Not so grand

Grandparenting, in the medical community of which i am a part, is not a fun job, I gather. You are away from your environment, away from your community, interacting, in many cases, in a new language; there is also the burden - joyful maybe but a burden nevertheless - of being responsible for a baby and/or child. The challenges are numerous.

The other day I talked to a lady who is staying with her son and wife to help them with looking after their baby. Her husband was alone back home. Though I hardly knew her, when I said hello, she poured her heart out to me saying she felt caged in the house, life was monotonous, she had no one to even talk to except the maids etc. I felt sorry for her.

Not to be ministered unto

Yeah, I know.  I know you think I have no right to complain. After all, I have decent quarters, great maintenance, and vegetables at prices that I’ll never get anywhere else. I know there are millions suffering.

I know that no one ordered him at gun point to join this course. (I know too that I married the man with my eyes wide open.)

The training is fantastic. Nowhere else in the world will you get to learn for such incredible fees.  Absolutely. When you leave this place, you will be made for life. You will be swooped up by the institution of your choice. You can earn big bucks. Granted.  All true.

But I sure hope that the majority will finish with some remnant of the excitement and hope with which they joined.

Talk the walk!

The morning rush is over. The kids have been sent off - to the school, to the park; the husband’s made his exit too. The homemaker breathes a sigh of relief. Some time to herself. The hub. That’s where she’s headed next.

“Why can’t I have a flat stomach?” was the question asked by a very flat-stomached Aishwarya Rai in an ad, some years back. “Will I ever have my pre-partum abdomen”? For the women at the hub, the gym, that’s the crucial question. The kilos you can manage to get off somehow or the other – by hook or by crook, by tread milling, by exercycling, by dieting, by self-delusion (ask my husband about the last one). But one thing you can’t do by all this and more is lose that jelly-belly.