Whom do you confide in?

Sharing your problems with a friend or loved one can be pretty therapeutic.  It gives you the space to vent out your feelings, and makes you think more clearly about the problem at hand. But be careful about choosing that friend in whom you confide. I’m not saying friends are bad, but not all understand what you are going through. Not everyone knows what is right for you. 

The one with a ‘me-too’ saga-

I had sprained an ankle, and it was swollen and quite painful. Confined to the bed, I was chatting up with a friend. And the next thing he says is, ‘Come on don’t be such a wuss, you can do better than that. I had a fracture six months ago and I dealt with it so bravely.’ Yes, but you had people buzzing around you round the clock, supplying you food on the bed, carrying you to the washroom, and providing you everything that you needed. You didn’t have to bother about getting your kids ready for school, or limp around to cook, or tend to sick kids simultaneously.

There is this other friend who’ll always say, ‘Arre, yeh toh kuch bhi nahi hai (this is nothing), if you listen to my problems you’ll know how much I’m suffering.’

The point is, no two situations are comparable. Many people compare your experience with theirs and in the bargain, end up making your situation seem inadequate of eliciting strong emotions. 

The one who doles out Advice-

An advice cannot be universal. What applies to me cannot apply to someone else and what worked for me might not work for someone else.

A friend who had just had a miscarriage was told by her sister-in-law not to think about the baby. She advised her to start chanting and meditating. Yes, chanting helps. But this was not the time - maybe eventually, but not at that point. She was grieving, she needed time to first accept her loss and overcome her grief. How could you expect her to just start chanting? She needed someone to vent her anguish and share the precious memories of her pregnancy and the dreams she had for her baby.

When I was going through a difficult time with my mother-in-law, a friend advised me to go and get a job. It helped her, she said. It kept her away from her mother-in-law for the better part of the day. Great advice, maybe I’d take up a job, but not for the wrong reasons, and definitely not as an escape route. That wasn’t my medicine at that time.  Another friend told me to cut off the mother-in-law and be nasty to her. Her words? ‘Give her back nicely’. I didn’t want to do that – my m-i-l had taken care of me so many times, and she wasn’t a bad person. I’d have to be a monster to even contemplate such a thing. All I wanted to know was how to resolve the issue at hand.

But people give advice as per their own experiences. They have no idea about your background, your limitations and your way of thinking. They tell you what worked for them. But you aren’t them, are you?  

The one who barely ‘touches and goes’-

A friend Apu, once told me that whenever she’s upset, she calls upon her partner, Ani, to share her problems. Once she starts discussing her problems, Ani starts getting distracted and keeps changing the topic. After that she switches off her mobile, is not reachable or busy every time she calls her again. But when Ani is upset, Apu’s expected to lend a patient ear, give some advice and also be compassionate enough to relieve Ani from work for a few days. All take and no give, eh?

I had this, ‘if-there’s-any-problem-just-call-me-anytime’ friend, who’d do the disappearing act when I called on her more than once. She’d coax me to tell her what’s bothering me, and assure me she’d be there whenever I’d need her. But the very next time I pinged her, she’d not even bother with replying or taking my calls!

I get it, upset people are not the most interesting people to have conversations with, but you don’t expect problems to disappear immediately after some pep talk, right? Some issues persist for a long time, and if you are not up to giving your time, or lending a patient ear, don’t make false promises that you’ll be around.

The All-India-Radio-

There’s an opposite kind of friend who loves to smother me with her affection. She’ll put an arm around me, give me a warm hug, and coax me to ‘tell me everything’.  She’d be there whenever I’d ask to speak to her. She’d listen to everything I had to say. But even before I’d realise, the words would be floating all around and be the talk of gossip mills. As a result, more people would now give me their valuable advice, leaving me pretty embarrassed and feeling let down.

That one true friend-

All friends are not made equal - some empathise with you more than the others. But it doesn’t mean you should forsake the ones who don’t feel as you do. Every single friend has a different role in our lives – it’s just that you should know what kind of friends to keep away from sharing all your stuff and who are ones worth fighting for. 

