7 A.M. Saturday morning. Alarm rings.  Mom, never a mornings-person wakes up.  Brain immediately goes into hyperdrive.

"Darn, it is 7 already.  But then it is Saturday.  Oh, someone called on the cell at 6.30 and I silenced the phone. Who was it? Prabandam mami. Wonder what she wanted so early. Maybe she wanted me to watch some prabandam show on t.v. But then, she knows I don't have a t.v. Well, I'll call her up later and talk to her. Should  I boil yesterday's milk or today's?  And there is a lot of yesterday's decoction left. Maybe I'll make my coffee with yesterday's and make fresh decoction for A.  Why the heck is my head hurting so much early in the morning? Maybe the cold. I wish there is some sunshine today. I am sick of damp, cold clothes.  You know, next time I get a payment, I am definately going to invest in a drier. I think I deserve to wear dry clothes.  Oh, I need to finish up a proposal today if I have to take tomorrow completely off.  Maybe I will work on the capacitor proposal. I need to find out why I should coat MnO2 with CNT.  Perhaps I can use some of the background section from the old proposal.  But am I going to make a case for a pseudocapacitor or a capacitor.  Oh well.   Need to read up some more. I remember Ajayan had a neat paper..got to look at it. Oh, have to talk to G3 about the Maney project.  I hope she will be able to help me there. I can't handle the project myself..especially with my regular work. Maybe we should go out to breakfast today.  Or maybe not. We will most probably be eating out tomorrow. CAn't make it a regular habit.  Besides this month has been such a terrible drain on the purse for some reason. Gotta tighten up.  But I still have stuff to buy. V's birthday stuff. I am totally slacking. Last year, by this time I had everything, including returnn gifts for V's friends ready by now.. I have not even starting thinking about it yet.  And there is the srgm trip coming up too. I am having second thoughts about the srgm trip. Maybe we won't go.  I have way too much work. But then V will be disappointed. LEts see.  And I really want to go to the Parasala concert tomorrow..don't know how to work the logistics. Stupid priya..why does she have to have school today? I can't even leave V at TN and get my work done today.Have to call up mil to see how she is doing.  Don't think I can visit them this weekend. She is going to be upset. Well.  I better get Pongal and sambar going. Damn, I really need a break from this stupid cooking..you know,like a forty-year break or something..sick of planning breakfast, sick of planning lunch..sick of dinner..and it is not even like I cook well..the food tastes yucky anyway...how I wish I were rich enough to afford a full time cook..."

At this point, the six year old wakes up, ambles up to mom and says :

"Amma, you know how castles are made of stones? Our castle is made of diamond and gold and jewels. If you enter it, it sparkles."

Can I please be six again?
 

"Live simply that others may simply live." said a mad man who wore a hand spun loin cloth through the better part of his life because many of his fellow citizens could not afford even that.

The 11.39 lakh Gandhi pen set

On one side of the room was a vintage wooden writing table where the Mahatma Gandhi Limited Edition 241 pen set was placed under a spotlight. It was surrounded by a pair of resplendent gold Gandhi spectacles, some antique-looking fountain pens cased in wood and an oblong shaped small bottle of flaming red ink that contained, what was labelled, the Mahatma Gandhi ink [...] This exclusive pen set, which ateliers in Hamburg painfully crafted (according to Bethge) with gold and rhodium, was launched in India. The 241 limited edition set costs Rs11.39 lakh.

I am sorry, Mahatma.  What more can I say?

A half-page colour ad in the Hindu Metroplus attempts to sell Dove soap.  The tag line reads "Real women. Real Stories", and the ad goes on to say that "when you do see Dove's next commercial..blah blah...remember that these women are real women, just like you."

"Real" woman?  So, there are "unreal" women around?  Where do these advertising types get such brain-dead, meaningless phrases?  And why am I the only one online who seems to find it amiss ?  It seems the advertisement has stirred up quite a few discussions online, and one of them goes "What do you think of the current Dove ads featuring women with "real bodies"?"

That's even better. Real bodies, as against, what, virtual bodies?  False bodies?

An advertising blog says "Dove - Real Women, Real Skin".   Now we not only have real women and real bodies, we even have real skin.  This blog nitpicks that "Dove is Afraid to Use Real Women". So, what is it using?  Robots? Transvestites (who, I am sure will object being referred to as unreal women)?

And the "real" problem is that consumers fall for it. The real women ads for Dove has soared sales by 700%. The brand manager claims that the ad "..is so eye-catching and relates directly to real women everywhere. We were talking to women in the way they wanted to be talked to."

Uh uh,  no lady.  I don't want to be talked to like I am a brainless nincompoop who would understand what a "real" woman means. 

I would much rather be strongly rooted in the "real" world.

