gaelikaa's diary

Rediscovery

2012-01-13T22:45:00.001+05:30

Many years ago, when I lived in Ireland, I discovered a hobby which absorbed me, made me feel creative and alive and even earned money for me. That hobby was writing. It was one of the best things I ever did. Now, I had always written. I was an avid letter writer as a child and used to get frustrated when my correspondents didn't answer as quickly or in as much detail as I would have liked. I also kept a diary for many years.

But one day, something happened which really annoyed me. A very good friend of mine invited me to go out for a drink and meet her new boyfriend (with whom she was, incidentally, head over heels in love at that point). So we went out and had a nice evening, me meeting the chap and getting to know him. Well, we didn't. Have a nice evening, I mean. The whole evening, my smart, witty friend behaved like a complete moron. She was giggling and laughing up into the man's face the whole time. Her strong opinions had disappeared. She spent the entire evening agreeing with HIS opinions (actually, I think Margaret Thatcher is a great Prime Minister too, you know?). I tried to inject some mirth into the conversation by mentioning the time when we'd gone camping in the countryside and the roof of the tent had fallen in, the rain had lashed down and we were all too drunk to do anything about it. Big mistake. She glared at me as if to say 'shut the hell up'. Then she gave another irritating giggle and whispered to him: 'I told you she was crazy, didn't I?' The next day when I met her, she was back to normal. But I was annoyed.

So I wrote a short article (names changed to protect the guilty, naturally) about how some smart and intelligent women turn into airheads when an eligible man is around. I had actually witnessed this scene several times. I proof read the article and sent it off to a women's magazine in Dublin. to my utter surprise they published it. I'd only ever submitted a few pieces before and been rejected, but this was a wonderful surprise. The same magazine published several articles by me that year.

Then I went off to India and married Yash. For the first number of years, I was extremely busy. I had four kids in eight years. My writing dried up completely.

I started blogging in 2007 in a bid to get my creative juices flowing. I loved writing my blog posts and got nice responses to most of them. I was invited to join the Loose Blogging Consortium where I got the opportunity to blog along with several friends on the same topic, once a week. That was marvellous fun and I'm still doing that. I joined a blogging group (on my friend Elizabeth Harper's blog) which undertook to write one short story per week. Surprisingly, I found that I loved writing fiction. Now my stories were not very good. Too many characters, too little dialogue, too much narrative. But I did get better with time. I was lucky enough to get into a critique group which meets online once a fortnight to share our stories and give constructive criticism. The members, most of whom are published writers, are mainly British, but there's me and even a member in Zimbabwe, and one in New York. The result was that last year, I was able to get two short stories published. It feels wonderful to be published again.

I am so glad that I have rediscoved my writing.

This is the weekly post for my blogging group, the Loose Blogging Consortium. We post weekly (usually simultaneously) on a given topic and visit each other to see the different takes we have on the same topic. We are, in alphabetical order, Conrad, Delirious, Rummuser, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit and Will. If you have time, please visit my friends too.
This topic 'Rediscovery' was suggested by Paul.

English Pronunciation

2012-01-12T19:39:00.002+05:30

A fellow member of a Facebook group I'm in shared this and I like it so much I decided to share it with whoever drops by here. Rummuser, do you like this? (I also included the introduction).

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he’d prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Feoffor does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

The Birds of the Air

2012-01-06T19:28:00.004+05:30

Look at the birds of the air, they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6;26 New Testament)
This is the Bible verse which came straight into my mind when I saw the topic for this weeks LBC (Loose Bloggers Consortium).

Sometimes, when I was very young, I used to find this verse incomprehensible. I knew that there was sickness, poverty and lack in the world. So how could this verse be true? I remember reading Isak Dineson's writings on life in Africa and laughed when I read of a young African boy who wondered why after his conversion to Christianity he was unable to pick up poisonous snakes without fear. According to the Bible (NT Mark 16;10), he should have been able to.

The truth is that Christianity is one of the most widespread faiths in the world. But many Christians don't believe in much of its teachings, or maybe just a selective amount of the teachings. It's just pick and choose religion, actually. Here in India, where I live, a country of many religions and faiths, Christian just means a member of yet another religious group. I remember feeling so angry once during a Mass in my early days in India. Yash dropped me at the Cathedral for Mass on a Saturday evening. During the sermon, the priest talked about how India was one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity. He boasted that 'many of our Indian people have a higher Christian ancestry than some Europeans.'

It's true that Ireland was a rather wild and far out part of northern Europe back in the day, with the result that Christianity arrived on the island rather a long time after Jesus walked the earth. As a member of the Irish race and therefore a mere Philistine in the eyes of some of the high born Indian Christians, I was really indignant. I wanted to walk up to that priest and ask him why was he speaking like this. In Christianity, it is not supposed to matter whether you are a new convert or from a line of baptized Christians that goes all the way back to St. Peter himself. When you take Jesus as your Lord, you are a new creation. Having Christian blood that runs all the way back to someone who was baptized by the very disciples of Jesus Christ Himself (He never baptized anyone Himself, His disciples did) doesn't make you a more valuable Christian.

The Christian faith is not about which church you belong to, or which community. It is not about whether you are married to a believer or a non-believer. It is knowing in your heart that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that God raised Him from the dead. That's it. It is not about what you eat or whether or not you pray five times a day. In fact, the Master cautioned us about religious pride, a very dangerous thing indeed (Matthew 6;5).

How do I know that Christians don't believe in their own faith?I have so many examples. One Saturday evening, after Mass, I was standing at the door of the Church talking to someone. One of the nuns from the local convent was also standing there and she had a terrible cold and a fever. She'd had it for ten days. I mentioned the healing Scriptures in the Bible and reminded her of Isaiah 53;5 "By His Wounds we are healed." I might as well have been speaking Spanish for all the understanding she had of what I was saying. If she wanted to use that Scripture for her healing, she'd have to repeat it and read it constantly in her prayer time. But she was so indoctrinated in the routine of praying in her convent home she wouldn't do it, I knew that.

I've come a long way since those days when as a child I pondered over the incredible promises written in the Bible. I now know that they are all true. But I also know that they are not automatic. They have to be taken by applying faith. God is ready to supply all our needs and we can avail of that advantage when we have faith in Him.

This is the weekly post for my blogging group, the Loose Blogging Consortium. We post weekly (usually simultaneously) on a given topic and visit each other to see the different takes we have on the same topic. We are, in alphabetical order, Conrad, Delirious, Rummuser, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit and Will. If you have time, please visit my friends too.
This topic 'The Birds of the Air' was suggested by Magpie 11.

Shakespeare Holidays

2012-01-04T11:05:00.000+05:30

Summer, a Twitter pal of mine who lives in Punjab here in north India tweeted this morning that she was reading 'Romeo and Juliet' with her daughter. I tweeted in reply that I am reading "As You Like It" with my son. She commented on the coincidence that we were both having Shakespeare holidays.

I enjoy Shakespeare and am certainly loving this opportunity to read one of his plays with which I've been less acquainted. A few posts back, I mentioned that I'm busy with Shakespeare on account of my son's examinations and Grannymar, a blogging friend of mine from Ireland replied that it seemed strange that I would be reading the Shakespeare if my son was doing the examination. That got me thinking. My mother certainly didn't read Shakespeare along with me and her input into my studies probably ended with asking me my twelve times table. But it's a bit different here in India. I was English speaking. Children in India have their own languages besides English and probably need extra support, be it from educated parents or tutors, when tackling sixteenth century English. Having me for a mother, Neil speaks English like a native, but he's a man of science like his father, Yash. Give him chemistry equations and he'll do it all himself (and ask his father if he has a question). But as for the Shakespeare, we're reading and discussing it together.

A couple of years ago I visited writer Sally Quilford's blog, where she was having a blog takeover day. She and a couple of blogging pals undertook to write their posts that day in another writing voice. Sally wrote hers in Shakespeare's voice where she waxed lyrical about Shakespeare having married Anne Hathaway, a girl of a mere sixteen summers he was promised, whom on seeing her he realized that the only way she could have passed sixteen summers was if summer came every two years. That humour was very appropriate, for Shakespeare's writing is full of humour. Well, the comedies anyway.

Here's my favourite Shakespeare story. Once, many winters ago, I was stranded in Dublin's city centre by a freak fall of snow. There was no public transport, and I was forced to walk to my home in the suburbs, several miles away. As walked (waded, rather) through the snow, I met up with another girl who was going in the same direction and we started walking together and chatting. We soon realized that we had mutual acquaintances, one of which was a young man with the unusual surname of Tackaberry. This girl had been to college with the fellow and I was a friend of his sister.

"Isn't Tackaberry an unusual name?" I said. "It's Shakespearean, almost."

"Shakespeare? That's my surname," she replied. I couldn't believe it. The idea of people actually having the Bard's surname as their own came as a surprise to me. I'd have thought that the name was extinct by now, and exclusive to him, but it isn't. And our mutual acquaintance confirmed it with me afterwards. The girl had a very simple first name like Ann or Mary, something like that. But she had this illustrious surname.

The memory of that moment still brings a smile to my face.

Ideas

2011-12-30T19:34:00.000+05:30

I've always been an avid reader and have nearly always had a huge 'to be read' (TBR) pile. My usual rule for which book to read is read the borrowed books first. Back in the early eighties, when I was on holiday in Crete, I had several novels in my suitcase. The first one I read was a bestselling book by a hugely successful popular novelist. This, had been borrowed from the friend who was on holiday with me. The plot was quite riveting. The main character was a woman who at age sixteen, was thrown out from her live-in service job in the north of England, pregnant and unmarried after a foolish love affair with the son of her employer. It was a rags to riches tale, of how the main character fought back, defeating all the odds, to build a happy and successful life.

