Of Mildly Venomous Wives and their Not-So-Mundane Lives

I don’t know if you are yet to be bedazzled by the glam quotient of The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives. Not a terribly original concept as basic research throws up a show called WAGS which is an American docu-series tracking the lives of WAGs- wives and girlfriends of famous sportspersons in 2015-2017 that ran for three reasons. The Indian version is hilarious in parts, predictable in others but a fun watch irrespective of its authenticity. The show made me question how fat are the paychecks these wives cut through their jewellery and fashion labels? Considering most of their husbands are out-of-work for decades, yesteryear stars or semi-celebrities who have hardly been newsmakers, forget roped in decent moolah through films, how do they afford the lives that they have? In fact, that’s one thing they all have in common besides their insecurities, wannabe-quotient and superficial bearings- their unsuccessful husbands.  Yet, they are wearing the best labels, holidaying in Doha, digging in to sumptuous food at the best restaurants in Mumbai and living it up in plush residences in Juhu and Bandra. 

The fact that the show is produced by Karan Johar also means there is a strong catty pitch at which the melodrama of these women’s lives operate. So we see him coming in at vital junctures to stir things up and play these gal pals against each other. To him, they are mere pawns he is having a gala time spinning around his chessboard to cater to the mass’ need for masala. So yes, they all swear by their 25-year-old friendship and yet you have Maheep sound disappointed when Seema and Bhavna do not have a massive showdown and get at each other’s throats after a difference of opinion. They all take jibes at each other in a condescending manner- like Bhavna’s spiritual leanings, Neelam’s prim and proper approach to life and Seema’s fear of flying. Maheep’s foul language would send my mother’s sense of equilibrium for a toss considering none of that is censored in the presence of her kids as well but then what do we with our humble middle-class virtues understand of the high-strung dynamics of our film industry’s hoi polloi? In true classic KJo style, nepotism is out there for some kicks as Sanjay Kapoor rues about how that didn’t get him the big budget blockbusters even as the next generation of kids gets groomed to make a dashing entry. So what if none of them can barely string two words in Hindi, Bollywood was never about getting your diction right, right? So while most average mothers in India are fretting over GRE and GMAT scores for their children, we have Maheep prepping her daughter Shanaya for a ball. Yeah, this is a fairytale world so why were you expecting anything to look remotely real. Le Bal as it is called is a French soiree where nubile nymphets of viable age strut their stuff, coming in to their own. It’s where every star daughter has to sashay into, armed with her proud father to regale people in an almost theatrical dress-up shenanigan. Chunky Pandey’s daughter Ananya’s already been there so there is no chance Shanaya can not go. 

 

The grapevines would have you know that there have been strong seismic waves underneath Maheep and Bhavna’s flowery friendship ever since KJo decided to launch Ananya in his Student of the Year instead of Shanaya. The show would hardly let you guess that with the camaraderie they all put up for our benefit. All the shallow hypocrisy that makes up this tomfoolery culminates in the ball of all balls- an invite to Badshah Khan’s inner sanctum- only here it is the Queen- Gauri Khan who holds stage, throned in the snazzy comforts of Gauri Khan Designs- whatever that is because the only designs on display are the ones that people are faking on each other. So all the lesser known Bollywood wives end up paying their obeisance to the first lady and man of Indian cinema as millennials may not know it- SRK and Gauri Khan. Got me thinking what that made people like Dilip Kumar-Saira Banu, Amitabh-Jaya Bachchan or even Akshay Kumar-Twinkle Khanna considering their standing in Bollywood as original superstars and joint net worth as in the case of the third couple should be astronomical as well. Anyway, this is a world invaded by KJo and hence, the world begins and ends at the feet of this power couple who own and relish ‘jannat’ as well as Mannat. They are in their element as gracious hosts, showering compliments and blessings with full gusto on the families of the lesser mortals. You only wonder how far this charade goes behind the cameras and what these people-pleasing manners ultimately result in. There is a befuddled looking Siddharth Kapoor loitering at this party with no contemporaries in sight. Hmmm….but the unintentional highlight of this glitzy show is Sameer Soni who swings on the balls of his feet as he gloats about his memory of remembering people’s sunsigns with glazed eyes and a slurring tongue. Red Bull and vodka, they would have us believe. Bullshit, I say. 

