It is not Just a "Fly-by"

The space shuttle Endeavor flew over Northern California yesterday before landing in LA. Today, most of us who know anybody living there, have received updates via Facebook, YouTube or e-mail showing home videos of this "historic fly-by". As you see the videos, you can hear the excited applause of the viewers as the Boeing 747 shot across the sky carrying precious cargo on its back- the excitement apparent in their postures and sounds.

What is it that makes this fly-by so exciting? After all, most people who took these videos have probably gotten a better and closer look at the shuttle on videos, in books or on the television at some other time. The quick fly-by was hardly long enough or low enough to enable them to see something they had not already seen or could not see by going on to the world wide web.

My thoughts are that as humans we want to combat our inevitable mortality and somewhere all of us are grappling to find an identity and a definition in a world that is becoming so complex that at times it threatens to swallow up our individuality altogether. We want to be part of something bigger than us- something out of the ordinary that will separate us from the crowd and give us a definition. So we look for events such as this and latch on to them. By becoming someone who saw the rare event of a shuttle fly-by we somehow become differentiated and hope that once we die our name we will not just disappear into the oblivion along with a million others- I will not be just Sakshi Goel,  but the Sakshi Goel who was among the selected few who saw the a live fly-by of the Endeavour Space shuttle.

I dread it, I love it, I am going to miss it

This year when Bappa goes back after Chaturthi it will be different. Since I am moving to the US, I am not sure when I will be back in this madness of a city to be a part of this thing which can only be described as "junoon".

I have been living in this city for almost six years now and with each year I have become a little more attuned to its rhythm and beat. I can safely say that as "Ganpati" comes nearer, you can hear this beat begin to quicken. There is so much activity around that at times it almost threatens to swallow you up!  People and cars everywhere. Roads get blocked as the pandals go up.  Festival shopping starts with a bang, and the rain keeps coming down adding its own bit of fury.

And yet there is a sense of well-being that comes with this craziness. You hear the mingled sounds of various loud speakers being tested with the latest Ganpati Bappa Morya song. Everywhere there are young strappy lads of various "societies" all charged up to collect "contributions" from the residents, their contempt barely veiled when they see a hundred rupee note where they actually expected five times of that. The enthusiasm of getting Ganpati home, the simple pleasure of finding the most "dhik chak" light for your "sarvajanik mandal" and the exhausted smiles of the organizers at the end of the day, all create a cozy cocoon that comes from being among people with who you share a heritage of thousands of years and who you may fault for their lack of civic sense but never for a lack of enthusiasm.

So as Ganesh Chaturthi comes around this year I welcome it even though I dread it, knowing that I love it and there is no denying that I will miss it.

When stuff around you is twenty five years old

So I am sitting there at the tail end of a busy day just enjoying my dinner and the Saas-Bahu serials on TV when along comes the Britannia Good Day ad to shatter my peace of mind. When I first  hear it, I think I am wrong but when they repeat it I know that there is no denying it- this biscuit is turning twenty five, and guess what I remember clearly when it first hit  the markets! So putting two and two together, I am now old enough to be older than events and things that are twenty five years old. I mean its not like I don't know people older than that who are younger than me, but twenty five sounds like a really big number when it is called a silver anniversary and celebrated with fancy logos and company specials.

Till now I have never really thought about getting old. Have never really thought of myself as old. Kids call me aunty and sometimes even very young men call me that and I have always put that down to the fact that in India women are either beti, didi, aunty or maaji. But when I think about all the things I have seen in my life time- tenth anniversary of 9/11, the first Indian astronaut in space, thirteen Prime Ministers, the fall of the Berlin Wall, break up of the USSR, my life span so far (and the title of aunty)  does seem to take on another hue. Sure it means I am not a teenager or a young woman  any more, but it means that my peers and I have lived through some amazing, and not so amazing events. These are things that will go into history course books and will add significance to the time we have spent on this planet.

So as the delicious  Britannia Good Day celebrates its twenty five years of bringing smiles to our faces, rather than thinking about how old that makes me, I am going to enjoy the fact that I have been around from the very beginning to enjoy it and many other such great creations of our times.

Life is a Tricky one

As these things go, I consider myself a realist. Which is to say that the tougher aspects of life such as death, poverty, suffering, move me but in general I am able to cope up with them. In the past week however I have been deeply moved by two everyday situations and they are making me stop for a while and give some thought to the way I measure happiness in my life.

The first was that of a house keeping worker at the beauty salon I go to frequently. It is your typical mid-tier salon run by a lady out of a small shop near a housing society. Clean, contemporary, but cramped. It is a 15'x15' space in which they have three treatment chairs, a room for privacy, a reception desk and a wash basin, leaving little or no space for the people who work there. Everyone squeezes past each other to get around when the place is full. The girls who work there will occasionally sit in the small room inside to stretch and get some rest but the same is not permitted for the elderly lady who does the housekeeping. She has been designated a small stool with a 1' diameter, right by the entrance. When I went there she was sitting on it all curled up,  her tired legs hitched up and her knees pulled up close to her chest. She had one square foot of space in that set up which she could call her "own" and she was all balled up to fit into it. At that moment she seemed to personify the struggle all of us face in this city everyday- the struggle to own that square footage of land and space that we can call our own. Space where we can sit and just be. And life had given her just one square foot of that.

The second was that of the building watchman sitting down for his evening meal. He was seated with his back to the entrance, drinking  water by his side in a used plastic beverage bottle, his food placed precariously on a 2" deep window ledge overlooking the rear parking. It was semi dark where he sat and everything about him seemed to say "I am lonely". It made me stop and thin-was he having his meal this way out of choice? I doubt it. If given an alternative would he not like a table and a chair, a well lit room and a proper chair and table and some clean drinking water with his meal? After all that is what his whole life's struggle is primarily for- three square meals a day. So why would he choose to have that in such a shoddy manner?

