Lessons Learnt as a Bride

No amount of secondhand advice can prepare you for one of the most important days in your life. Nevertheless, advice being free to give and receive, I'm dispensing some. These are mostly I now regret not doing/being unable to do/not even having thought of/omigosh how did that happen kind of things. 

Click a selfie in your wedding attire: no one knows your best profile, pose and angle as well as you do. Added bonus: it tells you better than the mirror how you look. 

Get your mehendi done two days before the wedding: due to shortage of time I got mine done the day before, and the colour just didn't turn dark enough. The day after, it was a shade to kill for. Oh well. 

Grin and bear it: If you are one of those gals who can pout for a selfie at the drop of a hat, more power to you. If, however, like me you hate being clicked, the endless pictures can be trying, to say the least. Well, there really is no way out of it, and it does mean a lot to the people who came all the way to attend your wedding and want a tangible memory with you. Try to grin if you can, else do what I did and just grimace until you can't feel your face anymore. 

Sleep. A lot: This is applicable for at least a whole week before, and especially the wedding eve. Do NOT sleep just 3 hrs before you have to get up and get dressed. Getting good sleep gives you a fresh look no makeup can impart. Prevents you from lumbering around in a half-asleep state during the rituals. Also helps you look less tired and grumpy in the aforementioned wedding pics. 

Sari-torial advice: Most of you probably aren't used to wearing the six yards. Far from carrying it off with grace and elan, today's brides hope that at best they don't trip and fall on their faces. Or maybe that's just me. So when someone is draping it on you, ('coz obviously you couldn't do it yourself, even at gunpoint), don't wear your heels. Because the rituals will probably involve you walking barefoot. And when you slip off the sandals, those extra two (or three or four or five) inches of sari will suddenly come to life and twist and writhe and do all in their power to ensnare your toes. True story. I'm not making this up.

Don't let usual practice fool you into thinking substantial makeup is essential in front of the camera; makeup is a dicey business. If you're lucky enough to have the time and opportunity to do a trial run, go for it. If that's not possible, then get someone you trust to be with you the entire time and prevent disaster while it's still in the making. Best of all, when in doubt follow the "less is more" policy or ditch it altogether. At all costs, avoid looking like a raccoon who's had a beetroot for lunch. 

And remember, the groom standing next to you is the best accessory of all! That's all folks!

Originally written on Sep 14, 2015

A Few Choice Words

Choice. The word brings with it a very positive meaning - the availability of options, each to be examined and airily discarded until the perfect (or at least, best among the lot) is settled upon. We like nothing better than having the luxury to choose, be it a toothpaste from among the twenty brands jostling on the supermarket shelf or the option to try Vietnamese cuisine tonight, Jamaican tomorrow and Gujarati the day after. We make dozens of these choices every day, some little and some life changing. We revel in having more options open to us than previous generations, be it as consumers or choosing our career paths or the way we live our lives.

Sure, choice is important and so is having alternatives open to us. But doesn't it feel like overkill sometimes? Flicking through two hundred channels and not being able to settle on anything to watch or standing every day in front of piles of clothes and lamenting "I have nothing to wear!" makes me wonder if it wasn't better when all I had was DD1 where comfortably settled down to Chandrakanta (yeah you watched it too) or five outfits to choose from which took all of five seconds to pick out.

Sometimes, not having a choice can be a good thing after all. A childhood friend of mine spent all her years growing up wanting to be a doctor, but after multiple attempts wasn't able to make it through and had to glumly settle on a career in IT. Years later she told me it was the best thing that happened to her, that she loved her job and probably wouldn't have enjoyed practising medicine as much. This happens all around us, when being forced into something we would never have voluntarily chosen, a sort of Hobsonian choice if you will, turns out to be far better for us than any choice we could have made on our own.