 

Why I still survived eight episodes of this great Bollywood drama- Maheep’s confession about spying on people with her binoculars, Neelam’s braving a cosmetic session to get her skin tight, Raveena’s frank and friendly advice to Neelam to go for it when it comes to her comeback without a hint of rivalry, that cute French guy who served drinks topless at Mondrian, Seema’s little pep talk with Malaika Arora about motherhood and living it up as a single parent professionally…there are many such moments in the show that keep you hooked and seem genuine enough to hold your attention. I added it to my watchlist as soon as I heard this line from Maheep in the trailer: “Of course we go shopping in a Rolls-Royce. Is there any other mode of transportation?” My husband thought I should watch it alone but gave in to binge-watching it with me with the first episode itself. And it made me feel slightly better for ogling at the luxurious locations and eateries these not-so-demure damsels flocked at. If Seema DM’s a Kardashian and Neelam’s ultimate goal is to sleep in the same bed as SRK and JLo previously did at the Mondrian, I can’t be questioned for making a list of places I want to hit next time I am in Mumbai right. I much prefer crabs in butter garlic sauce to their human versions you see.

 

 

 

 

 

A 'Suitably Safe' Adaptation

 

I vividly remember enjoying Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’, and if you have read it you will know that you have to be sufficiently invested in Lata Mehra’s quest to find her Mr. Right to get through the 1300+ page tome. Mira Nair’s visual adaptation of the book remains faithful to the main plot and characters. For those who haven’t read the book, it is a sufficient reflection of the trials and tribulations of how difficult it might have been to fall in love in the post-Partition era, let alone have a Hindu girl court a Muslim boy. So Mrs. Rupa Mehra has all the zest of a 19th century Mrs. Bennet from Pride & Prejudice when it comes to setting her daughter up with a decent match. The BBC One produced Netflix televised series has all the makings of a literal translation of page to screen with opulent backdrops to convey the post-Independence era in the fictional town of Brahmpur, the Nawabi havelis, the courtesan’s kothi and the British-influenced colonial architecture of erstwhile Calcutta. Lata’s sarees are ethereal and beautiful in their simplicity. Delhi-based debutante Tanya Maniktala playing Lata is a fresh face, and exhibits the necessary spunk that Lata embodies as she straddles the traditional Indian value system with her modernistic, youthful attitude to love and relationships. Maan Kapoor, one of the most intriguing characters in the story whose journey from boy to man is a noteworthy one, is earnestly played by new Bollywood boy-on-the-block Ishaan Khattar, who makes an effort to look convincing as the flawed black sheep in the righteous Kapoor khaandaan. Tabu shimmers subtly as Saeeda Bai, a woman who struggles to give a respectable upbringing to her ward- Tasneem while battling desire and social status accorded to her by her clients like the Raja of Marh. A special mention to my St. Xavier’s alumni and trained classical singer Namit Das who emotes with his eyes to essay his true feelings for Lata convincingly. 

