If I had a second chance ..

If I had a second chance ..
If only I could take another shot at life....
If only I had this matured brains back then ....
If only I chose differently when given the chance ....
 
I keep saying these.. Almost everyday, in connection to almost every thing. But over the last few weeks, incidents, though very insignificant, forced me to give it a thought. Would I really change my life if I were given another chance ?

Few weeks ago , we went shopping for dresses . I browsed , no ,not browsed, ransacked the whole of the collections in the store and picked up two. The irony, these were dresses of pattern and designs, I owned previously (about two years ago) just in different colors. I knew how the color had run and how the dressed grew shabby after a few washes. But my heart, my stupid heart wouldn't let go what it likes. I got the same ones again !!

And then last week when we visited my husband's place, my mom in law asked if I would like to exchange the mixer grinder I have at my place with the one she had there. I spat out 'NOooooo..' . The story of me, my mixie and my mom- in- law dates back to the day when my mom- in -law first laid her eyes on the mixie I had bought. She immediately identified  it as one that would not last long. True to her word it does have break downs starting the first month of usage. But exchange it for a better one? No !! Never...

These things made me realize, that I wouldn't change my life or anything about it for anything worse or anything better. Given a second chance at life , I would make the same choices over . I took those decisions, got those things, held on to those people, let the others go because that is exactly what I wanted back then .May be it was not the best thing but still it was what I wanted . Getting another chance wouldn't change anything . Anything at all .. I am happy with my life .. Touch-wood...

So,

If I had a second chance , I would take the same decisions again.
If only I could take another shot at life, my life would hardly be any different.
If only I had this matured brains back then , I would  live this same life anyways.. .
If only I chose differently when given the chance, my life wouldn't have been this awesome..

Best Friend's Wedding

Your best friend's wedding is probably the closest thing you would have to your own wedding . So much of excitement and so very hectic at the end of the day. But every minute of the occasion is one that you would cherish through out.

I recently attended the wedding of my best friend. We had been dreaming about it ever since we got together , around eight years back . So it was one occasion to be indulged and celebrated . Needless to say , ever since I landed at the wedding venue I was constantly besides her .

The wedding went great . Guests left happy . The couple felt blessed. And the day after the wedding , my friend texted me asking 'Aren't you tired ?  I feel drained!!' .  True , I am tired , but the excitement is yet to wear off. So , I thought while in the mood I should actually write out this pointers to help people live up to their friend's expectations on her big day.

1. Be there for her . Right from the day her wedding date is set , she would need you and your constant reminders about how she must finish her shopping well ahead of the last minute , her parlor appointments , her spa treatments , her hair styling , . She just tends to forget these important things in between other things .

2. Shop with her. Both my friend and me are people who rely on our fashion sense more than that of others. But , I was surprised to see her turning to me for approval when we went shopping for accessories . May be the pressure of looking your best makes you include others' opinions in your selections. So , do it earnestly. Help her out. She is more confused now than she has ever been in her life. Help her try the stuff and get that which looks the prettiest on her .

3.Get her try the dresses much in advance . We had a blooper at this one. And a huge blooper I must say. I just couldn't get her try her dresses until it was very late. And when things can go wrong , they will go wrong !! So did the fit. It was one scary situation when you have a bad fit and very little time to fix. The tailor of course did the fix , what I attempted at was keeping her calm .

4.When the beautician is around . This is one part that can be tricky . Once the beautician takes up the responsibility to dress up the bride , they don't quite like interference or opinions. But still she is your bestie and you will have to interfere!! So , pay attention to what is being done and if you don't quite like something suggest as pleasantly as possible if something needs to be changed. Better still if you can take her for a trial make up and hair styling session .

5.Her family . They already are burdened with loads of work . If you can, share their responsibilities., but remember your main responsibility is to be besides your friend. So don't commit yourself to any task  that would require you keeping away from her for long.

