Monday, July 28, 2008
CULTURAL MISFITS ?!
A L’il extension of my previous post at the cost of sounding obsessed with childhood days….i recount with great fondness another phase (yet again)!!!
The innocence and the purity never seemed to fail us then…we never sought to reason out the tragedies and pains that came our way!! Only when we grew up, did things start falling in perspective.
We, matured individuals, that we call ourselves slowly lost out the ability to welcome the uncertainties with open arms, we began to seek so much sense in everytin that life became awfully programmed, so much so that every time there was some shift or some loss, we began to get perturbed and shaken from within.
We began to think that one should dress in a certain way to come across as something!! One should talk in a certain way to be accepted by some few people, we should eat in a certain way coz mum n dad tole us that was the way to eat!!!
I draw an instance from my baby days in school. Mommy was now sending me food and was putting me on to the habit of eating a complete meal that she sent with the “Dabba walla”. I was trying my best to please mother and trying to eat from my tiffin; the complete spread of rotis, dal, salad, veggies. It was a tad too much for a child of my age but I was trying for mommy’s sake!! But what I did keep wondering at lunch time was, why did my food look so different from my Parsi friends who sat down for lunch with me and seemed to be speaking the same language as me… “broken stylish Gujarati” with English words interspersed in the Gujarati sentences or vanilla English sentences!!
What they ate looked like a fancy stick with something like a veggie stuck at the top. My Parsi , Bengali, Punjabi and Sindhi friends devoured this fancy looking eatable that looked rubbery and exciting…sometimes there was some craft work done to it like the silver lining and wrapping. I missed having a veggie that looked like that…that I could tear and eat little at a time and finally leave out a hard bone-like thing behind…it dint seem edible any further for my friends!! My veggies were boring and they landed straight in my tummy with no effort of separating the soft from the hard!!!
So, the forever confused child that I was, I went back home once disappointed. I began describing it to mom and questioned her as to why my meals were devoid of this interesting thing!! She then smiled and tried reasoning it out to me that we were Vegetarians and did not eat Chicken… knowing myself I must have surely dwelled in the confusion as to why wasn’t it possible to have a vegetarian chicken in my tiffin then!! But I have no specific memory of what followed…just that mommy explained that non vegetarian meant something that was once alive…PERIOD!! The idea of the stick with the veggie that looked like a lollipop soon became obnoxious!!
But I could not stop myself from succumbing to the habit of tearing rotis with both my hands…just as my friends did. So once when we were at the dinner table and dad was taking special interest in knowing what I had learnt at school, he accidentally set his eyes on my hands trying to tear Roti!! He looked at me weirdly…I must have felt like I was an adopted kid at that moment!!! …what he prolly found funny and shocking was what was that tiny little left hand of mine doing on the dinner table when it had no business to be there!!! Left hand at the dinner table was redundant apparently!! So he quickly popped a question at me and tried to know why I liked eating food the way I did…with both my hands?? I told him excitedly how I had learnt how to eat food without mum’s help almost failing to realize that it wasn’t even a relevant piece of information…
He told me that we were Gujarati Brahmins who ate with just our right hands and usage of left hand only meant disrespecting food!! (Weird!!). But dad has a way to put things into perspective…he will give you an option to try what you like doing and what he deems fit and then figure out what seems best. He prolly works on the gut that his option will look much more appealing. It surely does!!
…and when he explains that way, you are bound never to forget. So here we had this little girl who had just about begun eating independently who was given a more complex piece of instruction… “Leave aside the left hand at the dinner table”!!! so now as I broke little pieces of Roti, the underconfident shy girl inside me feared the left hand would spring from nowhere and upset father!! To avoid all of that , I found a solution…I would now fold my left hand backwards to almost touch my back and pretend I had no left hand!! Poor little left hand!!
Worse still, I did try acting smart by passing this vital piece of information to my friends who continued eating the way they ate back at their homes!!! I happily ate my food the way dad taught me and grinned within thinking all my friends were disrespecting food and were inviting the wrath of some imaginary God!!
