those too lazy to click the link. These parents decided to keep the sex of their child a secret from everyone but their immediate family… for as long as they could. The children knew they were either boy or girl but it was immaterial to them because they were brought up in as gender neutral a way as possible.

The children seem fine. But society seems to have a problem with it. Somehow a little “boy” with long hair and a pink dress upset everyone a great deal. But why should it? The consequence is that the boy had to be pulled out of school. Unsurprisingly, most people are enraged at the parents rather than a society that deals so violently with those that do not conform.

Because at the end of the day, this is about conformity. There is no logical reason why a boy should not have pigtails and a pink dress if he chooses to just as we now accept that there is no logical reason why a girl should not wear pants and have short hair if she wants to. The only reason is that people will make fun of him. And so parents have two choices – guide your child towards conformity or watch as your child becomes isolated because society in its infinite wisdom (NOT) cannot grasp a world in which the genders are not rigidly separated.

It reminds me of school. The reason many of us who went to school in India do very well in the workplace is because traditional school prepares you for life in a way unrelated to textbooks. You learn, for example, to do a whole lot of things you don’t want to do. Like sitting in a classroom for 8 hours, which is great preparation for the world of work where most of us will exchange classroom for desk. Work is actually easier because you have the Internet (and blogs) to kill the time and your boss isn’t standing right in front of you watching you, ready with a slap if she suspects your attention is straying. Other things learnt in school - reading and reproducing textbooks that make no sense, showing respect to people who may not be worthy of it. Of course one learns some things in school that are useful – like queuing up and making friends – but the biggest thing one learns in school is conformity, symbolized quite overtly by wearing a uniform.

One might argue that learning to conform works well because that’s what society needs. I’m not really convinced though that society needs people with the ability to stare into space for long stretches while looking busy. Wouldn’t society be better served by people who refuse to pointlessly sit around for eight hours twiddling their thumbs over tasks that require only a couple of hours? Many of the people who made a positive contribution to society over the years are those that didn’t conform. So many what society needs is less conformers – people with the ability to obey rules that make sense (like queuing up) but not those that are arbitrary (like only girls must wear skirts).

Apart from dress – which seems more heavily codified for men than for women – the two other big restrictions that masculinity places on men that I can think of are:

1. Pressure to be the breadwinner. The stress of being the sole provider of the family is something men begin living with from childhood. From the time they are little boys, they are encouraged – through the choice of toys, role models, comments by friends and family – into professions that will assist them in their future role as primary breadwinners. Their interests are indulged but are carefully watched and often nipped in the bud – if they veer towards such things as ballet or dress-up, for example. What the psychological effects of this clipping of wings are noone has any idea – or cares. Young men tend to get into careers that will guarantee a steady income, often not even letting themselves envisage alternative possibilities. Most of them end up in careers that are a means to an end that, if they are lucky, they have a vague interest in. Women, on the other hand, seem to have much more freedom to choose what they are passionate about – society’s assumption that they don’t have to work works in their favour here. I know quite a few women who have expressed the desire to step out of the world of fulltime work, to have babies, to pursue a hobby, to do nothing at all. They are met with nods of understanding. I know only one guy who has even allowed himself to think such thoughts.

2. Being a man means being unemotional: My son is not shy of expressing his emotions. If he’s frustrated or thwarted or sad or hungry, he throws his head back and wails the roofbeams down, tears flowing. Mums out there, when does this stop? When and how does your son realize it’s not manly to cry? Or to talk about his feelings? Or to communicate?

So will I be dressing my little boy in a pink dress? No. I don’t have the balls (literally). But I will not diss someone who does. And if my boy wants to be a ballet dancer, I hope I have the strength to help him go for it.

Sexy supergirls

2011-10-06T05:30:00.000+08:00

So what’s the problem if young girls dress and act sexy as they do in Toddler and Tiaras ? The problem is that it’s an act. They are performing all the outer trappings of sexuality without knowing what sex actually means. Orenstein writes:

“Sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity, it, too, has become a performance, something to ‘do’ rather than to ‘experience’. Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power but it will not help them understand their own pleasure, recognize their own arousal, allow them to asset themselves in intimate (let alone casual) relationships”.

Something Orenstein does not seem to quite grasp is that performance is actually life. That one might say that everything we do is performance and quite possibly always was, if not as far back as the caveman era, then at least around the 19^th C.

In his seminal book Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes:

To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage in such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman's self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whist she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.

And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within herself as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.

We may argue that some of us at least are no longer born “into the keeping of men”. But I find the rest to be true. Whether we are conscious of it or not, as women we are still playing out this split personality of surveyor and surveyed. It explains much of our beauty industry and its effect on us.

The knee-jerk reaction would be to argue for scrapping this entire system. However, it’s not so simple. This way of seeing, of being, has been part of the human mating ritual, human sexuality and generally human life for so long that it might not be possible or even desirable to dismantle it in one fell blow. As Laura Mulvey says in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” a “reconstructed new pleasure” cannot exist “in the abstract”. “The alternative is the thrill that comes with leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive of a new language of desire.”

So how do we conceive of this new language of desire? Well, it's not simple to undo centuries of heteronormativity. Orenstein points in her book to how an Anal-is-the-new-Oral culture emerging in high schools in US that does not seem to focus on girl’s pleasure. Orenstein says that she is not against girls having sex, and I agree. She says: “What I fear for my daughter, then, is not that she will someday act in a sexual way; it is that she will learn to act sexually against her own self-interest.” Amen.

Is this all much ado about nothing? A few excerpts from Orenstein's book:

According to the American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture’s emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behaviour.

…All of this does not suddenly kick in when a girl blows out the candles on her thirteenth birthday cake. From the time she is born – in truth, well before – parents are bombarded with zillions of little decisions, made consciously or not, that will shape their daughter’s ideas and understanding of her femininity, her sexuality, her self. How do you instill pride and resilience in her?

…Answering such questions has, surprisingly, become more complicated since the mid-1990s, when the war whoop of “Girl Power” celebrated ability over body. Somewhere along the line, that message became its own opposite. The pursuit of physical perfection was recast as a source – often the source – of young women’s “empowerment”. Rather than freedom from traditional constraints, then, girls were now free to “choose” them. Yet the line between “get to” and “have to” blurs awfully fast.

Orenstein observes something similar in the US to what was observed at a Hong Kong-based study: “Instead of feeling greater latitude and choice in how to be female – which is what one would hope – they now feel they must not only ‘have it all’ but be it all” Cinderella and Supergirl. Aggressive and agreeable. Smart and stunning. She says:

…In her book Enlightened Sexism, Susan Douglas refers to this as the bargain girls and women strike, the price of success, the way they unconsciously defuse the threat their progress poses to male dominance. “We can excel in school, play sports, go to college aspire to – and get – jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women.”

I think this is sums up the dilemma many of us are in today. And I hope it's something we can sort out and not bequeath to our daughters.

Women Against Violence

2011-10-03T09:50:00.002+08:00

Interrupting regular programming to point you all to this new awareness-building initiative by the people that were behind Child Sexual Abuse awareness month. Check it out, be inspired, and maybe do a post on your blogs.

I hope you all remember the April 2011 Child Sexual Abuse Awareness initiative. For October we are planning a similar initiative, on the topic of Violence Against Women.

We are cognizant of the fact that the subject of violence against woman is very vast and includes multiple aspects. To ensure that this awareness campaign is effective, we have limited our scope to the following aspects….

1. Domestic violence – Physical violence against the woman by husband/partner and other family members

2. Violence against girl child including deprivation

3. Sexual violence - including marital rape, date rape

4. Emotional/psychological abuse

5. Dowry related violence including Bride Burning

6. Female Infanticide

7. Acid attacks

As a member of the core team, I invite you to support and strengthen VAWM Oct 2011 as only you can. You can…

Keep up with our blog.

Write about it and send your blog post links or writeups to vawawareness@gmail.com (confidentiality and anonymity respected, as always).

Tweet about it – don’t forget to add http://twitter.com/#!/VAWMonth .

Join in the Facebook discussions.

Girls to the left, boys to the right

2011-09-30T10:24:00.001+08:00

Another interesting observationin Oresnstein's book was on separating the sexes. Apparently, little girls do tend to play with other little girls and little boys with little boys. But does that mean we should be segregating them? She interviewed researchers of the Sanford Harmony Programme: “Its goal, over time, is to improve how boys and girls think and treat the other sex in the classroom, on the playground, and beyond: to keep their small behavioural and cognitive differences from turning into unbreachable gaps.”

Today, there is much research on the value of same-sex education. I myself went to a same-sex school. I was often told how girls who went to co-ed schools were more comfortable around boys. But from observation, I didn’t find it to be true. These girls behaved similarly around boys, at least once they hit puberty, as we did. They also got self-conscious, they also had their crushes, and their closest friends remained girls. In fact, being in an all-girl’s school presented a sort of safe place where one didn’t have to conscious of the opposite sex all the time. So what was the big deal? Well, I guess I had the opportunity to meet and interact with boys in other settings.

Anyway, the book made me rethink my earlier thinking on same-sex versus co-ed schools. Since I believe that the more people are around different kinds of people the better, I guess co-ed would be the way to go. Though it wouldn’t be the single thing that pushed me to a school.

What about you? Do you think co-ed or same-sex is important?

Happy Ever After

2011-09-28T17:47:00.001+08:00

One of the issues Orenstein touches on is fairytales. She points out that Disney’s Princess line is based on fairytales but they are actually watered down and pinkified versions. But the original fairytales themselves seem questionable – she wonders whether she wants her daughter dressing up as the Little Mermaid who gave up her voice to get a man.

However, she later quotes Bruno Bettleheim’s seminal work on fairytales and how the original stories, their blood and gore included, provide important lessons for kids in a way that they easily internalize. Her own reading of Grimm’s fairytales with her daughter provides mixed responses. Her daughter laughs off the gore in some, but is turned off by it in others (such as stepsisters eyes being pecked out).

I had always kind of assumed that I would read my child fairytales since I had grown up on them. However, I myself read the Grimm’s version of the tales much later and found them quite trying – antiquated language, and at least my book had only text in a small font. The whole joy of fairytales seems to me to be colourful pictures because at the age at which fairytales fascinated me, I liked picture books. I think I read different versions of the tales, since we got quite a few storybooks as gifts. I’m not sure if my psyche suffered from not reading the original but I frankly don’t see myself reading anything that gory to my child (like apparently Snow White’s stepmother was invited to her wedding and then made to wear hot iron shoes and dance until she died!)

Now I wonder if I’d bother with them at all, Bettelheim’s reccomendations notwithstanding. I guess I would if someone gifted them to me. On the one hand, it would be weird if my kid had no clue about Cinderella or Snow White (I wonder though if boys take to these tales in the same way as girls) or at least of different versions of the tales from the Disney-packaged one. On the other hand, the handsome prince as the ultimate goal at the end of most tales is kind of overemphasized in these tales. Again, confusion.

Orenstein also objects to how many of the modern-day princess books seem to be “pro-girl” and “anti-boy”. In the example she cites The Paper Bag Princess the princess dumps the ungrateful prince and skips off into the sunset alone. Somehow, this message worries Orenstein too and strikes her as somewhat Thelma and Louise. “I want my girl to do and be whatever she dreams of as an adult, but I also hope she will find her Prince (or Princess) Charming and make me a grandma,.” She says. Really? Why? It seems amazing to me that someone who has thought about these issues as much as Orenstein has still clings onto this one version of happy-ever-after.

The fact is that girls are going to be bombarded with the finding-your-prince-is-the-holy-grail-of-happiness narrative anyway, so is the odd counter-narrative really going to pull a child in the opposite direction and ensure a lonely future. Why does not finding that special ‘one’ necessarily mean a lonely future anyway? Here I think Orenstein needs to take a good long look at her own convictions and prejudices.

She also questions books which introduce ideas such as “girls can do anything they want” at a time when some girls like her daughter don’t even know they can’t do anything they want. Again, it’s hard to predict when girls will start getting the message that they can’t do anything they want but unless the world drastically changes, sooner or later they will. At which time, it might help if ingrained in their mind is a story – as powerful as the Happy Ever After With Prince one – of girls who did do everything they want and who had the approval of the narrator of that book at least, and hopefully the mommy who read the book, they might not accept the irrational constraints of society so easily.

When I was growing up, there wasn’t much choice in terms of literature for kids. No wonder, then, that so many of us grew up on Enid Blyton, our fantasies filled with picnic hampers of sardine sandwiches and scones (both of which don’t hold a patch on a good samosa, if only I knew then) and British idealisms. Recently, I downloaded a whole lot of my Blyton favourites and found that I’m unable to read them. I cringe at some of her attitudes – how the girls help mummy in the kitchen while the boys work in the yard, for example, how foreigners were caricatured in the boarding school books, how people who were darkskinned when they appeared were always slightly dangerous and wild, but ultimately revealed to be goldenhearted (sometimes). And I wonder, would I introduce my children to these books? Sure, there is a wealth of imagination there. I myself gleaned much of my value system from them – telling the truth, a sense of ‘honour’ but God knows what else too. Now though we have alternatives – there’s Harry Potter, for one, which though not perfect transgresses stereotypes a lot more than Blyton and also provides a workable value system.

It seems like there are many more alternatives for children’s literature available in India itself. Would it be possible to ditch Blyton altogether? What about fairytales?

Little Princesses

2011-09-27T16:19:00.003+08:00

This is going to be a series of posts based on ideas from Peggy Orenstein's book Cindrella Ate My Daughter.

Why do mothers like princesses? Because, in short, Orenstien proposes, they feel safe. Princesses are non-sexualised even if they are vacuous.

On the other end of the spectrum is the baby pageant thing, epitomized in the show Toddlers and Tiaras which is like one of those awful spectacles you cannot stop staring at.

Somewhere in the middle are the dilemmas most of us will face raising little girls. A while ago R’s Mom posted about her discomfort with her daughter wearing nail polish. It’s really hard to know where to draw the line. I remember in school, they were militant about any kind of nail polish - apart from a number of other things like the length of one’s socks - and it got me thinking about why all this was so important. Nail polish was just embellishment, wasn’t it? Well, I guess a health argument could be made that it damages little girls nails, especially the acetone to remove the nail polish which is fair enough. Though would it be so bad as an occasional treat? One might argue that icecream is more harmful than the occasional nail paint.

What also got me thinking was a discussion on a popular forum for mums in Hong Kong. One mum asked where she should get her baby’s ears pierced – I suspect she was Indian – and a number of other mums wondered why the need to pierce a little girl’s ears. Piercing a little girl’s ears is such a normal thing in India but in the West it’s seen in the same way as nailpolish might be to Indian mums – as embellishment that can well wait for adulthood especially since it involves a body piercing.

When I thought about it, there seemed to be a pretty good argument in favour of not piercing a girl’s ears very young. It is painful, much more painful than nail paint. It is also something girls exclusively do – and why should that be? On the one hand, I’m kind of happy that my ears were already pierced before I could really remember it. On the other hand, if they weren’t and I wanted to pierce them in adulthood would it really be that much more painful than getting them pierced as a child (with the crucial difference that as a child I had no choice)? I got a tattoo as an adult; I’m assuming ear piercing is less painful.

My sister and sister-in-law have both not had their daughters’ ears pierced. They are not prone to any of the feminist introspections I am. I think they just can’t bear the actual taking of child to jeweler and watching the process. Well in my Sil’s case, she had a pretty terrible time with her pierced ears as a child – pus and what not – which has traumatized her. My sister did too but that’s not why she hasn’t got around to piercing her daughter’s ears. It’s just that she hasn’t got around to it – it doesn’t seem so important. It’s funny how I had just assumed my Sil would get my niece’s ears pierced and bought her a pair of diamond earings (which my Sil happily appropriated). For my sister’s daughter and my Sil’s second daughter, we had learnt our lesson and just got them pendants instead.

And for my own daughter, I think I’ll wait on the ear-piercing until she is old enough to decide herself. If my son doesn’t get to do it, why her?

As for nail polish, I think at the heart of it is the fear of our daughters growing up too soon and growing up in such a way that they internalize the idea that embellishment is what it means to be a woman. If nail polish, why not lipstick, if lipstick, why not the whole hog? Where does one draw the line? I’m still confused.

Pink or Blue

2011-09-26T10:14:00.001+08:00

Why do I want a baby girl so badly? Because I know girls, I get girls, I can talk to girls, I find girls interesting, more interesting than boys, maybe because girls are allowed to be interesting in a way that boys are not. All this, and also because I’m a feminist and I want the chance to raise a daughter a little bolder, more fiester, freer than I was.

So when I came across an excerpt from Peggy Orenstein’s book Cindrella Ate My Daughter in the newspaper, I found myself both nodding and crossing my fingers. And then I went out and got the book.

I identified with Orenstein’s gender preference, although I was never shy of admitting it. She writes: “Then I saw the incontrovertible proof on the sonogram (or what they said was incontrovertible proof; to me, it looked indistinguishable from, say, a nose) and I suddenly realised I had wanted a girl - desperately, passionately - all along. I had just been afraid to admit it. But I still fretted over how I would raise her, what kind of role model I would be, whether I would take my own smugly written advice on the complexities surrounding girls' beauty, body image, education, achievement.”

She goes on:

Shopping for her, I grumbled over the relentless colour coding of babies. Who cared whether the crib sheets were pink or tartan? During those months I must have started a million sentences with "My daughter will never …" And then I became a mother.

Well, thankfully for me, my own mother cautioned us long ago on the inadvisability of saying “my child will never”. She noted that it often turns out that your child does exactly that while you look only haplessly.

Orenstein describes how she initially succeeded in shielding her daughter from the gendered choices imposed by society but how all was rather quickly undone when her daughter ventured more and more into society.

