Category Archives: Life

What a Week…..TGIF…Really?

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This week’s kinda been a bit weird! We had a break right in the middle of the week and when I went in to work yesterday, it was with the feeling that it was Monday instead of Thursday. But today’s Friday and the weekend beckons! Not that this weekend’s gonna be anything but relaxing – think exams times two….


Wednesday was Diwali when the whole world has the excuse to hog like pigs! One of my friends said you start chewing in the morning and don’t end till night and he was right. But were all feeling the effects of the excesses and yesterday was a day of eating less and giving tummies a break!

This is me till Tuesday

BB and GG’s written final exams start today. They’ve done with the orals earlier this month and will have the written papers starting today with English, then Maths on Monday and rounding off the year’s examinations with Chinese on Tuesday. Then after another 10 odd days of school, they end the Primary 2 and get ready for Primary 3. Primary 3 is supposed to be a big jump from the ‘easy’ years of Primary 1 & 2. Science gets added to the mix now. I wonder how they they will cope, especially with Hindi! Got to keep the momentum going on even during the holidays.

Once the exams are done, I plan on cleaning the whole house, throwing out accumulated stuff that somehow seem to develop tendencies to give birth to more stuff! I want to do this before my helper leaves for her leave in December. Then it’s planning and shopping time for our trip to visit family in India in mid December. We’re all so looking forward to this. Another thing I hope happens in the next two months is me getting a new job and starting in a new place in the new year!
Got a lot to accomplish in the next two months. Wish me luck folks!

Bombay/Mumbai – what do you call it?

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Image from here

Mumbai, India’s commercial capital (debatable now, but I like the ephithet), the city that never sleeps. I found this in my previous blog and thought this was a beautiful tribute to my hometown. This was actually circulated to me by email eons ago and I am not the original author. I do not know who that is, so can’t give credit where it’s due. If you do know the author, please do let me know and I’ll give credit.

Gateway of India

Image courtesy from this site
Bambai meri jaan….

  • A City where everything is possible, especially the impossible.
  • Where lovers first love and then marry, Where there is place for every Tom, Dick and Harry
  • Where telephone bills make a person ill, Where a person cannot sleep without a pill.
  • Where carbon-dioxide is more than oxygen, Where the road is considered to be a dustbin,
  • Where college canteens are full and classes empty, Where Adam teasing is also making an entry,
  • Where a cycle reaches faster than a car, Where everyone thinks himself to be a star,
  • Where sky scrapers overlook the slum, Where houses collapse as the monsoon comes,
  • Where people first act and then think, Where there is more water in the pen than ink,
  • Where the roads see-saw in monsoon, Where the beggars become rich soon,
  • Where the roads are levelled when the minister arrives,
  • Where college admission means hard cash, Where cement is frequently mixed with ash.
  • This is Mumbai my dear, But don’t fear, just cheer, come to Mumbai every year!

The iconic Marine Drive or Queens Necklace

Picture from here

23 Things that prove you are a Bombayaite 

  1. You say “town ” and expect everyone to know that this means south of Churchgate.
  2. You speak in a dialect of Hindi called ‘Bambaiya Hindi’, which only Bombayites can understand.*
  3. Your door has more than three locks.
  4. Rs 500 worth of groceries fit in one paper bag.
  5. Train timings (9.27, 10.49 etc) are really important events of life.
  6. You spend more time each month traveling than you spend at home.
  7. You call an 8′ x 10′ clustered room a Hall.
  8. You’re paying Rs 10,000 for a 1 room flat, the size of walk-in closet and you think it’s a “steal.”
  9. You have the following sets of friend: school friends, college friends, neighborhood friends, office friends and yes, train friends, a species unique only in Bombay.
  10. Cabbies and bus conductors think you are from Mars if you call the roads by their Indian name, they are more familiar with Warden Road, Peddar  Road, Altamount Road
  11. Stock market quotes are the only other thing besides cricket which you follow passionately.
  12. The first thing that you read in the Times of India is the “Bombay Times” supplement.
  13. You take fashion seriously.
  14. You’re suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.
  15. Hookers, beggars and the homeless are invisible.
  16. You compare Bombay to New York’s Manhattan instead of any other cities of India.
  17. The most frequently used part of your car is the horn.
  18. You insist on calling CST as VT, and Sahar and Santacruz airports instead of Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport.
  19. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.
  20. Your idea of personal space is no one actually standing on your toes.
  21. Being truly alone makes you nervous.
  22. You love wading through knee deep mucky water in the monsoons, and actually call it ”romantic’.
  23. Only in Bombay , you would get Chinese Dosa and Jain Chicken.

Neighbours all

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For some wierd reason I feel like posting on neighbours, so please bear with me.

Housing in Singapore is of two very distinct types – public and private. We live in a Housing & Development Board (HDB) Executive Apartment type of flat. It’s not too bad and around 80% of people in Singapore live in these kinds of flats. Our previous home was also an HDB flat and when we wanted to move to a bigger flat, we decided to go to HDB again since we had not taken the subsidy they give locals and so wanted to use that before we move to private housing.

We’ve lived in our present home for the past year and a half and till  today I barely know our neighbours. The block we live in is in an L shaped arrangement with the longer side having around 7 duplex type of flats and three in the shorter side (including ours) which are all on one level.

The day we shifted, we met the other two neighbours on our side of the building. They seemed nice and we exchanged hellos when we met or when the doors opened. Then one of them moved away (we didn’t know as we were on a holiday and when we came back, the neighbour was gone!). As for the others on the floor, we do not know ANY OF THEM! Funny right?

At our previous place, since I was working full-time, we also had a hello-bye relationship with our neighbours (there were a total of 6 flats on our floor including ours). But as soon as BB & GG were born, we became very friendly with them and the 6 years we spent there after the children’s birth were fun!

