I start blogging in April 2005. That makes it 8 years and almost 1500 blogs. It all started like this. It must have been circa 2003 when I realised that the proverbial ‘pockets’ I easily dug into whenever    extra funds were needed were emptying at the speed of light or even faster. All the people one knew had been tapped and thus it was time to seek new pastures. At that time I was slowly discovering the magical word of the world wide web and it must have been around then that the first pwhy website went on line. Actually 2003 was quite a fateful year. It was the year when Utpal fell into the boiling cauldron and entered our lives; when two of our creche children died in strange circumstances and we discovered the apathy of the police who never wanted to register a case; when we were successful in raising funds for Raju’s open heart surgery. It was also the year when we were at the top of our page 3 days and the darling of many who organised stunning evenings and balls to help us raise funds. It was also a time when we were at the height of our fairy tale existence. It was also at that time that someone suggested I join a social network called Ryze. I must confess that I had a tough time building my page and it looked very puerile. But I managed to get quite a few contacts and thus began the pwhy network that is so precious to us today. We had a website that was not quite what I would have liked and I realised to my horror what the cost of maintaining would be. I had 2 options: not to have a site at all – not really an option -, or learn how to maintain it myself. I cannot remember how many nights it took to learn a new language – HTML – but I did. The other things I began doing was sending individual emails to all the people I knew. I had not yet discovered mass mailing or just BCC option. That is when a kind person – God bless him – suggested I start a blog. It would change my life forever.

It was a hesitant beginning but I had a forum where I could share the life of pwhy, the stories of our kids, the little things that happened everyday. I thought of it like a sea captain’s logbook that would preserve the chronicles of pwhy. True it started being just that but somehow mutated almost insidiously into a record of happenings in India viewed through a different prism: that of someone passionately in love with her country and often at a loss in comprehending the stark inequalities between rich and poor, the hidden agendas and corrupt games of the powers that be, the dignified and touching survival modes of the poor. The project why stories took on a larger meaning and I found myself writing about issues I felt important. The tone became harsher, the criticism more acerbic and the mood somber.

Simply making a difference in the lives of the hundreds and more children who came to project why was not enough. True it was important as it was tangible and thus valorising but I felt the need to add my voice to those of others fighting for causes I empathised with. And slowly the fairy tale like stories of project why became far and few. There were more important issues to address.

For me this became a platform to share my thoughts, my anger, my distress, my anguish, my horror and my opinions to aberrations that seemed more the rule than the exception. I wanted to be heard.

In 2009 I began writing my second book. This one was about the project why story. Once I again I opted to write it in the form of letters to a child and entitled it Dear Popples II. The bye line was ‘then project why story’. I wrote about 100 pages without any problem in a very short time. And then one day I simply could not continue. The story stopped circa 2004. It was a strange writer’s block that refused to go. I tried many times to pick up the threads but to no avail. I decided to let it be till the time was right.

It is only a few weeks back that I found myself opening the abandoned file and reread what I had written and see if I could move on or if not at least figure out what had happened. It took me some time to realise that my pen had stopped at what I call the fairy tale years and that somehow the approach that seemed right for the first 100 pages did not and would not work for the remainder of the story. The bye line could not be ‘the project why story’ but had to become something like ‘India song 20??-2013. I had two choices either rewrite the whole book or make it in two parts. I opted for the later as only this way will the reader fully appreciate the dynamic and organic nature of project why but also share the changes such an experience has on a human soul. For I cannot shy from the fact that I am in no way the same person I was when it all began. Have I changed for the better? I do not know. I do miss the naive and trusting being I was then and something do not like the bitter and splenetic woman I sometimes seem to have become. Maybe the truth lies in between the two.

Even though I will have to sneak time to write the book, I will continue to blog, as blogging is an immense catharsis for me and I need to rant and rave or else I would blow a fuse, but I what I would really like is people to react to what I write. Sadly my 1500 blogs have only 800 comments!

It is not always easy to pass on the mantle and yet that is what I have been trying to do for some time. The reasons are many: creaking bons and dwindling eyesight reminding one that age is catching on; the one woman show syndrome which may look attractive and inspiring but makes the entire structure rather shaky and fragile, and above all the seemingly forgotten mission that set the ball rolling: empowering people to keep the show on the road. I have been making myself as scarce as possible even though I must admit I more than anyone else miss my earlier persona and role. However and no matter what anyone else says, the experience has been positive as the project had been running like a clock work orange. project why needs another face, and the one I would like to project is that of my A team: namely Rani, Dharmendra and Shamika. Somehow I feel that as a crew they encompass most the qualities I have. I know that there is still the fundraising issue but given time I know that they have the ability to overcome the challenge in their own way.

