This and That…A Khichadi Post

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This post is a khichdi of different things. First things first though – a khichdi is an Indian lentil and rice dish which is essentially a one pot meal. You just chuck in rice, lentils, vegetables with some spices and create a fulfilling meal! The image is courtesy of Wikipedia.

Yesterday I went for my annual PAP smear test. My ob-gyn has recently shifted his clinic and somehow even though I kept saying the correct name, I landed in the wrong place! I had taken BB & GG with me since I wanted them to see the man who brought them into this world! BB & GG were very excited about this! The test was a routine one, but the Fibroid that I have in my uterus has apparently grown by around 20% over the last one year. It is still small enough to leave it for now, but over the last four years it has grown by almost 250%! Hopefully it stops growing any more and I am saved from surgery…

I also realised that I am seriously overweight! My scale at home is broken and I have not yet bothered to replace it. I weight 92 freaking kgs! I really, really need to do something. I also realised that this weight is very close my weight when I was nine months pregnant with twins! No wonder in the last few weeks, more than one person have offered me a seat in the bus – they thought I was pregnant!!

While coming back home from the clinic, we were talking about the fact that in my side of the family BB is the only boy in his generation – my sister has two girls and other married cousins with children also have only girls till now – and I said, “Because BB is the only boy in this generation, the grandparents tend to pamper him a lot”. For some reason, this set off GG in a fit of giggles and she wouldn’t tell me the reason. Then later when the giggling subsided, we realised that she associated the word ‘pamper’ to diapers or Pampers! Cue to continue giggling whenever the word was used, and believe me she used the word in many ways during the 10 minute drive home!

I also heard some other piece of sad news yesterday – an ex-colleague of mine JS who was just about my age (give or take a few years) expired on Sunday. I am not sure of the cause, but I heard the words Heart Attack. Even though he and me were not close and in fact I disliked him a lot, here’s a prayer for him and his family and may his soul rest in peace. I know he is the only son and has aged parents with medical conditions. May God give them the courage to go through this tragedy. It can never be easy for a parent to see his/her child go before them, this goes against all the laws of nature!

Conversations with God!

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What is religion? According to Wikipedia:

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and moral values.Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe. They tend to derive morality, ethics, religious laws or a preferred lifestyle from their ideas about the cosmos and human nature.

I was born and raised as a Hindu, particularly a South Indian Iyer Brahmin. While we follow all the tenets of the Hindu religion, there are some which are uniquely ours. I’ll be writing more about these in subsequent posts, but while the overarching theme of this post is religion, it is more specifically about God and my relationship with Him.

Different people view religion is their own ways. For some, this may take form of praying religiously in front of the manifestation of their preferred religion, for others it may be something they view with suspicion and fear and shun it altogether.

Where I am concerned, I believe in the religion I was brought up in and within which I bring up my children. I believe everyone needs an emotional anchor with which to anchor their lives and religion, if handled correctly, can provide that. My relationship with my religion and the God who personifies it for me is very personal and intense. To me, it is not necessary to pray a certian number of times a day, go to the temple so many times a week, but not be a good person internally. I believe that what lies between you and your deity is personal and should remain so. I definitely pray and constantly think of him, but it is very personal.

Painting of Lord Ganesh from Bali at home

Many Hindus have something called an ‘ishtadev‘ which essentially means a favourite God or Deity. I do too and with my ishtadev, I have a one-on-one relationship. My ishtadev by the way is the Lord Ganesh. I have always been drawn to him since childhood and there is one particular temple in my hometown of Mumbai that I love going to. This is the Siddhivinayak Temple in Prabhadevi and never fail to go there each time I go back.

I look up to Lord Ganesh or Siddhivinayak as a friend. I pray to him many, many times a day and selfishly also ask him loads of things during the course of my day. If something is not going my way, I ask for his intervention and when things are working in my favour, I

Idol of Siddhivinayak at the Siddhivinayak Temple, Mumbai

do thank him. A case in point – last night we got home very late from the temple (details later) and I didn’t have a very good night. Today morning, when I got dropped off at my bus stop, I did mention to S that although I am sleepy, I know I won’t get place to sit in the bus. Then the bus that came my way was not the bus I usually take, it was an abbreviated service that I usually ignore since using that bus means changing to another bus later on. But this bus was fairly empty and I saw if I boarded it, I can get a seat, so I got in and slept till it was time to get off and change buses, which coincidently came within 3 minutes!

This is my relationship with my God, my friend. How about you? Do you believe in God, in a higher power? If yes, then how do you communicate with him/her?