[[Ok Ok.. back to the "real" world with "real" deadlines and lots of "real" work]]
 

Some people have moved into an apartment in the building opposite ours that is separated by a narrow alley. Someone from that apartment watches television 24X7.  Well, to be fair, don't know if they watch it...the more accurate fact is that the television is switched on 24X7. 

Their life, their problem.  But the constant drone of television sounds in the background is driving me nuts. Especially since the window of my office room (or an apology for an office room) directly faces the window of their living room where the television is, and from the volume, I suspect the television faces the window.

Oh for some sweet silence.

Our local pet bookstore, Odyssey in Adyar, has done away with racks for Science and Humour. 

They just lost a couple of loyal customers. 

A couple of things surprised or even shocked me during this vacation.  The primary of those being the many connotations of certain words starting with an m and ending with an o with a j and o in between that I used in all innocence in my earlier post. 

Another was a surprising book I found in dude's library in his child/youthhood home - a book on female sexuality, covered with news paper, which belonged, not to dude directly, but to his late grandfather. I was first scandalized at the idea of thatha having a book like that, but once I started reading it, it was fascinating.  The book is called "Any  Woman Can", with the tag "Love and Sexual Fulfillment for the Single, Widowed, Divoced...and Married", written by David Reuben, a psychiatrist and first published in 1971. 

If you are looking for various KS-ish poses or steamy stuff, look elsewhere, because this book is all about evolution, science and misconceptions (no pun intended) of female sexuality. For someone with sufficient science background, who has known the biological aspects of human reproduction, and has had, ummmm...practical experience, most of the stuff written are known-facts, but it has been well written, and I would consider it worthy of addition to the home library, especially when there is a little girl who before long will be maturing into an adolescent with confusing and conflicting views and experiences on sexuality.

But no, this book is not what I want to write about.  These are my thoughts that arose as I read the first chapter of this book on the train back home, having just met a woman during my vacation, who, despite having a family to die for - a smart and intelligent husband, two well-bred children and a comfortable home of her own, with all the associated paraphernalia, eats twelve and a half pills every day (no exaggeration) to treat her clinical depression.  That coupled with my own more recent insecurities and doubts about my part in the large picture, led to the following thoughts that were typed out as they formed in the mind. Don't look for coherence of thought, they have not been edited and are a mere long hand account of the thoughts, joint or disjoint that raced through the mind, aided by fast typing skills on dude's laptop.

The first chapter takes on a disparaging tone on the married woman, and her (and societal) apparent disdain for the "unattached" woman, irrespective of her visible sexuality. It seems so unfair that the married woman is made the soap-opera villain, directly or indirectly responsible for all the social discrimination towards unmarried women.  But what is conveniently ignored is the hairshirt that the married woman wears,that is most often ignored by society, or even worse, considered "natural".

The modern "wife" is under enormous stress from within and without, her time at a premium and priorities torn between home management, career (in most cases), child (or children, if she has been blessed with just that much extra tenacity) and relationships with  that special someone, and the extended family, all of which is tight rope walking, with even a small falter boomeranging into judgements about her inefficiency or impotence.  Add to this some female sexuality, which is more often than not, at least through her growing up phase in a society that prides itself as being the custodian of human morality, considered to be a myth.  Or worse, wrong.  So the years of guilt that has been carefully cultivated thorugh the crucial ages of  sexual maturation ("Don't stand at the gate and make an exhibition of yourself", "why did you give your phone number to boys?", "you cannot join an engineering college because it is co-ed"), on one night, she is suddenly given the license to open out herself and all the carefully cultivated inhibitions should just morph into licensed passion.  The struggle of suppression of sexuality gives way to the struggle of overcoming inhibitions and prejudices that have been inculcated hitherto.

That aside, it feels stomping-leg-unfair to blame the "married" woman for her disdain for single status. Even if the disdain DOES exist, it probably arises from the little green monster that whispers that the single woman, is free to FEEL.  Emotions.  Something that the married woman has no time or justification to have.  For all the talk about sexual marooning in single, divorced and widowed women, and their social alienation from a society that prostrates in reverence before the women bound in holy matrimony, there is no talk about the emotional marooning of the married
woman.  The married woman, is, at least, for most practical purposes, unless we are talking strictly scientific aspects of sexuality, satiated physically and socially, and has nothing more to ask for.  But there is no mention of the emotional marooning of the woman, whether she is bound and gagged by licenses or not.  

Any emotional disturbance of a woman is, like everything else about her, attributed to the various chemicals running in her veins. In modern society, the emotional exhibition of a woman is condemned as vehemently as her sexuality. A woman who, in temporary rage of whatever- sleep deprivation, work pressure, or just plain boredom of routine, throws around a couple of dishes in the kitchen is menopausal.  An unnecessary snap is because it is "that time of the month again".  A wife and mother is the glue that holds the family together cannot afford to feel sad,  or angry, or even annoyed.  When junior has a scrape in school, when senior has a scrape at work, when superseniors have a scrape with their impending or imagined senility, the woman of the household, the Grihalakshmi, can just, by her charming and confident presence, kiss the boo boos away.  And if she cannot, it is HER fault that  she just has not that natural thing that binds the family and keeps it together.