After I read that book, I returned it to my friend. Then I began reading a book which I'd picked up while on holiday in the UK about two years earlier. This book was called 'Katie Mulholland' and had been written by Catherine Cookson. It had been originally published in the early sixties. As I read, I noticed something strangely familiar. The main character in this novel, like in the one I'd read previously, was a northern Englishwoman. She too had been thrown out of her live-in housemaid's job having been made pregnant by the son of the house. In this case, the girl had been raped. In this book, the heroine also fought back and built a successful life, becoming the dowager of a powerful family. She too found true love and became rich. It seemed to me that the plot of the recent, bestselling novel which I'd just read, had been copied from an earlier work, the one by Catherine Cookson. True, the writing style was different in each book. The more recent one was written in a more modern style than the Cookson one. They were two different books but the story was, to my mind identical.

Catherine Cookson was a legendary novelist who died years ago at a great age. The writer of the more recent novel (which I don't want to name) is still doing well. But the truth is I've never had much as much regard for her as I've had for Catherine Cookson after that.

A few years ago here in India, a television serial was launched starring a Bollywood actress who had retired from films having recently married. Apparently the plot of the serial was (although I didn't watch it) about another young servant who loses her job when unmarried and pregnant, who goes on to build a successful and happy life, finding true love and wealth in the process. Sounds familiar? Imagine my surprise when I read in the newspapers that the author of that successful eighties novel had actually sued the makers of the serial for a large sum of money, on the grounds that they had stolen her idea. This serial was set in India. It was in the Hindi language. This was a television serial, not a novel. However, the writer and her spouse were adamant that the idea had originated with her and that if anyone else wanted to use it, they had to pay for it. I thought that if this writer wants to sue the makers of the television serial, then she had better prepare for a similar suit from Catherine Cookson's estate, as her novel bore more than a passing resemblance to Cookson's 'Katie Mulholland'.

I'm not sure how it happened, but I do know that the case was thrown out of court and the writer got nothing. She certainly didn't deserve to. I am quite sure that her plot was inspired by the original Catherine Cookson novel, which she must have read in her youth, even if the actual memory of reading the book had faded. This could be very true of a voracious reader.

Yes, there is no copyright on ideas. Recently, the Harlequin Mills and Boon writer Kate Walker brought out a romantic novel inspired by 'Wuthering Heights', the Emily Bronte classic. The book called 'The Return of the Stranger', concentrated on some aspects of the plot and had a happy ending unlike the original classic. Kate Walker and her publishers were quite upfront about the fact that the book was inspired by 'Wuthering Heights', which was fine.They were also sincere in their admiration for Bronte's genius and work. It was nice to see an old classic getting some modern treatment. I'm sure Emily Bronte would have approved.

This is the weekly post for my blogging group, the Loose Blogging Consortium. We post weekly (usually simultaneously) on a given topic and visit each other to see the different takes we have on the same topic. We are, in alphabetical order, Conrad, Delirious, Rummuser, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit and Will. If you have time, please visit my friends too.
This topic 'Ideas' was suggested by Will.

Hospitals - Weekly LBC Post.

2011-12-24T10:54:00.000+05:30

Sigh! I missed the deadline for yet another LBC post. It's Christmas and my daughter Mel dragged me out for a bit of shopping. I purchased a great Christmas cake in case anyone calls around on Christmas day, or any of the twelve festive days. It's been somewhat hectic. My son Neil is having his pre-board examinations right now (the practise for the real thing) and has an English literature paper on Boxing Day. Couldn't the school have been a bit more considerate? I shall probably spend my Christmas day with good old William. Shakespeare that is. "As You Like It?" Not this time! I only hope I make it to the Christmas Mass. What with being ill and the horrible weather and no lift, I haven't darkened the Church door for many a day, shame on me!

The topic for this week's post is "Hospitals" or "Doctors". I choose the former. I've had many a brush with the hospital since I got married and came to live in India. Various members of my in-law family have been hospitalized since I came out here. I have been hospitalized several times, for delivery and once with a pregnancy related condition. I got to know that the differences twixt east and west are not entirely family related.

My late father was in and out of the hospital when I was a child. I was hospitalized twice in my childhood. In Ireland of course. I remember that once admitted, it was like you were taken out of the custody of your folks and were now hospital property. The hospital fed you and you could only be visited by your friends and family during designated hospital visiting hours. It's not quite like that in India, or in the part of India where I live.

During my first labour in in Indian hospital, the nurse asked if I would like some tea. I gladly accepted her offer and then waited. For about two hours. When the tea arrived, it came in a flask. She had sent my husband home to get it. Moreover, my meals were cooked at home and brought in by anyone who happened to be there at the time. I had a private room. There was a small, second bed in the room. One of my family members had to stay with me at all times and whoever was there at night, be it my husband, my mother-in-law or my sister-in-law, slept on that bed. This was all very new to me.

The food matter confused me a bit at first. Jokes about hospital food certainly didn't apply here. Then it struck me that in a society where there are so many different communities and where those communities have different food habits, some vegetarian, some non-vegetarian etc., this did in fact make sense. Having a relative (an 'attendant') to stay with you, was something very new. I was lucky because my husband could afford a private room. In the public ward, the 'attendants' were sleeping on the floor. How strange was that!

The doctors came for their morning and evening rounds and practically moved at the speed of light. Many of them were working in several different hospitals and nursing homes and had clinics of their own too, that was why. That could be universal, though. The nurses were seldom seen unless they were changing the bed linen or giving medicines. I know they work hard, but I think that there just didn't enough of them. You could practically go all day without seeing a nurse, though, it seemed.

Through my hospital stays, I came to know that most of the nurses come from an area in India called Kerala. The Keralite nurse is as much a permanent fixture in an Indian hospital as Irish nurses used to be in the west at one time. Not necessarily Christian girls, although many Keralites are Christian. It seems to be a profession which predominates among girls of that region.

I remember attending Mass several years ago in the Cathedral Church in Lucknow. It was a special Mass, celebrated by the Bishop, for the benefit of nurses. The Bishop spoke with great pride about Christian nurses and their devotion and dedication. I wasn't sure why, but I could feel a deep anger welling up inside me. I went home and thought over his words for a while. Then it hit me.

Whenever you read in the Church magazines and bulletins about priests and bishops being ill here, they are nearly always treated in a Christian hospital, attended by devoted nuns and nurses. The same treatment is not reserved for the average patient, though.

I remember when I delivered my babies, the actual job of washing and cleaning up the patient (me) after the deliveries wasn't done by a nurse. I was attended by a local woman. Not a Christian nurse, a Hindu woman. The day after my third delivery, I was surprised to see that the woman who had washed and attended me in my helplessness, with great gentleness and compassion, was actually washing the floor of the hospital.

Please don't read me the wrong way. I have nothing against cleaners. Not one little thing. And these ladies did a wonderful job. But I've learnt that in the traditional caste-obsessed Hindu society, the job of cleaning a newly delivered woman was left to the sweepers and cleaning women, because it was supposed to be such a polluting job. I couldn't believe that the Christians, the born again people of the New Testament, supposedly free of caste and traditions, had resorted to using Hindu sweepers for the traditional 'polluting' job that a nurse was supposed to do. Particularly the so-called Christian nurses who, according to the Bishop, were overbrimming with compassion and devotion to duty. It made me wonder exactly what sort of Christianity was being practised here at all. Perhaps it was just due to shortage of staff? Christians are supposed to be free of useless traditions, particularly those which degrade others. Hopefully one day, the light will dawn and they will understand what Christianity is really about, instead of being just another religious label.

Certainly, my brush with the hospital has been an interesting cultural experience.

I want to wish a very happy Christmas and a happy new year 2012 to anyone who comes into my blog this week.

This is my weekly post for my blogging group, the Loose Blogging Consortium. We post weekly (usually simultaneously) on a given topic and visit each other to see the different takes we have on the same topic. We are, in alphabetical order, Conrad, Delirious, Rummuser, Grannymar, Magpie, Maria SF, ocdwriter, Padmum, Paul, Rohit and Will. If you have time, please visit my friends too.

Recycling - A Look Back at an Older Post

2011-12-19T10:56:00.000+05:30

I wrote some long, rambling posts in my early blogging days, which aren't seen nowadays. As I'm rather starved of blogging inspiration right now, I thought I'd revisit some of my old posts for the present time at least. This post was originally called 'Mother-in-Law Matters and appeared on my original blog, "Out of Ireland, Into India." It's rather long, but I remember when I was writing it, I just couldn't stop once I started.

A Wife or a Daughter-In-Law?

I grew up in Ireland and I remember hearing the odd mother-in-law joke. Mother-in-laws were generally mentioned with dread and a sort of feigned horror. But in general, the partner in marriage who had most problems with their mother-in-law was usually the husband. Why? The reason is simply because, as far as I remember, mothers in Ireland are in general very supportive of their daughters. They generally think (whether they admit to it or not is, of course, another matter!) that their daughter is a princess who has married someone who is just not good enough. Woe betide the son-in-law who mistreats a mother’s daughter! As for the wife’s mother-in-law, well the relationship is usually cordial at best and suspicious at worst. Daughter-in-laws generally pay lip service to their mother-in-law and keep as far away as possible.

Not so in India, where I now live! In India, a wife’s mother generally thinks that her son-in-law is a prince. She certainly treats him like one. As I mentioned before, daughter-in-laws have traditionally been (in theory at least!) the handmaids of the family, who unquestioningly take care of the health and wellbeing of their husband’s family. They are (in theory at least) expected to make sacrifices unlimited to serve their in-laws. The son-in-law, however, is always given the status of an honoured guest, and is fussed over and pampered silly when he comes to visit his wife’s family. Of course, I knew none of this before I came out here. But I learnt with time. Time and experience.

