Tag Archives: Life

Festivals of India: Maha Shivaratri

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This year, I have decided to blog about all the major Hindu festivals as well as those of other faiths which are celebrated in Singapore. This will serve mainly as a repository of knowledge for GG & BB, when I am not around…

So yesterday, Hindus across the world celebrated Maha Shivratri. This is an annual festival which is celebrated in honor of one of the triumvirate of the Hindu pantheon of Gods – Lord Shiva. This day, celebrated as the convergence of Shiva and Shakti (male and female) is the day Lord Shiva married the Goddess Parvati. It is also said this is the day when Lord Shiva performed the Tandava dance, a dance which is the source of the cycle of creation, preservation and dissolution.

Devotees celebrate this festival principally by fasting all day and offering bael leaves to the Lord as well as staying up the whole night in prayer and contemplation. It is said that the planetary positions in the Northern Hemisphere on this day act as a potent catalyst to help a person raise their spiritual energy. The benefits of powerful ancient Sanskrit mantras such as Maha Mrityunjaya Mantra increase greatly on this night.

This Wikipedia link has some nice stories on this day which is a nice read.

The holiest of the Shiva temples in India are called the Jyotirlingas. There are 12 such temples, spread across the country. More information is here

Personally, though Lord Shiva is the kuladevta (or family deity) of S’s family, we don’t really do anything special on this day. There are no special prayers or dishes we make to commemorate this day.

Little Boys and their Toys

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Coming home from work today, suddenly I was struck with a thought – what is it with little boys and their toys? Every boy in the age group one to ten that I have seen, including BB till date loves their vehicle toys. Be it a bus, car, train or plane, they hold one in their hands, even while sleeping!

Is this something that is genetically embedded in them? While minoring in Psychology aeons ago, I learnt of the “Nature versus Nurture Theory” and when I realised I was pregnant with twins, I was determined that in my case, it will be nature which determines BB & GG’s individual and specific character and personality traits and not nurture as both will be brought up in the exact same environment.

Toys used to be gender neutral and had to be shared. There was nothing really that called out to gender-specific toys, but we could see nature fighting her way through quite early. BB loved vehicles – anything with a wheel, he wanted. When we left the house to go out, he would quickly come carrying as many cars,/trains as his little hand could hold and insist he wanted all of them to come out with him. He went through a  ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ where he managed get almost all the major characters. It does not help that S is an equal, enthusiastic partner, who loves to buy these toys for his son. He even had some cars which he had kept all these years! Big boys and their toys!! Now BB has graduated to playing with his cars and planes on an online world.

So is it our environment and the external world which reinforces gender stereotypes? Maybe that’s true as advertisements almost always show boys playing with more aggressive toys and girls being shown as more gentle. Why can’t boys be the more gentle ones? While reading for this post, I came across some very good articles which highlight this gender imbalance. Here’s one and another. And they wonder why girls don’t go in for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) subjects in school!

Why are Mondays so Difficult?

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Monday morning to me is a classic paradox! One on hand, I wake up, bright-eyed and eager to get started on the week. Then get to work and start on my To Do List and then bam! somewhere along the line, things slowly start to slow down and by 10 -10:30 am, my engine comes to a stop!

It’s a downhill all the way then. I keep on procrastinating, fighting sleep and doing everything else, except the most important task for the day, all the while waiting for the clock to hit the going home time!

One reason could be this – I sleep around 6-7 hours per night, which should be reasonable for a working adult, but is clearly not enough for me. To be at my optimal best, I need close to 8 hours of sleep, of which atleast 5-6 should be deep or REM sleep. But I average around half of that per night. So when Friday evening rolls, I have a huge sleep deficit which I try to even out by sleeping in over the weekend and also taking afternoon naps. The result of all this oversleeping is that I have a troubled sleep on Sunday nights, which makes Monday mornings a real b**ch

What can I do about this? Any suggestions to make my Mondays better?

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)