If you have that one/few close friend/s who understands you, will put an arm around you when you are down, will listen to you rant and vent endlessly and sometimes just sit and watch the stars with you silently - when that’s all you want to do, count yourself lucky. Trust me, most of the times that's all that you need.

Crashed - diet?

They say ‘be careful what you wish for’ for you never know when your wish might come true. But unfortunately, by the time I heard what they said, it was too late – the wish had already been made. Once upon a time, long, long ago, when we still woke up by chanting ‘karagre vasate lakshmi, karamadhye saraswati, karamule sthitao gauri, prabhate kar darshanam’ and not ‘karagre vasate whatsapp, karamadhye facebook, karamule sthitao instagram, prabhate mobile darshanam’, I weighed about 49 kilos. Umpteen chocolates and fattening food later, the scales stayed put at 49. I struggled crossing the 50 mark and no matter what I did, I couldn’t.

Well, I was reed thin and then I made the ‘wish’, that I now wish I had never made. I wished I’d put on a few kilos more so that I’d look a bit more, errr...how do you say it? Rounded? Curvy? Well chubby, maybe. And suddenly the wishes were horses and beggars were riding, and how! And what do I know, the scales not only tipped the 50 mark it kept going, and wouldn’t stop. The pointer was just about to touch 70, but I managed to get the needle to stop at 69.9. How? Ahem...well...I’d rather not say it here!

There’s this famous poem, ‘As a rule, man is a fool, when it’s hot, he wants it cool, when it’s cool, he wants it hot, always wanting what is not.’ Why did I think I’d be any exception? Now that I had gained weight that I had been desperately craving to gain since long, I wished I’d be back to the original size! There!

Damage already done, I needed some motivation to lose weight which was not until our trip to Munnar. That trip I must say was pretty ‘Moti-weight-ing’ and thus began a journey of a 1000 miles with a single elephant ride! They say, where there’s a will, there are relatives, no, I meant there’s a way, and groggily I found my way that went round or rather square in circles, (wait, is that even possible?) in the park near my house. Thirty minutes of walk, dripping in sweet sweat wasn’t doing much to the waistline, except making me sleep more in the afternoons. 

Like a god-send, a friends group on FB started a new fitness group which I enthusiastically joined. To keep us motivated there was this diet and activity chart that we needed to fill out every day.

When I logged in, I had already had a tall glass of lemon juice in warm water with honey at 6am and then a tall glass of milk at 7am, followed by a bowl of oats at 9am, a bowl of salad at 10.30am and 3 phulkas with vegetable at 1pm. I filled in my entry and skimmed through what the others had filled in. Lunch: 1 phulka, said one entry. How does one survive on 1 phulka? I mean, that’s like two bites, right? But maybe that was the trick to losing weight. I made a mental note to eat just one phulka at night. But the mere thought of starving at night was making me hungry again, and it wasn’t even an hour since my last meal. I gulped down water to make the hunger go away, but it wouldn’t go away. My kids don’t listen to me these days, why would hunger? Well, after wondering what to eat next, I settled with a bowl of cornflakes without any milk. Maybe I’d keep munching on it as I worked I thought. It was gone before I could spell c-o-r-n-f-l-a-k-e-s. A couple of hours later, the tummy was grumbling again. Walnuts went in, followed by a bowl of papaya, and green tea, and by the time it was 5pm, I thought I would die of hunger. I was too embarrassed to log in and fill up the rest of the diet sheet.

Why was I indefinitely hungry? Was I possessed by the food monster? As I marched back into the kitchen, my eyes fell on the pressure cooker, and like Archimedes, I suddenly knew the answer to my question – Rice, eureka! I am so accustomed to rice that nothing else feels like lunch. I can eat rice in the morning and stay full until dinner time. Skipping rice was my nemesis. The brain never registered that I had had my meal.  