This morning the children had to perform in front of a large group of expat spouses in a very posh hotel and the performance had to be preceded by the much dreaded speech. I must say that Rani made a wow speech in front of the same group at their Annual meeting some weeks back. So I had decided to let them go without me and repeat the performance. Yesterday I could see that the girls wanted to say something but did quite get to it. I stood my ground and repeated that I was not planning to go as I had other things to do. Imagine my surprise when I switched on my computer this morning and found this message: The office does not feel the same without you in it! You are our support, our strength and our energy! We still are very raw in doing stuff! We get very inspired by you. You are a great mother and a wonderful boss! We are very nervous about the event tomorrow  and don’t want any thing to go wrong. I was touched and a tad  cross at the same time. There I was trying to make them stand on their feet and gain confidence.

I was funny that my daughter chose to send me an email from her room within the same house. I guess this is modern communication that I still have to get used to.

I read the message a few times and realised that I had to act in the right way, and the right way at this point was to accept to go with them and hold their hands. The game of passing the mantle has to go through many twists and turns, and you have to play by the rules or else everything may crumble like a house of cards. I also realised that though my A team was doing great, they still needed to be helped and I saw my role like the prompter on a theatre stage: remain invisible but be there when you are needed.

I will be there till I am needed to make sure that the show goes on but I know that the day will come when my team will have the ability to write their own lines and perform them with aplomb.

Story telling has been part of the lore of probably every civilisation that has existed in this world. Be it fairy tales, mythological narratives, myths or just stories, this tradition played a major role in forming minds and instilling values. I had forgotten how much I owed to this wonderful art. I guess much of who I am today is due to the myriad of stories I heard and read from the time I was a toddler. Why am I talking of storytelling today you may wonder? As you may be knowing Utpal has been going to a therapist for the past 2 years. The child was unable to deal with all that befell him starting with the disappearance of his mother one fine morning, to the sequels of all the violence he has witnessed from the time he was born. Suffering third degree burns when we was just a baby, dealing with the mood swings and dysfunctional life of his alcoholic parents, hearing the jeers of people around him about the identity of his father; sleeping hungry when the mom forgot to cook or was too drunk to do so. You name it, he experienced it.

When things went out of hand he was packed to a boarding school. He was just 4. We had no option, or so we thought. But today when I look at my 4+ grandson I feel a sense of guilt at not having realised that Utpal was still a bay when I packed him off. Hope he will forgive me when time comes. You understand why he needed therapy as no one, even less a child, can process all that happened to him without help.

Sorry for this aparte. It was just to put things in context.

During his last session, the therapist asked to see me. She suggested that I read him moral stories during the summer break as that would help him learn values. I pondered over this for a long time and realised that what she said what actually a far bigger issue than that of little Popples. In today’s day and age there are no more storytellers. When we were young our grandmothers or grandaunts use to take time to tell us stories. Our parents often read us bedtime stories. And when we started reading, we read stories. Schools had moral studies as a compulsory subject and we thus heard moral stories. Each story planted a seed in our minds. That seed many not have germinated on the day it was planted, but somehow sprouted at the right time, when a situation occurred when we needed to take a decision. It helped us take the right decision, even if it was not the preferred one.

Today children live in nuclear families with parents who are not storytellers. Television and Internet have replaced reading time and schools have done away with moral study altogether. This happens across the board, be it with rich or poor children with a slight difference: the rich child may see a programme he likes while the poor child has to see the inane TV serials his family likes. And even if you try and look with the largest loupe you can find, there are scant lessons to be learnt in the violent cartoons or silly serials. It is time we restored the art of storytelling if we want our children to become caring and honest humans. But that is no easy task.

The news is replete with scams, corruption, rape, violence and more. The lessons we are telling our kids is that it is fine to lie, you can get away with murder, money is the only goal you need have. I am horrified at the number of expensive gadgets rich children have. This is the preferred way of parents who are busy making money to get rid of the guilt they might feel for the scant time they spend with their kids. And somehow children equate reading to a boring pastime and hence are just fed what the visual media gives them.

True there are parents who walk the less travelled road but they are far and few and cannot make the difference we want. Everyone is complaining about the rise in crime graph but this is bound to happen with the completely valueless education we are giving to our children both within the homes and in schools. Moral study should be revived in schools as that is the best way to ensure that these lessons reach a large spectrum of children. But as always who will bell the cat!