Amidst the rich fabric that makes up this era, what I found deliberately missing in the TV series are the strong political undercurrents that were running through the country at this time that laid the foundations of what India was going to be all about for the next few decades. There are glimpses to the destruction of the Masjid and its repercussions and the oppressive zamindari system. However, the elections in which Mahesh Kapoor loses his seat to Waris, the communal riots and the climactic changes brought about by Nehru’s eventual intervention in the nation’s state of affairs are largely overlooked to give the love story some precedence. In that sense, perhaps the on-screen version lacks the gravitas that the author of the book made his readers engage in and Mira Nair chooses a rather safe way to angle her story for today’s polarised audiences. The story of A Suitable Boy is as much the story of the slow and aspirational rise of the self-made man in newly minted independent India, Haresh Khanna as it is of Rasheed, the Urdu teacher hopelessly in love with Tasneem and struggling against both family and the feudal system in his village. Much sparkle is added in the book through smaller characters but with no lesser depth as the mains like the little boy genius Bhaskar Tandon or Kabir’s father Dr. Durrani, the mathematician. The supporting cast are not just there to add mere flesh to the lead characters’ slow tread towards their eventual destiny. The appeal of this book for me is in the impact of what the British left behind in our country- in the anglicised Chatterji family where Lata is welcomed by her philandering sister-in-law Meenakshi, in the democracy that has been and continues to be threatened by religious factions in India till date and despite western education and influence, how society is governed by a strongly overt moral code when it came to conjugal ties, old friendships and illicit relationships. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in another highly-criticised and reviewed show, Indian Matchmaking on Netflix again. This is an obvious representation of how we Indians are obsessed with finding the ‘right match’. High-flying and veteran matchmaker ‘Sima Taparia from Mumbai’ as she likes to introduce herself, is proficient in her matchmaking algorithms. She has figured the conflicts of what parents want against what young suitors today really look for in a life partner. The result: She knows for sure one size does not fit all. For someone who has never been part of an arranged marriage set-up, Indian Matchmaking made me as curious as it would a person alien to Indian culture. So it was interesting to see how two random people are actually put together on something like an excel sheet, some calculations made, some divine intervention sought, stars tallied, criteria ticked and voila! We have a pair! So what if the pair or pairs in this series, do not quite make the cut in the end. Post-coverage reveals none of the matches came good and the potential suitors remained only that. Given that the whole process of meeting and greeting was staged, I doubt we got to see what really went on behind the scenes and how serious anyone was about getting hitched through this show. It looks like a great compilation of well-heeled, ready to mingle but highly skeptical individuals who drop the potato at the first sign of a negative trait. It questions the authenticity of ‘first meetings’ and how many are enough to come to that big decision. How much of a person can you get to know when all he or she is projecting his or her best face and attributes to make that big impression. It also hit me that men have no clue what women want from a marriage.  No matter how badly they want to play the role of a 21st century urban equivalent of Prince Charming, they aren’t too far from the conventional mark when it comes to expressing their expectations when it comes to their ‘dreamgirl’. She has to charm the mother, make a valiant effort to ‘fit in’ and is a threat to his ambitions or ideas of domestic bliss if she has firm opinions and comes across as smart, independent and highly educated. The perpetual mother-in-law figure is also as intimidating and overbearing when it comes to deciding on a match for the good-as-gold son, a trait made infamous in countless saas-bahu soaps. So while women may have reached the moon, the roles they must play as wives remain morally ridden in strict ethical codes, writ in stone by other women. 

The Pihu Diary: Strength of a Woman

Pihu is growing up to be a little lady, with a deep sense of curiosity which ends up in a barrage of questions about all kinds of things. “What happens when you mix green and yellow?” “Why is red and orange not a good combination?” “How does sound come out of a phone?” “Who made strawberry jam?” “Why does the sun shine so hard and burn my skin?” “Why did my friend say keeping secrets is bad?” Arrrgh….now you know. The number of questions is directly proportional to the amount of time Pihu is at home, so come term holidays, and that number sure sprouts in to the beanstalk Jack ended up climbing. 

She is also becoming a very decisive woman. “I don’t want to have babies ever because it will hurt so much,” she says. So that day when she walked in to the bedroom from school and showed me a bruise on her elbow, I asked, “What happened?” After some initial hesitation, she confessed, “Louis from Year 1 pushed me to the ground saying, girls are weak and boys are strong.” Although my first instinct was yell curses at poor Louis who didn’t know better and go ask the teachers exactly what was happening in school that he got away with this kind of behaviour, I stalled. I pulled Pihu gently to me, gave her a cuddle and then told her this in stead, “Well the next time Louis says that and comes to push you, you hold up your hand, look him straight in the eyes and tell him, 'If God didn’t make women stronger, how come they are ones who give birth to babies? Have you any idea how much that hurts but how come Daddies don’t do that? Girls are stronger than you think, much stronger than boys in many ways'.” I actually put a smile on her face and she went on to repeat the whole thing line by line so she wouldn’t forget her response next time.

It is interesting what children can discover from parents as they grow older so I increasingly feel the pressure of saying the right thing when she is in conflict and looking for answers. I read somewhere that children learn from what their parents are, not what they try to teach them. So a lot of the learning is actually happening when you are not even trying to teach anything. Some of it is imbibed, some of it is picked up along the way through how we stand up for ourselves, our opinions, what we choose to support, what we don’t and what we say and what we don’t. A simple example is how a child will call his mother names and swear at the top of his voice when things don’t go his way because that’s what he has seen his dad do in frustration. I sure don’t want Pihu to hate men but she should be able to develop a strong personality, one that is formidable and attractive enough for people to admire and respect from a distance and love and treasure when they come close. 

