Every so often when morning start to mean 4.30 diapers, feeding, groggy mind looking around for now-gone-to-India-Mother for Coffee and grumbling about making own coffee, debating what to cook, running around not knowing what is being done, coming back again and again to a spot in an attempt to remember whatever was forgotten……every so often when mornings start to blend into each other and whole days go by without knowing date, day or month…it is nice to throw some clothes and head out to a nice hotel with room service, where continental breakfast is free, the bed is always made, the bathrooms clean, lunch is a walk or a lift service downstairs, where the sound of a baby snoring means, you can snore or read a book or post a blog without having to worry about laundry, dishwashing, cleaning and remembering to remember something or the other. Life is good. Will be better when I go back after a good 3 day nap and a long shower 
I have a son who is 3 months old babbling to the monkey, giraffe and the elephants on his play mat right now. There are supreme expectations of him. He was after all born on the same date as Obama, Kishore Kumar, P.B Shelley, Queen Mother Elizabeth. For me…all I want is for him to eat, sleep and poop for now. It is almost surreal. My mother was here and left last month. I went from being a daughter to a mother practically overnight. It is a difficult thing to put it in words. A daughter moves through so many phases in her life and everytime something life changing happens she stops being her parents little girl and acquires one another dimension. A son on the other hand remains that for all his life.
My life has taken on so many facets in the past few months, it is amazing that I still recognise who I am in the mirror everyday. Then maybe if I were incapable of doing that maybe life wouldn’t have changed much at all. It after doesn’t give anything that we can’t handle. I am rediscovering myself. It is interesting. As ground breaking as it is made out to be, I don’t think this phase has dramatically changed my life. I mean there were no trumpets and horns and rose petals from the sky…I did not cry except when they told me that I might have to lay off potatoes for a while….Even now all I hear are little tweets from when my son hits a spot on the mat, his burps and gas and life pretty much is the same. I still am on every damn social networking site, I still hear chai shop songs and the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and still watch friends and ER. I love my identity and look forward to keeping it, thank you very much. I am glad to be back though. Brain freeze is not pleasent, even unpleasent is forgetting you were going to update your blog. Hopefully, that train stops here. So welcome back to the three people who come here.
This is an article from OUTLOOK INDIA written by Mallika Sarabhai.
I was asked to write about whether it was a daunting experience for me, an independent, to contest against you, a mighty prime ministerial candidate. I choose to write a letter to you instead. By the time you read this, the election results will be out. You will either have lost or won. Either way, what I have to say to you will stand.
I am a post-Independence Indian. I was brought up to value and treasure my unique Indianness, to value our Constitution, which gives equal rights to all Indians, irrespective of belief, culture, practice or language. I learnt to revel in the differences that made us a rainbow country. We are a salad-like melange of cultures and not a soup where all variations get reduced to a homogeneous pulp—this, to me, is our greatest strength.
Instead of the hunger, thirst and soul-chilling deprivations that our people still suffer, you talk of swords and trishuls. Instead of the lynching of Dalits and the rape of thousands of women and girls, you speak of building temples and destroying mosques. Instead of propagating the Hindu thought of vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is my family), you split our family into religions and tell all “others” to get out or live as minions in their own country.
As a proud Hindu and a proud Indian, I feel vilified by you. You have reduced the great Sanatana philosophy to a Taliban-style Hindutva. As an Indian, you have tried to reduce my identity to a single factor—Hindu or not. You let your goons, saffron-clad terror units wielding lathis and worse, terrorise us and live above the laws of this country. And above all, you claim that the rath yatra, the starting point of all terrorism in this country and the fountainhead of blood-spilling in recent years, is your greatest achievement.
Every Monday, throughout the campaign, I asked you some questions. Neither you nor your public relations people nor the hip netizens on your team acknowledged or answered them. So let me list some of them again:
1 What efforts have you made towards opportunities for education and livelihood generation in the rural areas of Gandhinagar constituency?
2 Have you used your funds under the MPLAD scheme to benefit the deprived and underprivileged in your constituency?
3 What has the BJP done to make available affordable housing to the citizens of Gandhinagar constituency in the last two decades?
4 Several lakh depositors lost their savings in the cooperative bank scams of 2003. At least three BJP candidates who contested the election this year were involved in the scams. What have you done for the depositors?
5 How would you ensure that particular communities are not victimised with the anti-terror laws that you are proposing?
6 Did the money accepted by your party’s then president Bangaru Laxman come from a Swiss bank account, or was it swadeshi black money?
7 Some 35,000 families live in Ramapir No Tekro, where there are 10 toilets each for men and women, which open at 8 am and close at 6 pm. But as they are ragpickers, they go to work at 4 am. Are they, and some nine lakh similar citizens in your constituency, who lack drinking water, roads and social security, partners in your Vibrant Gujarat?