What have I learnt? Among other things, that in India, a married woman generally has two homes! Her maika garh (parental home) and her sasural (in-laws’ home). The maika is somewhere you go when (a) your in-laws ‘give you permission’ and (b) you need a break. Your sasural is your place of service, your temple. Your mother-in-law is the high priestess. And your father-in-law (if alive) or your husband is the reigning deity. This concept probably comes quite naturally, and maybe even seems perfectly normal to someone who grows up in this atmosphere but to a foreigner it can seem extremely odd, if not downright discriminatory. Ironically, ancient India was apparently a place where women were honoured, and fully equal to men in most respects. But as India underwent many hardships and transformations through the ages, with endless invasions, it seems that the people were given no option but to cover up the women and keep them at home. This was apparently for their own safety. Today, at least in urban areas, the Indian woman is getting her share of education and opportunities, and like working women everywhere, is facing the same problems of guilt and inability to spread herself around enough to fulfill all that’s expected of her.

If a woman is a mere daughter-in-law, it seems that her status is not very high, unless she’s an elder daughter-in-law with several younger sister-in-laws, i.e. the wives of her husband’s younger brothers. But the moment a woman becomes a ‘saas’, that his, a mother-in-law to another woman, then she gets a lot of importance. And when the daughter-in-law (bahu) becomes a mother and makes the mother-in-law a grandmother (Daadi) then the mother-in-law becomes a formidable person indeed. She doesn’t so much announce that ‘my son and his wife have become parents’. She tells everyone ‘I have become a Daadi!’ It’s a type of coming of age.

Although India is rapidly modernizing, the Indian joint family is an interesting concept. It is patriarchal in nature and consists of, let us say, a man, his wife, his sons, daughter-in-laws and grandchildren. This type of family thrived in an agricultural economy, where there was a farm or a family business. Unmarried daughters are generally considered to be destined for another family as soon as a suitable bridegroom can be found, therefore they are not considered to be permanent members of the family, although when they marry, their parental family is expected to give them a lot of support, as much as possible, emotionally and even, if circumstances warrant it, and if they allow, financially. You can see that when a young woman becomes a daughter-in-law, she is expected to please her in-laws and do everything in her power to make them happy. You often hear women discussing their daughter-in-law’s housekeeping skills, praising or criticizing them as they see fit. It is a matter of great shame for a woman if her in-laws find her lacking in this respect.

I often think to myself, all societies have their points in common. In the west, in the past, people lived in traditional types of families, with several generations living together under one roof. When western societies were agriculturally based, our way of life probably wasn’t very different from the way of life in the more traditional societies like India, apart from language, food, dress, etc. In Europe there were many large multi-generational families living together, and probably arranged marriages of some sort too. But industrialization hit Europe several hundred years ago, and the way of life in Europe slowly transformed. India only began industrial transformation process a mere sixty years ago. Although India has become very modern, there are many people still living the old, pre-industrial way of life, dependent on the traditional agricultural system for their livelihood. And moreover, even in the most modern families, there are older members who remember a way of life which would seem totally old-fashioned and backward to a person with a modern way of thinking. I often think that the present generation of young people must be having a huge culture shock as they cope with their modern outlook versus the traditional way of life which still has such a hold on them.

One of our neighbours has a beautiful daughter named Chitra. I remember Chitra, coming down the road on her bicycle in her school uniform calling out “Hi, Aunty”. Chitra used to talk to me sometimes, and I know she had cherished dreams of travelling and seeing the world. Out of school dress, I only ever remember her wearing jeans and tee shirts, donning the shalwar suit only for parties. A few years ago, right after she graduated from college with an arts degree, she was married. The wedding was fantastic, there was a great feast and dancing and music. I remember, as I saw her going off with her husband to her new life, wondering how this young, modern girl, a product of the MTV generation, would cope with the traditions. I’ve seen her since as she’s visited her home now and again after marriage. She comes now with her baby daughter, to whom she gave birth a year after the wedding. She has told me everything she has gone through, and I can only say, that this girl has had it much harder than I have had. From jeans and tee shirts (which she still wears at her parents house), she was expected to wear saris, don suhaag(marriage) symbols every single day, rise early, take a bath, perform puja at the family temple, prepare tea for her in-laws and take charge of the kitchen. She felt choked, stifled and resentful. She is happy that her husband had to move out of the family home because of his job, Otherwise, she says she would have gone crazy. Chitra had grown up in a modern nuclear family setup. She told me that her husband’s younger brother got married quite soon after she did. The second bride has fared much better in the house than Chitra did as she comes from a more traditional home. However, the mother-in-law and the younger sister-in-law have bonded together very well, making Chitra feel out in the cold. She has been on the receiving end of hurtful remarks and bitchiness from the two in-laws, and this has made her quite nervous. Her husband, for his part, has absolutely no idea of the the mental agony Chitra has suffered, seeing it as her duty to silently serve her mother in law, because that is the tradition. For girls caught in the halfway stage like Chitra, between modernity and tradition, life can be difficult.

The way things are, it seems that in many cases, a mother-in-law can make or break a marriage. A man is generally emotionally attached to his mother, and his association with her is longer than with his wife, so if his mother comes to him with a complaint against the wife, the men here seem to a take it as their moral duty to side with their mother. That’s very hurtful for a wife. To whom can she go to complain if she has a domestic problem? The man is living in his home where he feels quite comfortable, but his wife, uprooted and in a strange house, where no-one is ready to take her part, may be feeling very insecure indeed. Her family, even if they live nearby, would be afraid to be seen as interfering, so they can’t or won’t speak up for her. I really feel that mother-in-laws who have problems with their daughter-in-laws should refrain from dragging their sons into the matter. If they come between the couple they will destabilize the relationship, which will in the long run, destabilize the family.

Yet I have seen that there are some daughter-in-law horror stories too! A few years ago when Neil and Mel were small, I used to bring them to a local park to play in the summer evenings. I used to see a very frail, weak, arthritic old lady there, with two small and very lively children. The two children used to run wild, running up on the slide and jumping on the swings, and the old lady was hard pressed to keep up with them. A couple of times, I checked them for being rude to their ‘Daadi’(paternal grandmother) as they called her. They were usually already there when I arrived, and still there when I went home at around 5.30 pm. The old lady was having such a hard time controlling those children that I was at a loss to understand how she managed them on the road. One day I reached the park a little early and saw the grandmother and kids being deposited there by an extremely capable looking woman, who drove away on a scooter. It was none of my business, of course, but I felt so furious with that woman for dumping her wild kids in the park with that poor old lady, who should be doing nothing else in that park other than sitting quietly, or having a stroll by herself. In fact, I always take my kids with me when I go out so that they don’t bother my in-laws. “My kids, my responsibility” has always been my mantra.

Then there was Hemavati, a lonely old lady who befriended my mother-in-law a few years ago. She’d been passing our house every evening when she went for an evening walk, and took to dropping in to have a short chat. She never ate or drank anything. Her lot was a miserable one indeed. Living with her son, daughter-in-law and grandson, she was loved by her son (who was away most of the time) but ignored by the daughter-in-law. She sat alone by herself in the house, totally left out of family outings and activities. She made her own simple meal of boiled potatoes and spent most of her time in prayer and reading her Ramcaritmanas (scriptures). Although living with family, she was so lonely, it would break your heart. Her daughter-in-law (I met her once) would just pack up her son and go to her parents home as soon as the boy had school holidays. I’m not saying that her daughter-in-law was intentionally cruel to her, she just didn’t seem to care about her. That is no way less than cruelty in my opinion.

Another story! I have a friend Nidhi, a product of a marriage between a Christian mother and a Hindu Brahmin father. Nidhi had a love marriage with Sumit, a Hindu, around the same time as I got married. Sumit’s parents were dead, although he did have relatives, but when he announced his marriage to his relatives, they didn’t show much interest, as all were busy with various problems. While they wished the couple well, no reception or gifts were given to Nidhi from the groom’s side, not that she minded a great deal. One evening, Sumit, Nidhi and their two kids dropped in to our place and I noted that Nidhi was all dressed up in a sari, and she was wearing a prominent bindi and lots of sindoor (red powder in the hair parting), a must for a north Indian wife, but not something Nidhi is often seen wearing. A little nervous and a little excited too, Nidhi informed me, in the kitchen, where I’d gone to make a cup of tea, “I’m going to meet my mother-in-law.” When I asked how come, she replied that the widow of Sumit’s late father’s elder brother had come to stay for a few days with relatives in our city, and she had telephoned Sumit and especially requested him to bring his wife and children to meet her, saying that their meeting was long overdue. In north India indeed, the father-in-laws brothers are also fathers-in-law, and their wives are also one’s mothers-in-law. I wished her all the best. It must be strange for a north Indian woman to be married to a man for so many years and never to have met his family.

When I met Nidhi a few weeks later, she informed me that the meeting had gone beautifully. The elderly aunt gave Nidhi her ‘aashirwaad’ (blessing) and gifted her a sari, gifted Sumit a length of cloth to make a suit and some clothes to their children also. She was relieved that the dresses fitted the children perfectly. Apparently she had been keeping them for a long time in the hope of meeting Nidhi and Sumit sooner, and it had took rather longer to arrange their meeting than she had thought. She also mentioned to Nidhi that she had had to keep the sari hidden from her daughter-in-law with whom she lived. Why? Well, apparently, daughter-in-laws have rights, a great deal more than most people can imagine, and can demand saris from their in-laws on occasions. “If my daughter-in-law saw this sari, she would have insisted that I give it to her, and I would have had to do so!” the aunt explained. Interesting! I must insist that my mother-in-law gives me a few saris. If I was entitled to say one a year, I must be owed at least a dozen now!

