Swings & Roundabouts

By day singing praises of social media and the latest wonder it is capable of and by night, decrying those who use the power of the same to reach out towards some support and solace. The media, the blogosphere, everyone is at it again. Shellie Ross, aka Twitterer Military_Mom, finds herself the latest victim of a modified witch hunt, wherein she is being pilloried for tweeting about her two year old son’s fatal pool accident.

Shocked gasps must have resonated across cyberspace when, at 11.08 pm on Monday, Ross tweeted “Remembering my million dollar baby”. So of course this makes her fair game as “which mother will calmly sit and type when such a calamity has befallen her?”

What does one do when a loved one passes away? Ring close friends and relatives and pass on the message, who in turn do the same. When my baby cousin passed away suddenly in 2008, my mother and I rang many relatives to pass on the message. In fact, one of the first things we did on receiving the news, apart from falling apart crying, was ring one of my grandma’s closest friends, who lives next door, asking her to go and sit with my inconsolable grandma. Not once did we pause to think: “why are we sitting here with a phone in our hand when such a horrible fate has befallen us?” Because that is what you do – in times of grief, and of course joy, we want our loved ones around us, to comfort us and grieve with us. In order to do so, news must be passed.

In the modern world, where social media gains more and more importance by the day, what is so astounding that Ross tweeted the worst news a mother can hear? Didn’t that tweet cause her friends to rally around and support her in her darkest hour? What is so shocking that despite losing her son, she could sit and type out 140 characters to spell out the disaster of her life? How different is it from picking up a phone, dialing numbers and verbalising the disaster?

Poor Shellie Ross – not only must she come to terms with the loss of her two-year-old, she must first defend herself against people who cannot believe she used the latest technology to let the world know of what is happening in her life. If you can use Twitter or Facebook to tomtom your latest achievement, post photos of your children and even moan your migraine, what is wrong from using it to gain some much-needed support?

Some people should get a life. And leave the grieving ones to their grief.

Originally published in Desicritics.org

Buy from Amazon.com

Some might find it dreary, some depressing but to me, Autumn has always seemed exotic. With trees sporting warm tones of colours, from a mellow yellow to a fiery red, the first half of Autumn is more fun than Winter can ever be.

After Bonfire Night, it gets tedious, admittedly, with sodden leaves on pavements that make you slip and slide but despite this, there’s nothing to beat Autumn. Last week, as we were bowling through Scotland, with the hills covered in orange, I was most ecstatic. Standing at Glenfinnan, gazing at the Viaduct, it the air seemed to thrum with magic. I wouldn’t have been surprised had Harry and Ron come flying in a battered Ford Anglia.

There’s nothing to beat Britain during the cold months. Fireworks, roasted chestnuts, christmas lights going up everywhere – there is a sense of expectation and revelry that only Autumn can give. Other people can keep the crisp Spring, the warm Summer and even the frigid Winter. Me, I’ll be happy with Autumn. Sodden leaves and all.

1. Write in an “inverted pyramid” format – the conclusion first, background details next.
2. Be precise. Internet users are notorious for their short attention spans and so, try not to exceed the 700-word mark.
3. Proof-read. Proof-read. Proof-read.
4. Keep your target audience in mind, when drafting the content. If your article is aimed at teenagers, for example, be concise and use plenty of images.
5. Break up the content with sub-headings.

Man! What a hunt and what a lovely surprise! What fun! And what an amazing bunch of people! I do not have words to say what your gesture has meant to me and am sure the other MTBs feel the same.

Tharini – what a lovely idea! Thank you for that and what followed!

And what a gang – Tharini, Gauri, Altoid, Sujatha, MM, Reshma, Anupama, UTBT, Suki, Daisy, Chronic Worrier, Dipali, Kiran, MayG, Rita, Parul, Ceekay, Mona, Ams, Asha, DDMom, Sue, Sunita, Orchid, Broom, Yaadayaada, Shobana, Nisha, Choxbox, Trishna, Y, Priya (BEV), 2A’s Mommy, SilentOne, Ro, Eve’s Lungs (Mallika), Compulsive Dreamer, DotMom, Upsi, Anitha, K3, Mnamma, Aargee, Nat, Itchy, Sahithi’s Mom, Dee, Mummyjaan, Noon, SS, Aditi’s Mom, Big Zed, Premalatha, Sadhana, Raising T, Usha, ~nm, IBH, JLT, Swati, Timepass, Kowsalya, Squiggles Mom, ArtNavy and Neera!

How in God’s name did you lot, scattered as you are all around the world, cook up this fantastic idea and execute it so flawlessly? Girls, your talents are wasted being just bloggers! You should be running countries!

The biggest thing I felt when I was preggie with P six years back was loneliness – new to this country, far away from everyone I knew and no one to talk to, it was one of the worst time of my life. But this time around, things cannot be different. And the biggest difference is you lot – and of course, my fellow MTBs. That 3.00 AM feed will feel less lonely now, cos somewhere in the world, I know you lot are there, either going through it yourselves or cheering us on. You could not have given me a better present. Honest!

I have never felt so happy about being pregnant than during this exercise! Boy is it worth it for this feeling of happiness, this camaraderie alone!

