Monthly Archives: January 2015

Festivals of India: Pongal O Pongal

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This week all over India, various communities will be celebrating/would have celebrated their Harvest festivals. In the southern part of India, specifically Tamil Nadu, today is the day that is celebrated as Pongal.

Not to be confused with the yummy sweet and salt Pongal dishes, the festival of Pongal is a harvest festival celebrated by Tamil people all over the world around 13-16 January each year. This is a four day festival which is according to the Gregorian calendar, unlike most Hindu festivals, which are based on the lunar calendar and marks the start of the sun’s six-month long journey northwards or Uttarayan as it’s called in Sanskrit. This is also celebrated as Makar Sankranti in other parts of India.

The word Pongal in Tamil means ‘overflowing’ and signifies abundance and prosperity. The celebrations for the four day festival start with ‘Bhogi Pongal’ with the worship of Lord Indra, the ruler of clouds and rains to thank him for a season of good rainfall and to make sure he blesses the farmer with just enough rain to ensure abundant harvest. The next day is ‘Thai Pongal’ which is the main festival day. People wake up before sunrise and bathe and get ready and at the time of sunrise, ritually boil fresh milk and let it overflow the earthern pot it is being boiled in. When the boiling happens, people shout “Pongalo Pongal” which means “Let there be prosperity and abundance everywhere”.  The third day is set aside for the animals in the household called ‘Mattu Pongal‘ to give them thanks for the work they do helping the farmer with his harvest. The farm animals, specifically the bulls and cows are scrubbed up and decorated and treated with goodies. The last day is a time for family reunions, called ‘Kaanum Pongal‘ where brothers give their married sisters special gifts and employers gift their employees. This marks the end of the Pongal festivities for the year.

Other harvest festivals celebrated in India include Bihu in Assam, Lohri in Punjab and Makar Sankranti in Gujarat, my home state of Maharashtra and other states in India

This is basically a festival meant to thank the Sun God  for a good harvest and has been celebrated for more than 1000 years, though some historians say it’s older than that.

Culture is important for a human being. You need to know where you come from, what your values are, so that, as custodians of the next generation, you are able to pass it on. This post is so BB & GG know where they come from and are able to pass it to their children and grand-children!

A Cousin a Day keeps the Boredom Away

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“Nobody will understand the craziness of your family better than your cousins”

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Cousins are your friends by blood. Not everyone, especially these days of smaller families have cousins who are with them through thick and thin.

My mom is the oldest of four sisters and my dad is the oldest of a younger brother and sister. We’re closer to my mom’s family. My dad lost his sister when I was in school and his brother moved away when I was real young and now we are not in contact with him or his family! I feel real sad that I don’t know my cousins from his side – I have not met them (two boys) in the last 15-18 years and they must be adults now (I last saw them when they were 4 & 8!) I sometimes joke with my dad that if I ever pass them in the street, they would be random strangers to me, that’s how out of touch we are!

I’m the oldest of eight cousins from my maternal side, dominated by girls. Between me and the youngest there’s an 11 year gap. We’re six girls and two boys.

Growing up, we were close, but since we’d meet maybe once a year if lucky, it was not that “tell you all my secrets” type of closeness. Plus, because of the eleven year gap, when I was say fifteen, my youngest cousins were like three or four! I even have memories of my second last cousin’s birth! I remember seeing her as a new-born in the hospital and since she was born in early March, I distinctly remember going to my grandmother’s home for our summer holidays in April/May and being with her. I have memories of begging my aunt to let me hold her and I would sit patiently with her on my lap when my aunt went for a bath or did something else.

However, as we grew up, the age gap somehow closed and we could relate to each other and instead of growing apart, we grew closer!

Thanks to Facebook, emails and social media we got even closer, sharing photos and milestones. It was great, but somehow we were not able to meet due to distances, schedules and what have you. Currently, we’re scattered all over the world – Hong Kong, Singapore, India, UK, USA and Canada – you get the picture right, when someone is free in one part of the world, the others are busy in another!

However it was last year, when one of my youngest cousins got married, we really started connecting with each other. Before the wedding, we started a Whatsapp group to discuss what to give her. This was something we started when the first one of us got married. In addition to the family gift with the parents, we wanted to give something special to our cousin and at that time, with hardly anyone working, it used to be small. Now that we can afford it, it’s more expensive.

It was great fun at the wedding – we had the time of our lives and missed the one cousin who could not make it. Then we decided to keep in touch more since it was so much fun and since then there’s hardly a day when texts are not pinging their way across the globe.

