Oh! For a Flower Child!

After resolving to continue with my writing and my book, I find that I spend all my time at home watching movies, reading other people’s books and helping Ken with home-work. Life’s lessons learnt from the above activities: (a) I want to start a movie review blog, (b) I want to get my book published and have other people buy and read it and (c) I don’t like Ken’s life being wasted in this horrible manner.

The child’s routine is scary. He wakes up at 6:00 a.m., has a rather meagre breakfast, a glass of complete planned food, and is dressed and ready for the schoolbus at 7:15 a.m. He returns at 3:30 looking like a construction worker and as tired as one. I scrub the layers of black mud off him and give him something to eat. He’s so tired, he can hardly keep his head up at the dining table.

Rejoice!

I’ve been attending church services and listening to sermons all my life – both the church and the home variety. Very few have stood in my mind and one of them was a Christmas message about Joy. Quite a Christmassy thing to think about – Joy. For the first time in my life, however, I heard the Christmas story of Joseph. Joseph,s first Christmas. From any point of view, it was rather grim.

Here was a man, engaged to be married to a girl, who was pregnant with a baby that wasn’t his. Worse still, it was a child of God. A pretty unreal tale for a man to swallow – let alone convince his family and friends about. And then, just when things were bad enough, he had to travel to a distant place – on a donkey, with a full term pregnant wife – to take part in a census.

When Bipasha kissed….

When I first went on my hiatus from work, I was at a loss as to what to do and how to fill my day. A kind of routine has now set in. Occasionally, I now surf through news channels and they are better than comedy shows most of the time. For instance, here was the coverage of the Bipasha-Ronaldo kiss. I forget the news channel, I’m sorry. All of them seem to be much of the same thing anyway.

First, the badly taken shot of Ronaldo leaning in towards Bipasha flashed continuously on the screen using all the effects possible with Powerpoint. It went flying in, zoomed out, checkerboarded across, faded in, dissolved out… I mean, it really beat all efforts of tasteless kids seeing Powerpoint demos and eager to overdo. And then came the reporters standing by from Mumbai, Lisbon and God knows where else…

Maiden adventure

I've always had pretty interesting maids. For one, most of them have pretty dramatic life histories. Mary alias Lucy, my first maid and a single Mom, took over my household, told me I knew nothing and then proceeded to exploit my naïveté as best as she could, walking off with provisions, groceries and finally a set of my gold wedding bangles. I regretfully bid her goodbye.

The second, also Mary, also a single Mom, followed her predecessor pretty closely. Thankfully the jewels - a much larger haul this time around - was found in the tin of rice (a sort of temporary storage place, I guess).

The softer it falls...

As I grow older, I am getting better at figuring out what I like, what I dislike and what I positively loathe. Loathe in the sense that one wants to kill or die (mostly kill) for a little while. Red hot, hopping maddening stuff. One of them - of which I've been getting a lot these days - is uncalled for advice.

I generally dislike advice - when I ask for it - and positively loathe it when people walk by, call, visit and simply throw it at my head. One of the worst offenders is Mum. Mum is a highly conscientious mother. She completely subscribes to the dutiful Mum theory and has always tried, in her own words, to "do her duty" by us - her family.