The truth is, there are rights and duties in all relationships. There is good and bad in all situations. The success of a system generally depends on the good or ill of the people involved. In combined families in traditional cultures, where women had very little power or significance outside the home environment, the mother-in-law/daughters-in-law equation was a sort of power struggle. The mother-in-law enjoys her sense of importance, and if insecure, tries to show her daughter-in-law who is the boss. The daughter-in-law, on the other hand, is determined to show that she is no doormat and will not be pushed around by anyone. The ensuing rivalry causes a lot of misery and unhappiness. The plight of the person who loses the power struggle can be pitiful indeed.

And me? Power struggles are a waste of time. I abstain. I believe everyone deserves their space. “Live and let live” is my mantra. Now and always!

Act

2011-12-16T19:47:00.000+05:30

You know how it is when you meet a new person and they're so nice. Could be a new colleague, sister-in-law, just about anyone. You're so happy that you've met this lovely new person and so excited about the difference they'll make to your life. Then one day, like two years later, you're at loggerheads and you ask yourself how such a nice person turned out to be so awful.

And you tell yourself, their niceness was just an act.

What happened meanwhile? Life, that's what! With its inevitable pressures of expectations and unwanted disappointments. Someone didn't live up to your expectations. Well whose fault was that?

The truth is, the niceness wasn't an act. That was their real, true, good self. But the niceness didn't stand up under pressure. End of story.

We should never have expectations of others which are too high, you inevitably end up disappointed. The true self was the nice self. The horrible self is someone who is under pressure.

When we're doing interviews to get a job or trying to impress the opposite sex, we always try to show ourselves in our best light. Are we acting? Not really. Just being our true selves.

Incidentally, it's much better not to have high expectations of anyone. Less chance of disappointment.

And I never would have wanted to be an actor for all the money in the world. Imagine spending your life pretending to be someone else? That makes you a blank canvas, not a person!

Very deep thoughts. Well, maybe not. That was the topic for the Loose Bloggers Consortium this week.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria Silverfox, Magpie, Will Knott, Rohit, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, Maria, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Act' was chosen by Grannymar

Culture

2011-12-09T20:06:00.000+05:30

I've written umpteen posts on culture since I started blogging. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here and bore anyone who reads my regularly. I think it's fairly well established by now that Maria/gaelikaa suffered from culture shock when she married into a different culture. My traumas and tribulations are fairly well documented here. I plan to repost some posts from my original blog 'Out of Ireland, Into India' soon, so writing that stuff again would make for a predictable post and make me sound like a drippy pessimist.

What post would I have written on 'Culture' had I not left Ireland? I racked my brains and remembered. When I used to refer to 'culture' in the past, it was with reference to going to the theatre or the opera or the ballet or something similarly 'cultural'. When I lived in Ireland, a friend gave me a video cassette of a comedian named Brendan O'Carroll. I played it at home one evening and was horrified. The man was a person like me, with his roots in working class Dublin. But I didn't like his humour at all. Every second word out of the man's mouth seemed to be an expletive. It's not that I never swear, but I like to reserve that activity for special occasions. Like when I drop a computer on my foot or something. Also, he had absolutely now qualms about referring to stuff which I think is unacceptable in mixed company, like the menstrual cycle of the female and the like. I mean what I laugh at when I'm with the girls is one thing, but I'm not into laughing along with men laughing at women. The whole act culminated in Mr. O'Carroll giving a blow by blow account of a Dublin 'wan' (woman) having sex with her fella! I stopped the cassette and handed it back to my friend with as little comment as possible. That particular cultural experience was a flop!

A few years later, I was home from India with Yash and our (two) kids. Someone had given my mother an audio tape of Brendan O'Carroll reading his novel "The Mammy". This was the story of a Dublin inner city woman, Agnes Brown, who worked as a dealer (selling vegetables) on the streets of Dublin and rearing her seven children alone. My mother wasn't listening to it as she was regularly listening to a meditation tape recorded by a priest.

One day I switched on the Brendan O'Carroll tape during an idle moment. As I'd predicted, a string of expletives (recital in F major) poured forth from the tape. Agnes Brown was having a flashback to the first time her late husband (Redser Brown) beat her. Yash walked into the room right then and stood there, stunned. 'Is that the priest?' he asked. 'No,' I replied. Yash walked out of the room shaking his head.

I listened on. A section came up about the day Agnes Brown met her daughter Cathy after school and was shocked to see that the little girl's hair had been cut roughly with a scissors. When she questioned the child, it seemed that a nun at school, Sr. Magalen, had spoken roughly to the child in front of her class, making nasty remarks about untidy hair. Then she got a scissors and cut her hair. Agnes comforted her daughter but felt helpless anger.

Next day, she was sitting at her vegetable stall. She decided to go to the school and confront the nun. She left her stall in the care of the neighbouring stallholder and as a favour carried a packet of sandwich making vegetables for the neighbour's mother (the priest was coming to tea!). Agnes reached the convent, met the nun and was rudely rebuffed. In fury, Agnes hit the nun over the head with a cucumber saying 'who gave you permission to cut my daugher's hair', knocking out the nun's dentures. She walked away in fury. She was later arrested by the police and forced to stay the night in the lock-up. She appeared in court the next day.

In court, all Agnes's friends and neighbours were there to show support. The judge reprimanded Agnes for her rowdy behaviour. Agnes replied 'all I did was knock out her false teeth and that never harmed anyone.' Everyone laughed loudly and the judged asked for an explanation as to what led to the knocking out of the teeth. Sister Magdalen, incidentally, was nowhere to be seen.

Agnes explained the reason and there was silence in the courtroom. Agnes's friends were ready to start a lynching party for the nun. The judge let Agnes off with a caution and warned her that she should never again take the law into her own hands. Agnes replied 'what nun would be arrested on my word as quick as I was arrested on hers?'

My opinion of Brendan O'Carroll is now revised. I think the man is a genious. He encapsulated the culture of 1960's Dublin in that novel. The fear of clergy and the way ordinary people were so oppressed. I still haven't read the novel 'The Mammy', but I intend to as soon as I can.

In India, arts are almost considered as nothing and science is everything. Well, writing isn't rocket science, but it takes a really good writer to make us look at our culture, warts and all and make sense of it. Real sense. Brendan, if you're reading this, I think you should stick to writing. That is your absolute talent.

Foreign Flavours

2011-12-09T10:27:00.000+05:30

I was published this year as a short story writer - twice. I had a short story in the Halloween special of 'Ireland's Own', a family magazine in Ireland with a venerable history. I also have a story in the Foreign Flavours Anthology, a collection of short stories, articles and recipes put together by the extremely hard working members of the Writers Abroad group. I'm honoured to have my work published in both these publications. My Irish publication was available for a short while in Ireland, but the Foreign Flavours will hopefully be available for longer than that. The book can be purchased here.

This is what the book looks like:

My short story is called 'The Dreaded Haldi' and I've written it as Maria Perry Mohan.

Peer Pressure - Loose Blogging Consortium Post

2011-12-03T19:25:00.000+05:30

I apologize to my fellow LBC bloggers for posting late on this one.

When I discovered the title for this week's post, I was flooded with ideas. But if I used those ideas, the post would be extremely long. Long blog posts are not desirable nowadays for a variety of reasons. We live in a fast moving world and no-one has much time. So I'll write about how peer pressure affected me.

Firstly, I wasn't really accepted by my peers initially. I was an odd sort of kid. I didn't fit in. I wasn't a young one who played much on the streets. I was always at home, nose stuck in a book. I even talked like the people in books (usually Enid Blyton English kids). So it took me a while to fit in. I went through the usual agonies of self-consciousness and the longing to be like everyone else. It wasn't much fun being the girl who nobody wanted to sit beside on the school bus trip. It wasn't because I wasn't liked, more that I didn't belong to any gang or have a best friend. The years went by. I got to the stage where I didn't mind not having someone to sit beside me on the school bus trip. I could read my book in peace. But slowly, gradually, I made friends and had quite a few nice ones I must say. Some of the friends I made in my schooldays are still friends today (Pauline, are you reading this?).

But the question is, did I experience peer pressure? Well, sort of. Some of my peers were going out dancing and all of that while we were all still at school. I wasn't really cool or fashionable that way. So I didn't even try to be. I grew up in the punk/disco era in the seventies. One of the girls in my class even came to school with pink hair one day. She wasn't noticed though because all the teachers were at a meeting. It must have been a wash out colour because her hair was back to normal the next day. Well, even though I liked the punk and ska music, I happened to like disco too. And rock. And everything. So I didn't go for the pink hair and safety pin look. No! I was more into the flower power era and wore long caftans. Denim jackets and tons of eyeliner(sometimes). Of course I thought I was gorgeous. The fact that I wasn't a fashionable girl didn't even occur to me. I had to dress up for the office sometimes in imitation Chanel (the style suited my build, but I couldn't afford the real thing). I rather liked those collarless jackets with the gold buttons. I thought they were quite unfussy and nice. I liked myself no end. Especially when I was dressed up in my off duty gear. When I was, completing the look, there was usually this huge bag containing all the books I was reading and all the magazines and all the newspapers. I was still mad into reading. I like music, so I used to drag a Walkman around.

It's so strange that I ended up marrying a man who doesn't like to see me carrying a handbag. An Irish woman's handbag is one of her most valued accessories. It's a great weapon too. 'Leave all that rubbish at home,' he says, when we go out together. Well, when we go out together, which admittedly isn't often, I usually do what he says. Keep him happy, that's the secret.

Peer pressure? Well, it's a useful barometer to find out how cool and up to date you are. But I never let it bother me much. I've always done my own thing. Whatever that is!

This turned out to be quite a long post. Sorry about that and if you've continued reading until the end, thanks!

LBC Post - Belated But on the Way.