No, Mr Advani, I am not daunted by you. I may have lost this election, but I will continue to work for the disadvantaged and dispossessed, and to ensure that their voice shall be silenced no more.
Sincerely,
Mallika
(The writer is a dancer and social activist who contested from Gandhinagar.)
The signs are all there….Glugging water like a parched elephant followed a few minutes later by a mad dash to the nearest restroom, Looking like a beeched whale by evening or more or less all the time, forgetting things at the drop of a um….What was it. Having the family call me with panic in their voices when I tell them I am going on a long drive. Having my grandmother pray every time I talk to her, people looking at me with an uncomfortable silence wondering how to ask about the increase in body mass since I saw them the last time which was a couple of weeks back.
The funny part is, I keep hearing stories about how different women feel, and how their life changed in the eight and something months and more later on. The truth is, I don’t feel any different from how I felt the same time last year, Well! that is if you don’t count the crying and laughing at the same time, random mumbling, and going ballistic once every few days. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in yet, inspite of the fact that I often feel like the wheel the little hamster keeps running on, and my bladder has turned into a trampoline. Maybe it will hit me with the force of a frying pan later on. I don’t know. I am just trying to live in the moment. All I know is that I am due around mid to end of JULY. I cannot for the life of me remember which week I am in, all the calculations are incredibly puzzling. All I know is I am at the point where I am thinking ‘Huh! well, it is not that exhausting” to “Holy Crap! The House is dirty, I haven’t bought a thing, Where the hell will this go and why the hell do I need that”
The awesome news is MY MOTHER WILL BE COMING! YEYE!!! I do miss my family and friends though. It can occasionally get mind numbingly boring here and there are times when I wish to have lots of people around.
I guess there are somethings I will have to get used to. Blogging is fun though. There are times when I feel I can do this, just because I have read so many people pulling it off without trying to be perfect or knowing fully well that the occasional screw ups are part of the equation. I realize that I can come here for know-hows, how-to’s, OMG’s, No-No’s, and They say the darnedest thing moments. I know I will be alright.
Written on October 2006: Reposted
My favourite haunt used to be a local library about 2 blocks from my father’s office. There used to be a little nook there where all the archie’s comics used to be kept. I used to forget the world around me when I was there. I would devour 2 archies double digest in 30 mins and I was only 12. The librarian had to come and pick me up and drop me off in another corner of the library every now and then. There was a reason why I read those comics like there was no tomorrow. My dad was reading one when I was born, infact I have never seen him without one. And from day one I have always wanted to do everything just like him. I guess it is the daughter-father thing, but there has never been anything in my life so far where I have strayed far from things that in someway or the other revolve around his world. and no I am not part of the blame game. He has never imposed anything on me his entire life, except maybe his exceptional math skills and I have two lost and confused shopkeepers near my house who can vouch for the fact that he never got anywhere. From my love of literature, to poetry,history, Politics, science, totally useless trivia which came in use during quiz comps, debates, essays, writing every single thing in my life is attributed to his genes and I forever boast that I am my father’s daughter. One of the single most important reason why I switched from science to Politics today is to walk my path and live my dreams. I needed to do that for two reasons one to not end up like my father, giving up on what he is good at and living someone else’s life and two to give him a chance to experience something he always wanted to. I am exceptionally proud of it. Some of the best conversations I have had with my dad were debating the who’s, how’s and what’s of the subject I am studying. Agreements turning into arguments, thoughts turning into potential thesis, it gives me a thrill to pick up that phone and dial that number.
Something happened which makes me feel a little lousy though. The other day when I called him, he didn’t seem to know the answer to something.we were discussing about it and I knew a little more than what he did. While it is not such a big deal, I felt my heart sink just a little within me. Truth be told I am scared. When a bird is reluctant to fly or when a flower hesitates to open and absorb the world around it, it is not just because of fear of the unknown, it is also the fear that it might end up seeing too much, that it would leave its kind behind. I know that my father will always be there for me and he will always know far more than I do. But it stills sends a chill down my spine to think that there might be a place and time where I might be treading alone. It brings up questions of fleeting time, moments and mortality. Maybe I am seeing too much into little things, but the fact that I am moving forward makes me want to stop. When I was just baby, my father used to lift me and throw me high up in the air till I almost reached the ceiling and grab me on my way back. I have always looked down to see him when I went up. I have a photo which shows that. I feel the strongest urge to keep looking down even now. My father’s genes, love, and unbridled thirst for knowledge have thrown me high up in the air. I can see the sky, the world around and the stars I am to reach, but I still want to look down and make sure that he is there to grab me when I come down. And somewhere deep down in my heart I know he will be around.
P.S: He just called to give me my answer…Whooopeee….Hope you can see me dance!!!