Contrast this with my home in Mumbai. We live in a building with 19 flats and almost all have been there for as long our family has been there (give or take around 60 years, the age of the building). I’ve grown up there and know every single person in the building. There was no fear of the unknown and all the adults living there were surrogate uncles/aunties/grandmas and grandpas! When we were younger and my parents had to go out for the evening, we used to go to one of these neighbours homes and if it became late, even slept over and came back home in the morning. When my grandparents passed away and my parents had to go to the city they were living in, it was to this particular uncle/aunty’s care that my mom left us in. She would bring us food and make sure we went to college and later to work. It didn’t matter to them that we were adults by then, my parents had left me and my sister in their care and they were going to look after us, come what may!

I miss that sense of camaraderie that we had, here it feels like every one just lives their own lives and noone is interested in the other person’s life. But then if I want to be really honest, I am also more of a self contained person and prefer my own company and that of my family’s to others…So guess this is quid pro quid…

Depression

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I was not going to publish this post, this was supposed to be something just for me, but I think, since this blog is a my digital diary, I will publish it.

I think I am suffering from depression. This is not my imagination, but something that’s been bothering me for a while now – in fact from the beginning of this year. On hindsight, this was one of the biggest reasons I left my previous jobs, thinking a change of place and pace would ease all that was happening inside me. Web MD defines depression as “Depression is a serious and pervasive mood disorder. It causes feelings of sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, and worthlessness. Depression can be mild to moderate with symptoms of apathy, little appetite, difficulty sleeping, low self-esteem, and low-grade fatigue. Or it can be more severe.”

Depression is apparently more common in women than in men and twice as many women are likely to develop clinical depression as compared to me. Some of the symptoms of depression are:

  • persistent sad, anxious, or “empty” mood
  • loss of interest or pleasure in activities, including sex
  • restlessness, irritability, or excessive crying
  • feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness, pessimism
  • sleeping too much or too little, early-morning awakening
  • appetite and/or weight loss or overeating and weight gain
  • decreased energy, fatigue, feeling “slowed down”
  • thoughts of death or suicide, or suicide attempts
  • difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions
  • persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain

Image from Wikipedia

I’ve mentioned before just how toxic the environment was in my previous place and I think that environment was the cause for all this. The way I was treated in my previous work place is the underlying cause for this. I have now decided that after they give me the one thing I still haven’t gotten from them – my testimonial – I will cut all contact with the organisation and the people there. Unfortunately quite a bit of my coworkers are my friends on Facebook and now I have to decide how to get rid of them from my life without seeming to get rid of them. Any ideas?

The symptoms that I’ve been experiencing look like this – No interest in anything any more, especially the things I used to enjoy doing; Sleep patterns all over the place. Most of the time, I just want to sleep – even if I have just gotten off bed less than a couple of hours back. Then some days I just can’t sleep at night even if I am yawning away to kingdom come!; No energy to do anything and a feeling of tiredness all the time

I just took this test at the Health Promotion Board website and my test results reads “Your responses suggest that you have some depressive symptoms. You may feel down from time to time but these symptoms are unlikely to impair your daily function. It might be wise to reassess your symptoms in a few weeks.”

I told S about this yesterday and he wants me to see a doctor this week. I’m not sure if I want to, but in this case, I guess I may just have to give in.

I initially wrote this post yesterday and didn’t want to publish it. But looking back, the very act of putting my feelings down on paper has put me on the path to healing! I’ll go and see a doctor today but I know in my gut, I will get better soon

Yearning for school – Part 1

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When I wrote about my school going life earlier this week, it made me nostalgic about my school. So this post is dedicated to my alma mater – J.B. Vachha High School. JBV is it was (and is still) called is the short form for the loong formal name of the school. The name which used to be printed on all our school note books for the 12 years that I spent there reads like this – J.B. Vachha High School for Parsi Girls & The Cawasji Jehangir Primary and Infant School. I can’t find the school website so there’s no link to the school, although I did remember checking it out a few years back!

The school badge

I studied in the same school right from Junior KG (or Kindergarten 1) till I completed my Secondary School Certificate or SSC exams. Most of the teachers who taught me, saw me grow from a naughty 4 year old to a mature 15 year old young lady. The school was a purely girls school and except for our Games master and Indian music teachers, all the teachers were also female. While I was growing up, this was the most popular school for girls around the area I lived in (this would mean the Dadar, Wadala, Matunga, Sion areas, but we did get students from other places like Chembur, Parel also). I also remember seeing huge queues of people waiting to get the admission forms for their daughters and this was at a time when school admission was not as difficult as it is today. My mother used to see the queues and say that they didn’t really have to queue up so much – they just went to the school in the morning, got the form and I was called for an interview, which I did well and just like that I was in! In fact my grand parents were against my joining JBV as they wanted me to go to the same school as my dad – this school was literally a hop, skip and jump away from home and more inportantly for them, was a south Indian school and hence to their eyes, had all the right values and attributes. But I am so glad that my parents, and especially my mom stood her ground and put me and later my sis in this school.

What we called the 'New Building'.

Those days, when it was just education all the time, this was one of the very few schools which had a big emphasis on extra curricular activities. From the time we were in third standard till we graduated these were the extra activities we did – embroidery, needlework, library, Indian music/Western music/Dancing (you had to choose one), cookery, gardening, laundry, girl guides/social service. We also did typing and economics as special subjects in the IX and X grades. We also had one period of drill or PE every week and from the VII grade till the X grade, we had to stay back after school once a week for around 90 minutes of games.

Since this is proving to be a loong post, I’ll stop here for Part 1 and do Part 2 another time.