Drum Rollllll

I have launched yet another effort to learn something not boring. Unlike my previous attempt, ok attempts, at learning French this endeavour can cause significantly more distress (to everyone else) and embarassment (to me).
Current status:
6 of 40 drum rudiments. I am told this isn't pathetic. Suspect instructor is being kind. 
Proud owner of a beginners' drum kit. Standard 5 piece one. Looks pretty in the living room. 
About 2/3rds of a song. It may be difficult to believe, but I don't know which song it is. It was mentioned but I forgot and am afraid to ask the instructor again. 

The Maali

This is life as usual in my home town -   My dad messages me "the maali was offering to bring over a cow that was going for cheap. Mom refused."
While I hysterically laugh at the fact that a cow is being marketed around as casually as a piece of furniture, it seems to have been taken with remarkable equanimity by my dad. 
It set me thinking about other such weird happenings in the hinterland. Officially the city is classified as a Tier 2 city. Reality defies easy categorization so a recounting of the happenings even I find amusing seems a better way for everyone to draw their own conclusions. This is the maali episode. 
The aforementioned, cow-bartering maali also moonlights as a watchman for the house. So he finishes up his gardening duties which mostly consist of abandoning the garden to fetch things from the market on the whims of my mom, then he disappears for a few hours and turns up post dinner and goes to sleep in a little cabin. To his credit, he definitely looks the part of a ferocious guard so if any potential chor decides to check a darkened cabin before robbing the house he will surely be scared by his sleeping countenance. 
At least for a while the maali/nightwatchman double agent thing worked. But then it turns out he also turns into a kleptomaniac every Tuesday because that's the day the bottle gets the better of him. So one Tuesday, inevitably, shenanigans ensued and he got fired. I still think it's a shame because even though he wasn't much of a security guard he certainly looked the part and every Tuesday some entertainment was assured. 

More episodes of "life in a small town" to follow!

An accent with an identity crisis

Accents can be distinctive; clear giveaways to which country, city, even region  someone belongs to. That is, those accents that haven't forgotten who they are, tried to dress themselves up to cover up their origins, started unconsciously parroting local ones or been reduced to comical imitations of other accents. 
Mine falls in the the latter category but it's not simply playing temporary dress up, or imitating someone else or camouflaging its owner's true identity by chameleon-like blending in with its surroundings. It's all of those, all at the same time, sometimes in the same conversation. Pronunciations are murdered, cadence is a patchwork job and comprehension is the most frequent victim. Some accents' owners can switch between two accents, simply shrugging off one and putting on another; no confusion, no stray lapses into the other accent. I would like to say mine is like a patchwork quilt but then in that each patch is separate, adding adding a distinctive character to the quilt resulting in a pleasing overall effect. The one I have is more akin to the victim in "Murder on the Orient Express" - murdered by several hands who all think they were justified and leaving nothing but a mess behind. 
One day it will all be Indian but out of nowhere in a few words or sentences the 'r' becomes a rhotic one, then catches itself and pulls back into a neutral English one that is so prized in India but an instant later realizes Indian English is also mostly rhotic. So one word starts out in an Indian accent, rolls through what it thinks is a generic American one, abandons it midway and finishes up in affected tones of a colonel from the British Raj. 
Then there are some words which I have been pronouncing wrong all my life attributing it to accent differences - like 'metabolism' or 'adolescent'. It may be that I was saying those with an Indian English accent because everyone around me was pronouncing it in the uniquely Indian way of 'meta-ball-ism' and 'a-doll-es-cent'. But it doesn't make it any less confusing. 
I try to reason myself out of the guilt of having a fickle accent. English is my second language after all. But I was schooled in English so I should have a consistent and solid Indian accent which is mostly a neutral English accent tempered with red chillies & cumin. Well but I did watch a lot of American TV shows, I tell myself. The only thing that resulted from that was you started saying 'trashcan' instead of 'dustbin', 'iron' instead of 'press', 'counterclockwise' instead of 'anticlockwise' and 'apartment' instead of 'flat' because the American words were cooler than the ones your parents and grandparents used - my brain chides me. 
Then I went to college in Canada and my friends howled with laughter at my put on Canadian accent. To  the ever polite locals there my accent was chiefly Indian lapsing into momentary imitations of a Canadian one. The purpose was to make myself more comprehensible and the result was exactly the opposite. This continued after I came back to the motherland where suddenly my accent would start behaving as if it belonged to a bad actor auditioning for a role in a Canadian movie.
Eventually it wore off but the twang would creep back when talking to friends from college or more embarrassingly for no reason whatsoever. Even worse, in an attempt to wipe all traces of it, the accent turned into a half-assed BBC one. I can't even bring myself to be pretentious enough and put on a bad American accent while in America and switch back to my regular one when talking to Indians and when in India. The 'aa' refuses to become 'ay' and betrays me by words like 'last' and 'bath', 'master' and 'can't'; the 'p' and 't' remain unaspirated giving rise to the unfortunate situation where people think my name is 'Booja'. 
So here I am, with an omnishambles accent which cannot decide from one sentence to another as to where it's from, living in the US since the past two years and I moved to Texas a year ago. Now not only do I have a regional accent carrying out guerrilla raids on my existing one I also have to deal with the fact that quantities of people think my name is 'Pooha'.
Y'all see what I have to deal with?