As I grew older, I realized how vulnerable and gullible we were. We happily moulded ourselves the way people wanted us. We felt bliss while we remained ignorant of what they call CULTURAL DIFFERENCES… we loved our friends and folks alike and were unconsciously willing to change for either… we only knew the language of CAMRADERIE …it was above everything….caste, complexion, culture…
Wish we remained as MOULDABLE over the years gone by… without falling prey to becoming JUDGMENTAL!!
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Memoirs from Childhood ...
PART 1 :
I was born in a huge home...not only in dimension but also in terms of the number of people it housed...forever bustling with the jokes and pleasantries of people that made MY FAMILY...
For obvious reasons I don’t retain all memories of what transpired between the time I was born and the time I was old enough to understand what people spoke and responded to them in my unfathomable language.
What remains etched as a constant memory through my infant and baby days is the colossal, noise, sounds and hysteria, typical of the whole Joint Family concept! Little cousins dropping by, demanding their share over a morsel of chocolate that my father would have brought me and the ritual of sharing half heartedly because that was the rule in the home… “you gotta share evrytin”….fancy pencils, eraser pieces that looked like Strawberry and bananas and sometimes some random superhero, chocolates, ice creams, clothes, hair oils and fragrances…weird!! We grew up with the idea that everything that could be felt or thought of could be shared…cute!!
Our home had everyone…unique characters that you would find in a big happy family in any Bollywood saga : The head of the family (A man with principles and values),comedians , simpleton, devoted housewives, faithful housekeepers, the cook who occasionally became a family member, unpleasant guests from our hometowns (plenty of them) who would stay and feed themselves endlessly in our Mumbai home leaving the main leads; the ladies of our home tired and worn out around dusk time… Astonishingly my home had place for all: The rich and the needy, the old and the young, the well wishers and the envious, blaah…
Apart from being a part of these experiences at home, the kids of the family also went to school. My dad was just making his career with little means. He and my mum were seeing bright dreams with wide eyes for my education, for the way they should dress me, how I would grow up to be a well mannered, sweet looking child who would make their family (our BIG FAMILY) proud…For most part of his life, my father kept drooling over books and fancied being the most educated man that ever existed (or so I think!!!). A very focused man who was out to get the most coveted degree in those times and dreaming unconsciously that he wanted his kids to do that as well some day.
My mum in her maiden days would pass by the enormous school at Juhu Tara Road overlooking the magestic Juhu Beach that most tourists thought was a pilgrimage destination after the home of the legendry Amitabh Bachhan in Mumbai!!!! Point being, my mum was enamored with this grand school and dreamt her kids went there when she had them… So I went to the same school where most celebrity kids went. My cousins chose to go to the other schools their parents had in mind. The first separation!!
PART 2 :
Separate schools brought in different experiences obviously!! So now the curiosity and the exuberance was to return and share stories about weird guls and boys in school, new games that we learnt, new prayers and nursery rhymes, new gifts that one got from a birthday celebration at school and then the traditional sharing a few candies and chocolates with the homies in other school who did not witness any b’day celebrations!! The sharing did not stop with the separation.
Then came an exciting phase of my life…Benny’s Bus!! I was prolly 4 when my mum was keeping busy with a new member in our home; my sister. She was the rockstar from the time she was born…those weird mood swings, the starry tantrums, the beautiful hair, the light brown eyes that could kill, the way she slept and just about everytin…I was obviously over reacting cus I hadn’t played the senior to any of the kids at home …so here was miss Cinderella who walked into our lives and simultaneously I was busy with my pre-primary school days and ofcourse, the Benny Bus phase!!
Benny was a cute catholic school bus driver… n I was the tiny, little, shy, reticent gul…well behaved and always waiting quietly in line to get into the bus and go home n see mommy and the rest of the jing bang!!! I would long to see Benny as much as I detested the idea of seeing school. But going to school was a price I paid to be in Benny’s Bus!! Benny was cute simply coz he sang for me and customized weird songs so that somehow he would sing my name amidst all those made up words, verses and paras!! Benny never missed taking care of me while the naughty boys jus shoved me off in their fighting bouts!! He prolly thought I was “Miss delicate darling” who would cry with the violence around me.
I was shy, quiet and all that but I did have the undeterred resilience and patience of my mum to keep smiling in the face of all this discomfort!!
