The Roots that count

-The Roots that Count-

As a kid, I'd be fascinated by the pictures of the spick-&-span streets and everything to do with the "foreign lands" as I called them. Upon landing on that foreign soil as an adult, the glossy picture I painted as a kid held true when it came to the transport system, infrastructure & the technology abroad. Life was rosy indeed on the streets but the thorny bit at home balanced it out.

It was a hard yet a very humbling realization that I was to be my own housekeeper & cook. More so, during my days on the student campus where I had to juggle studies, assignments, lectures, cooking, cleaning, dishes & laundry and the 9 hour commute to and fro from London every weekend to be with my husband. That's when the Mumbaikar in me kicked in, thanks to the daily struggle to keep up with the rat-race.

It also dawned on me that as compared to living abroad, I led a similar middle-class routine yet a lot more luxurious life at home in India. Just like me, the British students held their own rosy image of the homelife in India. Househelp is a very foreign & fascinating concept to them and we Indians were often called "lucky buggers" for having been brought up so comfortably, for not being "kicked out" at 18 and asked to earn our own tuition & upkeep. That's when I realized how truly blessed I've been to have such dynamic roots of a secured, comfortable homelife, my ever-loving folks and a fighting spirit honed by the twists thrown my way by the ever-bustling streets of Mumbai, day in, day out.

Then I came across this amusing Desi lot, and I'm exclusively referring to the ones who have been brought up & educated throughout in India. They'd start speaking Hindi & Marathi in British/American accent; some of them would stop speaking their mothertongue altogether within an year of staying abroad. It goes without saying that views change with age & experience but what I mostly see in case of NRIs is a biased take on this matter. They'd criticize everything about the life or system back home but none of them would speak of the countless job rejections they faced abroad, about how they had to jump through the hoops of the system and pay through their noses to hold onto their American or British visas by the skin of their teeth. It's really quite sad to see them criticize their own roots all the time with no room for any praise. Because hey, when the London underground or the Manhattan subway collapses, it's my Bambaiyya instincts that click in place to find the fastest alternative routes. The life back home is so deeply ingrained that I still anticipate, rush and beat people to a queue at any kiosk or a ticket counter. When a crisis strikes, I have my instincts and my folks back home to count on.

Think before you present a half-painted, glamorous picture to your friends back home, just for the sake of showing how your life abroad has an edge over theirs. They deserve to know that their life back home offers much better things than yours does as well- the luxuries at home, the cheap laundry service, a lively society, food/grocery options around every corner, the closely knit family who has their backs and what not. Besides, you never know when a natural or political crisis might strike. Think before you feel embarrassed of your own roots, because mind you, when a disaster uproots your world, it's your roots that count.

Unboxing the Idiot Box

Have you ever thought of throwing your phone (the new age idiot box) and yourself off the grid for a while? After having tried it for a while, here goes the liberating yet vicious cycle:

When the world becomes a small place but you don't let it shrink to the point of developing a tunnel vision.

When the information at your fingertips isn't as enriching as the knowledge earned through exploring.

When your bucket list runs deeper than a checklist.

When the surroundings hold more gravity than 4G.

When you'd rather check it out than check-in.

When your senses capture more than your camera lens.

When a sight stays whole & vivid in your mind despite the filters.

When the experience makes you more eloquent or more speechless than hash-tags.

When you tap your fingers more to the rhythm of the world than on the screen.

When a paperback adds more dimensions to the reading experience, literally & figuratively.

When laughing isn't as passively mute & short as its acronyms.

When the scope of 'thinking out of the box' is not reduced to the one attached to your hand.

When you don't feel handicapped without that extra "limb".

When that "limb" gone malfunctioning doesn't throw your world into chaos.

When the very thought of its absence during a crisis makes you question your smartness for leaving behind the idiot box in this big, bad world.

And that's when you revert to the small world.

Cheers,
An enslaved hypocrite who just expressed it all through that very idiot box

Animals on Social Media (Part-3)

-The protesters-

Animals at the zoos wish that they had more restricted profile views & privacy settings because they don't want humans stumbling across their profiles and "reporting abuse" anymore.

The wild cat family is outraged that while being an endangered lot, they are multiplying by the dozen on snapchat.

The social butterflies wish the facebook memory feature could accommodate their short life and function in terms of days & months.

-The wanderers-

Bat: Damn GPS and check-ins. Never thought humans would catch on with our tracking ability with such 'sound' features.

Cheetah: I disable my location services on a hunt. Wouldn't want to give myself away to my prey because of a stupid check-in!

Bear: And those humans talk big about going into hibernation. Ask me!

Eagle updated his travel blog.
Snail: Recommend some places within a yard damn it!
Eagle: Why don't you just get onto your device, switch off the internet and slide along the map? You'd at least make it that way.

Dog: To hell with wireless & GPS! First I lose my trees, and now my poles & signposts.

Birds: We feel it more pal. Try being grounded in the cities.

-The selfie brigade-

Octopus: I'm the selfie king. Multiple angles, multiple devices, you name it.

Elephant: My options are quite 'truncated' as compared to you.

Frog: Talk about being literally tongue-tied while taking a selfie.

