Hanging upside down with a bad haircut!

Ever heard of a little guy called Trishanku? If not, you can read up on him here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trishanku

The longer I live in India this time round, the better I appreciate the poor fellow's condition. I am not drawing an exact parallel here, for instance, I don't presume to choreograph any metaphorical dances with the concept of heaven and earth etc. I mean to draw just one definite line of connection between Trishanku's state of being, hanging upside down in a world created due to his desires and my state of being in the land of my birth.

There are days when I FEEL as alien as if I am walking around on my head. Then there are days when I feel I LOOK alien with my short crop because women in this part of the country have such lustrously luscious long hair that when I go out I spend most of my time shamelessly ogling female heads...which reminds me...keeping my hair short here is such a trial because hair stylists are so inexperienced when it comes to short hair cuts.

The first guy I went to did a fairly good job of cutting my hair except in the course of the conversation when he finds out I just moved back from the US goes..."Oh, my short hair techniques are American" and I am impressed and relieved when he goes on to say "Yes! I learn from YOU TUBE and CDs"....whew! Do you mind if I snatch my head away from you boy???!! However, I was happy enough to want to go back to him except that the next few times I went/called to get an appointment with that guy I began to get the run around which in the end made me fear I might be mistaken for a cougar (he's a very young guy you see!) so I had to give up and find someone else...and someone else again...and nothing's worked out so far...they do a fantastic job of coloring but short cuts are another story altogether....so then I proceeded to give my dear husband a heart attack by announcing that he needs to start funding my periodic trips to Paris for fashionista purposes...thereby also rounding up my identity as an alien Desi! (To clarify, by history, heritage, nature culture etc etc we Indians are happier saving our money rather than spending it...just like it's said in the new Maruthi Ad!)

So now, what with a crazy hair cut that's growing out into it's "in between" stage, typhoid induced weight gain because when I am not eating, I am sleeping and my general air of bewilderment at finding myself in a little alien world of my own creation where I am happily empathizing with Trishanku, I truly well am hanging upside down and boy is it enervating!!

When Typhoid comes, can Malaria be far behind? And the lucky thief...

It has been a while since I wrote anything here or anywhere else. Moved back to India in May 2010 and life was a whirlwind of activities - settling down stuff, family issues, travelling frequently - come Feb 2011, I heaved a sigh of relief as we had nothing significant to focus on and I determined to put an end to aimless travelling and refocus on my LIFE. I planned on finally staying put in Ahmedabad and looking into my career needs and options as well as finish up something else that I had committed myself to months ago in the writing field.

Well, so much for my plans! I spent the first two weeks feeling progressively ill, then it looked like I had come down with viral fever but it finally turned out to be typhoid fever. Spent a few days in the hospital getting, I know not how many bottles of IV fluids and antibiotics and came home with more medications and extreme weakness. Now I am focussed on "regaining my strength" and "trying not to eat anything that might overwork my weakened digestive system"...apparently it will take some few weeks to get back to normal again...groannnnnnnnn! BTW, this is by no means the first time I have fallen ill since I moved back to India, this is the second time I was hospitalized and I have lost count of the number of times, I have been ill at home...whew! 

As if this were not enough, one day I had DH take me to a book exhibition as I was beginning to get cabin fever staying cooped up at home. Now, when I am around books I forget everything else including my existence and some lucky thief made away with my wallet which had everything from cash to cards and ID cards etc!! 

SO anyways....I am beginning to think I need to consult an astrologer and see if my stars have all aligned themselves in a way peculiarly inimical to my existence!

And Oh! When Typhoid comes, can Malaria be far behind? Hmmm...maybe I should spend the next few months vaccinating myself with every known vaccine to man...along with consulting the astrologer of course!!

Do you want an Audi?

Hey Ya'll! Do you want an Audi free of cost? Just come on over to Ahmedabad, India. I am right now on an "Audi Agent" hunt and I am sure to find one soon...If you are wondering what this is all about, here goes;

There was a very interesting bit of news in the paper today. A guy with flashy clothes and jewelry walked into an Audi showroom nearby my place and took an Audi Q7 for a test drive accompanied by the sales guy. After he had driven it for a while, he requested the salesman to drive it so he could sit back and enjoy the drive and the "view" alongside SG Highway (What view???Grimy rooftops and massive hoardings???) 

So the poor fool got out of the car and walked around to the driver's seat, when the "cool customer", slipped back onto the driver's seat and drove away, literally and figuratively leaving the sales guy choking on his dust!!! How easy was that?! 

Check this out..the showroom does not have security cameras, so they have no way of identifying him...apparently they have relayed information to the police check posts along the highways. Will this guy really try to get past police check posts with that car looking the way it did? My guess is, he will lie low for a while somewhere around here, change everything he can beginning with the color of the car and drive away with his aged parents, wife and kids or a bunch of kids or in some such "good citizen" avatar! 

