Baby - Boy

Sometimes I think Chubbocks is really growing up. He's already six years old and many a time he displays more wisdom than his mom. Like last night, for instance, or should I say early this morning, when for the nth night in a row Bojjandi was creating a ruckus and preventing me from getting more than 5 seconds of sleep at a time. I couldn't help but burst out, "Keep quiet, you stupid baby!" A sleepy Chubbocks pipes up from his bed on the mattress on our floor, "He's not stupid!"

And then there are other times when I realize he's still a small little boy, even though he's a big brother who sticks up for his siblings. Like when he goes to a friend's house for a playdate, starts missing us and calls us with tears in his voice to check when we're picking him up. Or Rusky…
His school has this cute thing where each class has a stuffed toy for a mascot and each child in the class gets to bring the mascot home for an overnight stay and write about his/ her adventures with Rusky. Chubbocks had turned out to be quite attached to Rusky. I recently made a donation to WWF and in return got 3 stuffed pandas, one for each child. Chubbocks promptly named his Rusky and now can't be parted from him at any price at night. Before going to sleep, he makes sure that Rusky is curled up in his arms and well-covered by the quilt. Even when he accidentally wakes up at night, he has a quick look to make sure Rusky's okay before he settles back to sleep…

Creating Beauty

A and I often discuss what are the things that are really important in life - not the big car or the big, swanky, over done-up house, not the brand name bags or jewels - but being able to add and create beauty in your life every single day. To that end, our efforts with the garden are quite interesting. I am pretty poor at being able to visualise a garden landscape, though I can perfectly well visualise interiors of a home. But we set out to create a sand garden in one part of our lawn that gets almost no sun due to a beautiful but large jacaranda tree that blocks out the sunlight. It's still a work in progress - the bottlebrush tree has to grow, all the poppies aren't yet in bloom - but I think it's getting there. What do you think?

And this is how our entrance looks - quirky, don't you think?
And how do you like our tea guests...
... curled up in the breakfast nook?

Poyums

Chubbocks has been addicted to Oh Say Can You Say for the past couple of months as his favourite bedtime reading. So now he has decided that he has to start composing what he calls 'po-yums'. Here's a sample:

There was a girl who ate a butterfly

Then she ate a bun

And there behind her

There was a gun

 

Don't like that? Here's another one:

Run across the street

And eat, eat, eat

And Burst

 

Eulogy for my favourite aunt

I can't believe we lost you yesterday, forever. I saw you in my mind's eye as I woke up this morning, looking as elegant as ever with your hair in its French roll and your brightly coloured saree with a sleeveless blouse. I don't know if you know how much I admired so many things about you: your energy, your eagerness to learn new things and to teach other people, your youthful zest for life, that bright smile. How feisty and independent you were and how proud, no matter what circumstances you were living in. How much confidence you had in your ability to do things. How much courage you had to live life all on your own. What lovely taste you had in jewelry, in clothing and how chic you were, how stylishly you wore your clothes. What a beautiful name you had - Champakamalini, though we always shortened it to Champa - and how much it suited you, that fragrant, elegant, strong flower.
I can't believe I'm not going to hear your youthful voice, making me roll my eyes at one more piece of advice doled out in your high, lively voice. I can't believe I hadn't met you in so long and that now I'll never meet you again. I can't believe that you never met Puddi - the two of you would have bonded about the manic energy you share. Or that you never saw Bojjandi.
I still have the beautiful frock you got me for Chubbocks' first birthday - what a pretty girl he made - and I remember how much I liked it that you had taken the trouble to travel all this way for his birthday.
I hope you know how much I loved you and respected you and how integral a part you played in shaping me to be who I am today. I will always miss you. XXX

Home is where the heart is...

Tomorrow I head back to work full time. I find myself strangely apprehensive about whether I can pull it off, put my heart back into it and about whether I’ll enjoy this time spent away from the kids and A. It’s not a good time for me to be ambivalent because I have to have a job given A’s new gig as entrepreneur.

I’m incredibly glad for him and grateful to God who in one way or another paved the way for this to happen, because if it hadn’t been for a Deus ex Machina, A might have carried on working at a corporate job but with his heart and soul completely not into it. There are some people who’re good at that and who pull it off incredibly well but for A and I, we have to operate from our cores, otherwise we get dissatisfied and that spills over onto everything else. I’ve been lucky in that so far, whenever I felt that’s sense of dissociation , I had the freedom to quit and start looking for something I wanted to do, because I was either unmarried or A was working, and I’m glad that my being at work full time is giving me a chance to repay A by giving him that freedom.