I know that the rest of the blogosphere has been scratching its head coming across some of the riddles in these blogs. For them, and for anyone else who wants to know what these amazing girls have done, well, they have just gone and thrown us MTBs (or Mother-to-bes) – Boo, Maggie, Poppins Mom, Kodi’s Mom, Lavs, Planethalder, Random Vignettes, Rohini (and Priya and STS!) and moi, – a fabulous baby shower – online, of course! And they did it with all the stealth and guile of top Mossad agents.

We were sent on a massive treasure hunt! Yes! Tharini’s rhyming e-mail started us off, then it was off to UTBT, and on and on. They left amusing little ditties on their blogs and by solving each, we had to bloghop to where the clue pointed to next, only to collect an alphabet for our troubles. And the devious lot threw a few red herrings our way too, in the form of ‘blanks, just to spice things up a bit. Boo, we did say and yayy said they, def! On and on it went, over gazillions of blogs and unscrambling the letters got us the username and password and from Broom’s blog, to a special blog set up by these fantastic peeps, our very own Doula Gang, for us. Chock full of gyaan for the mums to be, recipes and a whole lot of love! Who’d've thunk it?

It all started yesterday when Boo came across one of these rhymes. Imagine her puzzlement when she found the “Riddle-me-ree” message on a few more blogs. She wrote a plaintive message, asking people what gives. What we got in response were gleeful cackles, even as we blundered through! As the day went on, rhyming ditties were springing up hither and thither and before long, we knew there was some sort of Treasure hunt on. It took a while to twig on the order to go. But one thing the Doula Gang had miscalculated was the determination of Boo, Maggie, Poppins mom, Kodi’s mom and Lavs to crack this or die trying. They made excel sheets and sat all night and Boo cracked it around 2.00 am! The Doulas had thought we would spend the weekend puzzling over this but Boo and the girls had the last laugh alright!

So that is what the Riddle-me-rees are all about. One of the most fantastic ideas, hatched and brought to fruition by some of the most devious and superior minds in the world! And what presents we have got – a massive loot of goodies in the form of the gyaan, of course, a beautiful collection of rhymes, fab memories, big barrel full of laughs and bestest of all, the key to one of the greatest communities, spanning language, cultures, countries and heck, whole continents.

One of a kind, laydees, that’s what you are. One of a kind. I think I can speak for the rest of the MTBs here when I say, we are bowled over by this massive love. I feel so privileged, that you included me in this special act. Mere words are not enough to express my gratitude. Long may your tribe increase!

This is an awesome story – a man who was burgled, used the power of the Internet to bring his burglars to justice.

Check out the video here!

My staple food these days are rice, curd and maavadu pickle. No matter whatever else I chuck, I can at least keep this combo down (touchwood!) With P, I subsisted mainly on pasta and S has taken to commenting, ‘this one seems to be an Iyengar maami!’

But now, my diet is under attack.

Not by concerned dietitians or anything of that sort – but by the Gods of Indian climate. Rice exports from India have been banned and I hear that this year, the mango season also has gone kaput thanks to erratic weather and get this – ice formation on the tender raw mangoes! Ice!

What the hell am I going to eat? HALP!

 
The last time I was pregnant, I was woefully unprepared, physically, mentally and psychologically. I felt totally out of control and worse, beyond extending any sort of control over my situation. I just decided to go with the flow and hope that it got me and my baby through to the other side.

It did. I emerged with a few scars and a firm belief that I will not go through it again. Of course I changed my mind. But being older and wiser (ha ha!), I decided that this time, I will not be caught unawares. This time, I will prepare myself mentally and physically for the labour and beyond. This time, I have not just one baby but two depending on my stability – the last thing I want to become is a stranger to my beloved son and make the whole thing more difficult for him.

So the first three months have been spent in research. Whilst I firmly believe that a little science is dangerous and so did not succumb to reading up on labour room war stories, I have been, however, reading up on alternative methodologies and therapies in relation to  labour. In particular, the form of labour called active birth.

Last time around, I spent my labour in the classic position – flat on my back, legs in stirrups, with a midwife, a midwife-in-training, an OB/GYN who was called in due to a last minute complication, a nurse and some lady who was insistently waving a paper in my face and saying something. I was too zonked out to know what she was going on about. S thinks it was about storing the cord blood but I am not sure.

This time, I am going to make my wishes clear well beforehand so I shall not be told about fledgling research and other assorted stuff at the last minute. Also, so far, I have been classified as a low risk pregnancy (touchwood) – I hope and pray that this remains throughout, in which case, I can sign myself in to the midwife-run ward, which does not believe in anything stronger than pethidine injection by way of pain relief.

In an effort to understand what the active labour deal is all about, I have been educating myself chiefly by means of the Buddha Bellies DVD and website. The concept is all about using yoga to help you deal with the rigours of pregnancy and labour. I started the DVD just this week (week 14 – the DVD advises you not to start before) and find it soothing and calming. Clear instructions make it easy to understand and follow.