The value of choice also depends upon the way the choice is made. I for one, have drifted through life picking out things on the basis of what I do NOT want. It's not that I wanted to study economics, its that I couldn't bear the thought of being a mass-produced engineer; it's not that I wanted to enter the world of finance, rather I couldn't see myself mustering the high energy levels to take on sales, and so on. I never think much about what I'd like so much as what I definitely, absolutely want to avoid. Then there are people who made the same choices as me, but after carefully evaluating their options and deciding that Plan A would give better returns than Plan B. There is a third category of people who make choices in quite the opposite fashion, the spunky lot who pick the alternative they know is risky, because for them life without a bit of a gamble is no life at all. And then there are the people who agonise over every choice and can never choose at all, and hence are forced into one or the other just by virtue of all other options having passed them by. If we all ended up at the same place, then what exactly is the value of having had that choice at all?

All this is not to say that we should have no options at all. I like being able to choose what to read, where to spend vacations or who to spend my life with. It's just that sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. After all, there's a reason they call it being "spoilt" for choice.

Originally written on Jan 3, 2015

Shifting House

Your home is your sanctuary, the refuge that you return to after battling relentlessly with the outside world. The act of closing the door behind you, slipping off shoes from aching feet and sinking onto the welcoming bed is one of the simplest yet most profound joys. You are cocooned off from the vagaries of nature and humans alike, happy and comfortable in your own little world.

So when this sanctuary is suddenly unfamiliar, it's a huge shock to the system. Sure, you consciously weighed the pros and cons and made the decision to shift to a new place. But your mind and body do not always collaborate. Your fingers repeatedly reach for the wrong switches, your limbs take familiar angles and turns in surroundings that don't match the movements, and you lie awake listening to new kinds of groans and creaks as the house settles down for the night. You miss how the plants spilled out on the window ledge, can't help but regret how spacious your old kitchen was and yearn for the rhythm of life you were so used to.

But then the fickle human mind being what it is, one tends to focus on the good things, the things that are better, that are now available vis-à-vis the old place. You feel smug that the cross ventilation is sooo much superior (I was almost, though not quite, blown away), play with the camera outside you door (so posh!), and jump like a giddy little kid to discover there's actually a picturesque old man on a rusty bicycle who delivers fresh eggs and bread to your doorstep. Slowly but surely, your old habits and patterns fade away, and new rhythms fall into place. Soon enough, THIS becomes your sanctuary, and the other slides into the background, merely a faint bittersweet shadow of a memory...

Originally written on July 18, 2016

Doors

 Have you ever noticed how much character a door has? Doors differ from house to house, and often from room to room within the same house. And each door serves its own different purpose, has its own story.

The front door is a sturdy guardian, with its Cyclopsian glass eye bearing down upon visitors, judging whether they are worthy of being let into the fortress. A bedroom has a well-trained steward of a door, who stands with folded arms to ensure its occupants are not disturbed, or that their private knickknacks are not displayed for the eyes of all and sundry. The door of the utilitarian bathroom is a humble unadorned plank, made to uncomplainingly weather droplets and soapsuds, pierced with spikes to bear the burden of clothing. The door that leads to a balcony patronises Janus, with a pristine and well preserved inner face while the outer side is a weather beaten, paint peeling travesty, unrecognisable as once having been the twin of the other. However, what it loses in beauty it makes up in experience perhaps, staring out at an ever changing world day after day.

They have such distinctive voices. One door opens with tired creaking hinges, the other swings open with a shrill squeak. Some rattle, some grind, others glide silently to and fro. Some have a naughty habit of slamming shut with a bang at the slightest puff of wind and must be constantly and carefully minded with doorstops. Some have latches that slide in with a distinctive click, others with bolts that loudly resist being moved and literally need oil to be poured on troubled waters. We know our doors so well that one could lie in bed and identify from the noise which door just opened in which part of the house.

People say you can know much about a person from his clothes. I think the same could be said of doors. The man who fits his house with imposing mahogany doors wants to be taken seriously. The wife who picked out cheerfully light pine doors wishes to make her house a warm home for her family. The neighbour who bars his door with an additional grille might as well put up a 'Keep Out' sign. The doors with brassy multitudes of ornamental vines and flowers painted in bright gilt reflect the owner's proclivity towards ostentatious display.

Every door is different. And has its own story. We probably just need to pay a little attention in order to know it.