Incidentally, I have been watching a few very excellent representations of female characters through popular TV fiction on Netflix these days. The smorgasbord of drama across geographies and cultures that we now have at our disposal thanks to OTT content has made me realise one thing, there is so much in common between the situations that women face in different countries, the battles that they have to fight for their status and position, the expectations that they have to match up to, to prove their worth and finally, the sacrifices they have to make for the ones they love. One such story made up of charismatic women was ‘Gran Hotel’, the Spanish saga about a heritage hotel in the scenic sea-swept shore of Cantaloa run by a ruthless matriarch who has low tolerance for mistakes and no patience for people who don’t do her bidding. Doña Teresa is equally cruel as she is conniving, however you cannot help but admire her resilience in the face of stronger evil and her loyalty towards the one goal of keeping the family hotel under the Alarcón name. Giving her no respite from ruining the family name and unearthing all its secrets, is her daughter, in whom she meets her match when it comes to taking a task to its fruition and in Alicia’s case, meting out justice where it is deserved, even if it means risking her family’s name in the process. It is refreshing and charming to see how women in the same family are constantly pitted against each other in a plot that has men in supporting roles, merely for humour, decoration or moving the story forward. It is also moving how the decisions of the women in the family finally allow for the conflict to reach resolution and the secrets to be buried, without further ado. 

In another bustling corner of the world in the city of Memphis, is the Greenleaf family from the eponymous series, also running on Netflix, where the Bishop’s wife, Mae Greenleaf is trying hard to steer the Calvary ship forward — Calvary being a church that the family has raised up from the ground for a shoal of Black believers who worship the Christian faith, albeit their style and a dash of Gospel music. Plurality, inclusivity and diversity are not yet celebrated here and there is a clear divide between Blacks and the fairer race, that is not only acknowledged but celebrated. That the Greenleaf family is affluent and dripping in wealth, exuberant in luxuries from Chanel and Tiffany, prospering within the confines of their lakeside estate and have money to splurge on everything they covet, are facts they do not shy away from or putting up on display. A far cry from what we see of the Black community or are made to see more often. This is a powerful depiction of what power and wealth can eventually do to the religious roots of a deep-seated pious family. At the end of the day, even priests or pastors are not immune to vices and the seven deadly sins affect even the most astute of us human beings. It is then up to Grace Greenleaf, a character essayed beautifully by Merle Dendridge to bring her family to the pulpit of justice and seek mercy and redemption at the altar of their dying faith in the family name and its ability to overcome its dark past. Again, we see how the mother-daughter duel can raise the hackles of a family on its tether, and how sometimes you don’t have to look for your strongest adversary outside, sometimes it could be end up being someone at home. Domestic strife, power struggle, cash embezzlement, mysterious murders, pedophilia, rape, adultery, divorce and teenage angst are all woven in to five seasons of Greenleaf, setting off with Grace arriving at the family estate to mourn her sister Faith’s death and ending up with her at the crossroads of a future within or without her family. I couldn’t help but reflect on the story’s literary leaning, in terms of the way it is directed from start to finish as well as Grace’s mother Mae Greenleaf’s character displays strong shades of Ma Joad from Grapes of Wrath. Produced by Oprah Winfrey and with the lady playing an important character in the story, this is an unmissable series for those who dig entertainment with thought-provoking questions for takeaway. 

It is simply delightful to see women making independent decisions and winning their freedom from the grasp of their own mistakes, and not those enforced upon them by the men around them. It makes me wonder about how long before we actually see regular televised Indian fiction with women wielding the baton in a similar fashion, moving the narrative about feminist fiction forward, not stumped by the conventional idea of what women want and how they should be. 

Coming back to Pihu, as she matures in her understanding of the sexes and the difference between the two, she is developing an acute understanding of what she expects from the other sex. Here is what I have gathered so far from our numerous conversations. So a boy is qualified to play with her only if a) he is kind, b) he is respectful c) he does not say mean things to girls d) he does not show his bum-bum in public e) he is funny f) and does not dig his nose in public. Rather ambitious but well, one can always hope.

I think that’s almost an adult’s description for a life partner! So far so good.