Buddha Bellies believes in ‘giving birth back to women’ and goes to great lengths to demystify this frightening rite of passage. The woman behind it, Nicole Croft is a qualified Yoga teacher and conducts these ante-natal classes in Oxford. For women like you and me, who aren’t lucky to be residents of that city, we can arm ourselves with the DVD and reap the rewards. Her website contains quite a lot of information on the various stages of labour, water birth and a lot of other related issues. It all makes for fascinating reading.

What’s more, I quite like her concept of letting the woman be and not “dehumanise” her (as the Mad Momma put it whilst describing her own labour stories). Please do visit the site and read the articles – if anything, they do not scare the jeebies out of you and make you run for the hills. The matter-of-fact way of describing everything actually calms a person down. Even if you are too late into your pregnancy to get hold of the DVD and practice the asanas, these articles at least put your mind at rest and provide you with a set of options in dealing with your labour.

I hope to continue doing the exercises, following the DVD and would dearly love to see what sort of effect it has on my labour. However it turns out, you will read about it here!

 
Fresh out of college, I used to work for a local, city-based portal as a content writer and then later, Web Content Manager. In that guise, I met many interesting characters, attended many functions and generally led an interesting life. But of all the people I met, none affected me more than Vandana and Vaishnavi, founders of women’s charity organisation, Banyan.

I wasn’t a trained journalist so had none of the grit or the backbone needed to tough it out in search of assignments. All I had was a head full of ideas – ideas on what was great and good about my city that I could showcase on my website. Through a teacher at college, who was a good friend of Vandana, I heard of Banyan and was really impressed to learn about two women, who, in the prime of their life, threw away a regular lifestyle and immersed themselves in caring after mentally challenged women.

It sounded like a plot of a movie – too fantastic to be true. Clueless about what to expect, I asked for an appointment to visit the place to write about it. That visit and the women I saw, changed me and I honestly feel, I grew up in that space of two hours I spent at Banyan. I remember crying bitterly on my way back to work. Seeing those women, in their bedraggled state, not knowing what was happening to themselves or where they were, affected me like nothing had.

Though it has been years since I met them and the women and their organisation have come a long way since, I constantly think of them and their dedication to their cause. I cannot think of two better examples of women to salute, on International Women’s Day.

If you’d like to donate, please visit this page to learn how.

Image courtesy: AP/ BBC website

 
Now if that isn’t a miracle, I do not know what is. This baby girl, born two months premature, when her mum squatted over the Indian toilet on a train in Rajasthan, survived the fall, lying in the cold for two hours and the filthy toilet, too!

May you live long, baby girl!

ps: This makes my fears of delivering P in the toilet bowl unknowingly, quite sensible!

Today’s Val’s day – Feb 14 – yipeee! Cue hearts and cheesy music. Oh and red balloons, red roses, red chocs and anything else in red you can think of. Blech.

All this ‘lurve’ floating around is making my tummy turn (and no it ain’t cos I am pregnant!). What a load of palaver over a single day. I tell you who ends up happiest on this day – Hallmark’s. And other like minded people. Like M&S, Interflora, Le Senza, Clintons and the guy on A127 who’s selling roses from a bucket.

So when did this healthy disregard for love’s most venerated day start? Well, roughly around the time I entered college, I should think. Dang opposite my college building (Ethiraj College, if you wanna know) there used to be this hugely popular Archies Gallery. As it was air-conditioned, I used to meet my mates there and generally timepass till zero hour. But come January, the place will be full if idiots. Idiots, nitwits and nutters who should have never been released from the asylum.

Soon after people had finished shouting themselves hoarse ‘Happy New Year’, the chaps at Archies used to dust the red, glittery hearts and teddies and stuff the store silly with them and play Richard Marx and other cheesy ballads 24/7. And the nincompoops from my college and elsewhere in the 5 mile radius (but chiefly my college), used to wander about the joint in slow-mo, mouthing the words from the Cheesy Song of the Hour, with a goofy look on their faces. As the D-day neared, the number of such ninnies would dramatically multiply, till, on the day before, it will look like a scene from The Inmates Have Taken Over The Loony Bin.

Three years of this has seared the images into my brain and even after a decade, I am unable to walk into any card shop after New Year and not gag at the sea of hearts and moon-faced teddies. Hubby S, though not half the cynic that I am, can never cheese it up on Val’s day, thanks to (literally!) his lack of memory. When we were dating, he had to be prodded by well meaning friends to get a last minute card or chocolates.

Nowadays, I just see it as one more day I am licensed to some bling. Being a non-romantic sort, he threw in the towel fairly early on in the marriage game and just used to ask me straight out what I wanted. And I just said what. He got it. I generally remembered to wear it roughly around my birthday and all was well.

But then, I have heard some serious gasps of horror when I had narrated our careless attitude to this Holy Day and refusal to worship at the altar of St Valentine. I have even heard of some ultimate cases who choose THIS day as THE day to get married. That, as a concept, just blows me away. I mean, your wedding day is special cos it is YOUR wedding day, right? Isn’t that reason enough? Why would you want to link your lot to a marketing icon?

Oh well. Whatever floats your boat, hon. To all the believers, many happies and all that. To all the sane ones, may the Force be with you.