1993 Mumbai Riots and Blasts

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The past few days I’ve been reading about the tributes that were paid to the heroes and the people who died in the horrific September 11, 2001 crashes. This made me think of all those people who have been affected by these acts of terrorism perpetuated by terrorists.

What is terrorism? Wikipedia says that although there is no universally agreed, legally binding criminal law definition, the word refers to acts of violence which create fear or terror in the minds of people and which are perpectuated for religious or political or ideological goal and which has no respect for the lives of the ordinary person.

If the above can be taken as a valid definition of terrorism, then there are many incidences which have happened in my home state which adhere to this definition and which the perpetrators would never agree on it being part of something which created terror to the layman or ‘aam janta’.

One of the incidence which for some reason is in my mind happened in December 1992 when the 16th century mosque of Babri Masjid was demolished in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists and fundamentalists. The riots happened in spite of a commitment made the organisers of the rally that preceded it to the Supreme Court of India that the mosque would not be harmed. The justification given for the demolition of the mosque was that the mosque was actually built over the place where the revered Lord Shri Ram was born and that the Mughal King Babur actually had demolished the temple which was there and had constructed a mosque over it. The intercommunal tensions and riots which resulted from this demolition spread quickly to many parts of the country and this was the first time that my generation saw such riots happening in our own backyard in a city which we claimed to be the most secular in the country – Mumbai! This was very quickly followed by the horrific blasts which shook the city in March 1993. How naive we were back then!

When the riots and the blasts happened, I was in my first year of my degree programme and my sister was in class XI. I can’t remember much of the riots as it didn’t affect us directly, but I do remember reading and hearing really bad stories about women raped and killed just because they happened to belong to a different religion and decapacitated heads being found by people and animals. I also have this one image in my head – we were in the terrace of our building and a short distance away is the railway line. There is a break in the buildings and we could see the line clearly. On the other side of the railway line is a shanty area which used to be predominantly Muslim. We saw smoke and fire coming from an area near there. We were scared and I remember parents not letting anyone leave the house for a week or so after that.

A scene from the riot

The blast near the Mumbai Stock Exchange

Within two months however, it was the time of the Mumbai bomb blasts. When we had heard about the blasts in the city, I was back home from college as my classes usually ended before lunch. My sister on the other hand had classes the whole day till about 6 pm. The good thing was that her college was literally a 10 minute walk away from my home. Her other friends were not so lucky since they stayed quite a distance away. All public transport had come to a stop that day and phone lines were also not working. This was the pre-cellphone age and without the MTNL phones, there was no way to keep in touch. Around 4-5 of my sister’s friends came to my place that night. We tried to get in touch with their parents, but without phones it was very difficult to do so. Then around evening, we realised that we could make calls to some people and that started a phone relay across the city. I later learned that many people did the same to get news to friends and family. We called all the people we could get in touch with and left names, numbers and messages for the parents of the girls who were with us. Then they in turn tried the numbers and if they could, passed the message or otherwise did the same. This way through different people, we managed to get the message to the worried parents.

This actually made me realise the intrinsic goodness of people, especially in situations like this. I actually have many such stories, especially from the annual Mumbai rains, but that’s material  for another post.

Back to School….

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School started today after a week-long break. This is the last term for the year and the most pressured one in terms of moms nagging at children. This is because of the spectre of the Semesteral Assessment 2 which will start from next month!

For me personally this is going to be a real intense 2  months as predictably BB & GG failed in the Common Test for Hindi. They take Hindi as their Mother Tongue language and now I am really worried! This next SA 2 is the make or break test for them. I just don’t know how to get them to learn and love the language. If they find Primary 2 difficult, then what will happen in P3 when the ante ups considerably?

God, if you are listening in or reading this blog, please help me!

On another note, here is an interesting article with a local flavour on the teaching of the English language.

In My Hands Today….

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The Dating Detox – Gemma Burgess

Dating is a dangerous sport. So after her sixth successive failed relationship, romantically-challenged, 20-something Sass decides she’s had enough. The Dating Detox is born. No men, no break-ups, no problem. The result? Her life – usually joyfully/traumatically occupied with dates, clothes and vodka – is finally easy. Chastity rocks. No wonder nuns are always singing. Everything falls at her feet. Especially men. Will Sass break the rules? Why does fate keep throwing her in the path of the irritatingly amusing – and gorgeous – Jake? Will she ever roll the dice and play again? Or is a love-free life too good to risk losing? For the post-Carrie Bradshaw, post-Bridget Jones, post-credit crunch generation of singles, life isn’t beautiful, a bitch, or a beach. It’s a party.