All it took was one boy who, while whizzing past her in the playground, yelled, "Girls don't like trains '" and Thomas was shoved to the bottom of the toy chest. Within a month, Daisy threw a tantrum when I tried to wrestle her into trousers

She goes on to ask:

Since when did every little girl become a princess? It wasn't like this when I was a kid, and I was born back when feminism was still a mere twinkle in our mothers' eyes. We did not dress head to toe in pink. We did not have our own miniature high heels. As my little girl made her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her classroom, I fretted over what playing Little Mermaid, a character who actually gives up her voice to get a man, was teaching her.

One of the important things Orenstein points out is how much of it is marketing. One the rationales – one I was susceptible to myself – of finding out the sex of your child before birth is for the baby shopping. So you (and everyone else) can buy baby things and do up the room in the correct colour and style. Except less than halfway into my last pregnancy I realised how irrelevant this is. What correct colour and style? Why must we conform to this? Why can’t boys wear pink?

No reason, Orenstein says. The whole pink/blue thing was just a stroke of marketing genius:

Girls' attraction to pink may seem unavoidable, somehow encoded in their DNA, but according to Jo Paoletti, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, it's not. Children weren't colour-coded at all until the early 20th century: in the era before domestic washing machines all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them.

What's more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses.

When nursery colours were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, symbolised femininity. (That may explain a portrait that has always befuddled me, of my father as an infant in 1926 wearing a pink dress.) Why or when that switched is not clear, but many of the early Disney heroines - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins' Jane Banks - were dressed in various shades of azure. (When the company introduced the Princess line, it deliberately changed Sleeping Beauty's gown to pink, supposedly to distinguish her from Cinderella.) It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children's marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own, when it began to seem innately attractive to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few critical years.

So what makes boys boys and girls girls?

Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, says that for the most part, at least in the beginning, the behaviour and interests of the two sexes are nearly indistinguishable.

Both go gaga over the same toys: until they're about a year old, they are equally attracted to dolls; and until they're around three, they show the same interest in actual babies. Then the whole concept of labelling kicks in - sometime between the ages of two and three they realise that there is this thing called "boy" and this thing called "girl" and something important differentiates them.

Toy choice does vary according to gender, Eliot says. Studies on different kinds of monkeys have shown that male monkeys gravitated to boys toys (car aand ball), the females to a cooking pot and doll.

Toy choice turns out to be one of the largest differences between the sexes over the entire life span, bigger than anything except the preference (among most of us) for the other sex as romantic partners.

But that’s pretty much where it ends, or should, if gender differences weren’t such a marketing bonanza. “Splitting kids, or adults, into ever-tinier categories has proved a sure-fire way to boost profits. And one of the easiest ways to segment a market is to magnify gender differences - or invent them where they did not previously exist.”

It might be tempting to say “oh nature”, throw up ones hands and hand your daughter that baby doll. But Eliot makes an important point. Even if your daughter does prefer a baby doll, doesn’t mean she necessarily loves pink or would hate a toy train.

"Think about language. Babies are born ready to absorb the sounds and grammar and intonation of any language, but then the brain wires itself up to only perceive and produce a specific language. After puberty, it's possible to learn another language, but it's far more difficult.

I think of gender differences similarly: the ones that exist become amplified by the two different cultures that boys and girls are immersed in from birth. That contributes to the way their emotional and cognitive circuits get wired."

"Hormones, genes and chromosomes, then, aren't quite as powerful as we tend to believe. " Something we would all do well to remember.

Reading for a Baby Girl

2011-09-22T12:24:00.000+08:00

Some women prepare for the birth of a child by reading up on pregnancy and childrearing. Well, I did this somewhat just last year.

This time I’m reading up on feminism. Partly because I have stronger ideas on how I want to raise my daughter than on how to raise my son (the husband has not been consulted and will probably not be too thrilled either) and I want to firm up on some concepts. And partly because I’ve wanted to read up on this stuff for some time.

First up is Feminism in India edited by Maitrayee Chaudhuri. I realised in my many discussions on feminism on this blog and elsewhere that while my understanding of the development of feminism in the West is fairly sound, I was unsure about the trajectory and layout of the field in India. So I googled around for some kind of general introduction book and this one came up and the wonders of working in a university means I just had to toodle down to the library…

Right from when I started reading the Introduction, I realised I had the right book. Up front was one of the big issues that I come up with so often when the F-word is uttered. The discomfort people have with the word and women’s tendency to shy away from it and profess a belief in equality overall. And a related issue is, of course, defining feminism since so much of the discomfort with being branded one is an outdated understanding of what the term means itself.

The very first piece, excerpted from an essay by Kamala Bhasin and Nighat Said Khan pretty much did the trick. I wish I could just photocopy it and distribute to the naysayers. But to quote some salient points:

1. Feminism for us (a broad definition accepted by women from Bangladesh, India, Nepal,Pakistan and Sri Lanka at a workshop) is: “An awareness of women’s oppression and exploitation in society, at work and within the family, and conscious action by women and men to change this situation.”

2. Thus, mere recognition of sexism is not enough but must be accompanied by action. But the action can take any form

3. Therefore, it is not necessary to belong to a group to be a feminist though being part of a group does help.

4. “Today, feminists have gone beyond mere legal reforms to end discrimination; they are working towards the emancipation of women.”

5. Since as women we are in a position to understand the problems facing other women, we need to “initiate the struggle to change our situation and our society itself”.

6. “In its essence then, present-day feminism is a struggle for the achievement of women’s equality, dignity and freedom of choice to control our lives and bodies within and outside the home.”

7. They point out that “it is not enough to simply ask for women’s equlity vis-à-vis men in her community. For example, it does not take a peasant woman very far even if she becomes equal to a peasant man who is himself brutalized, exploited and oppressed by society. Feminists, therefore, are not only asking and fighting for the ‘equality’ of women, but for a just and equitable society – for women and men both.” Hopefully, this will console those who think feminism is only about manhating.

The book also includes Madhu Kishwar’s influential essay “A Horror of ‘Isms’: Why I do not call Myself a Feminist”. One of Kishwar’s interesting points is that feminism, like other ‘isms’ arose at a special time and place (in the West) to meet a certain situation and now its use has been exhausted and is not relevant to the current context.

I think, though, that unlike other ‘isms’, feminism never remained a static concept. It evolved. That is what I like about it, it’s amorphous nature. There is no manifesto of feminism to be conformed to at all times. Thus the definition of feminism I quoted above is a recent one agreed upon by women in a particular context. Feminism also allows for a lot of debate and contrary positions – there is no stated cardinal sins of feminism but just current feminist thinking on certain positions with room for disagreement and contextual variations.

Apart from that, a lot of Kishwar’s dislike of feminism seems to have stemmed from her personal experience of working in academic feminist circles or the organised movement where she felt pressure to toe the line and also the dislike of the term from the general public. To the former, since most of us do not work in the organised feminist sector, this is hardly relevant and to the latter, just because the branding of something has suffered doesn’t mean one has to throw the thing out altogether.

For me, the moment I decided I would call myself a feminist was when I realised I was uncomfortable with it. And when I probed the reasons for my discomfort – and those of my peers - it was very close to Kishwar’s discomfort with how the term was perceived. It seems to simply amount to ‘what people will think’. And I am allergic to allowing myself to cave into what people will think. It may be harder for people to listen to me if I have grey hair, but if grey hair is really important, I am going to keep it. If hiding my grey hair is about some kind of embarrassment about grey hair, then all the more reason to not cover it up. On the one hand, denying that you are feminist may help people to listen to you; on the other hand, you’re denying the legacy of people who worked very hard so you could even stand up and say all this and we cannot wish away that legacy or what we gained from it (as pointed out in Mary John’s essay in more esoteric terms).

Apart from these epistemological questions, the book also is a good introduction to the history of feminism. It points out how feminism in India differed from the West – significantly, men led the drive for the improvement of women’s lives here which probably explains why Indian reluctance to see feminism as gender warfare (which it isn’t anyway); Indian women got a lot of legal stuff right at the very beginning like the right to vote, access to contraception etc.

One inspiring document was the recommendations of a sub-committee appointed by the first National Planning Commission in 1939 (!) to look in women’s role in the planned economy. Wow! Way back then the committee recommended such things as an identical morality for men and women, putting in place conditions that would allow women to work, such as government crèches, valorizing the unpaid work of women in the home, equal right to property… all the things we are still struggling to achieve now, and which some doofuses still have trouble getting their heads around.

Another essay I found interesting was by Maitreye Chaudhuri on more contemporary feminisms. One of the points she raises is about choice, how feminism has come to become the right to choose. I was disconcerted because I have often argued this myself. What Chaudhuri has a problem with is how this right to choose has been appropriated by patriarchy intersecting with capitalism, such as the right to choose to be objectified. The term “strong woman” has almost been appropriated to mean the kind of women who stares out at you from a magazine cover, lips pouting, botoxed and photoshopped into perfection, bootyliciously. Or the one who chooses a kind of fairness cream or hairdye because ‘she worth it’. It’s kind of clever and sick how that happened, and how difficult it is to explain that choosing to be pretty or womanly or whatever is okay but not if we’re going to be entrapped by it.

I was a little disappointed by the essay on Dalit feminism – maybe because the points raised were not new to me or because I was hoping to get some more practical insight into the lives and struggles of Dalit women but only got some very theoretical stuff.

Overall, though, it was an amazingly enjoyable read. Be warned, this is the kind of book that would probably be a gender studies textbook so it’s got a fair bit of academic language. This is the first time I’ve read something academic for fun and it’s not going to be the last. What next? Will my idea of fun – as one worshipped cultural studies teacher put it – be Foucault and a hot up of chai?

Of X and Y

2011-09-20T15:37:00.003+08:00

Around the time Benji turned the curve of his reflux issues, V started raising the prospect of another child. To give him some credit, he is a hands on and excellent father who is clearly besotted with his son. It is also quite possible he was on some testosterone-fuelled spread-my-seed high. Or crazy. Most likely all of the above.

Needless to say, I gave him a good shouting and told him quite firmly that if there was another child was to be had, I was going the adoption route. Never mind that the first few months of Benji had me suspecting that I was not adoptive parent material. There were times during those exhausting months that I was this close to losing it (some would say lost it) and I was functioning on pure instinct. I could no longer be sure that those instincts would kick in with an adopted infant.

As a sweetener, V promised me a baby girl as our second child. I rolled my eyes and told him to shut it.

Then, I got pregnant. In between blaming V for his carelessness (of course it was all his fault, though once the pukeyness subsided and I started falling in love with the baby there was less blaming), I reminded him he had promised me a girl. Very confidently he said: “I guarantee it will be a girl…50 %.” That earned him a thwack.

The first scan I had in which the baby was no longer just a blob, I crossed my fingers and toes. And let out a breath when no penis was in evidence. The doctor said he “suspected” a girl but could only confirm at 20 weeks. V looked triumphant as if he had singlehandedly (dickedly?) managed some spectacular miracle.

After that we fell into the dangerous trap of thinking of the baby as a girl. We referred to it as ‘she’ and then sometimes caught ourselves and looked sheepish. I had also come to believe in my bones that it was a girl. For one, the pregnancy felt different. And then, there was the encouraging non-sighting of penis.

My 20-week scan was the definitive moment. And voila I met my daughter. She looked different from Benji, more like me, more peaceful (ok not like me) with (sigh) my nose. I guess the Universe does know what it’s doing after all.

V of course is acting like he is some kind of super-spermal genius who can will chromosomes into the correct gender configuration. “I told you, didn’t I?” he has taken to swaggering. I am inclined to be indulgent. I have my daughter, don’t I?

Mommy guilt2

2011-09-17T12:01:00.006+08:00

R’s Mom tagged me some time ago:

1.Write about 2 instances where you have put yourself before your child/ children… been a wee bit selfish.
2.How did you feel? Did you feel a pang of guilt or were you comfortable?
3.Tag 2 more moms

I decided to wait on that till I had done my big reveal so I could write openly what I wanted to. I won’t cite two instances because I actually can’t think of two instances. Not because I’m such a paragon of virtue that I never put myself before my child but because I do so too many times to count. Some examples:

1. I go out to work not because I have to but because I want to. I enjoy the space, being among adults, getting out of the house and yes, the time away from my baby. I would have preferred shorter working hours but given the choice between no work and working an 8-hour day I chose the 8-hour day. As a family we could have afforded for me to stay home full-time but I have a husband who does not like being the pressure of being sole breadwinner. I could have fought him if I really wanted to. But I didn’t. I wanted to go out to work.

2. On weekends, we do go out and leave Benji with our helper. I try to time it when I know he’ll be napping but that’s not always the case. I may also take a nap during the day and leave Benji with my helper.

3. When I was on maternity leave, I’d step out at least once a day and leave Benji with my helper.

There are probably many more instances of my selfishness. Do I feel guilty? No.

The reason – I went through a rough tough in the first couple of months after Benji was born. He had reflux and it was suggested to me that I modify my diet. I started cutting out things until it came to a point where I was eating only congee with a few pieces of boiled chicken in it (and then someone suggested chicken could also cause problems). Every meal became traumatic as I agonized over what I should put in my mouth. The problem was that there was no consensus about whether Benji was getting better or not as a result of my efforts. My mum or V would say: “He seems a little better” or “maybe you should just not eat this” and the confusion would start again. I felt guilty every bite I ate. I was terribly unhappy, tired and stressed out, and because Benji was unhappy due to the reflux, I hated to leave him – besides when you’re breastfeeding on demand, you’re kind of chained to the baby. I got barely any sleep because at nights he was a nightmare to put down and in the day, if I heard him whimper, I’d be up. I imprisoned myself in the house in my PJs. Finally I decided I had to go for a walk every day. I felt liberated and guilty at once.

Then the time to go back to work drew near. I found myself looking forward to it. Benji was getting better and it seemed that my helper could handle him, better than me if I was honest.

My first day back at work was great. I thought about Benji a lot but I also thought about other things. And I realised that this was the best arrangement for me. This is who I am and I can only be the best that I can be. In that first week of work, I threw away mommy guilt for the large part. When I get occasional twinges about certain things, I examine them to see if there is something there to consider and then I either shake them off or do something about it. If I slept in and didn’t go right out to Benji, I don’t beat myself up. I try to make sure that it isn’t affecting him and if it’s going to affect our long-term bonding, it doesn’t happen too often.

I know I am not the best mother out there. There are women whose mothering skills and commitment to their children I really admire, especially those that are stay-at-home. But I’m ok with not being a best mother. I just try to be a decent mother, to enjoy my son and to do anything that will scar him for life.

The guilt resurfaced when I got pregnant again. I felt ill and was falling back on time with Benji in a big way. There were days when I practically did nothing with him. Even for me, this was too much. My helper and V stepped up in a big way and Benji was oblivious to my absence which also made me sad. One day, when I came home from work V had got there first and was carrying him. I put out my arms to Benji but he turned away towards V. That is the first time he’s ever done that – normally he’s very democratic between V, my helper and me and happy to be passed along as it means being carried a bit longer. And I felt like crap. I felt the allegiances had been drawn and I had lost my son.

Well the worst of the nausea has passed and I am able to do much more with Benji now. His turning towards V turned out to be a one-time thing; he remained V’s fan for a while but now he’s my little beamer. Two weeks ago, he turned away from V and towards me. So there!

The bottom line. I feel very little mommy guilt. I have almost successfully turned that switch off. I probably come across as a coldhearted bitch to many. But I know not to my son which is all that matters to me. The end.

I'm tagging:

Dipali, because I want to know if this malaise affected moms in a different generation from mine.

RS and PoetMamma, because I read more mommyblogs now, yay!

Edited to add: Dipali and PoetMamma have done the tag. Thanks ladies, enjoyed reading your takes! And RS just did her's...Thanks everyone!

What's what

2011-09-16T05:59:00.000+08:00

Last weekend, I woke up from my afternoon nap flushed and with a terrible, desperate feeling in my stomach. I had had a nightmare (daymare?). Nothing dramatic when you think about it. My helper had come up from taking Benji down to play and was in tears. Something had happened. Benji had thrown up all over himself.

A child throwing up is not a big deal. I took Benji from her calmly and proceeded to get a change of clothes, but inside (in the dream) my heart was fluttering. I knew something was very wrong because my helper was crying and she is not the type that panics easily.

Then I woke up, all hot and bothered.

And I realised in a flash that what matters the most in my life is my son and the baby inside me. There would have been a time before this when I would have said writing a novel, the freedom to go out to work, achieving something mattered as much. All this suddenly paled into insignificance. I would throw all this away in a second for my children.

I know a lot of people realize this before they have kids or the instant their kids are born. I felt this when Benji was born and then the feeling kind of faded. But it’s now a truth imbedded in my skin, not in the first flush of motherhood but calmly and knowingly.

Reactions

2011-09-14T05:00:00.001+08:00

It’s a strange thing when you know who your friends are when their reaction to your ‘good news’ is to laugh at you (not with, at) for five minutes. A sampling:

Curly: hahahahahaha
And then: oh god, this is funny. dont know why
Im just finding it hysterical
[she then called to laugh and say this again in person]

MinCat: oh sweet jesus!!!!!
at least you have the helper
hahaha
catholic twins!!!!!
sorry
i know its mean
but
its hilarious
but yay

[and so forth]

Friend from Australia: hahahaha!
Friend from New Zealand (both of them were together when they called me to generally poke fun): “it wouldn’t be so funny but it’s you!”
Me: Glad to entertain you girls.