But the last four months have really been rather idyllic. First I was on maternity leave and about 5 days into it, while A was on paternity leave, he quit and he didn’t even have to go back for too long to serve out his notice period. So we spent a cool two months hanging out together all day, along with Chubbocks, Puddi and Bojjandi. Then, even when I went back to work in December, I was only working half days so I’d be home for lunch and we’d both greet Chubbocks when he came home from school. We took leisurely siestas together and hung out with the kiddos the rest of the day. We read, lazed in the sun and got our house put back together to some extent. We had time to chill, have a conversation and an after dinner walk and watch friends and laugh late into the night.

From tomorrow I’m back to being gone for 9 and a half hours a day, from 8:15 am to 5:45 pm. It’s going to be even harder knowing A is at home and that if I was we could be spending time together. I’ve gotten spoilt, used to spending my whole day bounded up with him and the kids and it feels a little like I’m being exiled from the Magic Kingdom. I’m going to miss the way Chubbocks bounds into the house after school, excitedly chattering about his day at the top of his voice. I’m going to miss seeing Puddi do all the wonderfully kooky things she does, from her request-a-minutes to have anything, from pomegranates to ‘chandra’ ( santra – oranges) to toffees to namkeens, climbing on the furniture, riding Chubbocks’ old cycle and watching the cat that haunts our place bask in the sun. I’m going to miss Bojjandi’s gurgles and coos, his calls for attention, the bicycling movement of arms and legs as he pumps them up and down when he’s particularly happy or excited, miss feeding him so many times a day.

Sometimes I wish I could reverse mortgage my time, that the workplace worked in reverse. That I could have worked until I had Chubbocks and then taken time off till all my kids turn 18 and then get back to work till the end of my days. I’m so glad today’s Sunday and family sleepover night. We have all three kids in our bedroom on Sundays and though it’s kind of cramped, my heart just feels full on Sunday nights.

I guess right now there’s no real cure for it, unless I quickly write that best-selling potboiler. So I’ll just have to store up heaps of time and attention for the weekends and just wrap those memories around me the rest of the week…

My grin has changed!

Written on 27th January 2009

Seems like just yesterday that my baby had a gummy grin. Then came the beautification of Chubbocks with lovely even white milk teeth. Made a handsome devil out of him!

Then a few weeks ago, Chubbocks came home with a wide grin and told me with great excitement, "Mamma, my tooth is moving. I'm so happy!"

All his friends at school had one or two teeth either loose or fallen and he couldn't wait to join the gang.

His front tooth had been moving quite a bit since then and every day, Chubbocks would spend hours in front of the mirror, manoeuvering it back and forth and watching it intently as if he could will it to fall.

Today he burst into the house, his face a beam of pride and joy.

"Abba, my tooth fell in school! There was a mountain of blood in my mouth!" He held out a pearly little tooth for us to see.
It was true!

My baby is growing up!

Home, where the heart's escaping...

We finally have some parts of our home looking the way we wanted. It's been a long time in the works. We moved into this house almost 7 years ago, just A and me. We had heaps of books, lots of prints of paintings, some souvenirs from our travels and a few things we'd picked up during our courtship - a lamp, some pottery dishes, an ostrich egg, a Chinese vase...So we really had fun shopping for furniture and linen and setting it all up.

Then our water curse kicked in. We had 7 floods in a first floor flat. We traveled some more and bought more souvenirs. We visited antique shops and junk markets and scouted for finds. Then the kids came along and brought along their own contributions to home decor - tons of toys, clothes, diapers, paper that they had scribbled on and now considered art, projects they brought home from playschool. Scribbles on a wall, crayon marks on another... We outgrew the old space, lost our library to make a bedroom for the kids. Our guests had to share their room with the TV and the two kids during playtime. We were bursting at the seams and we had a baby coming!

Then this year the downstairs tenant moved out and we rented the whole space. It turned out lots of repair work was required, and we waited and waited. Meanwhile, we knew we'd have the space for a library once again, so we ordered bookshelves. I had great fun going down to Nehru Place and hunting down fabric for curtains, we hit all the sales we could find for area rugs, cushion covers, and I got to order the furniture I coveted for our new family room.

