Being What I Always Wanted To Be.....

 I just had a memory popped up in my head today which happened a really long time ago. Maybe 2 decades before.. I really can’t remember when. But anyway, my father was getting the house renovated during which he decided to give a name to the house and a name plate engraved. This is a very common proud moment of anyone who owns a house in that era. So anyway, though I was a kid but being “the literature geek” I was asked to come up with some name for the house that covers the first alphabet of all the family members living there at that time. So that’s me, my 2 sisters, mummy and papa. And with all the letters 3 S, 1 K and 1 R, the most sensible Hindi name I could come up with was “Sanskaar”. So we named the house Sanskaar and my father got all the 5 names engraved below the house name in the order of their age: Rajiv Garg Kanchan Garg Supriya Shipra Shreya A lot of people of “the society” questioned my father on putting daughters’ name on the name plate. After all, daughters are no...

So I have been having this “social sickness” for a while now. It’s funny that before the pandemic, life was so occupied that we didn’t have time to breathe from the social life. Going to office was itself a fully social day.  It has been a good isolated run for a year and a half, with a bonus of being away from people, travel, traffic and mechanic routine. There is just one routine now.. the crazy routine !  But slowly it so happened that we got so caught up in the crazy routine that there was no time to be social even over phone calls and video chats. And now, when there is a day that seems to have an hour to be able to talk to someone outside the 4 walls.. I realised I am unable to find any. There are some whom I could never give time and now they don’t have time for me, and there are some who couldn’t give me time then or now and there are some who are there and I am here but I don’t know what to talk. So basically it ended up having this weird sickness called social sickne...

This one comes after a long time and by the time I finish, it might seem like a dragging confusing train of thoughts but I had to scribble these down so here I am!  We humans are such weird creatures.  We can’t keep our decades old relationship intact and we seek new love to probably disappoint them another couple of decades later if life gives you enough decades to live through. We want our kids to be small babies and as cute and as innocent as they are today but we crib the sleepless nights that come along with the pack and parcel of them being babies. We seek attention and love and care from everyone who love us but when they need the same we are conveniently busy.  We miss and cry and demand the presence of our loved ones around us but we can’t fill that gap by being with them instead.  Our problems are always bigger than others’ problems, our days are always bitter, our love is always lesser. We are a little less happy, a little more sad, a little too far and a ...

So it’s been a tough month for various reasons and one of those are the unsolicited advices that I have got in last couple of weeks for my 3 year old.  There is a phase when you are new at parenting and you can’t make head and tail out of any simple or complicated thing thrown your way. During that phase, you seek help and advices and that time you get all abstract advices. Like for anything related to your kid’s health, do not go to a doctor, go to a priest. For anything behaviour related to your kid, don’t try to reason it, just tell the kid this is how it’s done. So over the time you realise that though some things are very precious and exclusive in terms of the years of experience the other people have but it’s always safer to make your own experiences if you really don’t consider those people to be your role models for parenting. Then you start taking your own calculated risks in taking decisions about your kid. Like following only doctor’s advices, or following only home reme...

I used to be very proud of not being addicted to anything in my life. If I am spending time on tv which can become an addiction, I would immediately shut it off without being much affected, if I am getting to be a workaholic, I would immediately get back to other priorities in life and stuff like that. If I keep scrolling social media for no reason, I retire from all those apps in a snap.  And that’s the reason I prefer even the hobbies which are self dependent. I mean if I like sports, I prefer going for a run rather than something which needs another person. I like reading, writing which is a big time solo.  But lately, I realised that I have an addiction of being addicted to people which is probably since the time I was big enough to be social. And apparently that’s a real thing! There have always been people in my life in every phase whom I am addicted to talking to, chatting up, sharing things etc. Obviously not everyone is not so fond of such things and over the time the...

So today is Father’s Day and the father-son duo spent the whole day together playing like both are 3-year olds. I did my part by cooking on demand for both the boys and overall the day was good.  I do not exaggerate when I say that my husband is the best father I have seen in my life. He teaches our son the biggest lessons of life so subtly and so calmly that it’s nothing less than a miracle most of the time. Ayaansh has overcome his most fears, learnt to let things/people go in the healthiest way possible and brings out his artistic side .. all thanks to his father’s efforts. He is the strict parent among the two (yeah it is a surprise for me too!) but he is still Ayaansh’s best friend. They love reading together, they love hugging each other while sleeping, they love playing football together and they have this strange silent talking which Ayaansh never does with me. With me, he is a chatter box, whether I am idle with him, working, cooking, watching tv, reading.. whatsoever. But...