Friend from HK: You’re joking.
Me: No really.
Friend from HK: (stares openmouthed)
Me: You’re allowed to laugh.
[friend proceeds to laugh for five minutes]

Mother: Oh.
Me: Mother, hang up, digest the news and I’ll call you back.
[call back after 10 minutes during which I assume Mother ran around the house screaming]
Mother: So… you’ll didn’t take any precautions?
Me: Er no?
Father in background: Say congratulations.
Mother: So… you’ll didn’t use anything?
[I decide to hang up before mother gives me sex education lecture. That would be too much to bear. Apart from being around 13 years too late]

Contrast this with V’s parents: Oh my god! Such good news (etc.) [all said to V. I have not heard from them since ‘good news’ was reported. Not that I truly care.]

[Edited to add] I forgot this one my friend from Singapore:

After she had finished laughing etc. I decide to change the topic: So how are you?

Friend: Fine, fine. But I think my body had a violent reaction to your news. I just got my period!

There’s no easy way to say this

2011-09-12T16:53:00.000+08:00

...so I’m just going to say it.

I’m pregnant.

Yes, again.

Yes, my son – my baby – is only nine months old.

Yes, he will have crossed a year when the new baby comes. A year and two months. I’m quite proud of those two extra months.

Yes, you can laugh. My best friends called me from distant shores to laugh.* So feel free.

How, you ask?

Let’s just say the old-fashioned way. So old fashioned that contraception was not invented yet. When sperm-thingies swam unimpeded up to meet egg-thingies. I won’t go on. You know the drill.

But why?

Here I have no answer. Except to say nature conspires to make sex most pleasurable when the time for babymaking is ideal. Lust trumps good sense. This is what we caution teenagers about. Except I’m not a teenager.

And so I found myself weeing on a stick yet again. Like last time, I already knew. Unlike last time, this time the husband said: “shit!”.

So what else is new?

Nothing. Those who told me that if you have two babies close together, the nausea is less were LIARS. The urge to puke is the same. The aversion to foods is the same, only the foods are different. (Indian food this time making it harder).

This time I also have a baby. I mean in addition to the smaller baby growing inside me. Sometimes when I’m holding my bigger baby (Benji), I think, wow, I’m carrying two babies at once. Whee!

Except it’s not always whee. There were three months when I spent very little time with my big baby because my small baby was making me feel like shit. Still does, sometimes, but it's getting better. Luckily, my husband and helper are excellent and big baby is blissfully unaware that he is no longer the centre of the universe. He has all the attention he wants. The only one that feel regretful is me.

I feel more tired this time, and that is probably due to having two pregnancies so close together. I have anemia, and now must take the dreaded supplements. I even have the same infection down there that I had last time. But I have found a doctor who is with me on ignoring the infection and not worsening my nausea by taking antibiotics.

There is also the small matter of banks laying off staff and thus job insecurity in the husband’s world. But I will not complain about this. We are not badly off. I have a job. I am glad I listened to husband when he said, don’t quit.

I had to tell work I’m going to be on maternity leave again and I thanked God again for the blessing of my job, where my bosses, the goddesses, just said: it’s fine, family is important, congratulations, we’re happy for you.

Do I sound unhappy? Well, sometimes I am. When I am choking back the puke. Or when the threat of antibiotics raises its head.

But mostly, I’m glad. I believe babies come when they must. And this baby came now, shoving aside all my objections. This baby will be Benji’s sibling and friend before he has a chance to feel jealous (I hope). I wanted two babies and now I will have them.

This baby feels different. This baby is more peaceful. I am more peaceful. I will burgeon like a whale and pay no attention to nurses who tell me to eat less. I ignore the odd twinges. I eat everything, everything – except the things I am averse to of course.

We’re calling this baby Schmoonbee. Because Benji is Schmooney and this is a baby-schmoon. Also a schmoon, part B. (Before you ask, there will be no part C).

So yeah. Go keel over in shock. I’ll just have that extra doughnut now.

*Post on that soon.

Where were you?

2011-09-09T15:28:00.002+08:00

Where were you when the planes crashed into the twin towers? The Columbia Center for Oral History has this collection of memories.

So where was I?

I was at home, rather ill with what I would rather be told was a severe form of malaria that would almost kill me. I was watching Ally McBeal on Star World. Suddenly, the programme just switched off and images from Sky News of the towers and a plane crashing into them came on.

I remember thinking – what the heck! And switching channels. Every single channel had the same images on. My one abiding thought was “why can’t they just put Ally McBeal back on?”. I got that it was big news, but why did Star World have to show it? Weren’t the news channels enough?

My mother and sister were both in the US then but it didn’t occur to me that they were in any danger. It hit me as an inconvenience later when my mother was unable to get a flight home and I was really very ill.

I was so naïve. 9/11 changed the world. Not only was it dramatic in itself – the city of cities in the world’s most powerful nation attacked so daringly. It set in motion a train of events that meant that the world would never be the same again.

George Bush pledged to hunt down Osama and the US invaded Afghanistan. Pakistan became a crucial ally once again. They didn’t find him, until 10 years later, this year, when he was killed ironically – but not surprisingly - in Pakistan.

Then the US invaded Iraq. By then, I was a journalist . On the night shift, we were glued to ticker because we were expecting that announcement and yet, we didn’t believe they would actually do it. We didn’t believe the great US would be so deluded as to invade another country with no evidence. But they did. And the world changed again.

9/11 set ablaze the Islamophobia that is au courant. In the US, it became paranoia and a distrust of any foreigners. It spread to Europe, where the idea of a minaret in a town has become unpalatable to most. Norway’s Anders Breihvik is the other end of 9/11.

In India, we’d already had our own Islamophobia and attacks by Muslim groups. I think 9/11 hardened the stances all around. The Islamic fundamentalists were now part of global jihad, no longer was their struggle just their own grudges against the Indian state. Their actions warranted international attention. Anything that happened anywhere and a link was found to al Qaeda; the idea of al Qaeda is actually so amorphous that it lends itself to this kind of thing. And those that hated Muslims found a global brotherhood too. It was now fine to announce at dinner parties “All those Muslims should be bloody killed, drop an atom bomb on them”.

It’s true that in India we’ve suffered our own 9/11s over and over again, most recently this week. The original 9/11 still trumps all our 9/11s because the world was never the same again nor will it ever be after that day. It was the defining moment of our generation’s history.

But at the time, I kept thinking – what the heck, something happens in America and Ally McBeal gets cancelled!

On that note, read this piece.

Teacher Teacher

2011-09-06T10:21:00.000+08:00

It was Teacher’s Day yesterday. Everyone had Facebook updates wishing their teachers, or mothers who were teachers. My mother was also a teacher but she gave up before we were born so I don’t really think of her as one. She helped us make awesome charts though, when it was our turn to make a chart.

I realised that the terrible teachers I’ve encountered far outnumbered the good ones. Here is a sampling:

Our Marathi primary school teacher was an absolute horror. She was totally lazy, barely taught anything and seemed to exist for the sole aim of fussing over children whose parents gave her presents. She also had the habit of laughing loudly and meanly at one poor child and encouraging the class to do the same, slapping, and throwing the odd piece of chalk. She also routinely slept in class and woe betide the kid that woke her with a giggle. One of my earliest memories of school is pretending to mouth the words to arey arey pausa, terrified she would cotton on to the fact that I had no idea what I was saying. The terror worked though because that rhyme is probably the only thing I can say fluently in Marathi. This woman taught us for four years. I’m stretching the meaning of the word ‘taught’ here.

It’s amazing how many primary school teachers used to laugh at students, make rude remarks in front of the children as if they couldn’t understand and have blatant favourites. My sister was everybody’s favourite. I never was, I would be considered because I was my sister’s sister and then dismissed.

The best primary school teacher I encountered was in the third standard. She looked more like an airhostess than a teacher. My abiding memory of her is when she was explaining the structure of the nose to us and lifted her own very elegant nostril to indicate that there was hair there. All of us said “chee”. However, I never forgot the function of hair in the nostril.

The worst teacher in primary school was this short, extremely fat woman with red lipstick who was reputed to whack kids with a ruler. Luckily, I was never in her class. However, we occasionally heard thwacks and wails coming from the other class. Shudder!

The only time I ever got slapped by a teacher was by my Hindi teacher in the fifth standard. That was one hard slap. I still remember the humiliation of it and I actually saw stars for a bit. I have never forgiven her. My Hindi sucks too. Consider this – we started learning paragraphs of text in Hindi in Std 5, when we had never studied Hindi before. Does this make any sense?

The most mediocre teachers in the school were probably the Geography teachers followed by the history teachers. They pretty much sat there and read out the textbook. There were two absolute neurotic Geography teachers who would suddenly come out of their own stupor and pick on the odd girl and rip her to shreds, saying really cutting and insulting stuff. The girl would burst into tears. There would always be a terrified silence in their classrooms.

The best teachers in the school were the English teachers. I’ve had some really outstanding English teachers, who made up for the really mediocre SSC syllabus.

One of them was the lone outstanding History teacher also. She had a sharp tongue too but she was a great teacher. In the ninth standard she disregarded the textbook and just taught whatever she wanted, which meant we actually learnt something instead of reading about the exploits of Shivaji ad infinitum. Once she made us pick a topic, research it and present it in class. Imagine – an actual project!

I used the template for a resume given to us by another English teacher when I got my first job. This teacher also once ripped a friend of mine to shreds with really personal remarks so I lost respect for her. What is it with teachers being so petty?

The best Hindi teacher I encountered was in Std 9. I was completely terrified when I realised this woman was our class teacher because she was reputed to speak only in Hindi. I pretty much could not speak Hindi. Let’s not get into how I managed to pass Hindi (or Marathi) exams up till then – I have a prodigious memory. I learnt more Hindi in that year in her class than my entire education up to then. I took Hindi tuitions from her in Std. 10 and improved further. She realised I was one of those that needed to know the intricacies of grammar so she’d explain it to me. Finally, I realised what ‘ney’ was instead of sprinkling it everywhere in a sentence. It was so liberating to actually realize there was a logic behind using ‘ney’. I have now forgotten the logic but it served me well for several years.

We also had a set of Physical Ed teachers who were so out of shape they could not demonstrate the yoga poses themselves. No wonder all we did was shav aasan and giggle.

College was the first place where I encountered more good teachers than bad teachers. I can think of only a couple of really bad teachers in college and even they weren’t at the level of the school badness. That’s saying something.

The best teacher I ever had was Eunice D’Souza. She probably had the sharpest tongue of them all (she would roll her eyes and call us ‘cabbages’) but her being a truly great teacher made up for it. Once you got over the awe, and if you weren’t one of those full-of-yourself people that bored her, you realised she was actually a regular person. I don’t think I’ve forgotten a thing she taught and of course, she was a character herself. She pushed the door wide open and like the mad hatter led us into Wonderland. Most of us have not quite emerged yet.

All this makes it sound like I went to a truly terrible school but I actually went to one of the better schools, though not the best. This is just how education in India is because most people have similar stories. Boys schools sound worse. It does make me rethink my attitude to Benji and schooling though. I’m not as cavalier about it as I used to be.

Growing up is..

2011-08-23T17:12:00.005+08:00

[Partly post-conversation with Mincat]

...Realising your parents are just people with their own failings, even if they will always be your parents. That sometimes you will counsel them, though they probably won't listen and if they don't, it's okay, they're just people.

...Getting over the need for their approval. Valuing your own approval.

...Also, realising that's okay to be a girl. That the tough-guy male version of personality is not the only admirable one. (on that note, read this)

...Realising that black or white is the not always the answer and sometimes the truth lies in gray.

...practising how to hold one's tongue.

Ms Manners

2011-08-22T10:31:00.001+08:00

The Mad Momma had an interesting post on children and good manners some time ago. It made me reflect on my own attitude to manners. Being a parent often forces you to take a stand on stuff you could be neutral on as an adult.

I have never been very good at everyday courtesies. Maybe because as a kid I was extremely self conscious, few things came naturally to me, I over analyse everything. So I was the kind that would cross the street if I saw someone approaching who I’d have to wish ‘good morning’ or rehearsing frantically in my mind the exact moment I would utter that good morning, often resulting in me fumbling through it. Weird, I know.

I also questioned many of the courtesies imposed on me by my parents, such as going around a room at a party greeting every adult with a kiss on each cheek. Yech! I particularly hated having to say goodbye to people when leaving a party; often everyone was preoccupied in their own conversations and you had to really speak up to be heard, not something that came naturally to me.

As an adult, I’m bad with my please and thank yous. Don’t blame my parents for this; they enforced it but I think I outgrew it. I don’t know when I just dropped those words. I began to feel self-conscious about them too. I began to feel that they sounded trite. I would use them only in special cases of extreme gratitude; otherwise I would use my tone of voice to convey ‘please’ and skip ‘thank you’ unless I felt there was something to be really thankful for. Like I wouldn’t necessarily say thank you if someone passed the butter. However, lately I have realised I may be falling too much onto the brusque side and so I’m making a conscious effort to say more please and thank you. If for nothing else, as corporate speak.

On the flip side, I don’t notice the absence of these courtesies in other people. In fact, I am happier off without them. I find the propensity to wish every stranger you encounter on the street the time of day in Western countries a bit bizarre. In the US, I noticed shop assistants say ‘have a nice day’ to each customer; the mechanical way they say it completely creeped me out. In Hong Kong, they are compelled to say ‘bye bye’ in a singsong voice when you leave a shop; I find this extremely silly and feel sorry for the shop girls.

On the whole, Hong Kong falls into the strictly practical side of customer service. In the average restaurants, waiters don’t come up beaming with pleasantries; they just come, take your order and bring your food. Sometimes they smile. The same is with the small shops, where you might buy your snacks for the day or whatever. It’s nice if they smile, but I don’t really care if they don’t. And I sometimes don’t notice if they do.

The difference is if you are a regular. If you are a regular, then you’ll get a smile, they’ll remember your order, if it’s not too busy a time, they’ll try to make conversation with you even you don’t speak the same language. I like this because it’s genuine. It’s based on a relationship. I can do without the casual courtesy.

Where I insist on so-called good manners is when it has a practical imperative. Like giving up a seat to an elderly person, disabled people, pregnant women, anyone carrying a small child. I don’t believe in men holding doors open for women (I won’t object if they do), but I do believe in people not just letting go of a door once they’ve walked through it but holding it for a bit so that the person behind them doesn’t get slammed. I believe in holding the elevator for someone who’s rushing for it. I believe in helping people cross the street if they need help. Basically, I believe in keeping my eyes open as far as possible to whether other people need help and offering that help if they do, even if it makes me self-conscious.

So how far will I school Benji in good manners? I suppose please and thankyous – I’ll have to school myself first – not because I believe in them myself but because they are part of the language of society, kind of like pronouncing things correctly. And I’ll prod him to greet people who are right there in front of him and who address him, but not necessarily everyone in the room. Mostly, I hope I can teach him to be kind, compassionate, sensitive to the needs of others and with that rule of the thumb, other things will fall in line.

What's in a bag?

2011-08-17T10:35:00.002+08:00

R’s Mom had an amusing post up on the contents of her bag. I decided to do a similar one.

Around two years ago, I invested in my current big, yellow bag. I became an instant convert into the virtues of humongous bags – all the better to dump stuff in, my dear – but the result was more of a bottomless than ever. My bag this morning turns out to contain:

1. Pink, foldable umbrella (a year-round must in HK where the weather changes unpredictably).
2. Inspirational little card from boss. I am not her pet or anything; everyone got one at the office retreat. It is now been pinned up near my desk.
3. Carholder with visiting cards
4. Ballpoint pen – somehow I always think I don’t have one and end up scrambling and borrowing.
5. Assorted coins.
6. Oily skin wipes – never used (not because I don’t need them).
7. Bag of fruit to snack on – don’t worry, I had a separate bag of bakery goodies also.
8. Sunglasses by Marc Jacobs – my most expensive pair, quite proud they have lasted this long, in their case and everything (fingers crossed).
9. Underwear liner
10. Two sets of house keys. Because after groping in bag for five minutes, thought I didn’t have a set, so added another set. This is what I mean by bottomless pit.
11. Earphones, surprisingly hardy since they have just been dumped in and are yanked out unceremoniously, trailing keys, bits of paper etc.
12. Wallet - heaviest thing in bag, filled with all manner of junk too.
13. Toothpicks
1.4 iphone
15. Kajal, gloss and compact
16. Pawpaw ointment, gifted by friend from Australia. Used about five months ago.
17. Nailcutter, gifted by friend after trip to Korea.
18. Copies of credit card bills of last year’s maternity expenses to be submitted to insurance (I submitted them, okay. Apparently the credit card slips were not needed. Insurance money was received also. How efficient I am. Thank you. Not so efficient at throwing away bills though – they are still in bag.)
19. Hairclips

Observation:
Many of the practical things in bag like nailcutter, hairclips etc. I have never used. Practical things that I would use, such as safety pins, are not in bag.

Extraordinary event:
Bag did not contain book. That is because I am going to pick up book from library this afternoon. Hope it is not too heavy. The advent of iphone has made it possible to attempt one-way commute without book.

The why of children

2011-08-12T05:22:00.001+08:00

Like the why of marriage, the why of kids is something I ponder now and then. Both marriage and kids are something that society, particularly Indian society, just assumes that people should want – preferably in that order. I have never been convinced.

Especially on the kids front. Maybe because unlike many people, particularly women I know, I allow myself to think thoughts that most people would think I shouldn’t be thinking. Like “playing with this kid is boring” or “why should I colour this green because you say so and you’re little” or “that baby is really ugly”. Especially the latter. I realised that when I cooed over babies, most often I was faking it.

Faking anything has never been good for my psyche – I feel all cold and clammy inside and then end up wildly rebelling against the fakery one inopportune day – so mostly I don’t. Quite early in life, I stopped cooing over babies. I also made it clear I didn’t like kids. This proved to be a good thing because people stopped expecting me to entertain their kids. I could pick the odd kid I wanted entertain myself with.