We still have bits and pieces to come together. We only decided on the theme for the guest room - Chinese - two weeks ago so new lamp shades and bed covers have yet to come. A table needs to be moved into the library. The plants need a bit of reorganising. The mural on the kids playroom wall needs to be painted and I'm being quite slow. But most of the rooms are done or offer some clue as to how they'll look eventually. Oh, and our water curse is alive and kicking!
Welcome home...
That's where I had my moment of peace yesterday...
looking at this view:
The entrance is one of my favourite spots, just because it was such a process to get it right. I wanted the wall to be painted a deep blue. I even gave the contractor a reference swatch - but clearly he didn't take it to the shop with him, because I nearly fainted the first time I saw it. He'd painted it a horrible shade of muddy turquoise blue. He repainted it twice but kept getting it wrong until finally A went with him to get the right colour. And the light fixture - I spotted it when Dad and I were shopping at Lok Nayak Bhavan for the other lights, and just fell in love with it. Luckily for me it wasn't that expensive. Expectedly, A loved it, but unexpectedly, everyone else did too, including my mom and grandma who have more traditional tastes.

My view of homes is that they should reflect the personalities of the people who live in them, be welcoming and comfortable and have little moments of surprise or delight, unexpected discoveries, if you will, even for the people who live in them. I hate homes which are all done up to impress other people, stiff, unyielding and with relentless beige. I'm so not a minimalist! Maybe one zen corner somewhere, but for the rest of the house, I need colour and light and texture and warmth.

As soon as you enter our house, thanks to a huge shelf which was built in already, you have a pretty good idea of what we're about. The shelf has a few souvenirs from travel, including my favourite, a thepanom - a kneeling figure with hands joined in a namaste, made of blue celadon, which we bought in Bangkok. The rest of the shelf has books, but naturally, since our library is always overflowing. We have books on travel, cooking, history, art, gardening, decor and entertainment here - pretty much summing up our interests! Oh, and there's usually a chair which has the overcoat, bag and shoes I wore to work that day, reflecting my other passions:)
Our house used to be mostly in our two favourite colours, red and blue. Now we have a few more colours in there. In fact, I realised that our winter decor all has touches of gold, since that's also the festive season, and that keeps the same mood throughout the house, except for the kids' playroom and bedroom which are in shades of green and cream.
That's the drawing room:


And the family room:
I had been loving this style of furniture for a while, and it was great to finally be able to order it. Somehow that and the rug we bought last year in Turkey come together to make the family room a place where we instantly feel warm and cozy. We usually end up curling up on the floor, though, instead of sitting on that sofa. As you can see, Bojjandi's enjoying a nap on the floor cushion!

We put up two of my favourite pieces of wall-art in the kids' room. I used to have a fairy tale book that I loved, as a child. A family friend had gifted it to me when I was five. It was called The World's Best Fairy Tales, compiled by Reader's Digest, and used to have the most wonderful illustrations. Sadly, this hard-bound book had fallen apart over the years. I was loath to destroy it because I wanted my kids to be able to read the stories. then I scouted around on abebooks.com and found the book, albeit in two volumes. So I ordered that and promptly took the illustrations out of the old book to have framed. We had close to 65 illustrations, so we got them framed as two large pictures, as if each illustration was in a window. I simply love these two pictures, they're so magical, and the colours so bright and beautiful.





And the kids are having great fun playing house...

My Kind of Sunday

After a madly hectic phase when my sister and nephew were visiting, I was even more occupied Friday and Saturday with work. I literally was working from 9 am till 8 pm yesterday, which is a way was good because it helped take the edge off the fact that my sister's gone back to the US. Today morning dawned bright and clear and we decided this would be a great Sunday to hit the club. Our club has a brunch on the lawns on Sundays in winter, with a singer who knows all the old 50s and 60s numbers - Khoya Khoya Chand, Pal Pal Dil ke Paas and so on. They had a Hyderabadi and Lucknowi kebab and biryani festival which I knew A would love.