2011-12-02T20:04:00.000+05:30

I shall be back later, friends, with my LBC post for this week! :)

Catch you later!

Catch Up Post - and a few awards!

2011-11-29T11:08:00.000+05:30

I can't believe that it's almost two months since I posted on my blog;. Then again, I went a year without posting once. It happens.

My routine has changed completely. I had a visit from my mother. I acquired a pet and lost it almost within weeks. I've also had health issues. I've been writing but my hard disk contains three unfinished long works of fiction and a lot of unsubbed short stories. There's a degree I have to finish too. My son is sitting for his Class Ten examinations (O levels, Junior Certificate, whatever!) in March next year.

It isn't all pressure. I thoroughly enjoyed my mother's visit. I also had two short stories published recently. That was great. But I couldn't really enjoy that success much as a lot of other things were taking my attention.

Slowly, slowly, bit by bit, I'll get myself organized again. I have lots of work I want to get finished in my house with regard to organizing rooms and the like. Don't we all?

Housekeeping is one thing, blogkeeping is something else. I've just collected this long overdue to be collected Friendly Blogger Award from Teresa over at 'A Likely Story'. Teresa is a terrific writer who has had heaps of short stories published in various British magazines as 'Teresa Ashby'. Thank you so much Teresa, for thinking of me when you had to pass on this award!

Back in August, I was nominated for this interesting award from Annalisa Crawford, a fellow blogger and writer who I met on Facebook. Again, only collecting it now! Sorry, Annalisa, but better late than never.

Here are the rules of the award:

The Liebster Award (meaning “friend” in German) is meant to connect us even more and spotlight new bloggers who have less than 200 followers – but hopefully not for long. The rules are:

1. Show your thanks to the blogger who gave you the award by linking back to them.
2. Reveal your top 5 blogs and let them know by leaving a comment on their blog.
3. Post the award on your blog.
4. Bask in the love from the most supportive people on the Internet – other writers.
5. And best of all – have fun and spread the karma!

With apologies to the people who initiated this award, I'm going to bend the rules slightly. I love getting awards but I'm ever so slow about picking them up and doing the work involved. So I'm simply going to say that I'm going to pass on both the above awards to my blogging family, the Loose Blogging Consortium (LBC), should any of them desire to pick either of them up.

The Loose Blogging Consortium active members at the moment are: OCD writer Conrad, Delirious, Magpie 11, Maria SilverFox, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, Rohit, WillKnott, Grannymar and of course me. We try to go live with our topics on Fridays, but life sometimes interferes and prevents posting until later in the weekend. And sometimes never, as has been the case with me later. Anyway, I'm coming back this week!

I love blogging and have met some great friends on the net, so I'm getting back to visiting everyone again and keeping in touch. As I used to hear people say in Ireland years ago, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Back on Friday! Maybe even before that!

Random Acts of Kindness

2011-10-07T19:47:00.000+05:30

Were you ever in a spot and someone just appeared to help you out?

One day, when I'd sent my children to school, I noticed that my daughter, then aged seven, had forgotten to take her lunchbox with her. I couldn't bear the thought of her going through a day at school with nothing to eat, so after I'd completed my morning work, I got ready and took the bus to the school. The bus was crowded and it was difficult to find standing room. The day was very hot. Also, I knew I'd have to walk for about ten minutes after getting off the bus. I searched anxiously in my purse for the change to pay for the fare.

The bus conductor stood in front of me, waiting for his fare. As I shifted uncomfortably, looking for the money, the young man's face broke into a smile.

"You're Nitin's mother," he said. I looked at him and remembered a young boy who looked very like him assisting in the van which used to bring my son Nitin, aged about six back then, to school. The young boy had grown up but I looked the same.

He waved away my fare magnanimously.

"No problem, aunty," he said.

He waved goodbye warmly to me as I got off from the bus.

He made my day. He waived my fare of five rupees. It wasn't about money, though. It was the kindness. This young man spared my fare although he was very poor himself (it was obvious by his shabby appearance) because he remembered my son with affection.

I was really touched.

Marriage

2011-09-23T19:09:00.000+05:30

As we are all aware, marriage is the human institution where two people, one male and one female, come together for the purposes of creating a family. The union is usually sealed with a civil or a religious ceremony. Of course, many people raise families without the benefit of a ceremony, but that's a modern trend and a personal choice.

When Yash and I decided to marry, I wasn't a bit put off by the fact that we were different cultures and religions. We were human beings, weren't we? Well, yes. The problem is, as I didn't yet realize, eastern perceptions and western perceptions of marriage are quite similar and yet rather different as the cultural perceptions are different. Eighteen years later it all makes sense, but it drove me mad initially.

In the west, because, I suppose, of the Christian perspective, two people getting married usually set up a new home independent of the homes either of them originated from. That's based on the Biblical verse that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves only unto his wife. I had yet to learn that in the east, a man cleaves unto his parents until death us do part and the missus had better realize this or else she's in a bit of trouble. Or a lot of trouble depending on the family.

Of course not all cultural groups in India are innately patriarchal, but I'm afraid most of them are. A girl is considered to have actually cut ties with her natal family after marriage and henceforward, she belongs to the husband's family. For example, her husband's parents would be considered to be the 'real' grandparents of her children, and maybe even in the eyes of some cultural groups, the legal guardians. That's a bitter pill for a feminist to swallow. Not to mention one of western origin.

In those long ago, early days, I dreamed of Yash and I moving out to a house of our own as the ultimate nirvana. It came as a bit of a shock to realize that this would be considered as traitorous to the family group. His elder brother and his family don't live with us, but that's because he happens to have a job far away poor thing. Poor thing? I was jealous!

But time moved on. I continued to bring up my children as close to my own way as possible. I continued with my passion for reading and writing. I continued to read my Bible and meditate on it. And do you know what? I've learnt to make the best of my situation and even be thankful for it (sometimes!).

I think this is the marital skill that Indians call 'adjustment'. I call it being flexible. But I do know that I couldn't have saved my east/west marriage without it.

Breath!

2011-09-16T19:10:00.001+05:30

I'm very blessed to have two spiritual traditions to draw on. Yes, I'm Christian and don't think I could ever be otherwise, but that doesn't mean that because I find the fullness of truth in the Christian scriptures, that I can't occasionally draw on the spiritual wealth of Hinduism, which has amassed in India over centuries
.
This topic of ‘Breath’, which is the chosen Loose Bloggers’ Consortium for this week, has so many implications, spiritual included. Why? Well, as long as there’s breath, there’s life. The Bible tells us that God made the first man from the dust of the earth and breathed life into him. When God breathed into the man, he became alive. It’s there for all to see in the book of Genesis (Chapter 2, Verse 7), New Revised Standard Version

Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being

I heard a talk once by a Bible scholar who said that ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ are one and the same thing. It’s an interesting concept all right
.

I read an interesting quote from the ‘Bhagavad Gita’, a revered scripture of Hinduism, which says

: Na Hanyate Hanyamane Sarire" "Consciousness is eternal it is not vanquished with the destruction of the temporary body
"
I apologise for not knowing what edition and version and translation of the Bhagavad Gita this is, nor the chapter and verse
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This may come as a surprise to some, but spirit and soul are not exactly the same thing. The soul is your mind, will and emotions. The spirit is the eternal part of you, the part that lives with God when you die and (presumeably) reach salvation. The book of Thessalonions in the Bible speaks of them as if they are quite distinct
.
“May the God of grace and peace Himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit, soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Thessalonions, Chapter 5, verse 23, NRSV
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There are so many implications in the word ‘breath’, that this is the deepest I could go in this area.

The formatting in Blogger is very bad right now, so apologies for this untidy looking post

Things I Don't Tell About Myself!

2011-09-09T19:27:00.000+05:30

There was one thing I never used to tell about myself on my blog. That was my name. I crafted this blogging pseudonym for myself, 'gaelikaa'. The 'gael' bit is from the world for Celtic, or Irish, which I certainly am on my mother's side and also by birth. The 'ika' ending comes from the sanskrit feminine ending for a word. Sanskrit is the ancient language of India, in which many Hindu scriptures are originally written. I discovered from my son's Sanskrit schoolbook that 'balak' means a male child, but 'balika' means a female child. So if Sanskrit had a word for an Irish woman, it would probably be 'gaelikaa'. The 'double a' ending was just because of fashion. A couple of years ago, lots of women here with 'a' ending names added a double 'a' for an extra twist, or maybe because they wanted some extra luck numerologically. Thus, 'Isha' became 'Ishaa', 'Shobha' became 'Shobhaa', that sort of thing.

It was great being anonymous for a while, with this mysterious name. It made me feel quite the Celtic goddess. The problem was, that as I began to become friendly with people on the internet, through blogging and Facebook, the name caused confusion. Some people mis-spelt it 'gaelikka', which was just a simple mistake but which made me feel like a witch. Moreover, I love my own name and wanted to claim it back. So I've changed to 'Maria from gaelikaa's diary' now as opposed to Maria. It just feels right. I have an elder Consortium sister, Maria M. Burke from California who is affectionately known as 'the Silver Fox', so I have to be sure when I sign into blogs we both visit, that I'm the gaelikaa Maria, not the Silver Fox Maria.

One thing I never do is give out my husband or children's names, nor those of my sisters. Privacy is important, and while I choose to share a lot of personal stuff, I don't have the right to share the details of someone else's life without their consent. That's why I tell different names for my people. Not to mention my in laws. My husband Yash doesn't have much of an online presence, but it wouldn't be nice for someone to google him and find out about the fight he had with his wife last night or whatever. I don't even link to his Facebook page. He hardly goes near it himself anyway.