Paradoxically, by the time I was more mature and thought things out calmly after discounting my addiction to rebellion, I came to the conclusion that I would probably get married (maybe I’d watched too many romantic-comedies, also partner-for-life idea seemed appealing) and if I did, I would like to have children. I would not like to be a single parent because I don’t think I can raise a child alone.

The reasons I concluded I would like to have children are vague. Initially, it was something on the lines of – it’s a highly recommended experience, why not experience it? (I felt this way about marijuana and bungee jumping too.) Later, it was something more primal. I began to smile at babies. I began to feel a little urge. Then my husband pounced.

Now that I have a child, I know why I am happy I had him. Nothing in my life has ever made me smile like he has. Even in my shittiest moments, I only have to think of my son and I smile. Having your own personal smile-turnoner, that’s precious.

Because I am one of those people that cross-questions everything, I wonder if I say this because I have no choice. Because it would be truly horrendous to say, “I would have been happier without”. I can’t ever guarantee that I won’t say it. But right now, I know, it was worth it.

(It probably helps that I never idealized children or the process of raising them. I expected it to be hard, and it has been harder. But I have also not regretted it. I also admit I have great help. I wonder if I would feel the same if, like my mom, I had to deal with two small children all on my own. I think I would have gone crazy. I am not single parent material.)

This sounds as vague as my initial reason for having children. But suddenly I found a way to make it more concrete.

Like great art, children have a way of ‘making it new’.

At a very basic level, by creating a child, the parents have made something, something with the genetics mix of both of them. At a very egoistic level, there is a thrill to that, like playing God. Thus, the exhilaration of seeing your biological child in all its newness and thinking ‘wow, I made that’. Then, there’s the moulding of the child into a person – another act of creation – of shaping its innate qualities into something beautiful. This is the parent as poet, creating.

But the parent is also the reader. Like great poetry must make the world new for us, so does a child. That jolt of experiencing something for the first time that poetry gives, so also do children. That is what people mean when they more prosaically say “they keep us young”.

And that is where the pleasure of having children lies – in being both poet and reader, in living, just once again (ok twice) with wide-eyed innocence.

Now go read this article. And this one.

London – confused

2011-08-10T17:39:00.002+08:00

In 2009, while controversially accepting a literary prize in Israel, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said a few lines that I remember whenever I am confused about which side I should be on:

"If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals."

By this analogy, the youth going on a rampage in London are eggs, flinging themselves against the system with abandon. And yet, I find it difficult to see them as eggs. Maybe because they seem too hard boiled. They lack the fragility that Murakami described; instead they simply seem self-indulgent.

Poor youth with blackberries seems like an oxymoron to me. (Then again, maybe a blackberry is not a luxury in London, just like poor people in Hong Kong do have fridges unlike poor people in India.) As does poor youth… making a beeline for the electronics stores and nicking a flat-screen TV.

Why am I more ready to sympathise with protesters, even violent protesters, in Libya and Syria but not these supposedly angry young men and women in London?

1. The protesters in the middle-east have a cause. They are seeking a fairer political system and freedom from a dictatorial regime. It is possible that the London youth have the same agenda. But my gut feeling is that they don’t, that if asked what this is all about, they would not be too sure (beyond that flat-screen TV and the need to give vent to some pent-up aggression). It has gone far beyond protesting the death of one man allegedly shot by the police.

2. The middle-east protesters tried peaceful means first before resorting to violence. For me, this is important. If you have a moral cause, you will seek to gain it in the most moral way. If that fails, Gandhi would say, keep trying. But some might excuse doing “the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals” if peaceful means fail. The key thing is – did you even try the peaceful means?

3. There will always be some amount of disorder in a violent protest. But when the disorder seems ordered – when basically stealing seems to be the agenda first – it’s hard to be on the side of that kind of ‘disorder’. It’s the difference between a premeditated and a completely spontaneous crime.

There are those that argue that British society is responsible for the underclass it has created. Read this compelling piece.

I get it. A society in which a whole group of people feel they have no hope of bettering their lives and no stake is vulnerable to frustrations boiling over. The society can deal with this threat by placing many restrictions and dealing severely with expressions of public anger. However, a society that does not want to be so repressive has to take preventative measures – ensure that conditions do not arise whereby people feel so disconnected from society that they go crazy.

But how to do this? One argument is greater economic equality. The Equality Trust argues here for why countries where the gap between the rich and poor is less have fewer social problems. But the gap between rich and poor seems to be getting larger everywhere. I am surprised by the number of countries that claim that the gap between rich and poor in their country is among the highest in the world, if not the highest. Is it possible to reduce this gap? The Equality Trust believes so and this page lists how.

Well and good. But until then what? These measures take time. One might also argue that in the current economic climate many countries cannot afford this kind of spending (think the US debt crisis and the policy compromises Obama was forced to make). So when riots erupt in this interim period what stance are we to take? Note that the victims of the riots are not necessarily the rich or the powerful, just the slightly better off, often small business owners.

My other basic problem with this argument that the riots erupted because of underlying social tensions – i.e. if one accepts that these are indeed impoverished and disenfranchised youth and not just hooligans out for a free set of trainers – is that one may also apply it to terrorism or any kind of crime. One could say the same of Ajmal Kasab, for example. He seemed more impoverished and disenfranchised than the London kids (who may not have killed anyone, but I watched an interview where a couple of them said that’s their next move). One could say the same of anyone who breaks into a store and steals a TV. Should we be nodding sympathetically at all these people?

Or should we be understanding of their angst but not tolerant of their antics? In which case, would it be ok to go after them with water cannons or tear gas? Or would that be stooping to their level of violence? But it’s ok to hit someone back, if they hit first no? Or isn’t it?

Arrrgh. Confused.

Things that annoy the hell out of me

2011-08-03T11:40:00.002+08:00

People in Hong Kong pride themselves on being very civilized and are often turning up their noses at uncouth Mainlanders who allegedly push and shove, talk loudly, squat on the side of the road etc.

There seems to be little awareness of the self-centredness and selfishness in evidence every day by their own community. For example:

1. Young able-bodied people in the MTR play with their iphones, keep their eyes resolutely closed, or stare into space, steadfastly and the pregnant and elderly around them so they don’t have to give up their precious seat. This, even when they sitting in the seats earmarked for the disabled. Out of an entire compartment section, someone may hesitantly offer their seat; if it’s rush hour, don’t count on it though.

2. The elevator in the MTR is meant for disabled people, people with kids in strolleys, heavy luggage etc. For everyone else there’s the escalator. If it wasn’t clear enough, there’s a sticker right there denoting it. Nevertheless, you will see all manner of able-bodied folk thronging the lift, like standing on an escalator is too taxing. Worse, these people will edge in front of other people. Also irritating are the hangers-on of people who need to be in the elevator. It never occurs to these accompanying people that they could just let one person go with the strolley/luggage and take the escalator themselves, thus freeing up the lift for people who actually need to be in it. No. Let grandma, other lady with baby wait because I and my two family members must accompany my helper who is pushing my kid.

3. In other general irritating escalator behaviour, what is with the inability to move to the back of the escalator (or the middle of the MTR compartment for that matter) and the jabbing the door-close button as soon as you get in, even in the face of people rushing towards it? You know you’re a Hong Konger when you go for the door-close button ; I am guilty of this myself. What I am not guilty of is slamming the door shut in the face of someone else. I always look to see if someone is coming before hitting door-close. It really is that simple.

4. Standing in front of the open train doors but not getting in because you want to get a seat in the next train, even as an automated voice saying ‘Please don’t block the entryway’ blares over your head. Again, I do this, but I stand to the side and keep a watch about so I can move aside quickly so that anyone who wants to get into the train is not blocked. What I do not do is stand right there like a statue, and watch impassively as old lady gets stuck in the sliding doors because people did not move apart and let her in.

5. Not wiping the seat clean after you pee squatting over it because you cannot bear the thought of other people’s germs. Maybe you think leaving the evidence of germs in the form of pee drops – if not splashes - all over the seat is a public service, alerting all to the fact that the toilet seat is not sterile. Save your concern next time and just wipe the damn seat before you leave, ok?

Sometimes I think these people deserve a Bombay-style reality check. Instead of everyone politely ignoring the offender, what I wish for is a Bombay-style aunty going: “Hey get the fuck up” or shoving the immobile statues out of the way. Still, so enveloped in their cocoon of self-love are these people, that they might just think “how rude” and keep fiddling with their iphone.

Things I don’t care about

2011-07-29T14:21:00.001+08:00

But maybe I should?

This little gem appeared in the South China Morning Post in an article on the couple that founded Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the boutique hotel booking agent. I presume it is one of their tips:

“Book restaurants to guarantee your reservation. Say it's a special occasion even if it isn't. That way you should get a good table. “

Apart from the oddness of advising people to outright lie to get a reservation, what I don’t get is this ‘good table’ business. I understand if you’re in show business or a wannabe celebrity. Then, it is necessary to be seen and so you don’t want to shoved in a corner. However, otherwise, how does it matter?

I am sometimes quite happy to be shoved in the back if at a place that a lot of people I know frequent and I don’t want to run into them. I do not cherish being near the kitchen exit or the toilet entrance but if the restaurant is crowded I can understand. Normally, if you make a reservation this does not happen. If there is a nice view, I would like to sit by it, but overall, I’m not fussed.

I am not one of those people who enter a restaurant and make where I sit a point of prestige. Because more often than not, a table is a table is a table. Isn’t it?

Am I missing something? What exactly is a good table?

Mothers and Babies

2011-07-27T12:14:00.000+08:00

Before I became a mother I could look at pictures of starving children and sigh but not flinch. Now I find myself in physical distress. My heart constricts, I feel actual pain and the tears come.

So this morning I found myself weeping into my breakfast as I watched the images from Somalia. The skeletal babies, their eyes vacant and gaping wide, as their mothers bend over them.

Any mother will tell you the anxiety she goes through when her child skips a single meal, when her baby doesn’t get down that last ounce in the bottle. And then there are these mothers, forced to watch their babies starve.

After I had finished reading both the Bridget Jones books and was desperate for something else by the same author, I came across Cause Celeb. A chicklit novel is an unlikely place to get a glimpse of famine and how the machinery that might alleviate it turns but there is one episode in the novel that has stayed in me. It is pointed out that until children are starving to the extent that they are skeletons, and newspapers can be provided with those images, nobody will bother. The NGOs (which is not to say that NGOs don’t have their flaws) have to hunt out these starving children and click pictures of them to get the world press remotely interested. It is almost as if babies have to get to that to that state of starvation for the world to care. Also a certain number of people have to die – and be verified to have died – from starvation for it to be declared a famine and the UN to kick into action. Otherwise, you know, it’s not really that bad.

I understand this and yet I am horrified by it. When I watch the images on TV, I wonder how long were the babies starving – a month? a week? – to get to this state so that we could see these images and then finally, reach into our wallets maybe. Are we really so horrible? When told that people are starving in Africa, do we really think “oh but that baby doesn’t look starving enough?”

I guess we are. Even now, because these images seem to come up every few years and seem to have almost become a permanent fixture for Somalia (though I guess are not so because if the world press is reporting it, it must be really bad), many will not be moved. I know I am so moved, almost desperate for those babies, because I am a mother. Because I know what it is.

And for that reason, I force myself to look, to not avert my eyes, to spare a thought, because really it is the least I can do.

The One

2011-07-26T15:12:00.001+08:00

This article brought together two topics, one that has preoccupied me and another that has preoccupied many of my friends, for some time.

The first, the one I keep puzzling over, is the ‘why’ of marriage. It is something I kind of had an answer to but could never neatly articulate. De Botton does so:

..in the middle of the 18th Century, in the more prosperous countries of Europe, a remarkable new ideal began to form in one particular section of society.
This ideal proposed that married people should henceforth not only tolerate one another for the sake of children, extraordinarily they should also take pains to deeply love and desire one another at the same time.

…The new ideal set before the world the compelling notion that one might solve one's most pressing needs all at once with the help of just one other person.

... The bourgeoisie was hence neither so crushed as not to believe in romantic love at all nor so liberated from necessity as to be able to pursue erotic and emotional entanglements without limit. The desire for fulfilment through an investment in a single, legally and eternally-contracted person represented a fragile solution to their particular balance of emotional need and practical constraint.

But what interested me more was the parallel he draws between the new ideal of marriage that emerged in the 18th C and the new attitude to ‘work’.
It cannot have been a coincidence that a very similar yoking together of necessity and freedom became apparent at around the very same time in relation to that second pillar of modern happiness - work.

… The bourgeois ideal of work, like its marital counterpart, was an embodiment of an intermediate position. One needed to work for money but work could also be pleasurable - just as marriage could not escape the traditional burdens associated with childrearing - and yet it did not have to be without some of the delights of a love affair and a sexual obsession.

Since his article is supposed to be about marriage, his conclusion deals with that and is also nicely expressed:

We cannot say, as cynics are sometimes tempted, that happy marriage is a myth. It is infinitely more tantalising than this. It is a possibility - just a very rare one. There is no metaphysical reason why marriage should not honour our hopes - the odds are just powerfully stacked against us.

Today, many are unwilling to buy into such poor odds and are rejecting marriage altogether. Others have tempered their expectation of marriage being all things at all time, that marriage will “perfectly fuse together the three golden strands of fulfilment - romantic, erotic and familial” Instead, and I suppose I am part of this group, we believe that marriage will satisfy these different needs to varying degrees at different times but that the stability and convenience of the supermarket is worth it, even if one does get better produce in specialized shops. While rejecting the idea of ‘The One’, we have made our peace with the notion of the ‘more-or-less One’, someone who more-or-less fits the bill of our requirements, though understandably might not quite be there on some counts.

But what about our attitude to work? The great conundrum of our generation, it seems to me, is not so much trying to find ‘The One’ in terms of life partner, but in terms of ‘the perfect job’. Unlike marriage, most of us cannot afford to reject the idea of work altogether. So what is the alternative?

Help or hindrance

2011-07-25T14:30:00.003+08:00

One of the defining characteristics of being an adult Indian woman, especially a married woman, in India is that you begin talking about the household help. Sit with a group of married Indian women at a party or in the building and more often than not, the discussion will veer around to complaints about the maid or how to get a good one or how expensive they have become. When I got married I swore to myself that I would not become one of those women.

I still stick to my decision not to go on too much about domestic help just as I try not to go on too much about my child because basically going on about any one topic can get boring. Moreover, if this is an unending problem it might be better to take a breather from it and talk about something else.

But, now that I am older and wiser, I do not trivialize those discussions anymore. The fact is that for a woman running a household – and the job of running the household is primarily left to women in India – having decent help is pretty important, just as important as having decent employees is to any company. Just because the domain of the discussion is the home doesn’t make it trivial.

Poet Mamma wrote about how domestic help in India can be a cause of great stress for women in India. I agree.

My experience of domestic help in India is that they range from needing a great deal of supervision/management to being incompetent. Many of those who are good at their jobs have been trained through such arduous supervision/management over time and they are now in short supply.

I used to think that part of the problem is that they are so badly paid. However, now I am not convinced that that would solve the problem. I think attention to detail and pride in attention to detail – essential qualities in good household help – are just not high up there in the Indian work ethic. I see this in a lot of other professions in India but it seems to inflict household help in a big way. I definitely think that household help should be paid better. But from what I have seen, even substantially raising the salary does not ensure competence, leave alone excellence. While the ones that are good at their job are not necessarily the ones that are well paid.

My mother’s approach to handling the household help is rigorous supervision in the first few weeks of work. Honestly, if I had to work for my mother, I would have probably quit in a day. On the other hand, most people who work for my mother realize that she has a kind heart, although she wants things done her way and is quite a nag. Her friends, relatives, and now her daughters are often at the receiving end of phone calls appealing for help for the maid – kid’s school fees, husband’s job, how to secure a house, medical issues etc.

I prefer a more businesslike approach. I would prefer if helpers agreed on a salary, did your work well without having to be nagged or told, came to work on time and took leave as previously agreed, just like any other job.

But when I had to manage household help myself, I realised that a more laissez-faire approach doesn’t work. One has to project this kadoos image, otherwise you are perceived as a softie and all hell breaks loose. So you either turn into this nagging Nazi or be walked all over, especially if you are young.

My one experience of managing a household help in India scarred me enough for me to vow to just do everything myself when I moved to Hong Kong. Luckily, in Hong Kong it is possible to do everything oneself especially if there are no kids. First, houses are small. There isn’t copious amounts of dust. One does not feel obliged to cook complicated food, even for parties (I am shameless in this regard.) You don’t have people dropping in announced so it’s fine if your house is a bit messy during the week. Buying groceries is convenient – one has the option of a supermarket or a ‘wet market’ like in India but both are not a hassle to get to even in pouring rain (going to the bazaar in Mumbai’s heat/rain can be a trying experience) and the quality of produce is generally acceptable.

Getting anything done is simple – there can be communication barrier when trying to get the local plumber or electrician to come but once they do they do a good job or they say right away that they can’t do it and they also tell you upfront what they will charge. Even though you are speaking two different languages it all gets sorted out without the miscommunication that seems to occur in India.

It also helps to be married to a man who has lived away from his parents for at least a year. So he is used to doing housework himself instead of seeing it as the woman’s job. I had done very little housework before I moved to Hong Kong, but it’s not rocket science. V and I split the work pretty evenly – it was quickly discovered that I was a dud at cooking so V handled that and I focused on cleaning up. We basically did most of the housework on weekends. It gave me a sense of pride and relief that I could manage on my own without a hlper.

Then after about a year and a half, V’s friend asked him if we’d like to try out a part-time helper who was looking for work. We decided to give it a shot. Part-time foreign helpers and live-out are technically illegal in Hong Kong but they are still a common phenomenon because many helpers like to make a quick buck on the side, particularly on their statutory weekly day off.