We woke up in a leisurely way and after bed tea, had the time, after a really long time, to go through the papers, especially the Sunday Brunch. Brekker was light since we knew we were going to gorge at the club . I sat down to feed Bojjandi and found one of my favourite programs on DT&L being telecast - What not to wear. We finally made it to the club around 12:30, by which time the sun was out in full force, in that typically Delhi Winter way. We dawdled over lunch, Chubbocks freaking out over all the 'Non-veg kebabs" as he loves saying, and Puddi feeding herself four pieces of tandoori paneer. The food was good - low on oil, with a great selection of veg kebabs - and the music lovely. A and I sang along, really getting into it and enjoying the warm sunshine on our shoulders. We even ended up sampling three out of four desserts - GJ, Gajar ka Halwa and Kulfi, and Puddi made a meal just out of dessert!

On the way home we were all pleasantly drowsy and even Chubbocks wound up napping. I actually managed to go to sleep and had one of those deep slumbers which one gets occasionally in the afternoon, at the end of which you can barely drag yourself out of bed and the eyelids seem too heavy to open. I had been needing more sleep for a while so it was good to get down to it. When I woke up, the kids had gone to the park so only A, I and Bojjandi were home. We had our tea sitting out on our new patio, with a slight chill breeze running through the jacaranda tree and green plants all around, under a bright blue sky. A and I could sit and chat quietly. It was like a magical interlude, snatched out of time. The colony was quiet, for once no noise coming from the DLF constuction sites nearby. Not even a bird cry disturbed the stillness of the afternoon, and suddenly I felt such a sense of peace stealing over me...Reminding me of my favourite lines by Browning, "God's in his heaven; All's right with the world..."

It's so important to remember that, all the more during these turbulent times when it seems like there is only turmoil externally: the economic news sucks, friends and relatives are leading unhappy lives, we're missing loved ones...but still it's a wonderful life!

2009, here we come

There are some people who just hate change. They fight it kicking and screaming to the last nail. And then there are some who embrace it wholeheartedly, who seek the gifts that come their way with each change, who try and discover new meanings to their life each time life takes a turn. I like to think I'm of the second variety.

Last year was pretty eventful. We conceived Bojjandi early in the year, a big surprise and in some ways a shock - not in our plans, for sure. But soon enough we realised that this was God's whisper and who were we to not listen to someone who had other plans. Shortly after that, A was busy with the launch of his new television channel, something he'd been working on for 6 months and wanting to do for much longer. A gigantic work project came my way, and we were on a whirlwind of travel, client meetings, research, ideating, arguing and so on. I got roped into an online baby shower and on the way discovered a whole world of blogfriends, whom I couldn;t live without now. We had what must surely class as Chubbocks' best holiday ever, right here in good old Goa. And we finally got the opportunity to rent the whole house we live in and got busy with the renovation, from July.

Chubbocks went into kindergarten this year, from nursery, and became a 'bus children', as he calls it. From being a baby who greeted change with suspicion if not outright tears, he's become a sporty little boy, who looks forward to new adventures and meets them halfway. He's had quite a few milestones, including a tooth that, he discovered on 31st December, was finally wobbling. "I'm so happy, Mama", he told me with a big beam, as he wobbled it back and forth for me. He's had several playdates and even been on a sleepover. That was a big step for him, since he's only ever stayed over at my parent's place before. There was a playdate with four of his best friends from school, and he had the option of staying overnight there or coming back. He chose to stay over, and the house felt all empty to us. Puddi wandered around like a lost soul. He finally came back the next afternoon, with a strange expression on his face, and burst into tears. he had missed us dreadfully, and gotten up in the middle of the night and cried. His friend had told him to go to another room to see if he felt any better and this poor little baby had been roaming around the strange house, blinking back his tears. Now he's still full of beans for a playdate but starts getting antsy by evening, wanting to come back home to mama.

Chubbocks had his first crush this year, on one of his classmates. It's very sweet and yet funny to see the bashful expression on his face as he keeps recounting incidents from school which feature his ladylove. We've been really good and not teasing him, though it's hard to resist the temptation to ask him leading questions. He also electrified us by announcing that all the girls in his class had decided whom they want to marry when they grow up, and he agrees he wants to get married because , "otherwise I'll feel bad when I come home from work and nobody's there". He has also made his second career choice ( the first, last year, was to be a dentust), to become a paleontologist, and has been studying dinosaurs with avid interest.