 Ever since I was a child with a little understanding of the world and surroundings I have been a big advocate of never comparing children. We have all been victims of it somewhere sometime and we all know how it feels. Even before I was a parent, I have written blogs on this and still when I think world has changed, people have evolved, I see it all around me.  Infact I think it’s even worse now. I remember my 1.3 year old son compared with his 11 months cousin who started walking sooner! From there to now that he is 3 years (and still a baby), these kids have to fight this fight everyday. Is there a better child? There are just children.. unique and different in their own ways. But how difficult is it to understand for the most!  On one hand I get the expressions of “oh my god, why is your 2 year old attending online class!!” On the other hand, I get questions like “that kid responses to every question, why doesn’t your kid?” Does it matter?  So what instigated thi...

So I have been very lucky when it came to finding perfect friends at the perfect time in life. They all are very special and hold a special place for different reasons in my life. From having the oldest one with more than 3 decades of friendship to the dearest friend with whom I share more than 2 decades of friendship to the recent one which is just a 4-week old friendship, each of them have helped me being where I am today and this is no less than a blessing. I have always believed in these relations being much stronger or natural than the blood relations we carry by our biological reasonings. This is a family which might not share the same surnames or sibling parents but will be there for you at 3 am as well if you need them with no strings attached. So I have friends with whom I can share my darkest days, secrets, phases. Friends who make workplace such a brighter and comfy place to go to (physical or virtual). Friends with whom you can spend the night talking, drinking, dancing, sh...

 So today I was watching a YouTube video of a flash mob in Italy who performed for a guy who wanted to propose his girl in a very special way on the iconic Bruno Mars song “Marry me”. It was such a happy and emotional 4 minutes video that it took me back to those butterfly-in-the-stomach days of me and husband-dearest. My better half being the perfect shy gentleman that he is ..has never been too expressive. And I being the loud, talkative extrovert that I am have always taken the expressions to the highest level possible so much so that it has embarrassed him at many occasions ! Remembering one such xxl-size expression of mine, we were dating at the time and it was his birthday. We went out for a movie in the afternoon and in the attempt of doing something different than the past couple of years, something truly unexpected, here is what I came up with. A few weeks before his birthday, I dug out the multiplex manager’s contact number. And I contacted him to execute my super-special...

 So I got my first dose of vaccination of covishield on 11th May in a government centre of Karnataka. The experience was okay. I got a little lucky in getting past the local influence extremism and getting through vaccination. However, the worst part of it was they didn’t give any instructions on what we can expect post vaccination (1st dose) and just mutely gave me 2 paracetamol and sent me away. They didn’t ask me to wait around too so I also chose it better to get back home immediately. On second thoughts.. is that why govt centres are providing free of cost vaccination? They are like “ok we have vaccinated you so now go to watsapp university or google institution and go nuts on what’s expected and what not OR do a paid consultation with another doctor to get proper guidance?” Smart move though..! Anyway I got back and relied on friends feedback of their experience of getting vaccinated and found it’s not much of a hype. So while driving back itself I started feeling some pain i...

 So my kid brings out the best and the undiscovered in me since the 3 years (and 9 months) he has been born!  He made me a great cook in the first year (which I had no interest in for the past 3 decades of my life). In the second year, he made me a person who could paint, colour or think of atleast a handful ways of doing something crafty (which no matter how bad it turned out but it was still better than not being able to draw a straight line without a scale!). This year his goal is to make me a fit mom! Yes you read it right... so I resumed my pre-pregnancy routine of having a run atleast every alternate day and doing some cardio on the other alternate days along with doing the lessons learnt from son the dearest in the past 2 years. Things were going smooth.. I was getting fitter and after each lap of 200meteres, he would be there cheering for me and trying to race with me and give me high-fives along with husband dearest which made me push myself harder. He would be gettin...

 So this one comes after a really long time. Why?.. I wonder. Maybe I was busy cooking, managing home, office and a rapidly growing toddler or maybe I was busy shifting to our new home which is finally “our” home. All in all... I was really busy. Funny that when you are all hands and legs tied, you crave for the quiet and free time. Guess what? We are bestowed with this wish all over the country... even those who didn’t wish for it. Maybe that’s why they say “be careful what you wish for”. It’s not really quiet with a toddler in home but still so quiet in my heart inside that I can hear my heart beating (and this is not a cheesy Sharukh Khan dialogue... I really mean it). Yes... we are still very strict on “no outside food” but it feels that all the passion for cooking and eating has been stolen by someone which took up majority of my time in the first wave of this deadly coronavirus. IT industry at large understands the impact of this second wave and they are trying making it leni...