The Pihu Diary: Keeping up with the Expectations

If you have a child way past preschool which means you are very much into the hustle and bustle of motherhood, you’d like to think you have at least mastered some of the elements that make up the art of good parenting. Let’s face it: we live in a world where mothers are no longer just that and are probably juggling multiple roles as a seasoned professional, caretaker to elderly parents, super-efficient homemaker and a highly supportive wife to an equally multitasking husband. This means we are 24/7 at the mercy of a practical formula where work has to be distributed, delegated and disciplined. Pardon the alliteration but we do not live in an ideal world and Murphy’s law almost always swings positive in a mother’s case. So if your child is so much as sniffling, chances are she will come up with a fever the next day and you will bunk work because she is at home. If you have that important meeting the next morning, of course your husband will not be able to drop the children to school that very day and just when you want to give some time to your child’s study before dinner, your food processor will choose to call it a day.

If our lives weren’t so challenging by themselves, we have a cluster of people surrounding us who obviously always mean well but have a bundle of expectations to saddle on to our already bending backs. Here are my most popular gems:

So have you enrolled your child in gymnastics, aerobics, contemporary/classical dance, foreign language classes, swimming, singing, football, cricket, no? And God forbid if you do in all of them, you are a compulsive pushy parent who is crushing her child under the weight of all that ambition, some of them means you are never doing enough and if you don’t do any, you might as well disqualify yourself as an able parent.

Once you have done the good deed of signing up your child in a respectable size of extracurricular activities, who is going to drive her around? Of course, you darling. So if you don’t know your accelerator from your gear, which century were you born in mate?

Birthdays, how can we forget this one. So if you haven’t planned a theme party to go with the celebrations, what were you thinking and does that mean you can’t afford one or you just don’t care enough to know what your child’s favourite animation character is? Duh, loser.

And while we are on birthdays, are you one of those negligent and couldn’t-care-less lazy mommies who buy cake from a bakery for their child’s birthday? So basically your daughter’s cake isn’t homemade? Whaaaat? No baking skills? Awww, that poor, poor baby! Eating cookie-cutter, branded, baked, fluffed up, inorganic trash in the name of a cake.

Are you bilingual? Because by the time your child can say “hungry” she better know how to say it in both languages and whatever else they are teaching in school. And if you have multilingual roots as parents, hahahaha! Multiply that by 3,4….and I pity you. That is why you should have just stuck to your roots and married within your religion, community and linguistic borders like Molly Aunty suggested.

The most popular as my mommy pals suggest is checking on milestones. This one is of course centuries old. So if your child hasn’t started teething, been toilet trained and been able to recite the national anthem by 3, are you sure you took enough vitamins and almonds and did the right breathing exercises or whatever it takes to achieve above-mentioned feats?

And before I end this tirade, how can I end this post without mentioning the Malaika Aroras, Kareena Kapoors, Jessica Albas and Beyonces of the world. Yes, they all have kids and look at those hour-glass figures my friend. Never mind if you never had it even before motherhood. That love handle in the middle and those thunder thighs aren’t really going well with the shift dress that is rebelling against your bottom post childbirth. So if you haven’t found the ‘fat exit’ button in good old power yoga, zany zumba or the gym, well, what are you waiting for- the next lunar eclipse?

I know, I am back to my ranting ways but hey, don’t blame me. I am a full-time mother in COVID-19 times, home-schooling a child who believes I can play the role of a full-time teacher apart from all the other things I am trying hard to keep up with. Of course, the teachers have a swell job at this time, enjoying a pupil-free stint while we scramble to ensure our kids don’t lose a precious year. Arrrgh fine. I know no one wished this on themselves but how about reducing the syllabus by half considering that parents cannot be teachers and considering teachers are often parents themselves? Oh wait…I just realised my child is in kindergarten. Oh-my-God.

The Pihu Diary: Introducing the Part-time Permanent Parent

Do you have a full-time job? Do you have children? Do they go to child-care for more than four days a week? Are you able to spend a full 24/7 period with your child only on weekends? Congratulations! You have just won a job to become a Part-time Permanent Parent!

What this means is that your child obviously belongs to you and stays with you and hence you are his permanent guardian and sponsor. However, this also means during the active hours of the day (between 7 am to 7 pm) your child is mostly in the care of a person who is not related to him and is most likely a professional caregiver. Usually this means that the child is bonding with this person and is mostly going to pick up his early learning when it comes to his mental, emotional, physical, verbal and social development from this person/these people. Considering this is a paid service that the professional caregiver is offering to your child, there are chances the person will have a very mechanical, enforced, regimented and disciplined approach to your child’s nurturing. The care given will be holistic and healthy in most cases but will also be impersonal and standardised leaving very little room for customised attention or approach since each child is different.