6.Common Friends. The easiest of the lot of guests. You know them. They know you. But problem doesn't end here. At times they just go senseless enough to trouble the bride with really small issues like the route to her house when she is getting her bridal make up done. So , that's when you get into action , attending her calls and helping people out with such details.

7. Her friends .  A little tougher part. She had friends you don't know very well. But still it's your responsibility to help them out and see to it that the bride has the lease possible straining to do to accommodate her friends.

8. Stuffs, especially the ones most likely to be missed out , like the mobile phone charger, her toiletries , and other things to be packed is your prime responsibility . I did not myself fare well in this area though . It has hard to get everything packed and carried to the wedding hall but making mental notes helps.

9.The miss fix it all. That is exactly what you should be when the ceremonies are on . Expect her hair to get ruffled , jewellery to fall off , saree to need all adjustments any minute during the ceremony . And the sweat that runs out her make up , which needs to be carefully wiped off every few minutes. Be there with a few safety pins , hair pins and handkerchiefs ready . You never know when you need any or all of these .

10.Last minute deals. Change is inevitable and can happen to even a perfectly chalked out plan . Worst when it happens at the last minute. The bride is a bundle of nerves on the big day . Don't expect her to react well to such last minute hassles. You better be extra composed and calm and help her steady her nerves too.

11.The pep talk . Brides need it a lot . Excitement and fear of not knowing what to expect always makes her an emotional mess. Just keep her happy . Keep her in good spirits and hear out her worries if she has any . No one can do it better than you , after all you are her best friend !

At the end of the day not everything would be perfect . You might make lots of mistakes.But trying and helping make your bestie's big day wonderful should be your focus.The effort and heart you put in would matter a lot to your friend and your friendship .

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Being Married

    My best friend is getting married. And I am absolutely excited about it. Another friend of mine asked me today if it was a "Love Marriage or an Arranged Marriage".  The couple in discussion here met through their families. They made the decision of getting married keeping their entire family in loop . So , technically it is an 'Arranged Marriage' .

    I would never personally come to terms with people deciding to spend their whole lives with someone after one or two meetings. My intuition isn't that strong probably . However , I wish my friend and all those who have such marriages be blissfully happy .

     Getting married is all I have always wanted . Ever since I was a little girl . Now that I am married and married for over a year now , I wonder at times if all the anticipation and excitement was worth it . We have lows in our life .We have lows in our married life . Lows in life doesn't bother us. We always bounce back . But lows in married life shakes us , the married woman , a bit . That's what got me wondering .

   May be because all the stories mom told you, all the books you read , all the movies you have seen , depicted hardships in life and problems in love life. However ,most of them invariably ended with a ,' And they lived happily ever after' line.  But none gave a detailed account of what happens during that ever after . All the efforts you take to make the ever after happy was probably consciously omitted.


      Lots of factor contribute to  how we respond to lows in our life. Lots of factor contribute to how we respond to the lows in our married life. The biggest being you are still adapting to the fact that you are not your dad's princess anymore .Being a girl friend is relatively easier. (I can vouch for that) You just concentrate on yourself ,your partner and where to go for the date . But when you are married , you are everything you have always seen your mother being . And that definitely is some hard work.

    At times things seem to overwhelm . Most of my recently married friends and I have this discussion of how drastic a change marriage has been. But then only those who adapt survive , so that is the only way forward.

   Determination to be happy and being happy with the one person you are married to is probably the foundation to every happy marriage. Does the trick for me always .
 
   A revelation I had recently was that people can't get into your head !! Yep !! No one knows what you are thinking but you. The bunch of no ones includes your spouse too. So right , he doesn't know what you expect of him unless you let him know. Makes things a whole less complicated when you just tell him that you want him to help you instead of getting all frustrated about his not caring enough!!!

   And needless to say sharing your frustrations with your besties goes a long way in keeping you composed.

    Everyday is a new day . If something went wrong yesterday , you always have today . If today isn't enough you will have a tomorrow to fix things . Living and loving matters . Not necessary that you do it perfectly . Just give your best . Because your best is always good  enough .

