Pinch Of Humor

Sometime back, my sister was explaining to me the various problems of being a girl. You know the problems of adjusting and sacrificing that girls have to do continually through their lives. I thought, she was talking of some bygone century. But as I was to know later, she, as usual was right. I had heard this many times from many ladies that they will never want to have a girl child, not because they were prejudiced, but they will never like to see their own child go through so much pain as they have gone through. Naïve as I was, I always thought that maybe they are having a tough time. But after marriage and taking over the responsibilities of one’s own house, I could see what they meant.  It meant from being fed, you now have to be the feeder …..not only on time but with quality and within the budget. And the responsibility does not stop there. You not only have to take care of the food but also all the living and non-living things in the house. I was the youngest member in...

When I hear the word mother, I recollect a docile woman, getting up first in the house, getting me ready for school, working in the kitchen most of the times, dressing me up for the parties and telling me stories during the afternoon naps. A woman who liked to write down all the recipes she could get. A woman who liked to knit sweaters for us. She taught me my first alphabet and was my first music teacher. But as we grew up, somewhere she was the one who would bear the brunt of our anger for many things. If she wanted to talk to us and we were studying, we will just say “please don’t disturb”. When we went to college and she would ask 10 times in 3 minutes if we had food or not, we would tell her not to repeat the same thing again and again and she still did. We would scold her for being too friendly with strangers but she would be friends to everyone in the building. There are her morning walk friends , the temple friends, the friends in the shop .. and I am not sure who else…. I am ...

Yes we are the odd balls out. We never plan....or let’s say we plan, but none of them works. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for an imperfect planner. And this lack of planning or organization or order is reflected in all the aspects of our life. For the starters, I was the one in the family to whom every elder in the house will look at, roll their eyes and say “What’s going to happen to her? With no plan, no organization, no discipline, what will she do in her life? What will happen after marriage etc etc “.They have a reason to say so. I had a near perfect sibling and father who are neat, organized in everything that they do. A mother, who is organized in whatever she likes to do. In this family of organized people, I was the odd one out. For instance, my set of documents as compared to my sister’s would always turn out to be random. While I will order the set each time I open it, on reopening they always seemed to be cluttered. A stack of clothes- that I will arrange for half an ho...