Lots of people who read my blog know I'd love to be a writer. One area of writing which sells by the truck load is romantic fiction. I like romantic fiction and quite like the idea of writing stories about personal relationships and emotional conflict. I do dialogue quite well. The problem is, one of the reasons why romantic fiction is such a big seller is because nowadays, there's quite a lot of sexual content in it. And that, as Brendan Behan (Irish writer) might have said, is where Aughrim is lost. I can't do 'hot', not for the life of me. I wrote a novel last year and most of the sexual stuff was off the page. I put in a bit of kissing, but it was usually when my characters were saying goodbye at the airport. And believe me, I cringed when I was writing it. I wonder why I'm like that? It's probably all the sexual repression I must have experienced as a result of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing. All I have to say about that is that it's a pity some of the people who passed on the values to me didn't practise what they preached, but that's material for another post. Several posts actually, already published on this blog. Anyway, I don't think the man in my life (Yash!) would appreciate me writing that sort of stuff for publication. He's very shy about 'that' sort of thing. In public at least.

My daughter MelRoXx, (on a blogging hiatus nowadays) reckons that I should give being a romance writer a go. She wants to design a lovely new blog for me called "gaelikaa's World of Romance" and she wants me to get all dressed up with long dangly earrings and plaster myself with make up for the photo. I had to remind her that the romance writers I've befriended on the internet (Kate Walker, Sally Quilford and Christine Stovell) are nothing like that. They're smart, sensible women who incidentally, write incredibly tasteful intimate scenes. Well, I have a long way to go before I reach their standard. One Rebecca Brandewyne is quite enough. I think I'll stay the way I am for the present - a wannabe womag writer with just one story coming out within the next month.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria Silverfox, Magpie, Will Knott, Rohit, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, Maria, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Things I Don't Tell About myself' was chosen by me, Maria/gaelikaa and Anu.

Culture Shock.

2011-09-02T18:39:00.004+05:30

When I first married Yash and came out here to live in India, I had worked among Indians for over eight years. I had also read every book, article and news report I could on life and culture in this country. Therefore, I did not suffer from culture shock when I came out here. I wish that was true.

While it's perfectly true that I knew a lot about the food, literature and culture of this country and had more than a passing knowledge of the language, I didn't quite get everything about the culture of this wonderful and mystifying (for westerners!) country, while it could be said that I understood a great deal. I also found out one of the more obvious things in one of the most difficult ways possible - personal experience.

When Yash and I got married, we decided to try to have a child straight away as we were both quite mature in years. We didn't want to be at retirement age while our kids were still at school. We were both delighted when I got pregnant immediately. One morning, when I'd just completed the eighth month, I woke up to find that my uterus seemed to be dripping water. A quick trip to the hospital confirmed that my waters had broken so the hospital took me in and induced my labour. At the end of a long day (well, about six thirty in the evening), our first child, a boy, just a tiny scrap of humanity, made his appearance. Unfortunately, he'd inhaled some amniotic fluid during delivery. Some agonizing days ensued when we weren't quite sure if he would make it. Thankfully, he did.

Finally, battered, bruised and somewhat traumatized, I arrived home with my precious bundle to begin life as a mother.It wasn't easy. I both adored and was terrified of the baby. He was so tiny, I was afraid he'd fall and get hurt. I was afraid he'd fall asleep and never wake up. I had this urge to protect him from everything. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that the paternal grandparents seemed to think he was theirs. Not mine. Theirs. Every time I turned around, they'd picked him up and made off with him. To add insult to injury, whenever he got a cold or something (which he did, a lot, that first year), they used to scold me for not looking after him properly. Once, one of them, can't remember which, actually claimed that because of the premature delivery, I'd nearly harmed their grandson, but thank God, God was great and he was okay. I was severely upset by this kind of useless talk which was clearly just a throw away remark not at all meant to be taken seriously.

Looking back now, I realize that I suffered some kind of trauma at the delivery. There had been very little pain relief, apart from some injections - no epidural, as many of my friends in Dublin had when they delivered. Moreover, I suffered an excruciating form of torture known as an episiotomy at the actual moment of delivery, which aided a quick birth because of the emergency situation, but which had to be rather painfully stitched up afterwards. Lying on my back during the birth, I had no idea what was going on down at the other end of the table. No wonder I nearly lost my mind. I think I was in shock.

It took a while to recover. What a time to learn that in most Indian as well as many other Asian cultures, the mother is simply considered as the birth giver of the child. The true guardians of a child are considered to be the paternal grandparents. In a culture where very young marriages under the guidance of the elders was formerly the norm, this attitude probably made sense long ago, but seems irrelevant today.

Well, you live and learn. I know I did.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria Silverfox, Magpie, Will Knott, Rohit, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, Maria, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Culture Shock' was chosen by me, Maria.

Smile!

2011-08-26T19:30:00.003+05:30

I remember years ago, in Dublin, when I was a receptionist, I had to give a caller to my office bad news. Like the fact that the boss wasn't in the office at the moment when the poor woman had travelled halfway across town to meet him. She could wait, I suggested. Or go out and do a bit of work somewhere else in the area and drop in again later. Her answer really shook me.

"You could at least smile when you're saying that," she said.

"The cheek of her," I sniffed indignantly, when she'd left. "Telling me to smile. How dare she!"

I was rather immature in those days. I hadn't quite copped on to the fact that a receptionist (which is what I was in that office, among other things) is a professional meeter and greeter. That means smiling at people. Even when you don't feel like it.

Okay, so my Walkman was broke and needed costly repairs. Okay, so I'd finished my last packet of cigarettes before payday. Okay, so my (then) boyfriend (Yash) hadn't written to me for (at least) six months. This was the time of our long separation prior to our marriage. None of that mattered. My job was to smile. I had to just keep smiling and get on with it. The last straw was when Mr. Singh, a senior office colleague, commented on my sullen expression, which would probably have stopped a clock in its tracks.

"Miss Maria," he said (well, he was an Indian. Of the old school, you can say), "please do your job with the smiling face. Always." He was one of these people who always used the definite article when an indefinite one would do perfectly well. "The smiling face" indeed. I started to smile.

"That's better. Keep it up," he said. I laughed out loud after that.

If I ever wanted a quick fix smile, I only had to talk to this fellow. He was a tall, princely gentleman from the Punjab in north India. He was very smart and always wore his suit with perfectly matching turbans. One day, Mary, our office cleaning lady had an accident, hurt her back and was unable to come to work that day. Mr. Singh was very sorry to hear this.

"Hello Mary! How is your backside?" he asked, when Mary came in the next day. That remark raised quite a few smiles, if not a few outright laughs, in our office. He meant her injured back of course. Poor thing, he had no idea that "backside" meant a somewhat lower region of the body in our part of the world. I mean, technically, Mr. Singh's English was perfect, but every language has its little quirks, doesn't it?

I can only imagine the smile-inducing mistakes that I'd make if I attempted to speak in Punjabi. That was Mr. Singh's mother tongue, of course.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria, Magpie, Will Knott, Nema, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Smile' was chosen by Grannymar.

Animosity!

2011-08-20T19:30:00.002+05:30

I'm blessed to have wonderful friends and family and so I've been fortunate enough to receive a lot of love and good wishes from people in my life.

There are, however, people in my life who dislike me intensely. I know it because I actually feel real hatred from certain people at times. I know I've no animosity towards anyone - except perhaps when someone has shown hatred or animosity towards me in the first place - but that's normal, isn't it?

It is a curious feeling to have someone actually hating you, or maybe just treating you with disdain for some reason. I treat it like a learning experience, when I'm up to it.

One of my most interesting experiences with animosity happened about eighteen years ago when I was still in Dublin. I'd just secured a temporary position as a clerk typist in an Irish government organization which supported people with disabilities in the community. There were a mixed crowd of people. Some were qualified medical personnel. Some were technicians. Some were office staff and some were executive officers. The season when I worked there, there were a lot of refresher courses going on in customer relations and leadership skills and the like. Once, I found myself on a two day course in a hotel with the usual mixed bag of people doing this workshop course on communications.

The facilitator began by asking each of us to introduce ourselves in a few words and also to say a couple of words on what we were contributing to the group and to the organization, by way of our personal experiences. I racked my brains for a suitable answer. When it was my turn to speak, I explained that as I had worked for the Indian Embassy, a lot of my work had entailed interacting with Indian people who were living in Ireland as foreigners. Out of their usual environment, they were living in an atmosphere where they could very easily feel alienated. I mentioned that this experience could be a useful factor in my work in serving the disabled in the community, many of who feel alienated in society because they feel they don't fit in. I wasn't smug about it, I was simply trying to join in the exercise in an appropriate way. Imagine my horror when one of the executive officers, a lady who, for the purposes of blogging I shall call Anne Filbert, summed up the group session with the words:

"What a wonderful session - and so nice to know that if we're feeling alienated, dear Maria will set us right."

I went scarlet and looked down at the ground, feeling that I'd blown it. Things should have improved later in the day but they didn't. Anne Filbert and I were in the same workshop group. Someone nominated me as the 'rapporteur' back to the main group to report on the issues we'd discussed. I listened carefully do the group discussions without commenting and tried to sum up each issue discussed in one sentence each. When my turn came to report back to the main group, at least twice during my report, Anne Filbert sweetly interrupted me with the comment, "that's not quite the way I heard it, Maria", thereby embarrassing me horribly in front of the whole room. I thought the day would never end.

In the breaks, Anne Filbert proceeded to make a complete ass of herself. A single lady of mature years, she flirted shamelessly with all the men in the room and even shared some little vignettes from her childhood. Her father, she informed everyone, had wanted to christen her Gabrielle, but had been overruled by her mother.

"Imagine! I could have been Gabby Filbert," she simpered. Seeing her rather corpulent figure, I figured that Flabby Filbert would have been more appropriate, but I held my peace.