Puddi has grown into a mad little thing, with two distinctly different sides to her Gemini personality. She can be Miss Prim and proper, sitting with hands folded and ankles crossed, asking for her hair to be combed just so and begging to wear Mama's earrings and necklaces, deciding which outfit she wants to wear that day. And she can be a complete madcap climbing up the monkey gym, hanging off of the furniture, turning somersaults and making crazy expressions with her dancing eyes. She's great fun to be with, and has a tremendous sense of fun herself, throwing herself into all sorts of games. She has a whispering game which she plays every few days, when she says everything in a conspiratorial whisper. Her new thing is to ask Chubbocks if he wants to get into the Bat cave with her ( my sister brought them one), and then they both run in and then rush out, screaming. She loves pretending to be a dinosaur/ lion, everything with the same roar, intense stare and hands turned into claws.

She had her own milestone late this year when she became a big sister and started going to playschool. She's been amazing in the way she's adjusted to the new baby, never complaining about the time and attention I have to give him, and immensely interested and loving towards him. She loves laying her cheek softly against his head or stroking his chubby cheeks with her chubby finger. She's always clamouring to hold him in her tiny lap, and delighted whenever he smiles up at her. And school...wow, what enthusiasm she shows for it. The days that she has to go, she's ready from the morning, getting her bag out into the living room, dragging her shoes out. She practices each and every thing they do in school at home and has made leaps and bounds of progress in English.

A's had an interesting year as well. Launching two new channels, nearly getting posted off to Bombay, then resigning and deciding to finally strike out on his own and do something that's been a passion for him for a while now, film production. For a while now, he's been going through the angst of working to someone else's goals and values, which is a common conflict when one works in the corporate sector, and now finally, he gets his chance to break out and be true to himself, to operate from his center, as Oprah says. I've always believed that that way you get the joy that your work should be composed of, and you do end up making money.

For me, apart from the sheer delight of watching the kids grow, welcoming Bojjandi into the world and having an interesting year at work, the best part of the year has been the last three months, when A was home and so was I. We both got to hang out with the kids and with each other, chill out, have no agenda to our days, and it was fabulous. If there was one big gift the year gave me, it was that halcyon period of 3 months. Lots of little gifts as well:
Our new and improved/ larger house
Finishing my chick-lit novel
My sister's visit at year-end
The recession, which finally gave me the kick in the pants I needed to cut down on spending ( that's a bit of a 2-edged gift, but nevertheless...)

To misquote Tennyson,
"Old year you must not go;
So long you have been with us,
Such joy as you have seen with us,
Old year, you shall not go.

He froth'd his bumpers to the brim;
A jollier year we shall not see.
He was a friend to me.
Old year, you shall not die;
We did so laugh and cry with you,
Old year, you shall not die"

I'm looking forward to 2009 being an interesting year as well - lots more blogging, hanging out with friends on and offline, interesting work and hopefully financial security too...I miss shopping!

3 months old already

I can’t believe Bojji’s already that old! It seems like just yesterday that I was huffing and puffing fit to blow anyone’s house down with him inside me, being repelled by garlic (gasp, moi, who usually eats enough garlic to keep a whole village of Draculas at bay). He’s already been on the planet a full year - from conception to delivery. It’s been an eventful and tiring yet thrilling three months. One quickly forgets how small and vulnerable they are until a new l’il un comes along.

From this little puny thing that could barely move a muscle, Bojjandi’s now a pretty active little baby, kicking his legs and arms vigorously and craning his neck to look around him. Place him on a floor cushion in the family room and he tilts his head backwards so he can watch TV better – though what it looks like upside down, God only knows. He’s been smiling for a few weeks now, though mostly at the fan. But now he’s old and smart enough to recognize people – or at least the fact that someone’s talking to him. Pick him up, coo to him and he lets out the most beautiful beams full of joy. He seems to save his best smiles for me, and each time I pick him up, he focuses intently on my face and starts smiling repeatedly. There’s a magic in a baby’s smile which just melts the heart.

It's amazing to me that something so tiny can already demonstrate such intelligence or purpose, to know when someone is cooing lovingly at it, and to know how to respond right back to that love. Truly, someone up there knew what he/ she was doing when they made babies!

