“Be interesting! Your responsibility is to be someone worth talking to, and even better, worth talking about.”
- Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone
You think you know love
You meet the man of your dreams and fall flat on your face in love, you move in and get married all within a matter of months. You take lots of holidays together, engage in all things romantic, cliches and all. You argue and have horrible fights, but always work it out in the end. And after five years together you find that your love has only grown…and you wonder how it’s possible to love someone so much?
Each day you look forward to your quality time together, every morning you smile as you wake up next to the love of your life, and 5 years on you and your guy are still the best of friends.
You think you know love – it’s when all the songs make sense.
Then you get a pet. A puppy who follows you around with such loyalty and adoration in his eyes, completely dependent on you for his every need.
You invest time and effort into training your puppy, and he rewards you by being the most loving and obedient dog you could have wished for. His unconditional love is obvious when he shows his delight in greeting you every single day, even if you step out of the house for just five minutes. You worry about him when he’s home alone, and you’re beside yourself when he gets a deadly virus and spends a fortnight on IV drips. He recovers and your love for him only grows. He still follows you around from room to room, you bring him back to full health, and you just can’t help but love him more each day. When the dogwalker takes him down for his daily 30 minute walk you find yourself anxiously pacing as you wait for his return. And then there’s the look on his face when he comes home and is happy to sleep in his most comfortable spot – by your feet.
Again you think you know love.
And then… you become a mother.
Choice kills commitment
When we don’t have a choice in life we make do with whatever life throws at us, and we just get on with it.
The more choices we have, the more scope for questioning our decisions and wondering what would have happened had we chosen the other path.
Without a choice, we are forced to stay committed to our situation. We are forced to focus and make the best of our circumstances, often getting through difficulties and coming out stronger on the other side.
With too many choices available, we remain in limbo. Never satisfied, always wondering ‘what if’, always looking for the easy way out.
The solution, perhaps, to having too much choice: never regret a decision which was made with your gut instinct. And like Steve Jobs said, it’ll all make sense later when you look back on your life and connect the dots.
Be interesting
Home is where the Love is
What makes a house feel like a home? Its taken me almost three years of marriage (and pregnancy) to achieve some sort of peace and understanding as to what a happy home needs. Not several bedrooms or fancy cars or flat screen TV’s, just love and harmony and good vibrations. And how do these come about? Largely by acceptance, I’ve realised. Accepting people for who they are. Accepting that though they may not love you the way you want them to, that doesnt mean they dont love you the best way they know how to.
How we see things around us makes a big impact on how we react, and ultimately sets into our character, and therefore our happiness. Changing our beliefs is the biggest challenge, especially if we are set in our ways and outlooks. But if you try it and succeed – it can work wonders on how content you feel in life.
The most important thing I’ve learnt recently is that being happy is not influenced by what is outside our house (e.g traffic, pollution, climate) but rather what is inside our home (e.g culture, traditions, love, peace, family).
This post is for me to remember these thoughts and keep coming back to this when my own perspective gets a little skewed.
On working from home (or trying to)
Working from a suburban Mumbai home has a million and one distractions. For starters, the doorbell rings, on average, every 45 minutes. From the milk delivery, to the daily cleaner, to the laundry guy, to the coconut juice delivery, to the courier dropping off another bill. It seems endless. (Yes, I do appreciate all of the above services, but not when I’m trying to focus!).
Then of course there’s having to keep an eye on the daily house maids for fear they will steal or break something.
Did I mention construction noise? Our flat is a high-rise tower in a large complex, where 3 other towers are still being built. Being on the 24th floor still doesn’t allow me to escape the variety of building noises.
Of course there are the usual distractions – such as the kitchen and the constant need for a snack, knowing that it’s just a few feet away and always stocked up with goodies. Same goes for the couch/bed/television…all these factors are more enticing when they are so within your reach.
And having a puppy, now that’s distracting as can be. Now that he’s entered into his adolescent phase, he just cannot be trusted. When he’s awake, he needs constant supervision as he will chew on everything (with the risk of swallowing foreign objects). When he’s asleep, he might still wake up and chew on furniture (or his current favourite – the walls), especially if he thinks nobody is watching. Cannot be trusted, I tell you.
On that note, whilst he’s sound asleep beside me, I’m going to pop my earphones in, ignore the doorbell, and try and get some work done.
House maids: Can’t live with them, Can’t sack them
Having daily household help is the norm in daily life for all of middle class India and above. As is whinging about the help – a regular discussion amongst metropolitan women and home makers. It seems that someone is forever on the hunt for a new maid, or dealing with a runaway maid, or worse yet – someone else’s maid can’t be trusted because she brings her village boyfriend into the house every chance she gets.
Yet when they suddenly up and leave us, we are left feeling helpless and lost, such is our dependency on domestic help as we let it impact our daily lives. For example, as I write this, I am running 1 hour late for my day’s schedule, but I am still waiting for the maid to turn up to give her a scolding, rather than getting a move on with the housework to make sure I reach my destination on time.