Anyways, I finally got myself a bank locker and stowed my remaining jewelry in there...I don't recall if I ever mentioned this but our apartment was burgled a couple weeks after we moved to India and the stupid fools that we were, we had left some of our valuables here while we went out of town so, the thieves definitely had a ball...the police then told us that this city attracts out of town robbers due to its wealth but now I have this sneaking suspicion that it is not wealth alone but carelessness as well!

So, people moving back here, do watch out! We have some of the world's most enterprising people in our country!!

India Repatriate - to be or not to be? Or Why relocate to India?

I received an email from a blog reader who is currently pondering this question. As I finished reading her mail, I began to think back to my decision to move and how I would go about making my decision if it were now - that is, when I actually have first hand knowledge of what it is like to move back to home country.

It had always been my intention to move back to India but in my case, the timing sucked....however that's another story!

I never really had an answer to the question "why do you want to move back?" The reason being, there is no material reason to move back. Much as we would like to tout the progress India has made in recent years, it is still far from being the United States. It probably never will be...India is too tropical and too crowded to ever have the kind of space and resources that makes the US such a pleasant, easy place to live. Philosophically, we Indians are too relaxed, easy-going and fatalistic to constantly innovate, recreate and figure out the next best thing to improve our lives and our country at a rapid pace.

Living in the US, I not only had access to every single thing that I needed but was free to let my "wants" grow like weeds on steroids, fully secure in the knowledge that they would be gratified sooner or later! Living in an atmosphere where space, system and technology conspire to help you grow rapid and large it was easy to believe myself to be this bold, confident person who can make it anywhere in this world...and then I moved back to India, thinking, "so what if this is not exactly the right time in my life for relocating, I can make it work!"

India brought me down to earth with a nice big crash. Wading through my swampy first few months here, I cannot find words to describe how badly I regretted my decision and how many times I have spoken and still speak about moving back to the US. The question "Why did I move back?" haunted me endlessly until one day a few weeks ago, I realized that I will never really have an answer to that question...There is no answer to that question. I don't have reasons;

I am not here under the illusion that India is progressing and so this is the place to be.

I am not here under any delusion that my country needs me and I need to give back; whether I am here or not, whether I do something or not India will survive and move on. To put it another way, I need my country far more than my country needs me!!

If you ask me, I will say that I loved my American life better (and that despite being a totally stressed out mental health social worker for most of my life there!) than I love my life here.

If I did not have the option to move back and were forced to settle down permanently in the US, I would have happily made myself at home there for the most part. (Once upon a time, I would have thought that a traitorous attitude but not anymore. We are who we want ourselves to be and if you are born Indian but feel American and are happy being one, then so be it...all of us are human beings first and different nationalities next!)

However, would I have completely forgotten my country? No, somewhere, deep down, I would have continued to miss India and that emotion would have resurfaced from time to time, preventing me from resting content. And that is the only answer I have to the question, why I moved back to India. This is home, this is my heritage and ultimately, this is where I want to be.

Having said that, I will also say that I could have timed it better and prepared myself better for the move, in other words, I could have been a little smarter about it!

Settling down but not settling down...

The longing to be back in the US, living my previous life has been steadily receding, I am also beginning to feel happy about being back in India. I still continue to feel alien for the most part but I also feel at home more often. I still struggle to accept the easy manner in which people invade our privacy here but I am beginning to harden myself into maintaining my boundaries according to my needs. I am still confused about my place and my sense of self but I am beginning to accept that I will never be one thing or the other but a cultural mongrel of sorts and that is ok.
What I have not been able to do so far is actually work on putting down my roots here. For reasons unknown I balk at the thought of complete acceptance. This is funny because I remember going through the same feelings during my first couple years in the US. There was this fear of letting my old familiar self go in order to become the different person I needed to be to survive in a totally different environment. I never once thought I would feel the same on my return to India. But then, that's how matters stand, I am going through a similar struggle all over again and sometimes it all gets so overwhelming that I long to fly back in time and space to my cozy little apartment overlooking the chagrin valley in Northeast Ohio. At other times, it feels good to be back in this country of mine with her relaxed air and abundant sunshine. Go figure!

A WEDDING in the Family...and...

"There is an upcoming  wedding in the family, that is, my dear husband's (DH) brother is getting married in January 2011". Innocuous sentence eh? No!! There's a wedding in the family is synonymous with "yours truly is on a shopping frenzy" and DH is alternately losing his mind and fearing for my sanity.

Being back in India is insanely exciting come wedding and saree shopping time.

Excitement aside, this woman has hardly ever shopped for sarees in her life and never before has she done it without mom or an aunt beside her to give her moral support...now I am dependent on DH for moral support while BUYING SAREES...ouch!!

The scene kinda goes like this, we walk into a store having decided beforehand what kinda stuff we are looking for, gape at a hundred different varieties of sarees flown, flung, draped and defined for our benefit -

by the end of which we are too stunned to decide anything - shrug apologetically, give perplexed smiles and inch our way out murmuring that we would be back the next day...knowing full well that we won't go back and the sales guy knows it too!

