Our Home

Labours of love always take time. I mean, pregnancy takes a whole 9 months, right? And then the rest of your life to screw up your kids in your own particular way:). Our home has taken more time than it has taken for me to give birth to Bojjandi, and for him to become over a year old.

Last year was a crazy time - I was expecting for the third time, I was working on a huge project at work - in terms of scope, what we were trying to achieve for people and in terms of time and money ( we designed the world's first solar-powered mobile phone, among others), and we were getting to rent the whole house, but first it had to undergo serious repairs. The old neighbours moved out in April, and we found so many things that needed to be repaired/ reconstructed and so on. The kitchen had been infected with borer and ants and the neighbours ad refused to get anything done about it for the past three years, so first of all the kitchen had to be dismantled and the wood treated before the kitchen could be put back together. The outside area, which had been left as a sea of mud had to be paved over, as it never gets any sunlight. One bathroom had neither been used nor cleaned, it appeared, for the 7 years they had lived here, so that required ahandyman with a strong stomach to get fixed. Pipes were leaking, walls had seepage, the floor was stained...

The repairs began around April, supposedly to get over by end of August so we would have a month before the baby came to get it back together. In the immortal and universal manner of workmen world over, the work stretched and stretched until we finally threw the workmen out of the house in mid-November. The baby had already come, we were staying at my parents' house and A was on a break from work so he got to do some bits and pieces slowly and methodically - clasifying the library, for instance. For the rest, we really didn't have much time since my sister was going to visit mid-December and we had to be moved back in before that.

With much huffing and puffing, we managed to at long last get everything more or less together and moved back in Dec 10th. We still had some finishing touches to add - one room had lots of bits and pieces shoved in for later addressing, many paintings had yet to be hung up, but we figured we'd get to it in time.

Well, time has a way of rolling on and it wasn't until the time came for our annual party that we realised we had better get a move on and put our laziness/ life as parents and human beings aside and become slaves to the house. A whole lot of banging, hammering, cleaning, pushing and shoving later, we finally have the house almost as we want it. There are a few finishing tuches to come, as soon as we have any money again...though in some ways I think it'll never be 'finished' finished, since I love to keep changing things around. Want a tour? Here goes...

The entrance hall

The living room

The living room - another angle

Our pride and joy - the library

The Chinese-themed guest room

The Travel wall of the staircase

More travel pictures

Restaurant on the roof of the world - our terrace

The jungle...otherwise known as the kids' bedroom

More friends of the children

The School Thing

For any of you that haven't ever followed any of the school admission posts in Indian blog/ news land - let me inform you - it is a big, big thing. If you never do anything else for your child - become a politician so it can get paroled easy, start exporting lead pipes or some such unglamourous thing so your child never has to worry about where it can find money for the next snort of coke, become a Bollywood star so your child can star in flop after flop for crores...do this - get your child into a good school. And let me tell you, it may be more difficult to achieve than any of the aforementioned.

In Delhi, the courts finally decided the handful of good schools had had a party for way too long and established a point system - so many points for living within 5 kilometers of a school, so many points for girl children, so many points for being a sibling of a child already in that school or the offspring of an alumnus and so on. So you would think the whole process is simple and transparent, and the stress is off. Right? Well, no. It turns out Delhi had too few 'good schools' and parents living farther off were ina real quandary. add to that the limited number of seats available at the good schools and the levels of stress are reaching stratospheric levels. Especially for those who have recently migrated into Delhi, live more than 5 km away from the school of choice and whose elder son is eligible for admission.

We live in Gurgaon, where the number of good schools is even more limited, so we weren't sure how stressed we should get when Chubbocks had to apply for admission. I decided that we were going to be the stress-free type of parents which then meant that thanks to not subscribing to the Times of India, which is where all the admissions open ads come out, we were late for almost every school's list. In panic, we even shelled out an obscene amount of money to book Chubbocks seat in a school which I really, really dislike. Thankfully, we were on time for The Shriram School admissions and Chubbocks managed to get in.

This year, we have to try our luck for Puddi. I can't imagine any school not taking her - can you? but then, I imagine that's what all parents feel about their offspring. In any case, we decided, both for emotional and financial reasons since this year has seen our bank accounts get wiped out, that we're going to put all our eggs into the Shriram school basket. Word has it the school has a friendly policy towards siblings and Chubbocks has been doing pretty well in school. So fingers, toes and all our moveable body parts crossed until our interaction next week!