 

Holy Men - Seldom Reverent but Never Omniscient ...

Kate Bracks , a modest mum of three from Orange , Australia catapulted to stardom after winning Master Chef Australia-Season 3 .

But she was in news in India even before Master Chef Australia - Season 3 started airing on Star World India. Reason - she refused to address Dalai Lama , who was on their show as His Holiness. She refuted to the controversy saying , "My belief is that God is the only one that is perfectly holy."

True and logical . It is as simple as that . But , how can we , Indians , who belong to a country where a percentage of the population are holy men and a larger percentage are followers of such holy men , take such a comment lying down and doing nothing? Kate did invite wrath over her stance on holy men.

This reminded me of an incident . At my under grad college, in our third semester , we were given the list of staffs who would handle papers for us . We quickly went through it and found only one lady staff on the list who was incidentally our class in-charge.  How ever we later found out that the electronics paper was also being handled by a lady staff .The intriguing thing about her (besides her teaching that went way over our heads) was her name ; she had a name which  parents would generally name their sons with . Her peculiar name remained a mystery for over a year , till another of her college mate joined our college . It was this teacher who spilled the beans about the popularly peculiar name . When this teacher in question was a baby her parents took her to a holy man and asked him to name the child. The holy man mistook the baby girl to be a baby boy and named it accordingly . The parents realized the mistake but decided not to change the kid's name. After all a reverent holy man had named their kid !!! 

Phew !!! I just couldn't stop wondering how the parents could stand their kid being jeered at and ridiculed for her name throughout her school days , her college life and also at her workplace just because of a mistake by a man who was little better than a stranger .. 

All I could do after this was hope that at least my electronics teacher would realized that holy men may be reverent but not omniscient , they don't know everything , you can't trust them with anything , not even naming your kids !!!

All is Fair in Love and War . Is it?

I spent my entire childhood in Gopalpur-on-sea , a quite and exotic beach along the coast of Bay of Bengal. It was wonderful growing up in that quite and beautiful place where the only noise that graced one's ears was the constant rising and falling of the waves. It is a small place and everyone knows everyone else there. The Gopalpur beach is renowned for a distinct charm of its own which you would realize the moment you see the beach and the wonderful people living there.

 The languorous beach with coconut groves, casuarinas and gentle sand dunes is deserted for most of its stretch. May be the serenity , the divine beauty and the isolation on the beach that made it a preferred suicide destination for many from across the country . 

The fact that people came from far away places to drown their sorrows and merge with the calmness of the blue sea always baffled me. I remember many suicides on the virgin beach , but the one that would always remain with me is that of two lovers who felt that life held no hopes for them .

I vividly remember the walk from the bus stop to home one day in 1999 after school when every person I saw on the way had a strange gloomy expression that I couldn't fathom. I reached home and rushed to my mom and saw the same look  on her face. "Kya hua Ma?" , I spluttered . She informed me the cause of gloom over the entire town. The bodies of two young people who had consumed poison to end their miseries was lying on the shore . My brothers ever the curious lot wanted to go to the sea shore and have a look and they ran off with few of their friends. I dared not to . Mom stayed with me and gave me the details , all that she knew about this, all that locals have been talking of since morning. 

The dead were , a girl hardly 18 or 19 years old and a guy who would be no older than 21 years. They were in college somewhere from northern Orissa. The guy belonged to an Oriya family and the girl was from a Marwadi family (people of Rajasthan). They were madly in love with each other and wanted to have a lifetime of togetherness. The manager of the hotel ,where the guy and the girl had checked into a week earlier and had stated their purpose of visit as honeymoon , described the girl as pretty and short and the guy as handsome who still had the childlike innocence on his face. They were full of life and seemed like a normal newly and  happily married couple. During their stay they had even made a few friends like the owners of the fast food centers where they would have most of their meals , the local guides and photographers , the guy in the PCO booth which they used regularly to make calls. One night after a week's stay , they strolled out of their rooms as usual for dinner at their regular fast food center. After dinner they informed the owner of the fast food center that they would take a walk on the beach and be back to collect their bags and pay the bills. After so many meals at his fast food center , the owner trusted these customers enough to let them go without any doubts. He waited long past his closing time for the return of the customers , less worried about his payment and more worried about the handbag that the girl had left behind. After all , their room key would be in that bag, they would need it to get into their room for the night . But returning for the bags or to their rooms was not what the young married couple had in mind.