Delayed anniversary post

I can’t believe it’s been 8 years. 8 years of living together, fighting, laughing…well, to be honest the fighting and laughing has been going on much longer than that. It’s been an eventful year – Bojji was conceived and born, A decided to turn entrepreneur, we finally moved into the house of our dreams though unfortunately we don’t own it yet…

A, you’ve been my rock and more than that, especially this year with everything that’s been going on in our lives. I on the other hand have totally taken advantage of you, from leaving you in charge of the kids while I was traveling on work to having you do the bulk of the packing and unpacking of the house during renovation, dealing not only with the 3 kids’ tantrums but also mine. I even forgot your birthday this year. I promise I’ll try to do better next year.

At times I can’t believe we’ve been married eight whole years – our marriage seems much younger. At times it feels like maybe we were married at birth. It’s an incredible feeling to have one person who always understands you, even better than you do. Who always believes in you more than you do. Who’s always on your side and doesn’t even let you abuse you.

In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect partner for me than you. I always wanted to want someone but not need them. But you ruined it for me – now I not only want you but need you to be by my side every moment of my life. So, as the poet said, “Grow old with me, the best is yet to be”.

PS: Had to report this conversation.
A ( to Chubbocks): Tomorrow is mama’s and my anniversary – we got married on this date.
Chubbocks: You got married on Wednesday?

The Learning Instinct

Okay, had planned a mushy post on A for our anniversary today but am now not feeling the mush because of various reasons so here’s another post that I have wanting to put up for the longest time.

Puddi had been wanting to go to school for quite a while. Every morning, when all of us sailed off to school or work, she’d peer disconsolately down at us from the verandah, and plaintively demand to go to school. I wanted to enroll her in a parent-child program but knew I couldn’t go with her at such a heavily pregnant stage. So finally we enrolled her in playschool in November, after Bojjandi was born. It’s a new playschool but run by the same teachers who taught Chubbocks at playschool and we knew she’d really benefit from them.

She’s been going twice a week since November now, so it’s just about 14 classes or so – about 28 hours of school. She started out as this clingy little child who never got off A’s lap during class and didn’t open her mouth. But now she’s participating with gusto, requesting her favourite song during music time, speaking up to name the colour, shape or alphabet of the day. On the days she has school, she starts clamouring to go right from early morning. She replicates all the activities they perform in school throughout the day, be it singing the songs, the learning games or the ‘clean-up time’ song. What’s amazing is that we’ve never bothered speaking English to her – I speak to her in Kannada and A in Hindi – but just because the playschool is conducted in English, she’s been picking up so much of the language.

From a child who usually spoke in Hindi or Kannada, she’s begun composing long sentences in English. One can almost see the wheels in her mind turning as she gropes for the right word to express whatever she wants to say. It’s a joy to watch her blossoming and to experience how her mind is expanding. The more she learns – be it at playschool or from my mom who seems to have an inborn instinct for teaching little kids – the more she enjoys it and the more she wants to learn.

Chubbocks is similar – if there’s anything he gets interested in, he just goes after the subject, wanting to absorb information like a little sponge. He has a passion for dinosaurs, which started with A bringing him a movie called Dinosaur, and now he’s made us buy him several books on Dinos. He spends all his free time drawing different types of dinosaurs, reads up on them, knows the names of several different varieties and his latest ambition is to become a paleontologist. Earlier his passion was for tornadoes and again he loved going through a book which explained the phenomenon, asking us questions and discussing them until he understood the concept. Of course, if he’s asked to do any of this as a task assigned by us, he just doesn’t get up the enthusiasm – every time I’ve asked him to read in the afternoon, he’s either turned around and fallen asleep or chosen to spend his time drawing!

Watching these two and several of Chubbocks friends, whom I’ve known since they were all in playschool together, I come back to the conclusion that the learning instinct is inborn in human beings. Animals operate on pure instinct and nearly all their knowledge is inherited, but human beings are remarkable in that we come equipped only with the learning instinct. After that, it’s left to circumstance and later on one’s own inclinations, as to what and how much each one of us learns.

Unfortunately, that means that for those of us not fortunate enough to be born in the middle class at least, even this basic right is denied. The schools run by the government are so pitiful, the teaching level so pathetic even in the private schools, there is a complete lack of infrastructure by way of libraries or learning centers where thirsty little minds can drink in knowledge. And by and large the teaching methodology preferred is that of driving in what the teacher thinks it important for the child to know rather than stimulate the child’s curiosity and let it learn from a more wide-eyed and self-motivated perspective.