At one level his situation speaks of the apathy that we in India have for employees with that profile. Most watchmen sit on broken chairs with half torn cushions donated by some generous resident.In most cases they have atrocious toilet facilities and in the monsoons and winters,  most of them have no protection against the wrath of the elements. And at another, and perhaps deeper level, it speaks of the loneliness that is engulfing many residents of this city. We all sacrifice so much to just earn a living. Missed family dinners, birthdays, anniversaries all in the name of work. Livelihood and employment is so hard to come by and the competition so intense, that we forget what it is all for at the end- our families.We are okay with loneliness if it means we are able to put food on the table even if we have to eat it all by our self.

Even as I write this I am not sure why these incidents moved me but all I know is that they have forced me to stop and think. They made me re-evaluate my opinion of my life, re-evaluate how privileged I think I am. Like all people, I think I have some things missing in my life. I have my grouses with the world. But having seen the suffering in someone else's life, should I stop feeling that way? Should I instantly transform into an absolutely happy being because I have so much more emotional and financial security than a million other people in this city? Are happiness and satisfaction  relative measures?  Aren't they supposed to be your own? I don't have the answer yet. For now all I know is life is not an easy puzzle to crack- it is a tricky one, especially the part about defining and finding happiness.

Do not Underestimate the Power of a Routine

I will begin by confessing that I do not have one- a routine that is. But luckily I live among people who have one. My husband's grandmother who lives with us has a self-designed routine that is helping her manage the inevitable companions of old age- immobility and the consequential loneliness. Her days are measured out in a sequence of events- morning bath, followed by an hour dosing on her comfy chair, then an hour of prayers, breakfast, some TV watching and then her morning nap. She is so particular that she will sit on her chair post lunch till the clock strikes three. These small events help her to go through a sixteen hour waking cycle bit by manageable bit. If she did not have the routine, the thought of sitting in that same room, day in and day out, would just weigh down on her. Now her day is measured in smaller chunks and hence more comforting.

The other person who brings her routine into my house is my domestic worker. A single mother, she begins her day at 7 am and must get back home by 8 pm to be with her four year old daughter. When with me she has her task cut out and she knows that unless she follows a routine it is very easy for things to pile up and work to get effected. So the sequence of events helps keep the rhythm going. The part of her day that has started to bring a sense of familiar comfort to me is the evening prayer she does for granny on her way out. Her high-pitched nasal singing rings through the house every evening around 6:45 pm. Wherever we are in the house and whatever we maybe doing, we all know it is time for the evening chores to start and another day has gone by mostly peacefully. And most of all we know that granny is happy.

Today's world is a maddening place. Even for a stay at home mom like me who has no social life to speak of, you will be amazed at what googlies a day can throw up. It can range from a fire in my kitchen (it has happened I swear!) to a simple water shortage just when guests show up. And if it was not for the rhythm of the people around me and their subtle routines I would have nothing familiar, nothing comforting to hold on to. By being predictable, routine helps create some semblance of control and familiarity. And we could all do with more of that, right?

So go get a routine and if like me you do not have one because you are just not organised enough, beg, borrow or steal one :) You will live happier I promise.

Beyond the Buggy Bregade

There they were, the four of them, walking diligently, braving the brisk monsoon winds, their hands placed firmly on the hands of their individual strollers. My heart skipped a beat. It was not so long ago that I too had been wheeling around Kabir on these very streets just like this. It was an evening ritual that had given much needed respite to both of us. Out of the confines of the apartment, in the open, it was a time for a very different kind of bonding.

I still go down to the same play area with my lil guy but now he is a pre-schooler. There is no stroller for me to push and no handle bar for me to hold on to. He has graduated to the slides, swings and rides. Then why do I still feel like I am holding on to that handle bar of his stroller? Maybe it is not so easy to adopt another role if you have immersed yourself totally into motherhood for so long.

This thought crosses mind very often these days. And each time it leaves me terrified. Terrified at the thought of a transition. And the scariest part is that I have to make the transition myself. No one will be able to do it for me. But maybe here too I can learn from my brave lil boy. Starting school was tough for him. But now he has accepted that new role. He is building a new part of his life where there are people and things in addition to me. He still looks forward to coming back to me once school is over but he also looks forward to school every morning.  He has learnt to be a student and a friend in addition to being my sunny boy. Maybe it is time for me to also become something else. Not something instead of his mother , but something in addition to just being his mother.

Can you make something viral?

I just read about two completely unrelated incidents but having one thing in common- their online presence. The first is a simulation game developed by th UNHCR to help people "see and feel" what it is like to be a refugee. The second is a video of a bus monitor in Greece, NY who was verbally abused by young boys. While the guys at UNHCR are racking their brains about how to get people interested in this game about a really serious issue, the second video already has thousands of hits and has raised close to half a million for the abused lady. This just makes me wonder if you can ever really "make" something viral? Viral by definition means something that spreads very rapidly because it is able to strike a chord with people immediately and makes them want to pass it on, share it. So while the issue that the UNHCR is trying to talk about is far more grave and global than the abuse of a bus monitor and juvenile hooliganism, it will go viral if it finds a place in people's hearts, just like the video of the bus monitor. The developers of the game are quoted as saying that they are not looking for popularity like that of Angry Birds. But if a completely irrational game where birds need to be launched from a catapult to break some inane eggs in wooden castles can have universal appeal, why not this very rational, very real issue? The answer is perhaps not that easy, and it's still a mystery what makes something viral.