The next morning the fishermen who went in early to go fishing , found two bodies on the shore , dead. The police was called. The address the guy had entered in the hotel register was contacted. The parents of the guy and the girl were informed. It was learnt that both the guy and the girl were the only kids of their parents. The girl's family had fixed her marriage to a rich  NRI  and the marriage was just a month later. But that is when the young couple in love planned to elope. The families searched for them but couldn't trace them. And then the night when the couple committed suicide, they both had made calls to their parents and had asked them to come and pick them up from Gopalpur the next day. Both the parents were angry with their kids and both had refused and their kids had promised them that they would be meeting them the next day. What the parents did not know was that they would be seeing the lifeless bodies of their beloved kids the next day. 

The boy's parents were shattered and could not contain their sorrow. From the girl's family only her dad turned up and he was so angry that sorrow did not find an expression . He dumped her body in the ambulance all the time muttering about the disgrace she had brought upon the family.  

The incident rocked the peaceful town. People spoke about it for months. Many of the locals had seen the couple loitering on the beaches. No one had known the despair they had in their hearts. All one talked about in the following days were the foolishness the couple had committed . They were young, they had their entire life reckoning them but they chose to turn away and escape into nothingness. They could have started a new life , at a new place but they lost hopes too soon. They accepted defeat even before the battle had begun. They just quit. Now all is fair in love and war but quitting is definitely not accepted, neither in war nor in love .

Bhagavad Gita Classes to be Made Compulsory in Secular India

Irony , yet again. Why do our politicians generate new instances for us to laugh at every other day ? Guess it is  their way of proving the old proverb , "An idle mind is a devil's workshop " true. As our leaders are least interested in the welfare of the masses they get these peculiar ideas to idle away their time in their posh offices  . At least that is what I feel every time I listen to news like Karnataka government being open to make Bhagavad Gita teaching compulsory in all government schools. However , it is the Education Minister Vishwanath Hegde Kageri  who said  that, those opposing the Gita teaching should quit India, that made me go ROFL . You can't ask me to quit India because I stand for a secular country . By the way is that not what our Constitution aims at ?

So , when our politicians choose to avoid and not abide by the Constitution , I guess it is time we make Constitution classes compulsory  for the politicians . What say Supreme Court of India? 

'A Pat on the Back is not the Solution' - Mumbaikars

A friend of mine has her boy friend working in a top IT company in Mumbai. Because of the serial blasts yesterday , he was stuck in his office till late night and today morning he is back to work. Nothing to cheer about though. He is not showing resilience to terrorism nor has he resolved to defeat terrorism by not letting it panic him . He is very much startled , he is planning on a transfer and he would love to return to his family far away from Mumbai and be safe. But he turns up at work because he has no option . He needs to go to work to survive .

A young guy screamed into the NDTV camera that, "Only the families who lost their loved ones know the intensity of damage done by the blasts.It is easy for others to wake up the next day and go about their businesses. "

Government should take the cue. You cannot always let Mumbai suffer attacks and then pat the backs of Mumbaikars for going to work or school the next day . It is no longer accepted. The very much applauded "Mumbai Spirit" compliment is being taken with a pinch of salt by the people of Mumbai. There is intense anger that they are being targeted over and over and all Government does is praise the people for having carried on with their lives tolerating terrorism .

In reply to my last blog entry this is exactly what one of my friend Chinmaya commented. People get back with their lives only because they have to survive and not because they are Mumbaikars who are 'ever resilient     to terrorism'.