And lost somewhere in these commitments, her emotions go into hibernation.  Or pushed into the overflowing suitcase, until one day, the lock breaks, when least expected and the contents spill out. And THAT is her fault too.  For having bottled up without release, and having brought it to the point of seeking clinical care. And then the dirty words come out - clinical depression, nervous breakdown, hysteria.  Eat twelve-and-half pills after every meal to get the darn "chemicals" under control again.

Woman's sexuality is not suppressed as much as her emotionality.

One of my first friends in life will be visiting the janma bhoomi next month, and as what I am sure is a gesture arising from good intentions, asked me for my waist size so she can get me a pair of "comfortable pants to wear around the house".  I was all mushed up at the request, until today, when I took out the inch tape to measure the midsection.

Had S not been my friend of three decades, ever since we ate each other's biscuits in kindergarten, and continue to share joys and sorrows through life, she would be in hot soup. Here I was, until I took out the cursed inch tape, happy with my routine of three square meals, a few dozen snacks in between, and daily walks with dude around our wonderful campus as an apology for exercise. Now, I will still have the same routine of three square meals etc., only, I am sure it won't be entirely a happy routine, with this little voice (most likely S's) at the back of my mind, reminding me that I used up most of the inch tape just half-way into my midsection. 

Let us not talk numbers, but yes, I I have always been pear-shaped.  Now it is still a pear, just a mutant one.

I suspect that any human being who, on the day, she has a couple of work deadlines to meet and half a dozen errands to run, and is not a particularly enthusiastic cook, chooses to make vazaipoo paruppusili and keerai kootu needs to get her head examined.

I have ranted about this time and again.  Yet, every time I am faced with this situation, my blood pressure rockets and I have to control myself from creating a scene at the site of provocation.

My five-year-old moves to first class next year.  Her school, whose language of instruction ("first language") is English, requires that she chooses a "second language" in class 1. She is allowed to choose between Hindi and Tamil.  The principal of the school called for a meeting with parents of soon-to-be-first graders to advise that it is probably in the best interest of the child to take up their native language as their second language (e.g. Tamil for Tamilians, and Hindi for those that speak Hindi at home).  Sounds logical to me.

Some parents prefer to put their child in a language that is alien to their so-called "mother tongue", with the explanation that the child would pick up the mother tongue at home, so it helps if the school can teach a new language.  Which is also fine.

What I take strong exception to, is when parents, like a mom I was talking to today, believe that the child should take one language rather than the other because, that is the only way, in the tenth class public exam (which incidentally, is ten years away), the child would score a better total.  Why is it that our entire life is driven by the numbers that come on the report card that is granted on one year of our life?  Why are we subjecting ourselves and our kids to undue pressure to perform for the sake of those numbers?  Why has "learning" taken a backseat over "marks"? Why cannot a child enjoy the beauty of the Thirukkural or Silappadhikaaram or Rahim Doha when in school, instead of rote-learning something that can be vomited in the exam to score better marks, which would get him/her into a premier institution, perhaps, so that life would he handed to him/her on a golden platter, making the child a spoilt brat, unable to face difficulties, unable to enjoy beauty, and driven by secondary recognition all her life?

The importance given to the "public exam marks" bothers me particularly because I faced such enormous peer pressure in school to "score" at the expense of "education". The "school-first" rolling shield in the 12th Public exam remains nothing but a fuzzy distant memory.  The shield and the accompanying report card, that lies gathering dust somewhere in the loft gave me nothing other than a rude shock when I was out in the open facing life's many calamities (notably two back-to-back layoffs during the last financial recession), unable to handle it for want of perseverence, taking the setback as a direct indication of personal failure.  Precious years were lost searching for the true me, understanding that the 98% aggregate in 12th class was not quite an accurate image of me as I had assumed it to be.

A 12th standard boy in my daughter's school died of brain haemorrage, blamed on the enormous stress on the child to score in his public.  I dread to look at the newspapers soon after the public exam results are announced to read news of young boys and girls, with a rainbow life ahead of them killing themselves over a few numbers.  I feel impotent rage when kids at our elite institute of higher learning give up on life, unable to handle failure because the numbers that were so reassuring all these years were not satisfactory in one measely six months of their many years of existance.

Who is to blame?  Parents like us, who plan the child's public exam marks on the night they were conceived in love or passion. Will this ever change? Will there be fewer Lakshmi's who have nightmares of failing in exams, many many decades after they wrote their last exam in life?

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