Giving in to the temptation, I quietly open the lid and poured some steaming rice into my plate with a generous helping of tangy, spicy, rasam, a miserly dollop of ghee and some fried potato palya (vegetable) on the side. Heaven! One whiff of the food on my plate and half my hunger was already gone. As I mixed the rice and rasam, I felt the rice make gentle love to my fingers and then proceed to pleasure my mouth. As the rasam-rice touched my tongue, it almost felt orgasmic. I closed my eyes, yielding to the pleasure, letting the food satiate my hunger. (What? Literally guys!) Needless to add, I wasn’t hungry again until dinner and I could manage with a single phulka at night.

At this rate, however, I doubt I’ll be able to lose any weight. And if I manage to do that, I’ll be back with a ‘The journey from fat to fit’ post or else this might be the precursor to a post titled, ‘And this why I never managed to lose weight.’

So long, Ciao!   

  

Book Review : The Tales of Sunshine- by Sundari Venkatraman

Every day you wake up to news that makes you sad – to add to that there are little ups and downs in your own life and there’s hardly anything that cheers you up or motivates you to get up and get going. So when Sundari Venkatraman sent me her book ‘Tales of Sunshine’ I was so fascinated by the title and the cover, that it didn't take me long to dive nose first into the book immediately.  

Sundari calls them ‘Human interest stories’ and yea, they are most definitely that! The 'Tales of Sunshine' is a collection of heart touching and heart warming stories. There are stories of common people like you and me. There are stories of everyday experiences that shake us – difficult decisions, trying times, hopeless situations – things that make you pull your hair out in despair. There are stories that show you a ray of sunshine and a glimmer of hope as the protagonists come to terms with the helplessness at hand and turn around what seems to be impossible.

When you read the book, it is possible that you might find a connection with a story here, a character there or the situation someone is in. That’s what makes the stories so endearing and beautiful – they connect with you and lift your spirits. The book is an anthology of ten stories - but they aren’t preachy, and they don’t tell you what to do. But they do tell you that there’s always a way out, they give you a ray of ‘Sunshine’. 

I loved each one of them and my favorites were 'A ray of Sunshine' which shows that everything is not lost and that you have it in you to make the best of a hopeless situation, and ‘Is Grandpa Home’, which brought a lump to the throat.  Sundari's stories urge you get in touch with your humane side, something that we seem to have lost somewhere along the way. They also urge you to look at problems not as an end of the world but as a means to find solutions. Sundari's writing is powerful and flawless and she scores on all grounds with her evocative writing. 

So go ahead and pick up your copy of the ‘Tales of Sunshine’.  Isn’t a little bit of sunshine all you need on a rainy day?

Title : The Tales of Sunshine

Author : Sundari Venkatraman

Available on : Amazon Kindle  

And that's why I decided to go on a diet!

I decided to go on a diet. I guess the trip to Munnar did it for me.

As we drove along the winding Mattupetty road feasting our eyes on the luscious green Kannan Devan Hills, feeling the nip in the air, allowing the cool breeze to caress our faces, and enjoying the fog that would suddenly appear and disappear, we reached a place with an unusually high level of exuberance in the atmosphere - the elephant park. Getting down from the car we saw people screaming in excitement (the thrill was only half the reason as we found out later, the other half was in fear!) perched atop majestic (and kind of smelly) elephants swaying from side to side, herded by bored looking mahouts - probably making the nth trip since morning, and probably also wondering in amusement how a little trip mounted on a pachyderm could elicit such a feeling of exhilaration!

I shouldn’t say more about ‘those people’ since we belonged to that breed too, jumping with joy in anticipation of our rambling session. The trip paid for, including a photographer who would click candid shots of us screaming along our way, we settled on the machan-like waiting board. Ten elephants, ten groups and about 30 excited faces with token numbers held in sweaty palms, lingered in the limited enclosure like we were readying ourselves for a trip to the outer space! Ours was token no 1 and the excitement as you can imagine was palpable. I wanted a front view and volunteered to sit first - a decision, I little knew, I would soon regret!

The first elephant strode in, the passengers on it disembarked on a similar machan on the opposite side and the beast sashayed towards us like a model on a ramp.  The mahout looked at us and in local vernacular said to the guide who stood with us, ‘Aavaradille anne...Hari yethikum.’ Roughly translated, my elephant (wait....hold your breath) ‘cannot’ take this weight, Hari (presumably another elephant), will be able to take them.

