My Best Friend’s Wedding

Please mark this post. You won’t see much of happy stuff around here. My best friend got married early this month, which is good news but whats really giving me the high is that I went to his house in Gujarat (which is the northern most point I have ever travelled to), met his abs-adorable parents and relatives AND did not feel out-of-place or lonely. His house had an aura of ‘oh! I have been here and I know this place’ and even my friend had a deja vu a couple of times when we were talking in the house. I guess there is something beyond our understanding here that made us friends in the first place. I like that! He is one of my special 5 by the way. So I do have a ready post written on him but since it is in chronological order and he’s #4, he’ll have to wait till I write about the ones that came before him. But here are the high points of the trip:

a) As I already said, the house and the people that made me feel so at home; I miss it already
b) The climate – just hot enough to make my skin clear again (Bangalore weather ruins it, yeah I am among the odd ones who complain about such pleasant weather)
c) The wedding itself – less fuss more fun, simple and beautiful!!!
d) Ahmedabad airport – where
i) I saw a specimen one of my friends calls DG – ‘dignified gentlemen’, you know the sort that’s too old for you but still your heart goes ’sigh!’ and you wish your husband looks like that ten years down the line (*little hearts in my eyes*)
ii) and I met an old couple who clung to me like I am the last person on earth, presumably cos they were scared of the whole airport and flying thing. I totally empathized with them, I used to be like that too…But the funny part was how they kept talking to me in third person “baby kidar jaa rahi hai”, “baby kab jaayegi?”, etc. It took me a moment to figure out ‘I’ was the baby and then answer their questions. Embarrassing man! but cute, isn’t it?

And that’s it! On my way back home in Bangalore I was feeling sick and had to throw up as soon as I reached home. He was sweet enough to make some hot food and feed me when i was half-asleep though. I get so sappy when things like this happen you know, which isn’t often but whatever….Must have been my lucky 2 days

p.s: of course its over! I am not your regular Miss Sunshine remember?

Best of both worlds!

This post is going to sound very feminist or Ekta Kapoor-ish or like complaints from your mother’s kitchen. But I assure you, it’s not meant to be any of the above. It’s just that I have a new found respect for home-makers with a full-fledged career and one or two kids at home. The number of young women I know who take work as seriously as their husbands and also manage their home admirably well? Simply awesome! They have their nurturer’s instincts intact but they are also hunters / gatherers today.

One of my friends? Works 8 – 10 hours, cooks at home, goes out with husband, entertains guests, writes a blog, reads books and paints… Most of this I saw her do in the couple of days I stayed with her. God knows what else she does over, say, a month! Standing in her balcony and looking at 20 odd balconies out there and young women feeding babies, drying clothes, taking calls from office – opened a whole new world for me.

It’s not like they’ll get the best performer award or 3 wishes or a rewarding nether-life or anything. The days of near perfection go practically unnoticed. Agreed, the husband helps these days and there are a lot of short-cuts to save time and effort. But still why does the way women do things, define the character of the house? I mean who says, the house has to be arranged just so? Who says kitchen containers need to be color coordinated? Why do they have a signature dish? Why can’t the hired help do it all?

It’s easy for others to say, ‘who asks you to do all of this?’ In that sense it’s all totally unnecessary. But these women care enough to do. Many people look down upon them because they can’t obviously give their all to work. Its women who leave the home-duty elsewhere that make it to the top, apparently. In a nut-shell, a woman can’t have best of both worlds.

At least I haven’t seen anyone past 30 who can say they are the best at work and at home (not houses that run like a well-oiled machine but the homes filled with things made or presented with so much love and care, it shows when anyone steps in). Which is why this small phase in life where a young woman manages exactly that, seems so valiant in my eyes. May be because I am moving from the ‘stuff thrown around’ single life to ‘why is the key not in the key-stand?’ mode, it seems to be a big thing for me now. May be few years down the line even I will forget why women even bother to balance two full-time occupations. But right now? I want to stand up and cheer for her. Woman, you rock!!!

I am a successful… what?

This has been the latest in the endless list of questions I ask myself (just to make life more complicated than it already is). My boss also has a set of questions she uses to analyze any person. While that is proprietary information, my contribution to that was -  ‘Do you like yourself? – My theory is that if your answer is yes, you are likely to be happier, more successful and better off in life.

That was the origin of my current line of thought. One can ask ‘I am a good … what?’ but the thing is, ‘good’ is very commonplace. Your breakfast is good. The weather is good. So, the question is ‘what am I successful at?’. Considering everyone is supposed to be born with some talent, everyone ought to be successful at something, right? I am leaving the definition of success open as well, the answer shouldn’t be too difficult to find. But it is.

I think I am a good consultant, not a successful one. Similarly, I am a decent life partner, dutiful daughter, sister and aunt, enjoy reading and writing, have entrepreneurial inclinations, a new-found love for money, a dormant artistic tendency and a flickering flame of ambition. (phew!) But not quite ’successful’ by most standards. So these days, anything I do, I ask myself if I am going to be successful in it. Similar to Jack Welch’s ‘be in businesses only where you are no.1 or 2 and get the hell out of rest’.   Turns out to be a bad idea. Cos then I ought to get the hell out of my job, my marriage (how? no.1 & 2 is occupied by in-laws, my husband and I didn’t make it to the list), my kitchen and my wardrobe.

Remedy: I wanted to do many things like a pro, now I tell myself to do it like a child. Not like the uber-competitive children of these days who want to win Junior titles, but like when I was a child. To give an example, my drawings never won any prizes but I had a jolly good time making them. My mother and the nurses in the hospital (where she was once admitted) liked them, btw. And I never drew things I knew I couldn’t – hands for example. so all my figures had their hands tucked behind (LOL!!!). I never drew animals either. Anyhow, you get the point. The idea is to do things that make you happy and stay away from whatever hassles you. May not be much of a success mantra, but we don’t care about success anymore, remember?