Paranoia

I didn't know her in college. But I saw a picture where she had the kind of waist-line I could kill for. And had I known her then, perhaps would have hated her for it. I got to know her -- not really -- through her blog. Even went to her house for dinner once with Partner. And I remember her Brat. He had that smile that makes you want to smile. No matter how pissed off you are. Sometimes her posts piss me off. I will not go into reasons now. Sometimes they echo what I think. Sometimes they make me wonder about the starkness with which she writes. I don't think she is perfect, but if there's someone flawed doing a damn good job of things -- fumbling, learning, screaming, loving -- perhaps it's her. Especially since we are the same age and she has two children. I loved this post. Not because of the happy ending but because it scared me to bits.

It's not me it's the baby

IF I see one more Bollywood movie with divinely pregnant women practicing lullabies the moment their bloody ovum is fertilised...
Or any more filmi sequences where hero-heroine burst into "the moon of our eye and the apple of your womb" type romantic number when they discover they/she are/is pregnant.
Or any references to how life is going to change (completely, drastically, horrendously) because tum maa banne waali ho*. (All Hindi translations given at the end of this post, and if some are missing, I can't be f*cked.)
I swear I WILL kill.

We are pregnant

Why am I writing this, writing here? That’s the question I’ve asked the umpteen times I’ve tried blogging and haven’t. Each time I haven’t been certain of the answer and so haven’t bothered to write. I’ve sat and played game after game of online monopoly (pogo.com), tried the same campaign on Age of Empires at various difficulty levels, surfed through various websites…Done everything but blog. Either I’ve not known why I want to write – not what, never what – or someone else has said it better than I would, could. There’s no dearth of opinions, I’ve always had them by the truckloads, there’s just a sense of… Can’t-be-bothered. There’s so much that’s happened. It made the last year go by so fast, it seems I went straight from 2008 to 2010. Perhaps my not wanting to write was a way of dealing with so many new things, adjustments, changes. Perhaps. So many remember-it-lifelong events, moments. So many that at times you (and I) forgot them in an instant unless it had a Facebook album dedicated to it.

stuff that hides

(Republished without permission, please go here for more such)

Tears and stuff

Things got a bit intense last evening.

I walked in on my daughter watching a re-run of Jungle Book 2 on television. You know it. Mowgli rediscovers his old friends in the jungle, after discovering hormones in the man-village. My daughter was crying because Mowgli knew he had to return to mankind, and Baloo the bear was giving him a hug to make it easier.

‘Why aren’t you crying?’ My daughter asked me. She was pouring tears. ‘It’s so sad and happy at the same time.’

So I cried a little. I was surprised at how easily the tears came.

We sat there, sniffling, pre-teen daughter and middle-aged father, as the credits rolled up. It felt good to know that in her eyes I wasn’t a wimp.

quoted

"The human race would have died out if it was left to men to have babies."
--- Colleague at work when discussing a picture of a woman in labour that appeared in the Sunday Age newspaper. She believes, and we all agreed, that men cannot tolerate pain as well as women do. They (men) just don't have any pain threshold level.
Pic courtesy: theage.com

aao, khao

What better way to start 2010 than by completely feeding my face? In the year and half of my being in Melbourne, I've made no pretenses about missing Indian food. Especially when it comes down to chaat and sweets and the other goodies we take for granted back home.

It was a random chat with one of the dude's at the Indian store at Moonee Ponds that lead to my best discovery in Melbourne yet. Ironic though that it should be Partner asking about "Where can we get authentic gulab jamuns?" instead of me. Perhaps because Partner has been quite sick of the disintegrating gulab jamuns I've tried making. They taste almost the same except they are not round or any other shape.