(Written on June 5, 2014)

Bookworms

I picked up a book recently. What sounds like a non-event was in fact, a big deal for me after months - maybe even a year or two - of exclusively reading on my Kindle or consuming  audiobooks. I had almost forgotten how it feels to hold a book in my hand. I brushed my thumb on the enjoyably rough texture of the page. I nearly held it up to my nose to sniff in the half-remembered scent of old paper but stopped as it was an old stained book picked up at a flea market, and the smell of paper, if discernible at all, would probably be accompanied by other odours I wouldn't be inclined to smell. 

Leaning back in a comfortable chair, tucking my legs under a fluffy woollen throw, I eagerly dug into the Inspector Wexford mystery. Little did I know the book came with a little puzzle of it's own, a mystery within a mystery. It was a teeny-tiny hole.

I first noticed on page 11 an almost perfectly circular hole, the size of a pinhead. No, that was not the mystery, it was of course the path made by a bookworm burrowing through the pages. I turned the pages onward, careful not to unwittingly read some spoiler, and the hole kept going on and on. I was rather impressed by the worm's tenacity, and wondered what I'd encounter where the hole ended. A dead worm? A shell left behind, pressed into parchment, or maybe just a splotchy stained outline.

What I had not expected however, was that at page 107, the perfectly round worm-sized hole was joined by another hole of an irregular shape and size. Not for this worm putting it's head down and tunneling straight through the pages as the first one had done. No, this was a free spirit, stopping to explore it's surroundings a bit before moving on to the next chapter. 

Amused, I flipped the pages back. Sure enough, worm 1 had chomped it's way in right from the cover, no surprises there. But there didn't seem to be any evidence of worm 2's entry, the signs of it's first meal just appeared out of thin, well, page. Chalking it up as immaculate conception, I shrugged and continued following their journeys.

The holes went on and on until abruptly both burrows converged on page 113 into a coin sized hole, about five pages deep, with jagged chewed edges on all sides. And therein lies the aforementioned mystery - what in the book happened here? 

I pictured worm 2 either gnashing angrily in all directions in a fit of emotion, or trying to create a masterpiece seized by an artistic whim. It couldn't be worm 1 - oh no - not that paragon of economical efficiency.

Or did the twain meet and engage in a battle? Or a competition to prove who could outchomp the other? Nah, I like to imagine bookworms as peaceful creatures, snacking their way through literature, chilling and chewing the paper cud, so I can't quite imagine them fighting unto death. 

Did they maybe meet, connect instantaneously and have a passionate thrashabout? Or maybe they didn't meet at all. Maybe the mysterious worm 2 had been suffering from an equally mysterious illness and what I had in front of me were it's dying throes. If so, did worm 1 pass through later, perhaps even years later, taking in the ruins wide eyed (do bookworms even have eyes?) as a tourist would the crumbling remains of the Coliseum.

Whatever happened, only the first worm continued through. I expected nothing less from a gentleworm of his strong determination. But the hole, while strong and well defined earlier, started growing smaller and smaller now, until it stopped 12 pages later. The pages after that were smooth and whole, unmarred by little bookworm fangs. (Note to self - really need to look up bookworm anatomy). Whatever happened, changed him. It looked like he lost the will to continue his mission. Whether it was battle wounds, a lost love, artistic awe or something else altogether is now lost to the unknown.

Worm 1 for all his perseverance and his long weary journey, couldn't finish the book, but I like to think he died satisfied with his efforts, or perhaps realised that it wasn't what his heart really wanted. Worm 2, unencumbered by societal expectations, lived life large in the short while he was there. Both left behind something to be remembered by. That is life I suppose.

Where The River Meets The Sea

White crested rills
Riding the turquoise sea
Green fronds on hills
Swaying ever so gently

Pale sands shimmer
To the waves they kneel
Quick silver glimmer
The gull has found its meal

Breakers climb the sand
Wild and untamed
The tide eats up land
Rightfully reclaimed

Eddies pool and frolic,
Then dissolve playfully
Serene hides the mystic
Where the river meets the sea