This one arrived in a miniskirt (which she changed into shorts I think) and got cracking with a pair of earphones blaring music into her head. I didn’t have to tell her what to do. She went at the house like the pro that she was and in two hours V and I found ourselves staring at our sparkling home openmouthed. We were hooked. We also had a great deal of respect for these people who do a much better job than we ever could.

I have experienced three helpers in Hong Kong and never seen the level of incompetence that is rife among their kind in India. The helpers here are able to work independently up to a certain standard. They know what has to be done and they get on with it. If you want things done a certain way, you have to tell them or show them once and generally, it’s done.

Admittedly, I am a hands off kind of person. I am bad at delegation and if I have to instruct too much, I’d rather just do it myself. I am not too concerned about things done my way as long as the end result is presentable. This is not the case with most people but even my more exacting friends here are satisfied with their helpers. We do not often have conversations about our helpers because there is not much to say.

This is however not a universal state of being. Many people in Hong Kong are unhappy with their helpers. The helper discussions on online forums are always active. People ask me who I am leaving my child with when I come to work and when I say a helper, they expect me to follow up with a complaint and when I say that I am very happy with my helper, they look beyond surprised.

The attitude of the Chinese to helpers is similar to the typical Indian one. Here, the helper-employer relationship is regulated by law – there is a minimum wage, conditions of employment, statutory leave, a labour tribunal that is not unsympathetic to the helpers etc. But within the parameters of the contract, many families work their helpers to the bone, knowing that for many of them making the job work is a necessity. They are also treated like second-class citizens.

I think to some extent this inability to see helpers as human beings – or to see them as a different class of human beings – results in some of the problems between employers and helpers both in Hong Kong and in India. But it doesn't explain everything. I have seen many examples of decent helpers in Hong Kong but very few in India.

Once there are kids, whether one parent is at home or both are working, it is very hard to manage without help. I know people in the US do it, and I frankly do not know how. I think if you happen to have a difficult child (say even a baby with colic), it is extremely hard for two people to manage the child and all the housework, especially if one or both parents goes to work in the week. It would put an incredible stress on relationships.

Poet Mamma mentioned that one of the attractions of moving to India was the availability of household help. I am in the opposite situation. My primary reason for NOT moving to India – and V agrees with me here – is the lack of quality household help. I would not be able to manage a small child in India and stay sane with the quality of help available. If you asked me the reasons I am in Hong Kong, right now the biggest one would be my helper.

People Like Us

2011-07-22T10:37:00.003+08:00

Some time ago, I was chatting with a friend and she said something on the lines of “I was talking about people like us”. It made me think. Who are people like us?

Demographically, people like us (I’m doing away with the quote marks out of convenience) would be characterized as Indian, urban, middle-class, English-speaking, Gen X or Gen Y.

But there is vast variation in this group, and many of the people included would not be, according to my friend and I, very like us at all. We had a much narrower definition.

People like us (to name a few characteristics off the top of my head):

Spoke English as a first language, even to our parents.
Grew up reading Enid Blyton, watching English movies and dancing to English songs and probably missed out on the whole of 80s Bollywood.
Wore shorts around the house and sometimes outside the house.
Didn’t wear a bra at home even in front of our fathers.
Ate meat. Ate with cutlery, rarely using our fingers. Ate a mix of Indian and non-Indian food (or at least Indian versions of non-Indian food).
Were not exposed to a world where brothers and male cousins lounged around while the girls ‘helped’ out. Rather, all young people did very little work around the house. Mothers, though, tended to do most of the housework, dads rarely cooked.
Had cousins living outside India so had some access to pop culture beyond India.
Did not have a life that was completely secret from our parents; our parents – at least our mothers and eventually our fathers - knew our childhood crushes and later our boyfriends/girlfriends.
Starting drinking alcohol and went out pubbing when we were at least 18, for some of us earlier. And our parents knew we were going. Having a drink with parents was not a big deal.
Didn’t have to sneak our party clothes out of the houses. We got dressed for a night out, in short skirts and strappy tops or whatever, at home.
Were part of families where arranged marriages in our generation were rare. Our parents would be nonplussed by a request to help ‘arrange’ a marriage and would have to probably consult some friends as to how to go about it.

There are probably more, can’t think of them. An overarching commonality was religion. We were all Catholic and/or went to English-medium convent schools in Bombay. It is possible for people of other religions to be like us, though I don’t know that many. It is also possible for there to be Catholics who were/are nothing like us.

On the other hand, even among people like us there were differences:

Some people’s mums worked, others’ didn’t.
In some people’s parental circles, women smoking was common, in other’s not.
Some people’s parents were religious, other’s not.
Attitude to drinking and partying varied in the late teens. The ones whose parents had a strict curfew or a ‘don’t drink’ policy carried the glamour of partying into the next decade while most people like us, by our late 20s just saw it as something to do, sometimes.
Attitude to travel. Some parents were ok with out-of-town travel, in mixed gender groups, even in late teens, others were ok only with an adult chaperone, others were ok only with all-girl groups, others were just not with any kind of travel except with family.
Which college you went to and whether you studied arts or science/commerce.
Some had stable families, others didn't.

What I have realised having gone out into the world is that while a lot of people seem like us, scratch the surface and they are not. For example, V and his sisters seem to be people like us. So imagine my surprise when I went to his parent’s home and realised they are really not. The difference being that the liberalism is self-created, it doesn’t even go one generation back, so they are not deeply shocked by conservatism, they just shrug it off or are somewhat amused.

For example:

They did not bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home to meet their parents, or even let their parents know there was a boyfriend/girlfriend.
They didn’t go out partying with their parents’ knowledge permission until much later in life. They sneaked out.
My Sil’s wedding was probably the first non-arranged marriage in the family and caused much drama.
They spoke Malyalam to their parents.
Girls kind of ended up eating last in their parents home. Nothing explicitly stated, it just happened.

The point of this post was that if I restricted my discussions to people who are really like us, I would be talking about a group so small as to be statistically insignificant – basically the seven or eight girls who formed my core group of friends in college, and that even within that group there were differences that would make the actual people like us countable on one hand.

However, in listing out the commonalities, I realize that there are quite a lot of them and that while the group is small, if I allow for some characteristics not applying to some people, it might not be as small or as diverse as initially thought. So maybe ‘people like us’ is a fair characterization after all.

What Benji Did -2

2011-07-18T14:56:00.003+08:00

[By popular demands and also because I realised I should document this stuff]

Benji danced

To distract the Benj, V sometimes puts music on for him. Sadly not Mozart, more like hip hop and R&B. When Benji figured out that the sound was coming from the player, he stared at it in fascination. Unfortunately, once under my lax supervision, he also lunged for it and grabbed the ipod, thereby ruining the player. I was secretly happy because I’m not a fan of music at bedtime and V is, so the ruined player solved my problem (I did NOT, however, as suspected by V urge Benji to break the player). After much effort, V managed to get the player to play again. The other day, we plopped Benji down on the bed in front of the player and he started rocking his body back and forth. V felt he wanted the music on so he put it on and Benji started bopping his head and his body – basically dancing. Then V started dancing and Benji was too delighted and started moving more. Then I started dancing and Benji stopped dancing and gazed at me with a ‘God woman you can’t dance’ expression. Hmph.

Benji cried

The other day V pretended to beat me up. He wasn’t even physically making contact, so there was no sound to alarm Benji. Benhi, however, looked very distressed and started howling. My helper and I were very thrilled with him and rewarded him with many kisses while V looked very sheepish. Later, I pretended to hit V. Actually, I gave him a few smart slaps. V pretended it hurt. Benji couldn’t be less bothered. Then this weekend we decided to test it out again (I know, we’re very mean). This time, Benji kept looking at me unsurely. If I smiled at him, he would smile back. So then I pretended to cry. Benji immediately started howling. I am very thrilled that Benji is protective of me. It is also amazing how kids have a sense of what is upsetting about violence, even if they have no template for it (we do not hit each other, we have never hit Benji, he doesn’t know that hitting can cause pain) and also to know who is capable of hurting whom and also to love their mother more :).

Benji screamed

Benji doesn't speak yet - though V claims he said Appa and I claim he said Amma - but he does yell. He shouts 'A' and "ahh' and "Ehh" loudly, screaming them out. If you say something back, loudly or softly, he will yell back. It is amusing, but not for the neighbours I guess.

Benji developed a will

Before when we used take objects away from Benji, he would be easily distracted. Now not so much. If he so much as senses you are going to take something away from him, he arches his back and wails. Completely with angry let face, tears and all. It is quite funny. Also loud.

Mumbai

2011-07-15T17:38:00.001+08:00

I have nothing much to say.

Between 2002-2003, when there were a series of bomb blasts on trains, I was a journalist and was caught up in doing my job. We distilled anything we felt into our pages. Needless to say, we came to work the next day on those same trains every time.

I was more scared, outraged, pained and panicky after the 2006 bomb blasts although I was in Hong Kong at the time. When I heard I called my folks immediately and texted my friends, waiting anxiously for them to check in, doing a roll call of everyone I knew who could be in the vicinity of the bombs and realizing that it was really impossible to keep track of everyone.

The 26/11 attacks were different because they were so outrageous and we found ourselves watching the whole thing play out live.

This time, I feel only sadness and tiredness. I didn’t bother calling my parents as soon as I heard as it was early morning and I didn’t want to wake them. I didn’t text my friends. I have decided that my friends and family will be fine and if they are not fine, I will be informed, and there is no point clogging the phone lines trying to get in touch with people and then panicking (thankfully needlessly so far) when I can’t.

I also feel a sense of futility. This is not the first attack, nor will it be the last.

PS: Bhagwad has an interesting post on Train Accidents vs Terrorist Attacks. Please read and think.

Freedom at Midnight - not

2011-07-11T13:00:00.004+08:00

This post by Bhagwad drew my attention to the Delhi police commissioner BK Gupta’s nugget of wisdom on women’s responsibility for their own safety. Newspaper reports differ on the exact words of the commissioner (which is also a problem with the media. Don’t they have recorders? I’m presuming he was speaking in English since he was addressing a FICCI gathering so why the discrepancy in his words).

Anyway here is a sampling of what he purportedly said, the gist of which remains the same:

“You can’t travel alone at 2am and then say Delhi is not safe. It would be ideal if a woman takes her brother or driver along. It’s wrong to say the Capital is not safe for women” (From Bhagwad’s blog)

“You can't go out at 2 in the night and then say that you were a victim of a crime… We all need to take some precautions. You can't carry crores in cars with your employees knowing about it…Similarly , if you travel alone after 2 am and become victim of a crime, the police alone can't be blamed. It is advisable that a relative or friend is with you at odd hours… Delhi is as safe as any other city. It is just about the perception.” (TOI)

“You cannot travel at 2 a.m. and say that Delhi is unsafe…You should take your brother or driver with you. These reasonable precautions are expected to be taken by all Delhi citizens” (Daily Bhaskar)

In reaction, we thankfully have a slew of women’s organizations calling the police commissioner out on his misguided comments. We also have the usual brigade ready to side with the commissioner in the interest of women’s safety armed with their trusty analogy – “be reasonable, if you leave your house unlocked and it get’s robbed, it is irresponsible no?” The reason the “lock your house” analogy annoys the hell out of me is because it is what we are told time and time again (most recently with regard to Slutwalk?). The implication of that analogy is twofold:

1. Women are comparable to houses or possessions that can be locked up for their own safety. The fact is that it is not possible to live a full and free life under these kinds of restrictions. Women are not inanimate objects or cattle. This police commissioner says 2 am, the Bangalore police says 11 pm (that they cannot ensure safety of the city if young people are out of the streets after pubbing post-11 pm), a vast majority of the Indian population might say 8 pm, and some people might say never (and who can argue with them because the fact is that women are actually unsafe on the streets at any point, day or night). This common sense is so variable it might not be common sense at all.

2. The other implication is that the victim of the crime bears some responsibility for the crime being committed. This is the implication whether you are talking about women being assaulted at night or houses being robbed. It is wrong. It is not the responsibility of people to lock up their possessions or their women as if they are possessions. It is the responsibility of people to keep their thieving hands to themselves and if they do not, it is the responsibility of the law to come down heavily on these people. It is not expected of law-enforcers to make excuses for those perpetrating a crime in order to make their own jobs easier or to excuse their inability to do their jobs.

Note that when a crime is committed people do not “blame the police alone” (as Mr. Gupta reportedly suggests in quote no. 2). Rather, the first to be blamed is naturally the criminal. If, however, the rate of certain types of crimes is very high then the police will of course also have to take some responsibility for failing in crime prevention (as would say a risk officer in a bank who failed to spot risks or frauds and do enough to ensure they don’t occur, that being after all his/her job). Who people should not be blaming even a little bit is the victim.

The suggestion that women enlist a brother or employ a male driver to escort them is not only distateful it is dangerous. It promotes the erroneous idea that women need protection from men, that a woman without a brother or a husband is exposed and vulnerable, that girl children are a big responsibility (this is what many women are told when they give birth to a girl child) and by extension a liability.

It would be more productive if we did away with this idea of women as the ‘fairer sex’ in need of special protection and brought them up to walk about free and proud, capable of defending themselves if need be (and we must depend on our police to ensure that this need will not be every night, for the rest of history) and secure in the knowledge that if someone tried to harm them, they as law abiding citizens would be supported by the police who would strive to bring the criminals to justice.

Many people have pointed out that women need to be out at night for work. I don't think women should need to justify why they need to be out at night. So what if we want to stay late at a friends place chatting but decide to come home, yes, on our own without male escort in tow, at 2 am? Why must that be a ridiculous proposition.

Every society needs some amount of risk mitigation, and for that we have the police. Why must we be asked to enlist our own private armies for our protection? A society which requires private guards for women, even if they are called brothers, is a society in deep trouble and we need to just acknowledge that instead of making it sound like the women are stupid for venturing out without protection. Just as is a society that imposes a curfew on half its population in its capital city no less. Curfews are meant for wartime and states of emergency, not to go on indefinitely for centuries.

The propensity to commit crime is probably never going to be driven out of the human psyche. Again, for this reason we have the police. It is deemed by most societies that one of the primary jobs of the metropolitan police is to ensure the safety of the city both during day and night. If the police commissioner believed this to be an unrealistic expectation, he should have said so when offered his job. If after taking on the job, he feels unequal to the task he promised to perform, he can step down. If he feels, he has limited resources, he can bring it to the attention of the public.

It would have been more reasonable for him to have said: “I am sorry that I am unable to perform the duty vested in me by the citizens of Delhi to ensure safe passage for all its citzens at night. I would be able to perform this very necessary task if I had XX more men or XX more money”. Or he could have said: “The police of Delhi will do everything in their power to ensure the safety of its women at night. If there are crimes, we will go after the suspects no holds barred. We will not delay registering complaints. We will organise more night-time patrols. We will cooperate with citezen groups to organise neighbourhood watches. We will liaise with the government to ensure better street lighting. We pledge to respond within 10 minutes to a 999 call. We will do our best. it would help if citezens pressure the government for XX funds to execute our plan. We promise results in five years.”

It turns out that according to one report he did cite examples of what they are doing. He named women police commissioners, beat policemen liasing with neighbourhoods (and even submitting applications for electricity – something I think is quite unnecessary for an allegedly overworked police force who seems to be struggling with its primary duties to be undertaking but their intentions are good so let’s not condemn them) and conducting self defense classes for women. All very good and Mr. Gupta should have stuck with just that instead of revealing his misogyny in all its glory with his pearl of non-wisdom about women and their nightly assault-provoking adventures.

That is all we ask, that the police do their best. If they fail, they failed trying and not making excuses. At least one can respect that. Imagine the CEO of a bank saying “Arre what can I do, recession” for a decade or longer?
He/she would be out of a job. The problem lies with us and our propensity to accept excuses and mediocre governance and not demand our full rights as citizens. We are always asked to adjust and adjust we have for time immemorial (either adjust or cut corners) – women and the poor of course are asked to adjust more than anyone else, and poor women most of all. Our defense mechanism in India is to say – at least we are better than XX. Then suddenly, we realise with a shock that we are on a list of the five most unsafe countries in the world for women – sharing the limelight with Afghanistan and Somalia. (http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/india-fourth-most-dangerous-place-for-women-survey-112349)

What we need to realize in India is that a country will never progress if we set the bar at the lowest common denominator and take heart at mediocre execution. We have to look to those who are doing better and push our public servants to do the same. We need to hold our public officials to account and this does not happen by nodding in sympathy when they fail in their duties and accepting their inevitable and stale excuses.

Another favourite excuse in India is limited resources. I am not buying this anymore. We have one of the highest tax rates in the world. India believes it can afford a nuclear defense programme, something quite expensive to run. But it apparently cannot spend on a competent police force which is needed every day by everyone. Where are your taxes going really? Amit Varma has a series on his blog tracking the absurd ways in which our hard earned money is put to use. I do not believe we have limited resources because insufficient funds are collected to taxes. I believe it is because our public servants help themselves to the resources with abandon. Some resources are just left there, waiting to be eaten up.

I do not see why the police should lack resources. We should not have a manpower problem in this country. If people are calling the police with irrelevant complaints (such as lack of water supply), why not start a call centre (of non-police but trained people) to screen calls? Aren't call centres our claim to fame? If the police budget is insufficient, the commissioner should make it clear to the people. If he felt he could not do his job with the resources provided, he should have refused to take up the job, or made it clear what he could achieve when he took it up.

That was not the only odd statement the police chief made. Here are some more (from this article):

Citing the examples of New York, Johannesburg and London, he said: "The crime rate is much higher in these cities, including that of rape."