Brenda Maher, another executive officer with whom I had an excellent relationship, advised me to have a sense of humour about the whole thing. She was right, of course.

It's strange what wisdom by hindsight does. Looking back now, I know exactly what was going on. Anne Filbert and some (but thankfully not all)of her executive officer colleagues were unhappy at the idea of doing workshops alongside typists and in some cases, cleaning ladies. My enthusiasm was probably making them sick. But not all of them were as bitchy as Anne Filbert about it.

The best way to cope with animosity? Lovely Brenda Maher gave me the formula. "With a sense of humour and a touch of irony."

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria, Magpie, Will Knott, Nema, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Animosity' was chosen by Padmini.

Friday Loose Blogging Consortium - My Childhood.

2011-08-13T00:08:00.002+05:30

I was born in 1963, a few months before President John F. Kennedy visited Dublin. Apparently, when he arrived, my mother was waiting in the crowd to try and get a look at the U.S. President, then Ireland's favourite emigrant son, with her tiny daughter (me!) along with her.

My parents, Eddie and Carmel, were a couple from the north side of Dublin city. Eddie was a lorry driver and Carmel was a biscuit packer in Jacob's Biscuit Factory, which was a rather good job as factory jobs went, if you must know. They'd both completed their primary school education, but they had ambitions that their children would complete secondary school at least. They met at a dance in Dublin's Ierne ballroom in 1962. Eddie was smitten by Carmel's beauty and persuaded her to allow him to drop her home. He then made a regular habit of calling to see her. My maternal grandmother Mary looked Eddie up and down as only as only an Irish mother can and decided that he would do very well as a son-in-law. She encouraged him to visit often and fed him ham sandwiches and tea, truly an honour, as this was considered something of a delicacy back then over there. The couple were married within a year.

Eddie seems to have been a sharp young fellow. He looked like an Elvis clone, with a touch of Humphrey Bogart about him. He was tall, black haired and blue eyed. Carmel was a classic Irish beauty, with brown eyes and red hair. Eddie always had a car, even if it was a small, secondhand model. They were simple, religious people. I was their first child and they adored me, although, apparently, Eddie ever so slightly resented my intrusion on his wife's attention. Well, he was only 27 after all! I was soon joined by three sisters, whom for blogging purposes I call Geraldine, Pamela and Connie.

I was a bookworm and would have lived in the library. Not for me, playing out on the streets. Thankfully, my mother had some sense and pushed me out to play every so often so I could pursue the same activities of other kids my age, like swinging on lamp posts and joining in skipping games. I loved books by E. Nesbit and Enid Blyton, although their very British world of jolly hockey sticks and boarding schools was light years away from mine. I wouldn't say I was snobbish, but I was a bit of a misfit in my own community. That was ironic because now I crave the air of Dublin and the sharp edge of Dublin conversation. I recently read a current novel set in the heart of Dublin ("Faithful Place" by Tana French, read it, it's great!) and alternately laughed and cried my way though it. It brought me right back to my younger days. Living as I do among people who are foreign and who speak a different language and follow a different religion, I now live a life of permanent exile. Incidentally, I love my life, but I have this craving to return to my roots every so often. I think that probably it's always been my destiny to be a bit of an outsider and maybe even an observer wherever I've been.

Both my mother and father's families are large Irish familes. I have a huge amount of cousins and many of the cousins I played with in my childhood are my lifelong friends. A look at my Facebook page would confirm this. My cousins, two sisters called Sharon and Pamela are old, dear friends. Then there was cousin Veronica who wrote to me from Scotland for years. I've now befriended even cousins with whom I didn't exactly grow up, but the bond is there My father really believed in the importance of family and made sure we met our relatives regularly.

It was a happy childhood by and large. Our parents tried to give us the best. But, yes, there were shadows on my childhood. By the time I was seven years old, the cancer was already raging through my father's body. He put up a brave fight for his life, but ultimately succumbed at the age of forty one, when I was almost fourteen. I remember him ranting bitterly one evening when my mother was gone out. I realize that he knew he didn't have long to live and that he was leaving his beloved wife a young widow with four young daughters. He had a few issues with his medication. I've since discovered that he didn't wish to become addicted to painkillers and very often skipped him. He was often very tense and mad with pain. Woe betide the child who disturbed him. I remember being the subject of bitter verbal abuse and even, occasionally, beatings, when I was around ten years of age. This would have been uncharacteristic of him, but one has to understand the circumstances. The experiences of my childhood left me with nervousness and low self esteem for many years, but I feel, with God's help, I've come through. Forgiveness isn't difficult when one understands where he was coming from.

When a child comes from a troubled home, they can be preyed on by unscrupulous individuals. I was no exception. Finding things tense on the home front, I got involved in some of the Church activities like the Mass readings and choir. There was a priest, a certain Father R. who showed a huge interest in me. I enjoyed the attention, naturally. He encouraged me to visit him at home and borrow books from him. The trouble was, as he won my trust, he began confiding his personal problems to me. One of the problems was the problem of being unable to cope with celibate life. I realize that at eleven years of age, which I was at that time, I was way too young to be a party to confidences of that sort. I have an eleven year old daughter now and if I knew of any man in his forties discussing such issues with her, I'd have issues with him! I remember him discussing which of my friends he fancied for example. He didn't go near me sexually, unless hugs and kisses on the forehead are sexual, which they aren't necessarily, but he messed around with my brain at an age where I really wasn't able for it.

Father R. has since been exposed as a paedophile who abused over a hundred children. How did I escape? I'm not sure. When he used to confide in me about his sexual problems, I frowned and told him that I found it very surprising that a priest like him didn't pray to God for help. He looked confused, but he didn't pursue the issue. I also made it very clear to him that I had no secrets from my mother and that every conversation I had with anyone was always reported back to Mammy. Eventually he drifted off and found someone else to talk to. I have read Father R. being described in the media as a 'beast' but I never found him that way. He was rather timid and subtle. He is now dead. I feel that the man was out of his depth in the priesthood and deplore the lack of a way out for him. There was another priest, a Father W. who worked in our Church around the same time, who has also been described that way. In his case, it's probably true. Everyone remembers him as always grabbing the opportunity to touch kids inappropriately in the name of having a bit of fun. The first time he grabbed a hold of me on a seemingly innocent pretext, I made certain it would never happen again by keeping my distance. Father W. is now in prison for the rape of several boys.

It is tragic that the good and sincere priests and religious who faithfully served the people of God are getting a backlash of hatred for the wicked ones who raped and abused children under the cover of Church protection. The Catholic Church, which is supposed to stand for goodness and righteousness, has practically led to its own downfall through ineffectual dealing with the problem of clerical sexual abuse.

But there was no awareness of this back then. It was a more innocent age in some ways. After my father's death my mother worked very hard to maintain our standard of living. I never understood all she was doing for us at the time, I just took her for granted as children do. We didn't have our car any more. However, we still had our house and new clothes every time we needed them.

I'm middle aged now, the mother of two boys and two girls, the wife of a university professor. I have dreams of being a writer. I live in India, far from my roots. One of my sisters became a nurse and eventually, a university lecturer. Another is a manager and another is an air hostess. All in all, my mother did very well with us, I think.

It wasn't a bad childhood, overall.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Anu, Maria, Magpie, Will Knott, Nema, Noor, Joe, Paul, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'My Childhood' was chosen by Anu.

48 Great Things About Being 48

2011-08-11T11:21:00.002+05:30

To break my blogging fast, I'm embarking on a post on the theme of forty eight. I completed forty eight years this year, in May to be precise. My blogging/writing friend Sally Quilford is celebrating her forty eighth today. So through this post, I wish Sally a very happy birthday and give my take on the whole meaning of being forty eight.

You're still on the right side of fifty.
But there's no right side of fifty anymore. By the time you've reached this age, you know that age is just a number.
You don't get upset about the things that used to upset you when you were, say, eighteen.
If you have a fight with HIM, you know it's not the end of the world and this too shall pass.
On a good day, you can pass for looking a lot younger than you are.
Thanks to modern, innovative cosmetic technology, it is possible to look thirty without going under the knife
But at this stage, is looking thirty or under the be all and end all of life? You know it isn't.
You'd love to tell your kids all the great things you've learnt but the trouble is, the little darlings have to live their own lives and make their own mistakes. You can live with it.
You still tell them what you've learnt anyway and hope they learn something from it.
You can look back at the traumatic happenings of your youth and even smile. If you've worked through them that is. If you haven't worked through them, you'd better get a move on.
You actually learn to forgive your parents for the stuff they did on you which you didn't like. You even understand them better.
By the time you've reached this age you know your childbearing years are probably over. This is a sort of liberation.
You're still not too old for romance. Whether you're married or single.
You value your women friends more than ever.
Even though you and your friends seem to be aging to others, you know you'll always look the same to each other.
You realize that you have an inner age as well as an outer age. My outer age is 48. My inner age is 23.
You find teen flicks boring.
If you have children, they keep you in touch with who current celebrities are, like Lady GaGa. And you remember the punk phase of the seventies and have a good laugh to yourself.
Your role models are wonderful women like Cher and Susan Sarandon.
You've probably come to realize that life is what you make it.
You now officially know that life is not a fairy tale and that happily ever after doesn't necessarily mean strolling into the sunset hand in hand with the man of your dreams.
But you don't care and
If you do have the man of your dreams in your life the chances are that you've had your dreams shattered a couple of times.
But that doesn't matter either and
You know that sex isn't all it's cracked up to be
but that it can be a whole lot better especially if you don't take it too seriously.
You know that money isn't everything
But there's not a lot you can do without it either and you'd be lying if you said it wasn't important.
You realize that there are some things that you can't tell your husband. Like your best friend's secrets, for example.
He doesn't want to know anyway.
You still have dreams about your future.
If you're in a steady, healthy relationship you know you are lucky and
If you're single you know you're still lucky.
You've finally figured what the hell life is all about.
You realize you are fortunate to live in an age where fifty is the new forty.
You know you're not past it and that the best is yet to come.
You realize you'll never completely understand your husband nor will he completely understand you. But it's okay.
You sometimes notice youngsters obsessing over trivialities and find it sad.
You find it amusing how young people often think they've invented youth.
You feel happy when a younger man flirts with you
but it really doesn't matter either way because if he hadn't noticed you, you wouldn't have been upset. Not at all.
You get the odd panic attack about aging but you just get on with it and realize that you have gained much in experience and wisdom over the years and that that is worth more in the long run than perfect skin elasticity and a pert figure.
You've got more insight into the way people think than before.
The chances are you have friends and acquaintances from a variety of age groups. I am privileged to count as friends people who are twenty years older and even more years than that younger.
You get a lot of pleasure from revisiting the past in the company of old friends but you know in your heart that you'd never want to go back.
In some cases, the boss who terrorized you when you were in your twenties is now your friend.
You now know that twenty years is just nothing and
you are happy being exactly where you are!

