I am pretty excited as this week, S and I will take the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But in my home state of Maharashtra in India, the situation is quite grim as they have run out of vaccines and many vaccine centres have been closed for the past few days. My parents have gotten their first dose and were supposed to get their next dose some time later this week, but now as things stand, it is not certain when they will actually get the dose and the effectiveness of the dose.
Cases are really surging in many countries and the world has seen an excess of 135 million cases with the bulk of the cases in the USA and Brazil and India with India reporting more than 100,000 cases daily multiple times this week. I am very concerned for my parents and other elderly relatives in India. They have been planning to go visit my grandmother in Bengaluru for months now, but because of all the new cases coming up, their plans keep getting postponed time and again. We thought getting the vaccine will be the key, but now that also looks unlikely in the near future. We can only pray.
This week was quite bad for me in terms of productivity because for some reason, I kept getting distracted and could not do everything I wanted to do. I am hoping this coming week will be different and I am able to focus more and get all that I want to do done.
And this is the perfect entry to our thought of the week. That if you think positive, good things will happen to you and believing in negative thoughts and things is definitely the one major obstruction to success. So if you have negative thoughts coming your way, take a deep breath and push that thought away and think something positive instead.
That’s it from us this week. The children will start their second year next week, so things will get heated up for them now, with more face to face lessons. Stay safe everyone.
Tomorrow I complete one year of meditation and mindfulness. I am quite proud of myself and when I started, I didn’t really think I could really follow this through. I went through the apps I use for this and realised, over the past year, I have done slightly more than 183 hours in the last year. I have really benefitted by practising mindfulness and meditating daily and I have blogged about this previously. Find something that resonates with you, be it the app, the type of meditation and even the time and it will become a habit very soon. If I don’t meditate as soon as I wake up and have my coffee, I feel something is amiss and I think that’s my cue that this has become a part of me now, so much so, I prefer waking up an hour earlier than everyone else just so I have a quiet home in which I can meditate.
My walking took a bit of a hit this month because of the leg and ankle pain I had, but I am happy to report that GG while massaging my ankle one evening, popped something (we both have no idea of what she did, but we heard a distinct pop) and the pain has been minimal or non-existant till today (touch wood!). This month, I have walked across almost the whole of peninsular Malaysia, reaching the northern border of the state of Perak, just short of reaching the state of Penang and Kedah. I will most probably bypass the state of Perlis, because it does not fall in the North-South Expressway and by the end of April, I should enter Thailand.
My reading has really taken off this year and I am currently reading both e-books as well as physical books borrowed from the National Library of Singapore. I am currently 10 books ahead of my scheduled number of books to be read by the end of the year and will have to move my goal post if this goes on.
This week’s quote is about looking at an obstacle and not seeing it as a deterrent, but instead as an opportunity to show what you are made of and of converting that obstacle into an opportuntity and this boils down to your attitude. If you see a glass as half empty, you have a negative attitude and probably see it as something that will hinder progress, but if you see the glass as half empty, that you see things positively, then it’s a learning, even if it is an obstacle and you look at everything thing that happens in your life as a learning experience, be it positive or negative.
From tomorrow, Singapore opens up more and offices can start having 75% of their staff work inside the office as opposed to less than 50% previously. They will work three days a week in office and the remaining two days will be from home. This means that S will go back to work after a year of working from home. He is having mixed feelings about this and will have to start waking up earlier now as he used to sleep the time he had to commute to work.
My parents have taken the first dose of the vaccine, but are still waiting for another week or so before they take the second dose. I am worried about them as India, my home state of Maharashtra and specifically Mumbai has seen a huge spike of cases in the last week or so. I keep telling them not to delay their second dose, but apparently they need to wait six weeks for the second dose for the particular vaccine they have gotten. If you are eligible for vaccination, please go ahead and take them as soon as possible. S and I signed up for our turn last week when the government announced vaccines for our age group. This week we got our personalised link and have signed up for our first doses later this month and the second dose scheduled for early May.
That’s all people, stay safe, stay masked and get vaccinated if you are eligible.
Happiness is the only thing that multiplies when you share it. This is a quote that forces you to think on multiple levels. How is happiness defined and is the level of my happiness the same as someone else? It’s something that we seriously need to think about and once we unlock this lesson, it becomes that much easier to become happy and to spread happiness all around.
After about two weeks, my ankle and leg pain is much better. From a pain of 8 on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being very painful, it’s probably a three now. One of the days that GG was massaging my ankle, she pressed hard enough that we heard a pop from a bone that was painful to touch. But that pop helped in the healing so much that after that day.
We are about a year into lockdowns in most countries and with newer waves coming in, I am not sure when life will go back to being normal. Singapore will start easing some restrictions from next week, especially those about more people being allowed into offices. Residents between the ages of 45 and 59 are also encouraged to sign up for the vaccine and as soon as this was announced, S and I signed up for the vaccines, as did many others I know in this age group. We will get a notification once vaccines are ready and then we will have to book an appointment slot. I am quite eager to get vaccinated because of my parents. If there is an emergency, then between my sister and I, I am the one who will be able to get there faster and for this, I will need to be vaccinated so I am not forced to quarantine myself both sides.