No matter how advanced and altruistic a childcare service is, it has the humongous task of nurturing your child multiplied by 22 (for children of preschool age for example). Imagine where you can barely handle one or two of your own, a maximum of two-three professional caregivers are saddled with the responsibility of supervising and caring for over 20 such children. How much individual attention can therefore be expected to be given to each child? How much time do you think will be invested in understanding and responding to each child’s needs? And how far do you think the child will be able to solidify his bond with that caregiver given that he will move up a class every year and will be introduced to new people every time this happens?

So who’s side am I on: having been on both sides of the road I now know what it feels like being a parent with a child in daycare and how it is for professional caregivers who take care of my child at daycare. In my studies in Early Childhood Education and Care, I have seen all kinds of parents and teachers and can vouch for the fact that mostly, both parties have the child’s best interests in mind when they keep children in daycare. However, when children as vulnerable as 6 months of age are sent to childcare, it means we are placing them in an environment that is not natural to their upbringing. It is an environment where at least 4 others of their age will be vying for the caregiver’s attention and children can be a dollop of disaster waiting to happen if neglected for even a minute. I empathise with every caregiver who is therefore responsible for children in daycare. Knowing that they can never take the place of a parent in the child’s eyes, they still have to relentlessly pursue the role of being a parent/teacher/caregiver in the child’s life, for a significant period of time knowing that the child may never recognise them when they grow up. It is a job which can influence and change a child’s personality for the better or worse but one that is barely acknowledged by those who have built this system or the ones who benefit from it. So pardon them if this is a thankless job they are clinically pursuing most of the time.

On the other hand, parents and especially mothers these days are bound by their educational qualifications, professional aspirations, economic circumstances, social expectations and a liberal government who wants more taxpayers to go out there and do a job. We women take it upon ourselves to balance the heavy weight of running the house as well as the workplace, uncompromising as both may be in their demands of us. Most of us resent the role but also know there is no other way of doing it. Feminists would have us believe that we are not justifying our identity if we do not share the world stage with men and conventional wisdom will not leave us in peace until we ensure our children’s comfort and wellbeing. So I am not here to judge a parent who is trying to pull all the strings at the same time and deflate her efforts at being worthless if she is not a completely devoted mother. My earlier barrage of questions however is just a way to make us realise that this is not an ideal situation that we have carved for our children and they are most likely the innocent recipients of this modernised urban caregiving system.

Most children from the time they are born will always want to spend more time with their parents than in childcare and the best place where a child from 6 months to 2 years belongs is home. A childcare service simply tries to be the best alternative to home but can never replace it. A woman who therefore chooses to stay at home and look after her child is simply fulfilling her responsibility as a parent because she consciously chose that role for herself. There should be no guilt or demand made to force herself to go out and work. She should have the freedom of choice to decide which role she prefers to take on without being judged. As an educated woman who has been a working professional for the best years of her life, I am often questioned for taking a three-year break from it all to take care of my child. This came from well-meaning relatives, neighbours, friends, ex-colleagues and even those who interviewed me for a job after I wished to get back.

In all of this, we should not forget that the child we bring in to this world is not a puppet and deserves more respect and worth than what a part-time, permanent parent can afford. We are already robbing that child of his time at home and with us when we send him to childcare. Being brought up in a home where a mother figure was a constant and the rock around which the whole house functioned smoothly has made me realise how important it is to give a wholesome, personalised and unconditionally supported upbringing to one’s child. When we choose to not give a child that time and support, we already ‘compromise’ his upbringing and question his worth. This puts additional responsibility on us to shine as the permanent parent figure in whatever little time we spend with the child. So don’t hesitate to ask yourself, “Am I doing enough for the child simply by spending heaps of money on him and providing him all the material comforts of the world- read expensive holidays, a shop’s load of toys and splurging on Sunday treats, clothes and extra-curricular classes? How often do I hold the child and comfort him? How often do I sit and enjoy some interactive activity with him? How many times do I have a conversation with him, yes, even when he is an infant? How many times do I put him to sleep holding his hand long after he has closed his eyes? How many times do I motivate him to get up and try again when he fails at something? How often do I sit or lie down in the grass at the park with him and look up at the sky?”

As a parent, whether full-time or part-time, we owe our children much more because they deserve it and because we chose to bring them in to this world.

If your child puts his arms around you to say,

“I love you, you make my day,”

toast yourself with a glass of wine

because it means, you are doing just fine. 