Cousins brighten up your life so much, that I hope BB & GG also have the same relationship with their cousins, both first and second (aka children of my cousins)

In My Hands Today…

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The Enchantress of Florence – Salman Rushdie

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveller calling himself ‘Mogor dell’Amore’, the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal, the Emperor Akbar, with a tale to tell that begins to obsess the whole imperial capital. The stranger claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar’s grandfather Babar: Qara Koz, ‘Lady Black Eyes’, a great beauty believed to possess powers of enchantment and sorcery, who is taken captive first by an Uzbek warlord, then by the Shah of Persia, and finally becomes the lover of a certain Argalia, a Florentine soldier of fortune, commander of the armies of the Ottoman Sultan. When Argalia returns home with his Mughal mistress the city is mesmerized by her presence, and much trouble ensues.”The Enchantress of Florence” is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It brings together two cities that barely know each other – the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant emperor wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire and the treachery of sons, and the equally sensual Florentine world of powerful courtesans, humanist philosophy and inhuman torture, where Argalia’s boyhood friend “il Machia” – Niccolo’ Machiavelli – is learning, the hard way, about the true brutality of power. These two worlds, so far apart, turn out to be uncannily alike, and the enchantments of women hold sway over them both. But is Mogor’s story true? And if so, then what happened to the lost princess? And if he’s a liar, must he die?

PSLE Year Week 1 Update

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Another update that I wanted to do as a seperate post was on BB & GG’s final year in Primary School. They will give their PSLE exam this year in October and this weekly update should serve as a diary of sorts for me, to use as a guide of how they are doing in school this year and what we as parents can do to make the transition to secondary school easier.

Week 1 in school was a suspended timetable week with no co-curricular activities (CCA) or supplementary and enrichment classes scheduled. This will all start from today when out of five days a week, they come home straight back from school at 2 pm only on Fridays. When you add tuition to the mix, what you will get will be two very tired children at the end of the day. This is how their schedule will loosely look from today:

  • Monday: School ends at 1:30, Supplementary classes from 2-4 pm, back home at 4:30 and off to Hindi tuitions at 5. Back home around 6-6:30, time for some homework, dinner and then sleep.
  • Tuesday: School ends at 3:30, with online Hindi classes from 6-8 pm. Dinner in the middle, then homework and sleep.
  • Wednesday: School ends at 1:30, Supplementary classes from 2-4 pm, back home at 4:30 and Maths Tuitions from 6-8. Dinner before tuition and then time for some homework before bed!
  • Thursday: School ends at 1:30, Enrichment classes and CCA from 2:30 – 5:30 pm. No tuitions on Thursdays as they will be exhausted!
  • Fridays: The one day in the week they come back at 2 pm. Only have Hindi tuition at 4 pm. So will have time to do a bit of studies.
  • Saturday: Hindi school from 8:30 to 12:30, then music lessons from 5-6.
  • Sunday: No rest on Sundays too with one tuition from 8-10 am and another from 10-11 and 12-1! The evening is free…

The school pace has started to become faster than they are used to with teachers putting their noses to the grindstone and also reminding them of their PSLE exams.

I will be meeting BB’s Maths and Science teacher this week during their curriculum talk to discuss how we can help him for his Direct School Admission. I will also be speaking to one of GG’s teachers for her DSA! More updates on that later.

GG’s class also filled up a form where they had a list of some of the schools in our area plus other good schools and the scores needed to enter the school. They were asked to put 6 schools they want to go to and also their final score they need to get in! Hopefully this will motivate them to do their best! (Fingers crossed)

2015 Week 1: Weekly Update

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I thought of putting down what happened this week here so I have a kind of running update on my life!

This week was a mixed bag one – on one hand work has been good, but health is not so good.

Work: A good week, where my views for our forthcoming event was considered. So far 2015 has started well and my fingers are crossed that this continues for the rest of the year. A project I have been working for almost a year is seeing completion and I hope this will auger well for me.

Health: I had a good number of health goals for the year and this week was not a very good one, need to step up to the plate on this! I exercised 5 days this week while my goal was six days, so need to figure how I can incorporate this over the weekends. I also lost a bit of weight, though not the 1 kg I was hoping for. I missed taking my diabetes medication one time, should not do this again. Also food choices were not the best, so need to work on that too. I also started meditating this week, and could do that twice this week, which is a plus for me.

Writing: Not bad, managed to post almost every day, especially in my other blog. I need to work more on posting here!

All in all, a not-too-bad start to 2015. If my life continues in this vein, life’s gonna look good by the end of the year.