It apparently did not occur to him that the crime rate is higher in these cities because people actually report crimes, especially crimes like rape. They report them because they can reasonably expect their police force to act and not make excuses like ‘why weren’t you more careful’? They report them because rape victims are expected to be treated with sensitivity, not branded forever by society as a ‘shamed woman’ and raked over the coals by a justice system that has a low conviction rate for rape.

He also said: “No one in the world carries millions in a car. It only happens here. In Germany, they say if someone carries 500 euros with him, he would definitely be murdered. Strangely, here we like to carry millions with us”

Really? Will anyone from Germany verify this bit of folk wisdom? Forgive me for doubting the hearsay of the esteemed Delhi police chief. Is he suggesting that Indians carry millions with them by car because they have faith in the police force to protect them should anyone try to steal that money or because the likelihood of the money being stolen is low?

The police chief also washed his hands off thefts, burglaries and snatchings. "The bag of my daughter who lives in London was snatched more than once. It happens," he said.

OMG! Enough said I think. So everything ‘happens’. Why do we need him, I wonder?

Finally, if I sound angry, it is because is this not an academic question for me. It is a question of daily life. It is a question of being told to adjust and adjusting and still having my breast pinched hard when I was 12 years old and walking to school in my uniform. It is a question of my friend having a guy masturbate down her back in a train. It is a question of women of all economic classes being restricted from certain jobs because it is not safe at night. Our cities are not safe – not for men, and definitely not for women. The police need to accept that instead of passing thebuck onto the victims.

Ambitions

2011-07-08T17:20:00.001+08:00

So you know how I also say that parents must not foist their unfulfilled dreams and needs on their children and let their offspring’s hearts lead them where they will? Well, before you worry, I still believe that and all.

But parents are allowed to dream, aren’t they? Last year, my sis, my Sil and I had babies. Here’s a list of our collective aspirations for our kids. Not your standard engineer-doctor, or at least not completely.

Benji: He’s liked to look at art since he was a kid, absolutely stares open mouthed at the paintings in our house. So I’ve been harbouring hopes of him being an artist. Little kids in Hong Kong nowadays all play some musical instrument or another and although these lessons must be damn annoying for them, they look super cute with their little violins. So my alternative career for Benj is cello player. Yeah, I’m specific like that. Piano-violin is too clichéd.

La: Sil always wanted to be a model or actress in her erm youth so she harbours this hope for her daughter. Never mind that Sil is high-flying corporate type now. La is a big drama queen so this seems like an apt choice for her.

Sibear: Sister and bro-in-law want her to be either a scientist or a sport star (preferably tennis star). Sis and bro-in-law are both scientists. They are also tennis fans. But they said basketball is ok also, or any other sport she wants to be awesome at.

I have decided I want Sibear to be a doctor/dentist. Actually, in the midst of one of my many ailments one day, I thought it would be cool if Benji became a doctor. Then I would have a medical professional at my beck and call. However, V pointed out that Benji if he was a typical son would be most inattentive and probably tell me not to be such a moaner. So I thought Sibear would be a good choice for in-family-doctor since she would be obliged to be polite and listen to my woes.

Any: La’s sister is still too young for a definitive profession to be decided yet; however, she is very feisty so could well be a politician/local dada. I have, however, decided that if Sibear falls through on the doctor plan, Any can take her place in providing her aunt with sage and patient medical counsel. If Sibear does fulfill my dreams, then Any can become a dentist. Because I have a lot of teeth issues too.

So there is my humble plan for my and other people’s offspring. No need for career angst or anything; all they have to do is oblige.

What Benji Did

2011-07-05T10:26:00.000+08:00

People complain that I don’t put up pictures of my son on Facebook, some of you may even be wondering why I don’t write about my son.

I think it’s because when I’m with my son, I’m in the moment. I enjoy my son purely. There is no ambiguity. It is a joy I share with my husband and my helper. We discuss what my son did and we giggle. Every now and then my mum or sister will ask, “what did Benji do”, and I will tell them about his latest antics and they will laugh too and say: “I wish I was there”.

A friend once commented that I am a negative person. The fact is that my joys are in the moment and savoured. I don’t always need to share them and when I do it’s with limited people who are very close to me or who happen to be there at that exact moment. I can’t actually elaborate on my joys in the same way in which I can articulate my pet peeves.

Anyway, here is my attempt to capture and present to you some of the joy of being the mum of my son who is the bestest boochie-coochie boy ever. Here are some of his latest:

1. The very latest, he pooed on me on Sunday. That is, he did such an enormous poo it leaked out of his diaper and onto me. When I realised, I just sat there and screamed “aaaargh!” Benji of course looked at me quizzically, innocent of the idea that an adult might not like to be pooed upon. V said: “What are you sitting and screaming? Take him to the bathroom and wash him.” I said “aaarrrgh” again and then gingerly lifted Benji by his armpits and ran to the bathroom where I plonked him down as fast as I could and after aiming the shower at the most poo-covered spots, instructed V to bathe him. I don’t think this is the first time Benji has pooed on me. But it’s been a while. I was just so grossed out.

2. We can see traits in Benji that he has inherited from us. He has his father’s propensity to sweat profusely on his head, like his father he doesn’t like the sun and frowns if he happens to be passing through a sunny spot, and he has his father’s eye for the girls. If he spots a pretty girl, young or old, he will grin and grin (even if she is not looking at him) and sometimes gurgle and shout to get her attention. It is quite embarassing. He even did this to the billboard of a model once. I’m thinking it would be safer to keep him in Hong Kong till past his teens as there will be less chance of the Chinese girls reciprocating his attention here. And from me, he has inherited a love of books (i.e. pulling them off the shelf, rattling them around and then watching them fall to the ground in a heap around him) and a propensity to make complete nakra about his food when he is tired and then realizing after two minutes that he likes it after all.

3. Benji does not sleep with us but rather in a room shared with our helper. She volunteered to sleep with him because she saw me looking sleep-deprived every morning. Benji greets the day at 5.30 am, if we’re lucky 6 am, by shouting. This is because prior to that everyone is trying to ignore that he is awake. V or I (normally V) go and get him into our room and plonk him on the bed between us. He beams at us delighted by us and life and everything. Then he gets bored of us and starts to whine so we give him a carton or a plastic bag or something and he attacks that.

4. Benji likes to bang things so we thought we’d get him a little piano. We picked out a cheapie one which turned out to be a good thing because Benji sometimes prefers to turn it over and bang the other side. He also much prefers the box the piano came in to the actual piano. I am now focusing on finding him boxes of different sizes and colours.

5. Benji’s favourite place is the bathroom. This is because it has lots of mirrors. It is clearly not the most hygienic play area for a child – especially as he particularly likes to bang the flush tank – but it does keep him entertained so…

6. Benji’s main occupation is to put things in his mouth. His mouth is closed, ironically, only when he is really sleepy. Then he purses his lips and makes an increasingly loud Mmmmm sound until someone picks him up. His other main aim in life is for someone to carry him all the time. Unfortunately for him, most of the time we do not oblige.

People that bemuse me

2011-07-04T16:56:00.002+08:00

[I am not feeling very writey these days but in the interest of keeping this blog alive, I will just post something random that has been floating around my head for some time.]

1. People who visit a blog or the free version of a newspaper online and comment ‘waste of my time’. Dear person, the only thing that is a waste is you. If you visit a free site, not even your money is compelling you to read the said piece. So, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. Don’t visit the website again. Also, it normally doesn’t take more than five minutes to read most write-ups. So even if the reader persisted hoping that some breakthrough point would be made which did not happen, really how much time was wasted? One hopes that people sit down to read this stuff when they are at leisure. One hardly expects the likes of Anil Ambani to be reading, and I can bet that even if he was, he wouldn’t comment ‘waste of time’ because really that would be wasting more time. Which is really what amazes me about the time-waste commenters. They not only wasted/had their time wasted reading the pointless article, they then wasted more time commenting on it, a purely voluntary act. What does that say about them?

2. People who think they deserve the medal of honour for quitting Facebook or not participating in some new techie fad. Dear people, it is Facebook, a largely frivolous pursuit. Nobody held a gun to your head asking you to be part of it. Nobody is going to kill you for quitting. It is like saying ‘I did not wear that red dress yesterday, ha!’ and expecting applause. Moreover, do not expect that people are going to notice when you quit Facebook; this may be why people feel the need to trumpet their departure, because otherwise nobody would notice and then what would be the point. The point of Facebook is not to make lifelong friends who will be by your side in good times and bad. It is to keep tenuous contacts alive and to do timepass. If you didn’t get that then, you are a little slow. If you have better things to do, congratulations. You’d think people would be satisfied with doing those better things, instead of making it a point to tell everyone that they are indeed doing better things.

On SlutWalk

2011-06-22T10:54:00.000+08:00

Chandni has an excellent post here on Slutwalk in response to this very disturbing piece by Seema Goswami who writes for Brunch. It is amazing how dangerously misguided our co-called liberal intelligentsia are.

Mainly, people have a problem with the word ‘slut’. Why are women calling themselves sluts, it seems. Because:

1. That is the term the cop in Canada used. The implication being if you are a slut, you are open to rape. And ironically, that is the mindset most people seem to have despite their many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ (for eg. Rape is bad BUT women should dress properly, no?). So the title of the protest is meant to draw attention to that very mindset, and to show solidarity with the original protest in Canada. Is that so hard to grasp?

2. To spell it out further, by calling their protest Slutwalk and dressing as scantily (or not) as they please, the message is this: even if I am skimpily dressed, even if I have many sexual partners, even if I sell my body for money, YOU have NO right to touch me except with my permission or to harass me. It really is that simple. Note that for the India Slutwalk women were encouraged to wear whatever they usually wear. Because in India, just by virtue of being a woman you are in many men’s eyes a slut and therefore up for grabs. What you wear doesn’t really matter as the legions of us who have been molested in salwar kameezes will testify.

Now let’s get on to this ‘responsibility’ debate, the source of the many ‘buts’ of the women-shouldn’t-be-raped-but variety.

The disturbing analogy Seema Goswami used (not even original in fact) is of an unlocked house getting robbed. Apart from the horrifying fact that she is comparing women, as Chandni points out, human beings, to a thing that can be locked up and stored safely somewhere, she is also just wrong legally and morally. It is not the responsibility of homeowners to lock their houses. It is the responsibility of other people not to encroach on property that is not theirs. If they do, they, the encroachers, will be punished.

The problem with people like Seema is a failure of the imagination. They cannot imagine a world in which people and their property could be safe just like that, without lockdown. Where perpetrators are held responsible for their crimes. But believe me, such places exist where women can dress how they want and walk around at any time unafraid and where houses can remain unlocked. When you live there, you taste freedom. And that is what we should aim for as a society, not make excuses for the perpetrators of crimes.

Even if by wearing skimpy clothes, women are calling attention to themselves, this is no reason for anyone to take that as an invitation to grab, no matter how lustful their nature might be. Should all bakeries in India go into lockdown because we have a nation of starving people? Should all advertising be banned because shops invite you to buy but do not give away the advertised ware for free?

A couple of the other criticisms of Slutwalk as suggested in this article in HT are:

1. There are far more pressing concerns for women in India. Yes, yes, there are always more pressing concerns. Though I think the right to be safe in the streets is pretty basic no? And would benefit all women, regardless of class etc. After all, what it is seeking is a change in the mindset across the board. Even so, this delaying tactic will always be conveniently deployed. During the Independence struggle, women were told yes, yes, let us get independence first and then we will see about your rights. Luckily the women stood up and said “no can do, we want our rights now thank you very much” and that’s how we got the right to vote from the very beginning. Dalit women are often told let the class war happen first and then we’ll see to your rights. Well, you know what, the class war may never happen so how about making some changes in your society here and now. So while it is quite obvious that women have a multitude of problems in India, being unsafe and then being blamed for causing a crime is a fairly serious problem. Changing the mindset that underpins this problem will solve a lot of other problems. Even if it was just a small problem, applicable to only a minority of women, it still bears redressal. This argument is like telling me, the road in front of your house is broken up but go fix the other thousand roads that are messed up first. This article on the Saudi women’s right to drive is one more example of how sometimes one needs to tackle the small things first. Though, in the case of Slutwalk, I do not believe safety is a small thing.

3. Women are objectifying themselves by dressing as sluts. First of all, the women in India were asked to dress any way they chose. Most of these commentators don’t seem to have read the memo properly, so scared off were they by the word slut.

“Earlier feminists had railed against popular culture’s reduction of women to body parts — breasts and buttocks. This belittlement of women as nothing more than sexual objects was regarded as one of the most degrading things that patriarchal societies had done to women. Yet, this new generation of feminists want to dress in clothes that reveal their breasts and buttocks and demand this ‘self-objectification’ as a ‘right’? Again focusing attention onto their bodies? Is this false consciousness gone mad?” says Amrit Dhillon in his very confusing piece in HT which he seems to imply that the organizers of Slutwalk are the ones equating how we dress with the right to rape.

First, feminism has developed. We now believe in the right of women to wear what they please without fear – be it a bikini or a burkha. I don’t see why showing a breast or buttock should result in objectification. It is still a person walking around attached to that breast and buttock no? The problem is with the seer who can only see a breast or buttock. And if these people persist in seeing women as objects, that is entirely their problem. It only becomes my problem when they touch me. And in certain societies this seems to happen no matter how women are dressed.

Sex is power

2011-06-20T12:21:00.001+08:00

It took me five years of marriage to admit to myself that while I enjoy sex occasionally, I don’t really want a lot of it. Suddenly I found myself in the clichéd “honey, not now” role. This was kind of astonishing because before I got married and in the early days of my marriage, I had a lot of sex.

Part of this does have to do with availability. There was an excitement attached to sex as a 20-something because it was not that easy to arrange. By which I mean, the sheer logistics of finding a place to have sex, apart from finding a person to have sex with. So that probably added some excitement to the whole endeavor in addition to the whole forbidden aspect of it.

Once one is married with kids, the sex drive is supposed to slow down because of all the responsibilities of “grown up life”. And then there’s the inevitable staleness of having sex with the same person setting in. For me, it’s more about intimacy. When I’m emotionally not in tune with my husband, I find sex intolerable.

However, even when I am emotionally on a high with my husband, I no longer find myself jumping into the act like I used to. I’d rather spoon and sleep. And if I’m honest, my sex life slowed down before I had a kid and I don’t really have so many “responsibilities” as a married person. In fact, I lead an easier life than I used to simply because my job is easier and Hong Kong is an easier city to live in. So I am probably less tired and more rested now that I used to be. But somehow, when I was in Bombay, I made sex happen despite the odds.

It made me wonder about my early days of much sex. Did I enjoy sex all that much or did I enjoy the idea of enjoying it?

There was a time when women weren’t supposed to have a sex drive at all. And then suddenly, women reclaimed the right to enjoy sex and went about proclaiming loud and clear that they did. Which was, of course, very necessary.

However, I think, somewhere along the way sex became equated with power. By projecting ourselves as sexual beings, we were reclaiming a space hitherto reserved for men. We were saying that we could have sex on demand and could want a lot of it too.

But did we? Really? Want it I mean? I am no longer convinced I really wanted all the sex I had. I think what I wanted was the feeling of being a liberated person, of enjoying sex like a man. Similar to the reasons a lot of women smoke (though sex is much less injurious to health than smoking, especially if practiced safely) or the way many women feel obliged to flaunt how much they enjoy drinking alcohol and in copious quantities too, like a man.

I think it has become a little boring now. Just the way I feel people telling me how much they drank last night boring. Are we really being rebellious by flaunting our appetite for sex? Hasn’t that rebellion already happened (or maybe it has just happened in the corner of India I inhabit)?

We might save ourselves a lot of energy by examining whether we really want all that sex all that much. Maybe it will turn out that like Samantha in SATC, we do. Just as long as we realize we don’t all have to be Samantha to be free.

Edited to add: Or maybe it is all part of self-exploration and discovery, just like binge drinking is when you're 20. An interesting counterpoint here.

Once upon a quince

2011-06-15T10:09:00.000+08:00

I am reading this book called ‘Once Upon a Quinceanera’ which is about how the Latin American tradition of a big 15th birthday bash has taken off in the US. For a description of quincenera, see here.

It has become a huge deal in the US with families going all out and splurging on this party. However, it also a bit problematic because:

1. Many of these families are not that well off and they are spending a huge amount of money that some might argue could be better spent on a college education for the girl in question.

2. For a feminist, the tradition itself is a little questionable. Basically, the quinceaneara is like a mini-bride or a pre-bride, essentially a young woman who is being signaled as worthy of the marriage market and a lot of the associated rituals at the party point to that.

So the author of the book sets out to investigate the hooplah with initially quite a skeptical mindset but then she discovers some things that change her mind:

1. It is no longer assumed that the girl is being prepared for marriage. In fact, it is often seen as a replacement for a big wedding bash because parents are more pragmatic that they may never see their daughters married off.

2. The quince is an occasion to celebrate the girl herself, to tell her that she is special, that she can be whoever she wants to be and that the community is there to support her. It is a coming-of-age event and the tradition is slowly being extended to boys too. In the run-up to this marker into adulthood, the quince will hopefully reflect on who she is, what she wants to be, who are the important people in her life (she generally gives a speech thanking these people).

3. Planning the party becomes an opportunity for mother-daughter bonding. Many of these teenage girls had not interacted that much with their moms before the quince preparations.

4. The quince is also a way to acknowledge one’s ethnicity, especially for the second-generation who would be very Americanised.