The Auscillating Indian: Why you need to hold your ‘Mother’ Tongue!

The fun part about moving to a new country is how you suddenly seem to be thrown in to a multicultural melting pot. So you are neighbour to a Chinese person, your colleagues are Australian, Japanese, Korean, Phillipino, Samoan, British and Bangladeshi, while you can dig in to a new cuisine every time you hit the restaurants with authentic chefs dishing up a recipe with flair. This often brings your language abilities to the test because here it’s not about speaking English fluently but also understanding accents, observing cultural sensitivity and closing the gaps in communication with people for whom English might be a second language. I find it amusing how we Indians are always so keen to prove our English language speaking skills to every foreigner we meet when in countries like Germany and France, locals will probably snub you for speaking in English and not their native language. Unlike people from other nationalities, we don’t take enough pride in mastering our identity and are a bit too eager to embrace the ‘western’. Alas, we have paid a very high price for this mass adoption.

In spite of Indians speaking in 19,500 languages and dialects as mother tongues, the emphasis on English as the language of administration, educational progress and professional, economic and social status, has meant that we have largely cold-shouldered our origins. We millennials can barely decipher literature written in our mother tongues anymore, most parents and children insist on speaking English at home meaning that even verbal language skills are slowly becoming defunct. Precisely the reason I have immense respect for those who are genuinely making an effort to preserve their rich linguistic heritage through cinema, art, culture, heirlooms, literature and education. I remember being taunted for taking up Hindi and not opting for the more sophisticated French as a second language option in college at St.Xavier’s, Mumbai. I admire people who speak a foreign language but often, it becomes a criterion for judging how ‘cool’ or ‘accomplished’ you are. In my office in Delhi, there were two distinct groups that hung out together, the English-speaking and the non-English speaking ones. I once invited people from both groups to a party at my place and it was hilarious how they all ended up drunk and dancing to cheesy Hindi item numbers and thumping Bhangra beats together! So if language can tear people apart, it also has the power to bring people together.

If I were to claim I am a linguistic expert in Maithili you’d wonder which planet I am from. Maithili, what’s that again? Thankfully, my parents insisted on us speaking in our native languages at home so my sister and me were already speaking two languages before we joined kindergarten. When my cousin brother in Nagpur, Maharashtra graduated in Pali literature, no one in the family raised an eyebrow. So yes, as a mother it is imperative that I pass on the wealth of language diversity in my family to my children, in the hope that they can carry on the tradition.

Here in Australia, when someone generally comments on how much language diversity he sees in my motherland, it makes me proud but also reminds me with a sense of guilt how I stutter every time I have to read the Bengali script even though it’s my mother tongue. Or how my Marathi has got stilted ever since I moved up to north India after marriage, being out of touch with people who speak it every day. And when it comes to writing in these languages? I am sorry, is that even needed these days?

Truth be told, I love English, a passion developed and nurtured through reading countless books in the language since I learnt to read. Blame it on my English-medium ‘Convent upbringing’ but I went on to graduate in English literature and realised very early in the day that, even my thoughts originate in the language. It has helped me find my voice in the professional sphere of journalism today and I will be eternally grateful to it for ensuring that I can seamlessly carry forward my skills to any English-speaking country.

Does this mean I wave goodbye to my roots? NO! We can still be Indian and very much preserve our traditions while on foreign shores. Bilingual citizens are more proficient and score higher on intellect, acceptance of diversity in the workplace and communication. I continue to devour films in all regional Indian languages, spreading the net to encompass songs that I love irrespective of what language they are worded in. As an NRI, I regularly attend multicultural events, speak to fellow Indians in native languages and insist on correcting my child’s pronunciation every time she may stutter on a word.

Up on my wish list is learning one more Indian and one foreign language, may be even post retirement as learning a new language is fodder for the brain and a way of exercising those grey cells. Why stop at speaking four, reading and writing in three and listening to twelve? Thanks to my linguistic skills, I can speak to a Bangladeshi in Bengali and converse with a North Indian in Hindi even in a foreign land. It cements your relations by bringing you closer to other people, while sharing an immediate fellowship, lending a whiff of intimacy and confidentiality to your banter. So next time you walk up to a person whose mother tongue you know you can speak, try replying back in the same. It won’t bring your economic or social status down a few notches, but it will win you more smiles, warmth and genuine friendships than you may realise.