Dear Mama

Today is Mother’s day! I do not know why there has to be a Mother’s day as for me every day is Mother’s day. You may have left me 23 years ago but there has not been a single day I have not remembered you. You have been with me every moment from the time I last held you on that fateful June day. You gave me the gift of life, the most precious gift anyone can offer, but you also showed me how to live the life you gave me. From the time I was a little girl, you took me by the hand and set out on a journey that has not ended even when you left this world. You live in every breath I take. True some memories have yellowed faded like the this picture has. I sometimes need to ferret in the umpteen boxes of photographs that lie in a corner of the house to recollect the less than four decades we shared in different corners of the world. There are the very professional pictures taken by photographers where you are always dressed to perfection, your hair in place, your sari impeccably draped and your beautiful smile ever present. But there are also the personal photographs, taken with a shaky hand and probably with the wrong settings. These are the true repository of our lives and somehow in most if not all of them, I find myself, be it as a baby, a toddler, a school going child or a rebellious teenager. No matter what you were photographing, your child had to be there. This discovery made me realise the extent of your love for me.

You are the one who wanted a battalion of children but got only one, as your son was taken from you even before you could hold him. No wonder then that you smothered me with your love. You had to make this one child worthy of your love. And that is not all. How can I forget that you are the one who were willing to accept life as an old maid rather than give birth to a child in a enslaved India. Your  incredible love for this land made sure that your child never forget the fact that she was first an Indian. Though we lived in faraway lands across the glove, you made sure my mother tongue would be Hindi. Your way was simple: you never spoke to me in any other language. I must have been 5 or 6 when I realised that you knew other languages. And talking of languages what an incredible woman you were!  You, a girl from a small town suddenly propelled into the international arena by virtue of the profession of the man you married and whose husband was steeped in French culture, learned French on the sly to be able to gift the man you loved a very special birthday present: the ability to speak the language he loved. You were truly to the manor born.

I fell in love with you the instant you first held me. That Mama was instinctive love. But I have a secret to share with you, and what better day than today, Mother’s day! I fell in love all over again with you after your left when I had the sagacity and maturity to understand what an incredible woman you were. I wish I could tell you that in person. I wish I could ask your forgiveness for the times I may have hurt you inadvertently. I realise today that everything I am or have achieved is because you were my mother. 

In the past decade or so, I have tried to walk a path that encompassed all that you held as true: your love for the land, your fight for women’s equality,  your passion for education, your compassion for the downtrodden, your belief that everything was possible if we had the courage to take the first step. I hope you are proud of me. 

I do not know why I feel your presence around me, urging to take a final look at my life, wanting me to dare to jump in the void without a parachute and see whether I have the wings needed to fly.

For you, I will take that final leap!

I love you mama

your daughter

anou

Today’s post is personal. Maybe it is because I am at this very instant faced with a challenge that requires me to take a decision I am weary of taking. I do not know if there is a translation for the french expression ‘ la spirale infernale’. The best would be a ‘vicious circle’ or maybe ‘downward spiral’. I feel like I am at the edge of a precipice and need to make the decision to jump or not. I did start by saying that this post was personal but realise now that nothing in my life is purely personal anymore. From the day I began my pwhy journey, I have been compelled to look beyond the obvious in more ways than one. Nothing is what it seems anymore. I have written many posts on the health and medical situation over the past few years. I have been privy to the state of medical care available to us Indians on both side of the spectrum and did not like what I saw. From quacks to super docs, it is all a matter of extorting as much money as possible from people who are at their most vulnerable. The Hippocratic Oath is well forgotten. Maybe one should revisit it.

Today medicine is the new commercial kid on the block. Just like education! Hospitals look like 7* hotels if you are rich. A well rehearsed sales pitch awaits you when you go to seek help and you get drawn into that downward spiral even if you think you are well prepared. I have seen the game from far many a times. Playing on our desperation, we find ourselves drawn into a vortex from which there is no escape.

I have known many who fell in the trap and got landed with surgeries and other interventions that cost a bomb and were not really needed. The arrival of medical insurances has been a boon for such outrages. My own cousin brother was probably almost DOA, but kept alive and several surgeries performed on him before they finally declared him dead. You would have guessed that the bill amounted to the sum he was injured for!

In 1992 I too fell into this trap though at that time it was not an insurance issue. My father who was in no pain and in good health was taken to a ‘specialist’. This happened on the 30th of October. On the 29 of November he breathed his last. In between these 2 dates complex surgeries that should not have been performed on a 81 year old were done. In medical terms they were successful! I guess this was because he came out of them. For me they stripped him of his dignity. I still wonder if we would have been with us for some more time had we not visited the specialist. My mother refused all conventional treatment. She lived with her dignity intact.

I also know of people who did not fall for the carefully laid trap that includes dramatic scenes worthy of the best playwright. They sought a second opinion from the still honest medical practitioners who unfortunately work in hospitals where it is quasi impossible to get to them unless you have ‘contacts’. In all these cases, people who had been told that they were ‘about to die’ and needed ‘immediate bypass surgeries’ were simply advised a change of lifestyle. They are around and in good health! One of my relatives was kept on a ventilator after a car crash for one month. We all knew in our hearts that he would not make it but fell for the well written scenes that was enacted in front of us every day.