What??? The elephant just rejected us? Were we seriously overweight? The husband and I exchanged looks which cannot really be described using an adjective. Perhaps, you could call it the ‘its-your-fault-you-have-put-on-so-much-weight’ look! Anyways, there was hardly anything we could do...we just moved a step behind to let the people next to us board ‘our’ elephant which was no longer ours, by the way. Next came Hari, (I think), and even as I thought excitedly, ‘this is it’ and lifted a leg to put it around Hari, the mahout, nodded his head, ‘Nextu madam.’

‘Huh?’ I asked.

“Elephant weight not taking, bigger elephant coming. You waiting.’

Seriously? We needed a bigger elephant? I really hoped he was kidding, but looking at his face it was apparent that he was anything but joking!

We took one step back again, allowing the next family to board Hari.

With Hari gone, the third one swayed along, but we hardly had any enthusiasm this time. To my eyes, he looked smaller than the previous two or maybe it was my mind playing tricks with me. Our minds have strange ways of dealing with disappointment, don’t they? They know how to trick you into believing something is not for you, irrespective of whether it is or not, so that you should not feel let down should that thing actually not be for you!

This time, before the elephant could reject us, the guide broke the news to us, but we weren’t as disappointed. He told us we were to board the next elephant - he was the biggest and he should be able to carry us. That, I guess, was a polite way of telling us to let the third family board this elephant which we did with an embarrassed face and heavy heart. If there was a bucket of water somewhere, I’d have gladly drowned myself in it! And if the fourth elephant that was expected to carry us also couldn’t, then a handful of water would have sufficed.

‘This elephant madam, you all taking,’ the guide said with a wide grin, showing us his beedi stained teeth, and apparently more enthused that he finally found the right elephant for us or perhaps relived that we could finally be sent on our joy ride without him having to refund the fees that we had already paid! I secretly guess it was the latter.    

And so after having been rejected by three pachyderms, we finally got to put our weight, err, ourselves on the one that gladly (I hope) agreed to seat us!  

The leg that I lifted with so much aplomb refused to go around the mammal, so wide was its girth! After much struggle, I managed to seat myself, little knowing that it is not as fun to sit on an animal’s collarbone, especially a huge one at that, and get walked around on a hilly terrain! No wonder people screamed and we did too, once the four of us were ready to be hauled! With every step that it took, I thought that either I was going to fall off and be trampled under 5000kg of grey flesh or worried if our combined weight on its shoulders was going to make it angry enough to shake us off its back and trample me under all of its 5000kg anyway!   

It took quite some time to adjust to the meteoric rise and fall of the giant’s footsteps, but by the time it happened, we were almost at the end of our journey!  

And oh, did I mention that our pachy took two breaks in between and wouldn’t budge from its place for long! Apparently, it decided to unload its gut contents midway. Anyways that was the only thing in its control, for it couldn’t apparently unload us. Imagine sitting on an elephant that is busy making dung and emptying its bladder at its own leisurely pace while you squirm in displeasure!

As for the kids, they had a swell time enveloped between the two of us, shouting in joy, singing songs and discussing what the elephant could have had for lunch looking at the contents it so graciously spilled on the jungle floor!

No, don't let the smile fool you, it was purely for the camera!

When we alighted, I tried not to look into the elephant’s eyes, but I did, and I think in those tiny brown eyes, so disproportionate to its size, was a silent plea asking me to lose weight. That pretty much started me up on a diet, but what happened later is another story altogether! Will hold that for another day. 

The Application...

The glass door flung open and she walked into the lounge, her hair scattered all over face, and her orange and pink dupatta flying about her as if announcing her arrival. Balancing her helmet, a purse and shades that had just got off her eyes in one hand, and a bunch of papers and what looked like a book in the other, she struggled to shake off the unruly hair from blinding her.