My friend’s daughter recently chose to take up IB, International Baccalaureate, at high school level because she was so bored of the commerce stream she had chosen. Ever since this girl started in the program, she has been so self-motivated even her own mother is surprised. She has to do several different projects for each course, they have interesting extracurriculars like drama workshops and model United Nations conferences, they have to prepare an independent paper, like a mini-thesis, for the course…it really equips children for a lifetime of learning. The traditional way Indian schools teach is intended to be useful only from the exam point of view – regurgitate and forget. And it invokes little desire in most people to continue a love-affair with learning. As for the children of the poor who really get the most unmotivated bunch of people teaching them for the most part, no wonder so many of them get bored and drop out of the system even when not forced to by the sheer need to earn a living.

One of my friends from college, Ravi, started up an NGO several years ago. He graduated from IIM A but his heart was never in the corporate sector and luckily, he realized where his vocation lay pretty early. So he set up in his own home, and started running tuition classes for the poor children who lived around – maths and English. As he went on, he realized that spoken English was a key requirement for them as even the brightest of them wouldn’t get a good job if he or she was unable to converse in English – sad but true. So he expanded to cover spoken English and later on, computers. Not programming but the use of basic Windows programs – Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Over time, he built up a base of more teachers – I helped him out for a couple of years when I lived closer to him – and had regular classes in batches. The biggest issue we struggled with was how to keep them interested and to help them built further on what they knew rather than starting each day as a blank slate. Ravi at least has managed to light the fire in many of the kids he helped, and now they want to study further and to run similar helping centers for other kids like them. But who helps out the rest of India?

Piecing it together

Helpful tip: Never have your third baby and renovate your home in the same year. It's incredibly stressful!

So...this was the year the Bojjandi chose to make his appearance, as a happy surprise for us. And, as it turned out, the tenants from the ground floor finally packed up and left and we decided to rent their place also, since we had outgrown the space we had rented 6 years ago, when there were just the two of us and no Chubbocks or Puddi in our lives, with their 3 tons of toys and other gear. Dad manages the house for the owner, who lives overseas, so he did a full evaluation of the ground floor and discovered that the previous tenants had done little or no maintenance for the past 7 years - from things as small as leaking faucets in the kitchen to a bathroom which was neither used nor ever cleaned in the entire duration!

So the contractor and his men moved in mid-July, claiming that it would just take them a month to complete all the work - from repair work to correcting water seepage to waterproofing the outside of the house to repainting all 3 floors. They started with the ground floor and managed to complete it by around mid-September. From telling us that they would let us know a week in advance of when they wanted us to move out of the first and second floors, suddenly one day they landed up brandishing their tools and asking us to vacate immediately. The move was chaotic, not least because I was working insane hours at work and heavily pregnant. poor A ended up taking the brunt of it, and our stuff got hastily moved out of their way- clothes were bundled up in old bedsheets or into the cardboard carton the new fridge came in, the kitchen stuff was spread across three rooms by our helpful household staff, all sorts of things were crammed into two rooms + the kitchen on the ground floor.

The contractor and crew didn't finish their work until way after Bojjandi was born - in fact, they just finished middle of last month, and have left delightful little surprises for us. Shower and other curtain rods are missing, doors which used to lock earlier are now unlock-able and so on. There were some things that they just couldn't do, for instance cleaning up the weird stains on the mosaic floor...Meanwhile we had our hands full dealing with three kids and were at my mom's place for the last two and a half months post Bojji. A did some of the unpacking and setting up whenever he could, including organising our massive library, and I helped at odd intervals, when I could spare the time between Bojjandi's two and a half hourly feeds.

We finally moved back Sunday and I've already been back at work half days from the 1st of Dec. So we're back to hunting out spare moments when none of the three kids want attention and we're not wiped out and needing rest ourselves to piece the rest of the house back together. It's beginning to come together room by room and it's also amazing us how many things we (especially the children) have, because we sure didn't pay for most of their stuff...On the plus side, our efficient old live-in maid who'd gone away to her village for many months, is now back with us. I'm looking forward to the day when we've finally put away every piece of the puzzle in its rightful place and can heave a sigh of relief and joy. But the thing is, in Delhi, that's never a day of final reckoning, given the constant change of seasons...