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Right parenting or Awesome kid ?

By nature, I am a DO IT NOW person. If I have a task in my To-Do list that has a future due date but can be done now, I will do it NOW. I ended up wanting my son to emulate this behaviour too. He would get his work done, but not at my pace or when I ask him to do it. This time, he had an activity that was due on Jan 21st and it was assigned in December before the vacation. Three times after asking him to work on it, i decided to do it on my own. Atleast as a prototype and also because it looked like a fun activity to take up to test my creativity too. So I sat and created the template and set everything ready. Kiddo just had to write the content and submit. At the time, it looked like the perfect thing to do. Instead of scolding him and nagging him to do it, I could finish most of the work and just make him do things that he absolutely needed to do. The plan was perfect. It was moving according to the schedule. An entire afternoon of cutting, research and drawing the template and I wa...
Recent posts

The better batter

Disclaimer: This is not about cricket ! When I was in my teens, my Amma used to go for work and would take a pooled shuttle to her workplace. She made friends on the bus and one of them was older than Amma and just mentioned one day that she was looking to give away an old idly/dosa grinder. Amma jumped at the opportunity to get a good quality, second-hand grinder that could make her life easier. When I was young, I was surprised to see a grown up being excited about a kitchen gadget. I went with her to collect that huge and heavy set. The grinding stone was itself like one of those weights used by wrestlers to work out. I do not remember how we managed to bring it home, but it was love at first sight for Amma. From that day on, every weekend, she would soak the rice and dal and grind and grind and grind. It was hands free, so she could just let it do it's thing. Post grinding, she would have to remove all the batter by hand and then use a sponge to clean it post a load of wate...

Testing my patience !

I embarked on this arduous task of taking up diamond painting. The minute I saw the 10s of small packets with different colours and the tiny boxes with numbers labeled on it, I was 100% sure I would drop that midway and not complete it as intended. I stashed it away as my table could not handle all that while I was still working. It must wait until the holidays started officially. They remained in the shelf until 24th evening when I was wrapping up all tasks for the year and merely wishing everyone Happy Holidays! I packed up my laptop and charger in my office bag and cleared the table for this monstrous assignment that I was picking up. I started with one colour around the border. First picking up the "cement" and then cutting open a small sachet of the numbered coloured stones and laying them on the green tray to line them up for faster picking. The first 10 made me want to give up. Then I had some more time, so did a few more, and then some more. Opened up another pack...

Vacation Guilt-Tripping

Five years back, 2 months post my mother's passing, I went on a "vacation" with my husband, kid and in-laws. I wanted it because it was a tough to go through the week of disconnect from office without sitting and crying. It was a nice place, outside the city, aloof and with very few folks around. Remember this was around a time when there was still Covid around, so with two senior citizens and one toddler, it was only okay to get to a place by car and away from the city and with few people. The loss of a parent is never easy and there is no rule book for handling the loss. But one needs to do what they think they need to do to handle it and lessen the pain. And if going out of town and get away from the hustle and bustle does it, then so be it. It was distracting for a bit to dress up, cycle around, trek a bit and enjoy the buffet spreads 3 times a day. This was the new year's eve. Post midnight I get a message , "Now no Covid ? Happy New Year!" It was sup...

How much do I care ?

I definitely care enough for a person if I voluntarily choose to travel all the way from south bangalore, Kengeri to Whitefield on my day off, just to meet up with a friend for a couple of hours. If you are familiar with Bangalore, you will know that even with Metro, this is a good 1.5 to 2 hour commute. So why would I do that? I just wanted to have the whole day to myself and so I chose a place closer to my friend's home. That way only one of us had to commute a significant distance. I chose Metro purely because it was a holiday and I did not expect too many commuters - which usually would have thrown me off this option in the first place. Second, the distance made it automatically reasonable only to take the metro. So after cooking for my family, i got ready and off I went to the Kengeri station, bought a ticket and boarded the metro. It was one hour ride. I used that time to finish up "Never Lie" audiobook - just the last 20 minutes. Then I looked up and looked arou...

Creative writing in unexpected situations

As I sat to write my end of the year impact statement at work, I wondered if it was a lot like writing my blog. I can't get creative about what I write. I have to call out what I have achieved in the year and what metrics I have managed to achieve, but that is pretty much what I am doing here on my blog in December. As I looked back at the accomplishments at work, I realized that I could not fit all of it in the 1000 character limit. It is in a way a reminder of doing what is really important and prioritizing my 1000 character limit. Letting go of what we cannot fit in really helps in leading life with purpose and priority. Even the 1000 characters do not make any sense if I cannot call out the impact of the actions. That is life, how much we do does not matter as much as how much we affect the people around us positively. And then I start to think about how small and insignificant that impact is in this universe and all of the universes. How we are all microscopic in the broade...

Movie memories over the years

Today we were talking about a tamil movie, "Nayagan", starring Kamal Hassan. There was a scene where he was beaten up and I was screaming "They are beating appa up"(in tamil ofcourse). My dad had to take me out as I was distrubing others and embarassing my mom and him. I have no recollection of the movie or this incident but my mother would always narrate this incident to me laughing at my reaction to a movie. The next memory I retain of watching movie in theatre, infact my first movie experience that I remember, was on my parents' wedding anniversary. We went to watch the hindi movie, Saudagar. It was a cute Romeo-Juliet kind of a movie with lovely songs. Songs which we still hum with fond memories. I would have been 6-7 years old at that time. Then, my next memorable movie was Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. For most of the time, movies were an all-family event. This movie was the first one that was only mom-daughter date. I cried so much through the movie and Amma was...