In class I was the well behaved hard working child some teachers noticed and some did not… simply coz I never made my presence felt and loved to exist in my own world and day dream!! I dint wanna be the star of the class while others secretly wanted to make their presence felt and chased different agendas: figure in top 3, to be best athletes, to impress the cute looking boys/ guls, to be chosen for the annual day dance functions….i dint know any of that!!! I just knew Benny’s Bus, the bus ride and then coming home n telling my cousins and now my infant sister, the happenings of the day!!! My granny (“Maa”) stayed on the ground floor and on most occasions watched out for my bus and fetched me from where Benny dropped me off. The story of “Maa” needs a separate mention and I save it for another occasion….
Not to mention, the academic results were always good coz mom paid special attention to it…. A devoted mother who could go without food to make sure I got some table manners and somehow managed to feed me while I climbed on to the windows, the short cupboards in my room and as if that wasn’t enough, at the end of it threw a fit that mommy was harassing me when one of the aunties entered the room…the generally well behaved child that I was did get nasty at times!!....especially cus of Miss Cinderella who was happily eating away into my share of time with mommy!! But I still luved her existence… So while me n miss Cinderella kept becoming plump and pink, mommy was getting dark circles under her eyes for lack of sleep and the running around and the tiring study sessions with me!!
PART 3:
Then came another phase… an independent home for all the families of the home….they call it nuclear homes these days!!!
Dumb and innocent that we were, we did not fathom the consequences of this. All we saw was a brand new home constructed in the same premise on the top floor. The idea of separate kitchens was sooo new and exciting…we prolly thot that we would have different things cooked in each and then share all of it with each other which meant more variety!! But it was separation second!!!
The needs of the family to expand and the shortcomings of the huge home to now take care of these needs was perhaps the reason!!
Whatever the reasons, that was the age we kept smiling through all the hardships, presumptuous situations and the internal agony of not waking up to the sounds of the cousin in the next room crying after spilling milk.
We wept and then we stopped and life moved on… All discomfort forgotten, all grievances taking a backseat as newer joys filled our lives…no questions raised to god as to why our lives were shaping the way they were…no questions at all… submitting ourselves completely to the uncertainties yet to come….NO QUESTIONS EVA!! It was soo good to play that age…A role I could kill for today!!
No scars of incidents and quick healing from rude shocks!!
I was born in a huge home...not only in dimension but also in terms of the number of people it housed...forever bustling with the jokes and pleasantries of people that made MY FAMILY...
For obvious reasons I don’t retain all memories of what transpired between the time I was born and the time I was old enough to understand what people spoke and responded to them in my unfathomable language.
What remains etched as a constant memory through my infant and baby days is the colossal, noise, sounds and hysteria, typical of the whole Joint Family concept! Little cousins dropping by, demanding their share over a morsel of chocolate that my father would have brought me and the ritual of sharing half heartedly because that was the rule in the home… “you gotta share evrytin”….fancy pencils, eraser pieces that looked like Strawberry and bananas and sometimes some random superhero, chocolates, ice creams, clothes, hair oils and fragrances…weird!! We grew up with the idea that everything that could be felt or thought of could be shared…cute!!
Our home had everyone…unique characters that you would find in a big happy family in any Bollywood saga : The head of the family (A man with principles and values),comedians , simpleton, devoted housewives, faithful housekeepers, the cook who occasionally became a family member, unpleasant guests from our hometowns (plenty of them) who would stay and feed themselves endlessly in our Mumbai home leaving the main leads; the ladies of our home tired and worn out around dusk time… Astonishingly my home had place for all: The rich and the needy, the old and the young, the well wishers and the envious, blaah…
Apart from being a part of these experiences at home, the kids of the family also went to school. My dad was just making his career with little means. He and my mum were seeing bright dreams with wide eyes for my education, for the way they should dress me, how I would grow up to be a well mannered, sweet looking child who would make their family (our BIG FAMILY) proud…For most part of his life, my father kept drooling over books and fancied being the most educated man that ever existed (or so I think!!!). A very focused man who was out to get the most coveted degree in those times and dreaming unconsciously that he wanted his kids to do that as well some day.