Tyrannosaurus rex: Thank goodness for selfie sticks!

Chameleon: And photoshop too! At last, I can make myself stand out.

Panda & Zebra: Amen to that & Prisma!

Snake: Damn you all!

Anaconda: Stop throwing a 'hissy' fit and try cover photos mate. I can finally flaunt my long, dark & handsome self, cheers to panoramas!

Cobra: Thanks for the recommendation buddy! Just uploaded a cover pic of mine with my hood poised over a mongoose as my profile pic. Makes me look so savage!

Owl: Who needs those 360* photo apps when I can work that with my head?

Duck: Speak for yourself; I'm on a sabbatical from selfies. The duck-face is so cliché.

-The online shoppers & reviewers-

Coyote's review for Acme products:
Not worth a star! 100% guarantee of trapping the roadrunner?! Yeah, right. Would have given a good rating if I were a masochist.

The Grasshopper: Hail Amazon prime. Why toil like those ants when winter's stock is just a click away?
Ants: You'd understand only if you looked up fitness apps & trackers, lazybum!

The chicken finally found the purpose behind crossing the road and the answer to the chicken-&-egg problem on Quora & Fauna.

-The workaholics-

Ant: Our enterprise rocks at team-work. Not to mention the connections on linkedin.

Bee: Good for you. The humans have made us go through so many mergers & acquisitions. They even use the connection to the Queen left, right & centre. Talk about twisted nepotism!

Lion: More than connections, it's raining endorsements from the hyenas for my hunting skills. What a sly pack!

Kangaroo: I just offered them the deliveroo services- our pockets at their disposal.

Crow: Mine is the most underrated profile on linkedin. So much for doing my bit for the environment! No connections, no endorsements or recommendations whatsoever, that too after being such a great nanny to those selfish cuckoos!

Meanwhile, the fish upgraded to linkedin premium to stay ahead of the corporate sharks in the bigger ponds.

-The serial daters-

Why limit the mating to a season when there's Tinder?

Cheers,
Just another social animal

To all the Haughty Grammar Nazis & the Proud Engineers

I'm quite ashamed to say that as a judgemental brat, I took to looking down on non-scientific fields because of being into engineering and going grammar nazi on people for a while there. Thanks to several people & incidents over the years, I went from questioning that arrogant attitude, through cringing at its recollection, to sighing at the sight of many teenagers and adults alike rampantly shaming someone's intellect based on their English grammar, scoresheets or domain.

The rude awakening began one fine day when I was cribbing about the fat engineering text books I had to go through (while being secretly proud about it) and saw a medical student silently juggling a couple of gargantuan books in a corner, with no time to even be smug about it. Suffice it to say that going by my low grades during that year, had I been into medicine, I would've had an year drop for sure.

Then came along peers who couldn't string a proper statement together in English, which remarkably affected their scores as well. When I finally got the hang of their lingo, they blew my perception right out of the water. Not to mention that some of these brilliant minds were fluent in more than 5 languages. If at all, it was them who had more right than anyone else to look down their linguistic noses at people who knew barely a couple of languages besides English. But then they were rational enough to not treat their own language as the be all and end all.

Mingling with people of different nationalities was an eye-opening experience where I got to learn about fields beyond the glorified Indian educational quartet of engineering, medicine, CA & architecture. More than that, it was humbling to witness their genuine interest in, and most of all, respect for all fields alike.

There's nothing wrong with taking pride in your grades, domain or language, but think before looking down on someone through your gradient, field-distorted, grammar-tinted glasses. There are panoramic personalities out there that you wouldn't want to slip past your thumbnail of a vision.

Disclaimer: The Grammar Nazi bit is solely for the arrogant lot, not the well-meaning ones.

iHad it all!

iHad it all!

I came across this old animated film aired on Doordarshan and it brought back a flood of wonderful memories associated with it! Like how my mom would painstakingly record these cartoons for us. Then dad would spend a remarkable amount of time setting up the sprawling jumble of wires and we would wait with bated breaths for the VCR to function. We went through that routine every time we had a cartoon session with cousins & friends. We wore those video cassettes out to the extent that my parents patiently dislodged & revived the jammed tape for us, n number of times!

And how we would enjoy listening to the radio every dawn when mom would simultaneously tune both the antenna and my head while braiding my hair for school. Or listening to records on dad's gramophone with relish, entranced by the inward slide of the stylus on the disc! I ought to appreciate these old devices as well, for so openly offering insight into their functioning, stirring up curiosity in our young minds and satisfying it as effortlessly. Unlike the modern gadgets, rather contraptions under a compact & deceivingly simple exterior, that if something goes wrong with their functioning, kids are robbed of bonding over let's-figure-out-&-fix-it sessions with their fathers. Touch-screens on the outside, yet losing touch with what's going on on the inside!

It definitely is a lot more convenient for kids to catch this stuff on tablets & phones today and I do appreciate that. But my parents' ever enthusiastic involvement & efforts along with these curiosity-inducing old devices made the experience wholesome and way sweeter for me. So what if we didn't have touch-screens back then? What I had as a kid was the REAL touch. iHad it all..