BB got his results early last week and though he did better than the previous semester, he didn’t do as well as we expected. After a long talk, he has promised to pull up his socks and work hard in the next semester. This is probably his last chance to pull up his grades if he wants a chance to go to university after his national service.
This was all from my side this week, stay masked, stay safe and stay indoors if possible!
I grew up in Mumbai, very close to what is the heart of the tambram community in the city, Matunga. Where we lived was a 15 minute walk to the heart of the community, to the market and the temples, to the flower shops and the vegetable vendors, some of whom though they came from the northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, but could banter with the mamas and manis in Tamil. Before COVID-19 stuck and life changed, my mother used to make the thrice weekly trip every week to Matunga to get her fix of all of the above.
The other day while I was thinking about this, I realised that I actually grew up in an urban agraharam. So what is an agraharam you may ask? An Agraharam or Agrahara was a grant of land and royal income from it, typically by a king or a noble family in India, for religious purposes, particularly to Brahmins to maintain temples in that land or a pilgrimage site and to sustain their families. Agraharams were also known as Chaturvedimangalams in ancient times as well as known as ghatoka, and boyas. Agraharams were built and maintained by dynasties such as the Cholas and Pallavas. The name originates from the fact that the agraharams have lines of houses on either side of the road and the temple to the village god at the centre, thus resembling a garland around the temple. According to the traditional Hindu practice of architecture and town-planning, an agraharam is held to be two rows of houses running north–south on either side of a road at one end of which would be a temple to Shiva and at the other end, a temple to Vishnu. An example is Vadiveeswaram in Tamil Nadu.
Where we grew up was a collection of about 50-60 two to three storey buildings set in a sort of square with roads intersecting them. We were framed by educational institutes on three sides and a main road on the fourth. While our small community comprised of people from different communities across the various states of India, if I look back, I can see the Tamil Brahmin community most predominant here, with most of them from Kerala or the Palakkad Iyers. Most buildings, with some exceptions which only had people from a certain community as residents, had a few tambram families in residence. Everyone was a mama or mami and not uncle or aunty and everyone knew everyone, or at the very least knew our parents and grandparents, many of whom they were either together at school, in the same class or from the same village in Tamil Nadu or Kerala.
In my own building, the bulk of our neighbours were from my own community and this is why I call my small slice of area an urban agraharam. Everyone was solidly middle class and if you probed enough, you found some connection with them, either through family or friends and once the connection was made, you were part of them. I know now that even living in a secular and multi-community city like Mumbai made us quite insular when it came to Tamil culture. The only Tamil culture I knew was the Tambram one and coming to Singapore, to a culture similar to my own was actually a culture shock to me.
But, growing up in a community made mostly of people who had the same values, the same traditions as us was just as charming. Festivals which are unique to my community was commonplace here and I never questioned why the rest didn’t celebrate it. For example, the annual Avani avittam festival which is the only festival for the men who on this day would change their sacred threads used to be held in a nearby school with a few priests from one of the temples in Matunga coming over to conduct the rituals. Since there were enough men who wore the sacred thread, it probably made sense for the organizers to hold a mini session in our area. Since the day was not a public holiday, they used to do the session fairly early so the men and boys could then go on to work and school. And in all the years my grandfather and then father went here instead of to our temple in Matunga, I never questioned why. It all seemed normal to me. We loved going to each other’s homes for festivals like Diwali, Navratri and Ganesh Chaturti in our pavadais and sing songs and gorge on the delicacies.
That was a lovely time growing up. Everyone looked out for each other and mamas and mamis didn’t heaitate to scold or tell on a child they knew if the said child did something wrong. We thought nothing of going into anyone’s house for a drink of water or to use the bathroom. We were also quite safe in our little enclave and most of us pretty much lived our whole lives there till we moved out.
Life in our small community has changed now. Many buildings are being knocked down to make way for high rises, especially since this area is now a prime area, within what is considered the original Bombay and close, but not too close to the city. A lot of people from the community moved to suburbs like Chembur, Thane and Dombivili when the real estate prices here started picking up in the nineties. I think my grandparents and parents even explored the idea of moving to Chembur, but thankfully dropped the idea very soon. Life goes on, but in our area, the percentage of tambrams has reduced tremendously, so much so it can’t be called an agraharam anymore. I mourn for this loss, but c’est la vie and life must go on. The chakra of life never stops and I am sure in some of the suburbs I mentioned newer urban agraharams have been created.
This week and the following week is results week for BB & GG. GG’s results came first and while it was more or less expected, she didn’t do as much as she expected to do which meant her cumulative GPA fell down a bit, for which she was upset for about half a day and then bounced back promising to bring it up in the next semester. BB’s results come out tomorrow and I for one, am in equal parts anxious and worried.
My leg and ankle pain is still there and some days are quite bad. I am lucky that GG is a talented maseusse, though she does not know any technique, but helps me once or twice a day to massage the aching parts. This means my walking this month is getting hit and I don’t think I would walk as much as I have done in previous months. This is a busy week for me, but I think if the pain persists, I will have no choice, but go to the doctor next week and have it checked out. I know I am probably being negligent, but I hope this goes away before I need to see a specialist.
Today’s quote is a classic positivity quote which asks one to bring positivity with them wherever they go. It’s a great lesson, especially for me, since I am trying quite hard to be more positive in 2021. It means bringing something positive with you at all times, and making the best of any situation.
Memories and Such 