This is not about the poor! Theirs is another story. This is about you and me. And it is not about money.  One would be willing to spend the last dime in one’s pocket if we could get our loved one the right help. But the problem is that one knows that the advise you get is loaded! I am sure there are honest doctors but I do not know where to find them.

I am lucky to have a wonderful GP who is everything a doctor should be. For the past decades he has treated us of all our ailments and donned every specialist cap possible. I prayed that this would continue till we all breathed our last.

That was not to be. Yesterday I was asked to get a second opinion for someone I love the most. It is true that we have been battling with his health issues for some time and not being able to nail the problem. So my doctor asked for the dreaded ‘second’ opinion. Sadly he did not know anyone in the field and gave me some names and numbers. I do not know why, but I did not rush to fix an appointment and did some web search. The results were not great. I do not know why, instinct perhaps, but my mind zoomed back to what happened to papa. My blood ran cold. I found myself at the edge of the precipice that I know would take me down the dreaded spiral from where there is no way up.

What is strange is that though I know the game and thus should not fall for it, I also know that when it comes to a loved one your reason vanishes and your heart takes over. You are sure to make all  the wrong decisions.

I am now at the edge of the cliff, fighting to hold my balance. I will give myself some time to explore possible options and also take hold of myself and not act in haste. Love will have to be harnessed, and reason given all the space it needs. I will not jump in the void without a parachute but develop the wings I need to fly.

So help me God!

You are the best girl in the world said my little grandson when we connected on skype this morning. I guess for him it was simply because Nani gives in to every whim and fancy, buys all the cars and toys, allows extended TV time, bypasses mummy’s diktats and gorges one with chocolates and ice cream! I guess that is what nani’s are made for! But to me these eight words spoken my an innocent child were a much needed sign from the heaven’s above as for the past months now I have been feeling somewhat low and shaky. The reasons are many! First a slew of health issues in my family requiring practically all my time, if not as a poor ersatz of Ms Nightingale busy doling out medication, holding hands or dishing out dollops of TLC, then as wife and mother spending sleepless nights worrying. And to crown it all,  I am joining the bandwagon as it seems that my eyes have developed cataracts. This certainly added to my misery as my eyes are my most prized possessions as they are the ones enabling me to face all obstacles head on! I mean reading and writing are essential to my survival.

I must admit I have been wallowing in unnecessary self pity and once you take that road then it seems to be always a downward ride. I was spiralling out of control and was praying for a sign. And it came this morning through the words of my little Angel. His lovely words were the kick I needed to stop basking in my self pity and look at life with new eyes. The first things that struck me was the fact that though I had, by force majeure, been terribly absent from the pwhy, both physically and mentally, the project was running like a dream. Even funds were sufficient, not needing me to worry constantly, at least for some time. It was as if the Gods were on my side. I am not only referring to the day-to-day running of the project, but my team has successfully handled many visits as well as a successful pilot of a learning programme called SMILE and initiated by Stanford University. And there is more. The ace pwhy team organised 2 cultural programmes for visiting guests and is now preparing yet another for a large expat group. I was happy to learn that workshops on gender issues are also going on as well as preparing for co-educational classes during the summer holidays. Another surprise was the fact that the team on it’s own has organised a partnership with a travel agency to train some of our students in upmarket motorcycle repair, thus fulfilling a cherished dream: that of providing useful vocational skills to students who may not be academically inclined. For all the months when I have been unavailable, my team stood like a silent rock behind me and for that I am eternally grateful. I wonder how I would have survived the past months if I needed to worry about the nitty-gritty of the project.

The best girl also needs to look at the coming time with optimism and realise that physical and other ailments do get resolved if one is walking the right road. I have been doing my best to support those who need me. Here also there is something I had not realised. I could only do so because my ‘health’ was spot on and I had the physical and mental strength to hold on. This is alo a blessing from the heavens above.

I have shared my problems with some close friends, friends that came into my life thanks to pwhy, and they have stood by me through thick and thin, giving me courage and determination to face the future. This is a blessed gift as being an only child and having lived a nomadic life, I never had what is known as childhood friends.

And the fact that my little grandson used the word ‘girl’, I guess means that I have to stop complaining about my age and continue giving my best to one and all, be it my family or my work. So I have no excuse to stop writing or doing what is expected of me to be the ‘best’. Please do not take this as grandstanding, far from that! The use of the word best was a gentle reminder to do what I needed to.

Tomorrow may hold new challenges. Some may be difficult and even trying but what is needed is to give one’s best and accept whatever comes with a grateful smile.

It is said that God speaks through children! I second that with conviction.