Why I like shopping for books over shopping for clothes

You don't have to try them on.

One size fits all.

I don't have to care whether the book:
- clashes with my complexion
- makes me look fat
- is dry clean only
- is season appropriate
- will go out of style next season
- fades, shrinks or bleeds colour

Glue and tape are the only things needed to repair any damages.

I can't complain about not having a pair of shoes to go along with a particular book.

And the best of them all - never, under no circumstances, ever needs to be bloody IRONED.

Doctors' Daughters

A small town in western UP - the so called heart of North India - where ( I learned later) patriarchy rules, sons are revered, girls are an embarrassment and women who beget them even more so, is not a place I should be proud to call home. And I am not, but I am proud of having a family and being surrounded by people who made it possible for me to grow up completely oblivious to the inherent gender bias existing in that town, the country and in that indefinable institution which rules all our actions - society. 

The first time I got a hint of this bias was when the next door aunty's grown up son (a doctor)  got married and his wife delivered their first child. We were all sitting in the the verandah of our house when my dad spotted the said aunty walking back from the nursing home with a dejected face and pronouned immediately 'it must have been a girl'. I remember that moment because the realization that a girl child could cause sorrow hit me in full force for the first time. It was difficult to process and unpleasant to think about. I didn't dwell on it much because I heard my father gleefully declare how aunty should have been ready for this because, didn't she know, most doctors in our town had two daughters and how he sincerely hoped the second one would be a daughter too.

Before that day I had no scale or comparative measure, no stereotypes to limit my imagination, opinion or activities. I was never told there were games, jobs and hobbies that 'girls' did and another set that 'boys' did. I grew up hanging out with all the kids in our colony where all of us ran around like maniacs and played games like hide n seek, tag and other games with ludicrous names like 'crocodile-crocodile', 'tippy tippy top', 'iron-touch-wood', 'dog n bone', 'poshampah' which mostly involved more running around like maniacs. We played 'chor-sipahi' too, girls and boys alike.Many times  the ring leader role of this rag tag bunch ended up being played by my elder sister who in supreme fairness was omni-tyrannical to girls and boys alike. The only concessions made were due to age, not gender.  I had a He-Man doll as well as Barbies. We played cricket and set up our Barbie paraphernalia with equal joy. 

What saddens me is that I should now feel that I had a privileged childhood instead of one that should be the right of every little girl. I shudder every time I see subtle hints of differential treatment meted out to the girls and boys and all the more because I see it in friends, acquaintances and yes,  family. I boil with rage when a random aunty at Amsterdam airport looks enquiringly at my mom, who's proudly declaring that she has two daughters, and obligingly supplies, "and a son?". 

So here's a very heartfelt gratitude to those people who, whether they were conscious of it or not, provided me the environment where I could be independent, opinionated and and grow up as just a child, not a girl child. And a special thank you for never saying 'we brought you up like sons' as if we were meant to be a substitute. 

Facebook, Marriages and Political Correctness.

There's an emergent branch of social behaviour which I summarize as - How to Behave on Facebook when you're Married. Being in a state that is not even in the same galaxy as 'married', these are merely my observations. 

Some Basics 

'Like' every status update of your spouse. It's apparently a reaffirmation of the relationship. The one you just cemented by MARRYING them. But still, why take chances. Since it's quite unlikely you live in the same house, it's perfectly understandable that they might not know you like what they said. Just to make it doubly sure you could comment on it too. 

'Like' every picture posted by your spouse. Especially if it's of a meal lovingly cooked or a present thoughtfully bought by her/him. Extra points if you're the one posting the pic and then thanking your better half publicly by tagging them. Because what good is a thank you when not subject to the admiration of everyone on your friend list. 

Be proficient at judging the other person's mood by carefully monitoring their facebook updates. If they posted a ':(' on their wall or an update about their day, which you missed out because you couldn't be bothered to check were working - be warned!  "But it was on my FaceBook", has been recently inducted into the 'Glossary of Valid Arguments' by the Worldwide Associate of Marriage Counselors. 

The icing

On anniversaries and more importantly birthdays you have to wish your spouse by updating your own status and mentioning her/him in it. You can post on their wall in addition, but only posting on their wall just won't do. It's sort of like when tabloids and gossip magazines publish birthday wishes for celebrities and then give their readers the option of wishing them too in their comment section. 

The cherry

This, pardon my bakery analogies, really takes the cake. Extra brownie points all round and pretty high returns when you invest a little bit of time 'liking' and dropping in a few comments on the posts/photos/activities of the extended family.   A quick guide:

Siblings & Parents - Always 'like'. Frequently comment. Tag them in a post or two and you're golden. 

Cousins - 'Like', without fail. Invite them to visit you at every chance you get. Even if it's while commenting on their picture of a manhole cover they found particularly interesting. 

Aunts & Uncles - 'Like' most of the time. Always wish them on anniversaries and birthdays. Throw in an occasional comment on how they are getting younger by the day. 

I dare say someday I might be guilty of some or all the above. When that happens,  Orwellian-like, I will come back and delete this post. 

Motel Life

When dinner is a diet coke and a KitKat from the vending machine. And just to give your life that extra, thrilling edge you get the extra crispy KitKat.