There are incidents which can frustrate you beyond imagination, here are some experiences of my own here in Mumbai over the past 6 months:
- Daily cleaning maids often turn up late and you just can’t start your day on time. Of course they don’t call to let you know, and those who have mobile phones will never answer it
- Some are so annoying that they hum tunes while they work (a personal pet peeve, this might not irritate everyone)
- They bring with them their illiteracy (for which you can’t blame them due to their affordability and living standards), however this means they also bring with them poor hygiene – read body odour and random belching
- Our laundry guy lost 9 pieces of our clothing recently. Lost, vanished, gone, for good. Mixed them up with someone else’s clothes he reckons. When we calculated the value of the missing shirts and trousers, it works out to be more than what we’d pay him for three year’s worth of ironing services
- If you need a tradesman of any kind, be it a plumber, carpenter or electrician, be prepared to follow up at least 5 times before he turns up to complete the job
- Expect worse for specialised services – we scheduled a guy to fix our water filter, only he turned up after we called 17 times. This is no exaggeration
- The building maintenance guys didn’t bother painting our carpark spot for the longest time, so random people kept parking in our spot. Of course nothing was done about this despite our repeated requests, calls, complaints. In the end we had to stick a paper sign up there in big red writing saying PRIVATE PARKING. GO AWAY.
- A greedy bunch, they all are. Essentially they try and ask for a pay rise every month. Or they sneakily take our old newspapers and used plastic bottles and trade them in at recycling shops for a few extra bucks. Drivers tend to be the greediest and don’t have much loyalty to their employers, changing jobs at the drop of a hat where a better offer is involved.
Maids raising kids (like nannies, but uneducated) are prevalent in India’s society today, but this is a contentious topic. I personally can’t say that I would even trust my maid to look after my puppy for a whole day. (Especially after we recently underwent 10 days of expensive vet visits and almost lost him, this was after a day in the maid’s care where he ended up swallowing chemicals and plastics).
Despite all this, I honestly don’t know how I would live without domestic help in a city like Mumbai. Even though I’m not the totally dependent type (like my friend who won’t even answer the doorbell when she’s sitting two feet away), there are things I have to admit I love about having domestic help – like, how do you wash dishes again? We have to accept that no matter how well we treat them – e.g we give our maids tips and old clothes all the time, not to mention feed them full meals – this sector of society is probably not born with a sense of loyalty, and they can blame it on their difficult circumstances.
I guess we just have to take the good with the bad when it comes to house help. Even if it means some broken glassware every couple of weeks.
Revenge, puppy style
Originally written on 10th October, 2011
You’d think our household pet would be grateful to sleep in an air conditioned room, in fact the bedroom of his ‘pack leaders’, as soon as Mumbai’s October heat kicks in.
Instead, he woke us up at 3.30am and behaved as if it was his morning. I took him out for a pee, and then instructed him to go right back to bed. But no, he wanted to go for his morning walk and wouldn’t let up without the attention he thought he deserves (just for being a puppy).
After taking ages to get him to settle down again (including bribes of the chewy kind), we finally got back to sleep at 5am, only to be awoken again at his regular time of 6.30am.
Then the daily activities started: the morning walk (more of a jog today, not as enjoyable when you still have sleep in your eyes), ablutions, and of course the little guy’s breakfast.
Usually after this he sleeps from 9am – 11am but not today. Today was one of those days. Like I said, October heat has surfaced in Mumbai (for those unfamiliar, this is a humid stinking heat which happens right after the monsoon season when the hot air is still trapped in the atmosphere). And there’s no time like the October heat wave to lose electricity for two hours.
So without the comforts of air conditioning, or even ceiling fans as we have it here, the poor little mutt wandered around the house looking for a suitably cool place to rest his furry self and catch his morning nap. But even the bathroom with its slightly cooler tiled floor didn’t help today, that’s how bad the heat outside was. It doesn’t help that we’re on the 24th floor of a high rise apartment, and yes, Mr Marusich (my Year 9 science teacher) I believe you when you say hot air rises.
What was he to do? Bug me of course. He spent the whole two hours following me around like Mary’s little lamb, and got in the way of all my routine chores.
When I finally got him to sit in one place (more bribing involved, this time with his favourite chew toy, that too after I tired him out more with some games of fetch), and just as he’d started to doze off, the unmistakeable alarm bell rang. The doorbell, I mean, which acts as his alarm, because of course he has to greet every single visitor to our home.
This particular visitor turned out to be the painter, arriving with a bucket full of paint, and armed with a fear of dogs. My little pup started for him with his usual happy-go-lucky greeting but the guy’s fear got in his way and he splashed the paint bucket around and turned my beautiful black Labrador into something more resemblant of a zebra.
Let’s just say the swearing under my breath at this point was no longer under my breath.
So I had to drag Kaizer in for a bath, mind you it was the first time I was giving him a bath without my husband’s strong arms for support. I would have settled for a sponge bath but he went absolutely bonkers on me, trying to run away from me and running in circles in the bathroom, thereby wetting the entire floor not to mention me in the process. That’s when I decided the sponge bath wouldn’t cut it, and found myself intermittently pouring buckets of soapy water over my dog as he darted frantically this way and that.
It was exhausting.
You’d think the whole morning was exhausting for him too, but no, he didn’t settle down for another 30 minutes. Instead, he kept going to the bathroom door and looking up at it in a distrusting way, ready to pounce, as if to take revenge for the horrific bath-time experience.
All this before midday. He’s finally sleeping and I think I might just do the same.