For those of you wondering why all this bewilderment...try figuring out stuff like pure georgette, dye-able, brocaded, self embroidered with silver tikkis (Not stones!) with traditional border vs synthetic georgette(that's why it is cheaper madam), double colored, velvet floral bordered shimmer material with stones (Not tikkis!)...yada, yada, yada....

or how about a Benarasi pure silk patola vs, Benarasi Brocade vs Benarasi Jamaver vs South Silk (meaning kanjeevaram) plain or south silk enhanced with Kutchi work, kundan work, kantha work...etc etc etc

or better still the latest fad...net sarees with beautiful handwork including tikkis, crystals and uncut diamonds ranging in price from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars...whew! I wouldn't mind paying thousands of dollars( one day in the future if and when I can afford to that is!!) for an elegantly woven and worked silk saree...after all the production of my saree begins with thousands  of poor little silkworms (which means my saree is organic, right?)...but I cannot imagine paying so much for what to me appears to be gorgeously colored and worked mosquito nets....but on the other hand some of these net sarees are out of this world elegant...so maybe they are not so bad after all....

...and this is just the beginning, we still haven't touched silk cotton...Italian crepe...pure chiffon...raw silk...paper silk...tussar silk...moonga silk....blah blah blah...or sarees from all different states and districts...cities, towns and villages...handcrafted vs machine woven...chemical dyes vs vegetable dyes, royal vs rustic....oooooooooofff...gasp...some water please...

If this is not enough to fry your brains...you must be made of one of those pure silk with pure gold thread border kinda material that they promise will live on in full glory for eons after we depart this saree laden earth...

After going through this process(torment?) in some smaller boutiques and indie shops, we felt braver to approach the big guns of the city. (Or may be the fact that the wedding is less than two months away has something to do with this sudden spurt of courage??)

So now we have actually started buying sarees!! More about that later...coz you see after buying comes the drooling and draping...and plenty more ings....

Of Me, my Dear Husband(DH) our Maid and Cook....

To continue with the story of trying to manage a maid and a cook....

After weeks of getting up in the morning and sweetening our morning cup of coffee with squabbles over what instructions to give the maid and cook on that particular day and which of us would do it, I had had enough and came to a decision; to split "them two" between "us two".

I bagged the cook and gave DH the maid as in our former lives I used to be master chef and DH the sous chef and he was the janitorial supervisor, me the imbecile cleaner ( which basically meant that I was too stupid to do the bathrooms etc so he got to do all the heavy duty stuff...hehe!)

Today happened to be the first day we could put this into practice as DH happened to be at home( he is usually out of town, either for a day or for days together on business) BUT when I woke up this morning he had just gotten back from his early morning yoga class thoroughly thrilled with the weather and sighting my daily plumpening (is there such a word? If not, there should be, coz there's no better way to describe me...)he "encouraged" me to go for a nice long walk and offered to pass on my instructions to the cook AND promised to remember everything I had pointed out around the house to him so he could instruct the maid.

I went for my nice long walk and stayed out for about an hour soaking up some sun before it got to be burning hot and then went back home to find...

...my DH busily typing away at his laptop.

Cobwebs continued to lurk in both dark and bright corners while the maid was apparently on the point of finishing up her day's work...the toilets did not look like it had been cleaned...on questioning DH, he asks me, "doesn't she clean it everyday?" (????)...on questioning the maid, she explains that she cleaned it with plain water (?????)...

Went to the kitchen to inquire after my dish of thinly sliced and sauteed raw bananas only to see that the thin slices seems to have transformed to big fat cubes...so I ask DH, "did you forget to give her my instructions?" and he goes..."No! I told her that the bananas have to be "thinly sliced", hasn't she sliced it?"...ok who do I yell at? DH for assuming that a woman who struggles to articulate basic numbers in English would understand the term "thinly sliced"? Or my cook for assuming to understand when she hasn't understood his instructions?

Well...I didn't yell at anybody...after all it was a nice morning and I had just come in from a nice long walk...and also DH excused himself on the score that he was preoccupied with his work...yeah yeah...

Fast forward to our luncheon conversation...DH is telling me how my cook's alcoholic husband has ruined her life...the cook told him her story this morning and apparently the maid too added her two cents to abuse the cook's husband...ok! whew! The two women hardly ever shoot the wind with me despite me being at home all the time, while DH sprints in and out of the house like a freakin olympic athlete and the day they get him alone they gossip and all my instructions are gone with wind....

Jeez...whenever will I acquire the skills required to manage my servants and teach it to DH? Coz, you can't simply give orders to Indian maids or you will speedily find yourself without household help. You've got to learn the value of well placed smiles with your regular requests, special smiles for special requests, playfulness while delivering corrections and criticisms, the ability to turn a blind eye towards certain negligent behaviors while wholeheartedly appreciating positive behaviors, just the right mixture of coaxing and command while instructing, not being too uptight about (for them immaterial) things like punctuality and keeping you informed in advance about a change in their plans....the list goes on so I will stop here...

The day I master all this, I'll apply for a position as a foreign ambassador and have myself sent to our favorite neighboring country...eh?