Anyway, I was most interested in 2), the coming-of-age aspect. In ancient times, a coming-of-age ritual was an important part of growing up, signaling the entry into adulthood and the clear transitioning from one stage of life to the next. Modern youth seem quite lost and there seems to be a demand for customs of this sort, if the popularity of Bat Mitzvahs and now quinces in the US is anything to go by. I was wondering, what would be the coming-of-age ritual that signals adulthood for an Indian woman. For many, would it be marriage? Or is the first time you have sex? Or when you move out of home for college/work? Or when you get your licence or voter registration card?

Also, Dipali in her post on what mommyhood has taught her, mentioned how having children expanded his circle of interaction and how she learnt so many new things. I think marriage does this too. I learnt so much about a different culture by being married to my husband (never will I smirk at a South Indian accent again, for example, unless with the family and they are laughing too). My sister is married to a part-Mexican and so my niece is one-third Mexican. So I now wonder if she will have a quince…

And finally, the book articulated for me the importance of godparents. A Mexican quince is a family production… every aspect of it paid for by a sponsor/godparent among family and friends. In doing this, the sponsors are doing more than contributing financially. They are signaling their role in the life of the quince, to support her in achieving her dreams, that they have a stake in her success. This is the role of a godparent, to be there to pitch in when needed. This is also why I baptized my son. I am not a religious person but I feel the ritual has significance. It is a way to acknowledge that this circle of people who surround my husband and I as we raise our son have a stake in him too and that we all commit to supporting him and to bringing him up with certain values. It is a way for us to acknowledge the village and for the village to acknowledge their responsibility in raising our son.

Where the mind is not free

2011-06-10T10:36:00.000+08:00

I was sad to learn that MF Husain passed away, not so much because he died (the man was 95 after all) but because he died still in exile from India. It was a sad day for our country when one of its greatest artists and a free thinker felt so unsafe in his own home that he had to flee. Justice Kaul concluded his judgement quashing the cases against MF Husain thus: “I have penned down this judgment with this ‘favourent' hope that it is a prologue to a broader thinking and greater tolerance for the creative field. A painter at 90 deserves to be in his home — painting his canvass."

Exactly.

It is sadly not surprising that many even in our so-called educated and enlightened Facebook circles would not agree. Not surprising because we are the new macho India, ready to take “offense”, spoiling for a fight, quick to take on intolerance with intolerance.

Since it has now become the done thing to air vitriol against the Pakistan cricket team and crow over their defeat wishing blood and gore upon them and their families, since it has become polite dinner party conversation to say such things as “all those Muslim buggers should be shot”, why should one be surprised when you find people siding with the violent mob? Oh, they may not – though some of them will – come right out and say it was right to attack the galleries showing his work, destroy his property, harass an old man and threaten his family. They will say: “But he should not have hurt our feelings, no?”

I’m sorry your feelings were hurt. Even MF Husain was sorry and said so. That was not his intention. But he has the right to express himself, and you have the right to – and can very easily – ignore his expressions. He is not after all doing some Clockwork Orange scenario where you are bound down and forced to see his work and be indoctrinated by it. That your feelings were hurt, unfortunately for you, does not give you the right to be violent and should not give you the moral excuse to condone violence.

When we condone the suppression of freedom or thought and expression, we are shackling not just the “offending” artist but ourselves. Today it his him who has given offense, tomorrow it will be you, yes, you with your jeans and your t-shirt and your habit of stopping by at the pub on Friday and socializing with boys of (gasp!) different religions. Oh wait, that already happened. And then too we had those not-so-subtly siding with the violence, the aunty brigade who said “yeah, but, good girls shouldn’t be drinking no?”

How many times has history taught us this lesson that we, caught up in our hurt sentiments and frail feelings, ignore.

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me.

Why do we keep forgetting that when we hand over the key to our – yes ‘our’ ‘your’ ‘mine’ not ‘his’ – freedom to the mob, we are designing our own enslavement? Today it is MF Husain and you can smile smugly that he got his just desserts. Tomorrow it will be you.

We must also be careful not to turn into the very face of what we hate. You purport to hate Muslims because you say they are violent, they are terrorists, they are cruel to their women. Then you say let’s be violent, strike terror and be cruel to their women (and ironically our women too). How is any purpose served except a new cycle of violence and chaos?

I admit I am susceptible to this trap too. So disgusted am I by the vitriolic right wing, the religious fundamentalists and the women-haters that I sometimes wonder if the only solution for the liberal would be to toughen up, get armed and take on these people head on, fighting fire and with fire. But then what would be the difference between them and me? I have become what I am fighting against. I have to keep reminding myself of this when the rage takes over.

We have a powerful model for an alternative in Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violence. We were warned of how violence begets only violence and of the much harder but more morally and philosophically sound path.

But because I am angry, I will go one step further and ask the ever increasing tribe of offendees. What exactly were you so offended about? Normally I hear two things:

1. That he painted Hindu goddesses nude. I’m not sure why that is offensive. In his judgment, Justice Kaul points to the long tradition of the nude in art and of the equally long and glorious tradition of nude and even sexualised representations of Indian gods and goddesses. This is the amazing thing about the Hindu tradition – that it does not obscure and pussyfoot around sex, it celebrates it. Now, of course, in every spiritual tradition there will be those who tend towards the belief that salvation/nirvana is to be attained by abstaining from sex and those people who are celibate are the truly pure. In fact, this is possibly the Muslim tradition and most definitely the Christian one – we are asked to believe that if a woman is really pure she can give birth to a child without having had sex. So that’s the way you want to play it? Back to the days where we pretend that women have no sexuality then? Okayyy. Forgive me if I find this new puritanism and the enthusiasm with which even young women are condoning it barf-worthy. Again, be careful when you hand the keys of your freedom to the mob that functions as the moral police.

Even as I fail to see what is so shameful and vulgar about the nude body or human sexuality, I also fail to see why religion is placed on this untouchable pedestal. It is almost as if religion is afraid. Rest assured your religion will remain and you can even believe in pure virginal women, even if the odd painter paints a nude. The singer Madonna has satirised the figure of the Virgin, and far from being offended as you’d think we would be and despite the best efforts of the more hard-core groups, her music has become a staple in Christian homes. We grew up dancing to Like a Virgin and Life a Prayer, in the video of which she seduces a priest. Partly, we didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics but even when I understood what she was about, I was just amused. In Western art, artists like Michelangelo have tried to push whatever boundaries they can in sexualising the Madonna. Dan Brown made some big insinuations in his Da Vinci Code and by and large people just took it in their stride. The general attitude was we will continue to believe Jesus was celibate and Mary Madgalen was a peripheral whore. Fine then. But Madonna is free to sing her songs and dress up as a whore while calling herself the name given to the Virgin Mary and Dan Brown is free to write his books.

2. The other thing I hear a lot is “Why doesn’t he paint Muslim Gods nude’?” Why indeed? Not that I think people must be forced to stick to their own religion or even their own culture in the subject matter of their painting. But Husain answers this question – even though it was not asked – in his interview with Tehelka: “Some conservative Muslims told me, why don’t you paint on Islamic themes? I said, does Islam have the same tolerance? If you get even the calligraphy wrong, they can tear down a screen.” He believed Hinduism to be more open, tolerant and flexible. His paintings were a tribute to that. For his daughter’s wedding invitation he painted Shiva with his hand on Parvati’s thigh. He believed Hindus were ready for a conversation that Muslims were not. Why is that not seen as a compliment? Why has tolerance become a byword for weakness?

3. The final thing I hear is “so Qatar is more free than India? Ha!” That is to miss the point. It is to not see the tragedy of a man at 95 having to take refuge in a totalitarian state because a democracy cannot ensure his safety.

Please read Tehelka’s interview with MF Husain which I think is the definitive interview with the man.

And read this article which summarises Justice Kaul’s enlightened judgement – and then read the judgement itself. It is an amazing document, citing the many precedents in case history in India and abroad dealing with the subject of freedom of expression, obscenity and offending people. You’ll be surprised to see the long tradition of the courts in India striking down the right of people to suppress the expression of others on the basis of being offended, the last being the Bandit Queen case.

Brothers and Sisters

2011-06-08T15:25:00.000+08:00

MadMomma had a post some time ago on the ideal number of children to have (or rather that there is no ideal number). During that discussion, someone brought up that it’s better not to have two girls because sister tends to get compared. Say what? But apparently this was a sentiment shared by quite a few people – majority of them did not have sisters – that sisters would not be able to get along because they would get compared.

I’m not sure what that even means. I suppose it means to each other because they are the same gender?

Now first. I have a sister. Were we “compared”? Yes. My sister was constantly told how dark she was and my mother was even asked how it was possible that she had produced one dark-skinned kid and one fair. In our presence. Yeah, people are classy like that. This did not make sister angry at me. It did give her something of a complex but dark children in India always have that.

To make matters worse, there is a tendency on my dad’s side of the family to favour the younger child and to blame the older child for everything. My mum was very firmly against this but I happened to be my father’s favourite. Although my mum tried to make up by siding with my sister and it helped that my dad was actually not around for nine months of the year, my father’s favouratism did affect her (though my dad denies there was any). Did this make my sister hate me? No. She remained as protective of me as ever.

My sister was Miss Perfect in school. Unfortunately, she was blessed with a sibling who was scatty, forgetful and rebellious. She covered for me as much as possible – and I mean literally! She would actually cover my school books, iron my uniform, and run home if I forgot my PT shorts. The former was because she couldn’t bear to be associated with a messy person, the latter was because she genuinely did not want me to get in trouble. Despite her best efforts, did people compare us? Yes. Did I get a lot of “you are her sister? Oh!”? Yes. Did it make me resent my sister? No. It did make me roll my eyes when teachers called me her name instead of mine, but that was because I cherished their embarrassment when I glared at them. I’m evil like that.

Did I get a lot of hand-me-downs by virtue of being the younger sister? Yes. Did I care? No. I was happy to wear my sister’s clothes. When I stopped liking her fashion choices, I stopped wearing her clothes. My mum got it. That was when I was 16 though. And I still raided her closet a lot. Did she mind? No. She raided my mum’s closet, and sometimes my dad’s (checked shirts were all the rage in college).

Did we fight? Yes. On several occasions, we drew a line down our room and screamed if the other person put a toe over it. But we also converted our room into a lab/toy hospital/teaching centre and spent entire summers closeted inside with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. We knew each other’s secrets. We covered for each other. We would be up late into the night chatting. I knew all the intrigues of her friend’s circle (and they knew I knew) and all her friends. She knew all mine. We would even follow each other into the toilet while the other was pooing (gross I know! But there were urgent matters – boys – to be discussed) so we could keep talking.

Did I get to do stuff earlier than my sister ever did? Yes. I went on my first out-of-town trip to Goa with my sister’s friends when I was 15. My mum was a chaperone but it was 20 boys and girls aged 17. I went to socials and dance parties when I was 15 with my sister and her friends. I waxed my legs earlier. Did my sister complain? Yes. But she also fought for me to have these privileges – be it leg waxing or shorter skirts – although she halfheartedly grumbled about it sometimes when convenient to her.

When we were younger, we used to tease each other saying “I wish you were a brother”. The main reason we wanted a brother was that we would have been introduced to more boys. Also, we had this fantasy of the protective older brother. Now that I think about it, though, I got all the advantages of an older brother with my sister. She had a tonne of platonic boy friends, the most coveted ones from the boys school. They hung around our house all the time because my mum was cool. My sister was even into soccer so I can discuss football like a guy. She did engineering so she is into gadgetty stuff too and can repair things, and she is bloody strong. And I had the advantages of a sister – someone you can discuss even your vaginal problems with. This is something you really appreciate when you’re pregnant by the way.

I don’t know if brothers and sisters can have the same closeness as sisters. Because girls discuss everything, we communicate in a way boys don’t. And because there is so much shared experience. So in retrospect, I’m very happy my sister was not a brother.

Now the flip side of the comparison debate. V has two older sisters. Was he compared to them? All the time. Sil1 was Miss Perfect, like my sister, headgirl, top of the class (my sister wasn’t, I trumped her there), and all that. Sil2 was also Miss Perfect though she tended to be late for assembly and then hide out in empty classrooms. V was Mr. Fuckup, always late, always on the dishonour roll, failing every subject. His sisters famously disowned him once when he was spotted in the canteen eating in an, erm, messy way. Did this affect them in any way? Yes. The Sils were embarrassed. Did it affect him? No. He continued to be a ruffian. Thankfully for them, his grades got so bad he had to change schools. (This by the way is the man who is very spiffy – or used to be till three years ago – and earning pots of money in the corporate world now).

In short, I think this comparison logic is nonsense. There may be reasons siblings don’t get along but being compared happens whether they are the same gender or not. And it affects the relationship only based on other things.

Sil2 has a different take on whether having a brother or a sister is better. She says she is closer to V than Sil1 because Sil1 was very bossy. There was only a two year gap between Sil1 and her, and a two year gap between V and her. But I don’t see V and her sharing the kind of confidences that I share with my sister. In fact, she probably shares more confidences with me than with V because V, being a typical male, just does not take the conversation so far. Like when Sil2 adopted her baby, V said, “Oh that’s awesome news!” (all heartfelt, of course) and then quickly ran out of things to say while I then went on to have a full 45 minute chat with her sharing all the intimate details like how she felt when she first held the baby etc. I’m sure she has more proper chats with Sil1 than V but she still says she’s closer to V. Hmm.

Anyway, which would you rather have – a brother or a sister? Do you think siblings of the same gender have more potential to bond?

Job Sob

2011-06-07T16:45:00.000+08:00

I found this in one of Sidin’s old columns:

Not a lot of people are “meant” to do something. They just say that to sell bad books. Salman Rushdie might make an excellent, and content, supply chain management consultant. Who knows? You will find various amounts of meaning and satisfaction in various things. Choose your compromises wisely.”

Sidin’s column is one I keep forgetting to read and then when I do I find myself snorting and chuckling, so maybe it’s a good thing I don’t read it too often considering I’m in office and all that.

So, the above quote, I think is the opposite (at least in sentiment) of the last post, which is very follow-your-heart types. The truth is I am ambivalent on the job satisfaction thing.

I think my contemporaries have hit a stage where some amount of angst sets in. Settled into a career but not exactly at the helm of it. I hear many friends complaining about how they don’t feel engaged by what they’re doing, that they’re not really passionate about their jobs, that they don’t feel fulfilled.

A lot of this comes from the sentiment that Sidin expressed – that we are led to believe that we are “meant” to do something, that we should find our “calling”. Well, I think, if my calling is to correct other people’s English then that is seriously pathetic. I am more comfortable with the idea that this “calling” concept is a big myth, just like the myth of “the one”. That’s not to say the odd Florence Nightingale or Christiann Amanpour won’t pop up now and then, just that most of us have less intense feelings about our jobs.

As Sidin says, there are a range of options and compromises to be made in order to feel happy. Don’t feel unhappy just because your job doesn’t make you leap up your tail wagging every Monday.

Some Donald Trump-type person said something on lines of how you should do something that makes you happy to go to work every morning. Well. Good for the Donald (if it was indeed him who said it) but I think that’s a little unrealistic. Anything that you do every day is bound to become a bit of a drudge even if you started out liking it. Like my husband likes to cook but if he had to cook every day he’d get a bit cross. I understand. Sometimes you just want to chill on the couch with a book. Okay, a lot of the time. That doesn’t mean you hate your job.

I also think this whole idea of “being fulfilled” may have also gone a bit too far. As long as your job doesn’t make your skin crawl (like number-related stuff makes mine) and you enjoy aspects of it, you’re fine. It would be great if what you do is what makes you tick. However, sometimes just by virtue of doing it everyday it can stop being enjoyable. In fact, one of the reasons for my brief foray into law was that I didn’t want to turn my hobby – writing – into my job.

The fact is that my job involves writing – even when I was a journalist – but it is not the kind of writing I do in my free time. It helps that I am good at my job and I can do it with ease, which was really the point of the last post. If you have to pick a job, pick something you’re good at. It makes doing it every day so much easier because you can be done with it quick and without stress. And pick something that somewhat interests you – so I like being in education, rather than finance (For now. Who knows when I might go knocking at the banker’s door?) – because again it makes it easier to spend a good chunk of the day on.

But fulfillment, passion, I’m not so sure about that. I don’t think it’s possible for everyone to find work that absolutely fulfills them. And I also think we need to find stuff to be passionate about in our jobs. Like I have a lot of drudge editing but I also have a chance to write speeches, write ad campaign slogans and blurbs and shape how the university is marketed. I love those parts and put my heart into it. By the way, I took the job thinking it would be just drudge editing and I was fine with that. I do a lot of my own writing on the side, as you can see.

But if you really feel so strongly about matching your job with your passion, then go do it. If you were really passionate about it, you would. I know most of us aren’t loaded with capital but we have more resources and networks than a lot of people who have gone on to do much more. So go do it. Take that leap, take the stress that comes with it, take pay cut and do it. Then if you fail, maybe you have the right to complain.

Above Average - thoughts

2011-06-03T12:52:00.000+08:00

I didn’t intend to write a review of Above Average because I am never happy with my reviews of anything but Amitabha, the author, stopped by and asked what I thought (and I cannot help feeling a bit thrilled about this) and also a couple of commenters mentioned their impression of the book, so I thought I’d give mine.

Overall, it was above average. Ok, that was cheesy, I know, but I couldn’t resist. I don’t think it is the greatest work of literary fiction to come out of India in the past decade but in the genre of popular fiction it is good, actually very good. Yikes, this is why I can’t review anything. I can’t do a succinct grading without feeling self-conscious. Let’s just say I liked it. And I think it’s a little more literary than the average popular fiction also.

Books by Indian writers – except the big names like Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh etc. who are beyond the pale on this – tend to be in two categories. There are those where the grammar is a little awkward and, unfortunately, Chetan Bhaghat’s books fall into this category. It’s a pity because his books generally have a great concept and storyline but the awkward grammar and typos keep me wincing throughout. I don’t blame Chetan Bhaghat here so much as I blame his editors. I’ve read a couple of other books in this category and now I realised I just can’t do it. Above Average is in the other category, where the English is fluent and at places almost lyrical.