He sat gazing at her from his seat across the customer desk, his heart fluttering wildly like it always had when he saw her. He wished he could sweep her hair off her cheeks and tuck them behind her ear. As she tried to use the back of her palm to push her tresses away, the papers and book loosened from her grip and scattered on the floor. With the papers flying in all directions, she nodded her head in disapproval at her own clumsiness, cursing herself and then muttering an inaudible apology to no one in particular.

A damsel in distress, they say, is always the beneficiary of male sympathy! They weren't  wrong at all,  because  as soon as he saw her struggling with the scattered papers, he jumped off his chair  like it were a trampoline  and was beside her in no time!Together, they caught the papers like they were hens that had escaped the coop, and sighed in unison and smiled at each other when the task was completed. He escorted her to the chair opposite his desk and manoeuvred himself into his chair.

‘I’m so sorry Karan! Quite a mess I can be at times,’ she said apparently embarrassed.

‘C’mon, don’t beat yourself over it, Suma, I can be worse.’ he said trying to make her feel better.

Then a silence followed, neither speaking a word, looking into each other’s eyes as if expecting them to do the talking. And then suddenly aware of the obvious and shameless stares, she looked away smiling. The eye contact broken, he was shaken out of his reverie. He smiled too. ‘How can I help you today?’   

‘Ah, yes. I lost my pass book. So I need to issue a new book and check a few transactions. I think something doesn’t tally,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ he said making a face, ‘and I thought you had come to see me.’ He gave her a naughty grin.   

‘Why would I...’ she began, appearing surprised at first as if he had read her mind, and then she caught the naughtiness in his expression, ‘...not,’ she said cheekily, ‘in fact, meeting you was the main reason, the pass book was just an excuse’ she added playing along and they both burst out laughing.

He so wished what she had just said was true. Only ifwishes were horses...

Suma had been one of his earliest customers at the bank. He was smitten by her simplicity and jovial nature from the very first time he had seen her. Over time, they had become good friends and she would directly approach him whenever she needed to transact at his branch. He was more than happy to provide her all the services without making her stand in the queue.  Four years of knowing each other had finally begun to assume the form of an intense liking for her. They knew almost everything there was to know about each other - they were both foodies and shared a love for Italian cuisine. Both loved white water rafting, and travelling. They would often regale each other about their travelling exploits and favourite food spots. Something about the way she looked at him made him suspect that she reciprocated his feelings but he wasn’t too sure. He had been wondering for long if he should confess his feelings to her. But he was scared. What if she denied having such feelings for him, what if she got angry, what if she left never to return again. 

He shook his thoughts away and brought himself to the task at present.

‘Ok, write an application letter, addressed to me... I mean, the deputy branch manager’ he added sheepishly.

‘Help me...’ she said with pleading eyes and a pout. His soul leapt across the table and placed a quick kiss on her lips before the pout was gone, while his body sat still trying to feel what his soul had just experienced.

‘Sure’ he said plucking a sheet of A4 size paper from the printer feed tray, and placing it before her and handing her a pen.

‘Address it to me, ‘he said and waited till she filled the ‘To’ and ‘From’ details. Once she was done, he continued, ‘Dear Sir, I have lost my pass book.’ He looked at her as she scribbled what he was dictating, biting the corner of her lower lip between her teeth, a strand of silken hair teasing her cheek and her dupatta sliding down one shoulder exposing her collar bone. There was something different in the way she looked and behaved today and he could not quite put a finger to what it was.

She caught his gaze lingering on her lips and raised one eyebrow like only she could. It was a few seconds before he realised she had caught him staring at her, and he shyly glanced away, too embarrassed to meet her questioning looks. She smiled and continued writing as if nothing had happened.  She scribbled some sentences, signed it, neatly folded it in half and handed it to him. 

He sighed. He would perhaps never gather the courage to let her know. For now, he accepted the application and opened it to check if the details were correct.

‘Dear Karan,’ it read, ‘I have lost the pass book of my life. I am not sure the transactions of my emotions tally anymore. There are some missing entries, mainly those pertaining to my heart. I fear that someone has messed with them...could it be you? Kindly issue me your heart so that I can search if my missing feelings are in them. Do you think you could do that?’ and then it was signed, ‘Love, Suma.’

Wishes sometimes did come true!