My mum in her maiden days would pass by the enormous school at Juhu Tara Road overlooking the magestic Juhu Beach that most tourists thought was a pilgrimage destination after the home of the legendry Amitabh Bachhan in Mumbai!!!! Point being, my mum was enamored with this grand school and dreamt her kids went there when she had them… So I went to the same school where most celebrity kids went. My cousins chose to go to the other schools their parents had in mind. The first separation!!
PART 2 :
Separate schools brought in different experiences obviously!! So now the curiosity and the exuberance was to return and share stories about weird guls and boys in school, new games that we learnt, new prayers and nursery rhymes, new gifts that one got from a birthday celebration at school and then the traditional sharing a few candies and chocolates with the homies in other school who did not witness any b’day celebrations!! The sharing did not stop with the separation.
Then came an exciting phase of my life…Benny’s Bus!! I was prolly 4 when my mum was keeping busy with a new member in our home; my sister. She was the rockstar from the time she was born…those weird mood swings, the starry tantrums, the beautiful hair, the light brown eyes that could kill, the way she slept and just about everytin…I was obviously over reacting cus I hadn’t played the senior to any of the kids at home …so here was miss Cinderella who walked into our lives and simultaneously I was busy with my pre-primary school days and ofcourse, the Benny Bus phase!!
Benny was a cute catholic school bus driver… n I was the tiny, little, shy, reticent gul…well behaved and always waiting quietly in line to get into the bus and go home n see mommy and the rest of the jing bang!!! I would long to see Benny as much as I detested the idea of seeing school. But going to school was a price I paid to be in Benny’s Bus!! Benny was cute simply coz he sang for me and customized weird songs so that somehow he would sing my name amidst all those made up words, verses and paras!! Benny never missed taking care of me while the naughty boys jus shoved me off in their fighting bouts!! He prolly thought I was “Miss delicate darling” who would cry with the violence around me.
I was shy, quiet and all that but I did have the undeterred resilience and patience of my mum to keep smiling in the face of all this discomfort!!
In class I was the well behaved hard working child some teachers noticed and some did not… simply coz I never made my presence felt and loved to exist in my own world and day dream!! I dint wanna be the star of the class while others secretly wanted to make their presence felt and chased different agendas: figure in top 3, to be best athletes, to impress the cute looking boys/ guls, to be chosen for the annual day dance functions….i dint know any of that!!! I just knew Benny’s Bus, the bus ride and then coming home n telling my cousins and now my infant sister, the happenings of the day!!! My granny (“Maa”) stayed on the ground floor and on most occasions watched out for my bus and fetched me from where Benny dropped me off. The story of “Maa” needs a separate mention and I save it for another occasion….
Not to mention, the academic results were always good coz mom paid special attention to it…. A devoted mother who could go without food to make sure I got some table manners and somehow managed to feed me while I climbed on to the windows, the short cupboards in my room and as if that wasn’t enough, at the end of it threw a fit that mommy was harassing me when one of the aunties entered the room…the generally well behaved child that I was did get nasty at times!!....especially cus of Miss Cinderella who was happily eating away into my share of time with mommy!! But I still luved her existence… So while me n miss Cinderella kept becoming plump and pink, mommy was getting dark circles under her eyes for lack of sleep and the running around and the tiring study sessions with me!!
PART 3:
Then came another phase… an independent home for all the families of the home….they call it nuclear homes these days!!!
Dumb and innocent that we were, we did not fathom the consequences of this. All we saw was a brand new home constructed in the same premise on the top floor. The idea of separate kitchens was sooo new and exciting…we prolly thot that we would have different things cooked in each and then share all of it with each other which meant more variety!! But it was separation second!!!
The needs of the family to expand and the shortcomings of the huge home to now take care of these needs was perhaps the reason!!
Whatever the reasons, that was the age we kept smiling through all the hardships, presumptuous situations and the internal agony of not waking up to the sounds of the cousin in the next room crying after spilling milk.
We wept and then we stopped and life moved on… All discomfort forgotten, all grievances taking a backseat as newer joys filled our lives…no questions raised to god as to why our lives were shaping the way they were…no questions at all… submitting ourselves completely to the uncertainties yet to come….NO QUESTIONS EVA!! It was soo good to play that age…A role I could kill for today!!
No scars of incidents and quick healing from rude shocks!!
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