All in all, I would say that forty eight is the most perfect age to be and very much gives one the best of both worlds, the wisdom of hindsight and the enthusiasm of youth.

Unwritten Laws - Belated LBC Post

2011-07-12T16:54:00.006+05:30

I am extremely late with my LBC post this week. My apologies are due to my fellow LBC bloggers. It seems that Blogger and my kids conspired to prevent me from posting this last Friday evening. That is a pity, because this is a post I had very much looked forward to writing and sharing.

Twenty years ago, there was an Indian student called Vinay, studying medicine in my native Dublin. His family were based in England and this is how he came to be studying in Dublin. Vinay was very impressed with how friendly his Irish fellow students were. Every Friday evening they would drag him along to the pub, where they bought drinks for him all night. He was overwhelmed with their friendliness and kindness and decided that Ireland was definitely the place to be. He succeeded in saving a fair bit of money too, because he didn't have to spend any money on the nights out. After a few weeks, however, something seemed to change. The Irish friends weren't quite as friendly as they used to be. They stopped insisting that he join them in the pub on Friday evenings too. He wondered what he had done to offend them, but nobody said anything. When he joined them in the pub, he got the distinct impression that he wasn't wanted. As one by one his friends ordered rounds of drinks, his drink would automatically appear. Something however, was wrong. One day, he accidentally overheard a conversation in the classroom concerning him and he was honestly shocked.

"Do you like Vinay?" someone asked.

"Oh, he's alright," came the reply. "But he's a mean son of a bitch. That swine doesn't know how to put his hand in his pocket."

He asked one of his closer friends, someone who wasn't involved in the pub scene, what 'knowing how to put your hand in you pocket meant.' Then the light dawned. The gang were disgusted that Vinay hadn't yet started to take his turn in buying a round of drinks on the nights he went to the pub with them. The first week or two was fine, because he was new and a foreigner. But now he was one of the crowd. No more excuses.

Anjali was a Punjabi girl who joined her brother and his wife in Dublin. They were hoping to get her a suitable match somewhere in the United Kingdom. She befriended some Irish people and used to go out with them sometimes. She was deeply touched by the fact that the Irish friends always insisted on paying her bus or taxi fare. However, after a couple of weeks the new friends cooled off without explanation. Next time she went along with them, she was surprised to be bluntly told her share of the fare and was asked to pay it. Her friends had had a little discussion about Anjali's 'meanness', as she had never once attempted to pay for anything. It was decided that if the friendship was to continue, she'd have to be asked straight out to pay her share.Everyone would have preferred that she did it without being asked, but as everyone was short of money after being out with her, plain speaking became necessary.

Both Anjali and Vinay were astonished that if they were asked to meet friends in a pub for someone's birthday, they were expected to pay their share for drinks, even if the party took place in a hotel. In India, when you are invited to a party, the host pays for everything. They also found it difficult to understand why if they gave someone a gift, they didn't get one in return. Another Indian custom.

When I came out to India to marry Yash, I had no idea about the Indian custom of 'dahej', other than the fact that I knew it existed. The English for dahej is dowry. I knew that asking a bride or her family straight out for dowry was illegal, but other than that, I knew very little. It took me years to figure things out.

Some of my nephews here told me that prior to my marriage, seventeen years ago, when they were children, there was great excitement among the friends and relatives about the foreign bride coming in to the family. Apparently, some callers to the house were predicting that our family home would be like a Taj Mahal after the new bride came. Apparently people were predicting air conditioners and all sorts of luxury gadgets to be installed. So the new bride came. And nothing new was installed. After the wedding, the family was still making do with the usual ceiling fans and coolers.The kids were wondering what happened to the air conditioner and the dishwasher and all the fancy gadgets. They told me about this recently with much laughter. I realized that probably relatives and friends of the family must have thought that I'd be bringing a very fancy dahej with me and that I'd want to upgrade the family home to my former living standards. It apparently puzzled them greatly that I didn't want to do it. In fairness, I have to say that Yash's family never expected nor demanded anything of me, understanding the situation much better than their friends and relatives obviously did.

No doubt airfares to and from India had eaten into my savings, but it had never dawned on people that I wasn't rich. Everyone just assumed that foreigners were. Being from a working class backround, I've always had enough to live on all my life, but I've never had wealth in the real sense.

I had a request from Yash just before I came out here to bring a camera with me of a particular brand, as a relative had requested it. I had to spend my own money on it and Yash promised I would be reimbursed. The camera cost 1,000 U.S. dollars, no small sum at that time. When I reached India and asked Yash to recover my money, the concerned relative suddenly developed amnesia about having asked for the camera. Which left me stuck with an expensive camera, purchased in Paris, which I was unable to return and didn't want. I later realized that this relative is someone who could have expected to receive a hefty slice of the dahej, had it been available. This camera was probably something he wanted as a gift from a dahej which had no existence in reality.. Oh, well, you live and learn.

I remember my mother discussing my situation with one of my neighbours when she visited me. When my mother saw that I didn't have an ironing board, she was annoyed. She told my neighbour that she was worried that her daughter didn't have too many good facilites. My neighbour replied "but that's your fault, you sent her here with nothing!"

Yash never required dowry from me and that was the measure of his love for me. But it certainly raised eyebrows that I had got myself such a highly qualified bridegroom so 'cheaply.' In the mentality of many of the people I have met, it is the parents duty to 'buy' a bridegroom for their daughter and set her up with all the comforts they can afford. When I told some people here that in the west, we don't do it that way, they couldn't believe it. Surely everyone in the world has to do this for their daughters? Incidentally, my mother has helped me a great deal over the years with moral and emotional support and she brings a lot of nice things like clothes and shoes for my children when she visits. Not because she is obliged to but because she wants to.

There are unwritten laws in every culture, north, south, east and west. The more aware we are of them, the better we can cope with cultural difference.

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Unwritten Laws' was chosen by me, gaelikaa.

Petition!

2011-07-04T21:14:00.000+05:30

This blog has been rather quiet lately. I've been writing a lot of short stories and am struggling with a novel at the moment not to mention my four kids who are off on their summer holidays. They are, however, going back to school soon.

There is a blogger who is very dear to my heart, but it's not one of my usual readers. This blogger and blog couldn't be more different from me and mine, but it really doesn't matter. She's a housewife from the upper strata of middle class life in London and I'm a struggling housewife/student/aspiring writer here in north India. But we share a common bond. She was the one who inspired me to blog. She is DulwichMum.

DulwichMum is going through major despair at the moment. As a mother of schoolgoing children, she is horrified that her local borough council in London has decided to axe some of the Lollipop Men and Lollipop Ladies who make the roads safer for the schoolchildren to cross on the way to school. For the sake of a few pounds, the lives of schoolchildren are being put at risk. DulwichMum is promoting a campaign to save the Lollipop people. So, because what matters to DM matters to me, I'm posting the link to the petition here. So if any of my blogging friends show up here, please go over and sign the petition. I'm not widely read these days I know, but every little helps. Please go and sign the petition and DulwichMum and I will owe you our eternal gratitude!

And here's the link.

And here's the link to DM's inspiring post on the subject.

Ancestor!

2011-07-01T19:54:00.002+05:30

It's time for my Loose Blogging Consortium Post and I am left with no alternative but to blog from my mobile owing to power cuts and the Indian monsoon weather while my children dance in the rain.

Some time back I was intrigued to learn that I am in fact descended from one of the most prominent people in the history of the world. Abraham, who was then childless and married to his half sister Sarah. Abraham meditated and communicated with God regularly. God called Abraham out of his old life along with his wife and taught him many things. Through obedience, the childless Abraham became the father of nations and his descendents are innumerable on the earth as God had promised. He is recognized as being the ancestor of the Jewish people, of which Jesus Christ is is one. Notice that I am speaking of Jesus in the present tense. He rose from the dead. He's alive, my friends.

How am I descended from Abraham? Jewish, right? Wrong! I'm baptized. I belong to Jesus. That puts me in the family. If He was descended from Abraham so am I.

In the Bible, adoption is as valid as blood relation. No second best about it. Jesus was adopted by Joseph, His mother's husband. That made Him a valid descendent of a Royal house, although His mother wasn't! Likewise, when God adopts us as His own children, we really are. Just as Jesus is.

For those of us who believe, this is an incredible truth.

After this post went live and the power came back on, I had to come in here and tidy it up. Still, it wasn't a bad effort from a mobile and at least I kept my date with the LBC if nothing else!

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic. Our members are, in no particular order, Akanksha, Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, gaelikaa, Grannymar, and Rummuser. This topic 'Ancestor' was chosen by Delirious.

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