I admit I’m biased towards these kinds of books because they take me back to India. Somewhere in between Above Average I found myself thinking “Oh, maybe we should go back to India after all” and I thought I had resolved that question. That’s why I used to read even Chetan Bhaghat’s books, because it took me back to that place and those experiences. And yeah, I have a soft spot for books about engineering schools becuase of my sister, they're so close to home.

I found it a little hard getting into Above Average though, I’m not sure why. Maybe it is because the narrative jumps around a lot. A lot of writers today seem to have adopted this cinematic montage style of narrative and I get it and usually it’s not a problem but I found it a little difficult sustaining a particular mood with this one. Or maybe it was because I was expecting to plunged into an IIT campus and instead I got suburban Delhi life initially.

Ironically, when I look back, this honest portrayal of ‘Society’ life is one of things I liked most about the book. I think I like the parts set in Mayur Vihar best – the friendship between Bobby and Rindu, the little crushes and attachments that develop in a society and the violence that erupts.

I also really liked the insight it gave me into the male mind. This is a story told intricately from the male perspective; the female characters are very peripheral. And although I cannot be 100% sure, I think it’s a very typical Indian male perspective, though Rindu is a bit more pensive than the average joe. In particular, I was intrigued by the way men communicate with each other. As I’ve said before, I grew up in a very female-centric environment and it was a shock to me to realize how uncommunicative men are, how they gloss over the important stuff with platitudes. I’ve always suspected that there’s more to men than they let on and this comes through in Bagchi’s novel. Both that there is some depth to the male sex but also that they communicate in a very obtuse way – the scene with Neeraj where he leaves him after something really poignant has happened to go watch a film, this sort of thing would be unforgivable among women. Neeraj was the odd one out in thinking so. Apparently, it is perfectly normal among men – even if something dreadful has happened – to say “chal yaar I have to go” and bugger off. In fact Rindu was unusual because he hesitated. There is also a pettiness to men that is normally perceived to be the premise of women. I think it was a pretty honest non-caricatured portrayal of masculinity at that age.

Overall, it was authentic. The characters were real, interesting and sometimes surprising. I liked there there was a caste element - now that I think about it it is astonishing, or maybe reflective, that so many novels obscure this point. I can’t comment on the authenticity of the IIT bits but the portrayal of a middle-class boy coming of age in a big city rang true.

Hmmm, and I think that’s all I have to say. Whew.

Above average

2011-06-02T10:36:00.000+08:00

Reading Above Average by Amitabha Bagchi brings back memories of my sister’s engineering days. Above Average is about an IIT student – there really seem to be so many around about IIT life. Wonder why the IIM’s don’t inspire similar novels, maybe IIM life is too glib, not as earthy as IIT life.

My sister didn’t go to an IIT. She didn’t even aspire to one, knowing her capabilities well. That she was aspiring to engineering at all was a surprise because my sister wasn’t one of the academic toppers in school. I think it was the surprise of scoring the second-highest in our school in the SSC Boards that fuelled the ambition to get into engineering college.

And boy, did she work for it. Her only concession to herself was to do her 11th and 12th in Xavier’s which wasn’t a college which students who wanted to do engineering or medicine went to. The other students in Xavier’s are interested in a lot of other things apart from academics – sports, music, theatre, or generally just hanging around – and so the campus lacked the competitiveness that pushes students to excel academically in colleges like Ruparel.

My sister managed to enroll in the three prestigious tuition classes that coaches students in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. She had to beg the tuition teachers because they did not take students from Xavier’s seriously. At that time, I think it was Rs 13,000 per tution. Part of the problem with Xavier’s is that they take attendance very seriously. You need 75% attendance to pass and you cannot miss class just to attend tuitions. So my sister would be in college in town all day and then rush back home, eat lunch, and head to Ville Parle for tutions. Then she would come back home and spend the whole evening doing homework and the night studying. Rinse and repeat. She started this schedule in the 11th in preparation for the 12th.

She was scared of the dark and being up alone at night spooked her. She would hole herself up her in room and my mum would keep a flask of coffee and some snacks for her so she didn’t have to go anywhere. If she needed to go to the loo, she would race down the corridor. I could hear her thudding by in my sleep and once she even fell down.

In the end, she scored 98.6% in PCM (god those acronyms!). While the rest of her friends were rejoicing at their 70% or that they had passed at all, my sister was crying. Her percentage wasn’t good enough to get into the top tier engineering colleges like VJTI. It wasn’t even good enough to get a free seat in the second tier colleges. She ended up paying for a seat in one of these colleges.

It turned out to be a good choice because the college was not as geeky as some of the other engineering colleges. Nevertheless, engineering was tough. The first year she got a KT (keep terms) – in a totally unexpected subject – and was completely shaken.

Like the IITs, there was a hierarchy of students in terms of their smartness, not necessarily in the exams. Unlike the IITs, the pecking order wasn’t determined by grade point average but by the US universities they would eventually go to. There was a guy who was guaranteed a scholarship in Stanford. These were the cream. Then there were those who would get into some coveted schools like Purdue, again with a tuition waiver.

And, of course, the students from IIT were spoken of in awe because US universities would even send them the application packages for free. My sister’s friend Rat had a couple of friends in IIT and they were generally considered ‘cool’. This was because not only were they were academically brilliant (and not just in textbook learning) but they were well-read, into music, generally rock music, and smoked weed. These kids could pick whichever US uni they wanted to go to and a scholarship would follow.

My sister’s tryst with IIT was in her final year where she did a dissertation under a supervisor from there. This was unusual, because she was from a second-tier college. Securing this was a quite a coup. I remember driving to the IIT campus with her and being strangely disenchanted with how run-down it looked. This was the vanguard of Indian technology?

Of course, I would later discover that this kind of shabbiness is characteristic of most Indian universities and not an indication of the academic brilliance within. In fact, the dishevelment of the surrounding has seeped into the people who feel a need to be shabby too in order to look ‘intellectual’.

When she graduated, my sister’s aims were modest. She wanted to get into the University of Madison, Wisconsin. That was her dream. I have no idea where she built this dream from since we had never heard of this school before. But she had set her mind on it. Unfortunately, she was rejected.

Her friend Rat, who was smarter and had got a scholarship to Purdue, told her not to give up. She crafted a letter for my sister, explaining why she really wanted to study in Madison and why some allowances must be made for the vagaries of the Indian education system if the KT was what was behind the rejection. It worked! Madison admitted my sister, although without a tuition waiver.

Luckily, my sister was not the lone soul going to that school. Every year, practically the entire batch of her college went to the US. So there were bound to be seniors in any college in the US worth its salt. She understood how the US funding system worked before she got there, and she had friends scouting for job possibilities. When she got there she secured a teaching assistanceship and got a tuition waiver.

Then the struggle began all over again. Engineering in India doesn’t prepare one for engineering in the US which is very hands-on and grounded in fundamentals. She had to pretty much learn everything from scratch. That was a period I was a bit disconnected from my sister but I cannot imagine what a struggle it was for her, the pressure to keep her teaching assistantship because she knew my parents couldn’t afford the tuition and the loneliness of life in a new country.

Neverthless, she always did well for herself. She kept her teaching assistantship and then got a research one. Her supervisor was a terror but she survived him and he even wrote her a glowing recommendation. She did an internship that secured her a job after she graduated even though the economy was in the doldrums. It wasn’t what she wanted to be working on but it was a good job. And she’s moved on to other jobs, which continue to be very technical unlike most engineering graduates who are often in management positions or in general IT. Till recently, I never quite understood what she’s working on. It’s not an easy ride even now. She has to keep struggling, keep learning to keep up.

And me? I was actually the one who consistently topped the class and then the school. I was always quite embarrassed about this though. I tried not to draw attention to it. I shocked everyone by choosing to do Arts. Partly, I wanted to be a rebel – anyone with my percentage was expected to do Science – and partly I knew I really didn’t enjoy science and I hated maths. Ironically, the teachers at my school convinced my mum to make me take maths in junior college; Xavier’s was the only college that offered it. What a pointless exercise, the only sore point in my otherwise blissful college life.

I sailed through college thoroughly enjoying everything I studied. I did some extracurriculars and mostly I just hung out with my friends and had a good time. I chose to graduate in Literature although Economics was a more sound choice from a career-perspective. I loved every minute of my third year, when we studied nothing but literature and I thank God for giving me the privilege of spending a whole year studying something useless that I was passionate about.

I realize that I have never really push myself to do things I don’t do well, ever since I left school. In school, I tended to copy my sister and I did a lot of things because she was doing them. I got into athletics though I’m not really sporty. I learned to play the piano though I’m not really good at it. Thankfully, my personality came into its own around the time I was in class X.

Whenever I’ve tried to push myself into something that’s not me, I realize it’s not worth the effort. I did Maths in junior college and did well also, but I don’t see the point. I briefly studied Law and again hated it. Thankfully I almost died and I realised I didn't want to keep living in order to go to that dusty law college and pore over ruling that made little sense to me from a justice perspective. I took to journalism like a fish in water, even though I struggled with reporting because of language barriers. In Hong Kong, when I worked in financial journalism, again I struggled and I find that’s it not worth it. It means more money, but I’d rather do something that comes more naturally. The funny part is that I was good at it – there were financial magazines offering me jobs and much more money than I now make.

It’s not that I don’t know how to struggle. My first boss was a complete bitch. Her aim in life was to break the spirit of those under her. Those that didn’t break became her friends. I came so close to giving up many times but I stuck on. My boss in my last job was similar, though I don’t think she realised how hard she was being. I left both jobs on my own terms, with both bosses asking me to stay.

I’m not one of those people that gives in easily. I like quitting on my terms. But I also don’t stick with things that don’t suit me. Doing engineering was not a natural fit for my sister. She would have most naturally been a teacher, and an excellent one at that, without all this struggle. But she wanted to prove something to herself and the world and she did it. I never see myself going through all that trouble.

All around me, I see students pushed into careers that don’t really suit them and struggling to keep up. I don’t see the point. I came first in class throughout and sure I put in some work, but I didn’t kill myself to do it. I probably make less money than an engineering graduate but I make more than enough. And I’ve sailed through life because I was drawing on the skills that life gave me. I wasn’t swimming against the current, except the current of expectations of other people who expected me to take Science. I think whatever you pick, if you're good at it and put your heart into it, you’ll probably do okay in life. So why choose the arduous path?

Coffee or Tea

2011-06-01T15:58:00.000+08:00

Chandni had an interesting post on one’s beverage of choice.

I have always loved the concept of coffee – the aroma, the conversations it always entails, the coziness of coffee shops. But on the whole I think I drink more tea.

If I track things historically, I started out as a coffee drinker. We graduated from Bournvita (yech) to coffee as kids quite young. We always had coffee in the morning, a special brew made by mum, and tea in the evening. It never occurred to me ever to break this sacred pattern, and request coffee in the evening.

In Hyderabad, it became coffee all the way, because there was so much of excellent coffee around. Apart from my morning cuppa of Nescafe at home, my cousin and I had a ritual coffee at Kamat’s every evening (with an idli for me). The cups are pretty small so we’d have one and sometimes share another. The waiters there knew us well and would oblige with extra decoction, no added sugar etc. as needed. Sometimes, we would be there twice and thrice in a day. I miss those days and those conversations and of course, the coffee, which remains in my mind the best coffee in the world.

Because of Kamat’s coffee, I didn’t drink coffee in Hong Kong for over a year. Nothing could satisfy my longing for filter coffee. Hong Kong people – those that drink coffee – have a very Americanised palette. Although their local milk tea (or lai cha) is very close to Indian tea (it is filtered boiled a lot and filtered through a stocking!), their coffee tends to be over-strong with inadequate milk. Starbucks here is awful – I think they over-roast the beans. I have now made my peace with Pacific Coffee and discovered some speciality coffee shops with really good coffee which you can brew at home too. What I have not discovered is a friend to have the kind of soulful coffee chats I used to have in Bombay (where a friend and I famously once sat in one coffee shop from 10 am to 6 pm) and Hyderabad. The coffee shop experience in Hong Kong is more solitary and a time for me to catch up with magazines I am too cheap to buy.

At home, I briefly fell into the reverse pattern from Bombay. It would be tea in the mornings, and coffee in the evenings. Then I got pregnant and all of it stopped. My only allowance was iced lemon tea which is a general favourite and readily available everywhere in Hong Kong. Iced lemon tea is my drink of choice with food.

Hong Kong seems to understand that a person could well be both a coffee and tea drinker at once, and therefore does not oblige one to choose. They have a drink called yin yeung which is both coffee and tea. It’s pretty good too.

A shot in the art

2011-05-30T16:13:00.000+08:00

On Saturday went to the HK Art Fair. The idea was to get sense of what is out there and how much it costs since I’m seriously considering buying something. And of course to look look look since I’m the kind of person that can spend an entire day in an art museum.

This was my first experience of actually buying a ticket. The problem with having been a journalist is that you get used to freebies. The first year of this fair there were so many tickets lying around, it made me allergic to buying a ticket thereafter. Even up to last year I could get a ticket from my friends back at the newspaper. But this year, the fair seems to have got much bigger and tickets were really tight.

So after finally determining that I was not going to get my hands of a free ticket, I finally bought one. I got a two-for-deal so V came along too. Except I am not a good person to go to these kind of things with because I tend to lose the person I’m with. That’s ok if that person is my husband, because I’ll always find him eventually.

Except that this time I got a little irritated because we were supposed to be looking for something to buy – although V thinks I should buy in India as it will be cheaper – and I suck at asking for the prices of anything, apart from the fact that I’d like V to like what I pick too. But when I tracked V down, he kept marching me through everything at high speed, kind of how he does when there are a lot of sale signs in the mall, so I ended up getting very grumpy and we parted ways after convening for a coffee.

V claims there wasn’t that much interesting stuff which is so not true because there was tons. Not if you’re marching through at the speed of light, I suppose. What I saw:

1. I always discover one new famous artist to love at the fair and this time it was Julian Opie. ‘New famous artist’ sounds like a contradiction in terms but what I mean is new to me but already famous. Opie’s work is really simple but just makes me smile, especially the electronic figures with the swishing ponytail/skirt.

2. There were the usual smattering of Picassos but what I realised was that they were not as unaffordable as I thought. One rare gallery had put up the prices next to the artwork – more on that later – and the Picassos were priced at around HKD1 million. Now I am not sure I can personally afford HKD1 million because I have a poor sense of awe when it comes to money and I have this problem of thinking if I can afford HKD100,000 then I can afford HKD1 million which is of course laughable when what I can probably afford is HKD40,000. But that is why I need V around to keep my reality in check. But the point is I expected Picasso to be more than HKD1 million, even though these were probably not his best work – they were in black and white and could have been etching. I didn’t look closely because I was so excited at the thought that I might have been able to afford a Picasso. Anyhow, the Julian Opie was HKD70,000 which I thought was also not bad.

3. So I don’t understand why galleries don’t just put the price tag up with the art. What is with all this mystification? I have a feeling they are losing customers because wimps like me will just assume the art is out of their range and not ask the snooty salesgirls. When what do you know, I can probably afford an Opie even though I don’t look like much and was wearing Bata sandals.

4. On the subject of which, I know art is supposed to be all la di da but the art fair is huge and it just makes no sense to be wearing six inch heels. Why do we women put ourselves through this? And then we sniff at women who cover themselves up with a burkha. Give me a burkha anyday over feeling compelled to spend upward of two hours standing in six inch heels.

5. I also some beautiful Damien Hirst butterflies. It annoys me when I find myself agreeing with the hype. But there you have it. The man’s work is cool and funny.

6. I also spotted one nice Subodh Gupta painting – too large for me to covet – and one ridiculous huge-ass plate.

7. Suddenly Anish Kapoor is all over the place.

8. Ditto with Korean artists. They are all over the place. It reminds me of when I went to Seoul on an art-related junket and we went to the Korean International Art Fair and someone noticed that all the Hong Kong galleries had Mainland artists and they asked “but what about artists from Hong Kong?” Well.

9. I booked myself into one of the free art tours (by ParaSite) which is what I recommend for anyone going to the fair, especially if you’re clueless about art (which I’m not but I still benefit from structure. Unfortunately the only tour I could get on was the last one for the day I would have dearly liked to have left by then… or seen the tour as some sort of intro and then made my own way around. I almost skipped the tour but I’m glad I did it. The guide introduced us to a few interesting pieces, some of which I had missed and others which I had spotted but which she gave a new perspective on.

10. Thanks to the guide, I finally got what Murakami is up to. But still, not sure I like his work. In short, it hurts my eyes.

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

2011-05-27T11:00:00.000+08:00

Just as I had discarded the idea of buying a diamond in favour of what I hoped was a higher pursuit in the form of art, V decided to get me one anyway. At some level, I think he had got so into the nitty-gritty of the diamond trade that he couldn’t just give up the quest. But mainly, I think, he wanted to thank me for being the goddess that gave him his son.

So, I accept the gesture of thanks with a smile. Ok with delight and stamping of feet. It’s not every day that a girl gets to have her diamond and her painting too (if I could ever identify and decide on one painting).

Now, that I am the proud wearer of a serious stone, I feel the need to be worthy of it. Thus, I feel that my clothes must be smarter, my nails well done, my hair in place, my shoes a little higher, my perfume tasteful and my bag upgraded. Definitely, the latter. It is not in me to turn down the excuse for a new bag, however, flimsy.

Oh dear, I do think this ring is turning out a bit Gollum-esque. But as they say, when the economy is in need, every citizen must do their bit.