55-er: Good morning, Bengaluru!

Lush green fields, empty roads, sound of the chirping birds: I would wake up in the heavens every morning, during my 7 day stay at Ucassaim-Goa.

Vacation over.

Crammed up spaces, hawkers screaming at the top of their lungs and traffic blasting your ear drums.

Good morning, Bengaluru!

Book Review: Not Without my Daughter

I’ve been wanting to blog about this book from the moment I picked it up from the bookstore but first, I got too engrossed reading it and once I was done reading, I got back into my daily chores and this book review never saw the light of the day. So here I am, finally sitting at my laptop and completing this much overdue book review.

“Not without my daughter” is a true story of an American woman Betty Mahmoody, her Iranian husband Dr. Sayyed Bozorg Mahmoody and their 4 year old daughter Mahtob and how their lives changed forever when they came to Iran from USA in the 1980s It’s a heart melting story of how an innocent American woman was forced into accepting the beliefs and culture of an alien Islamic nation where women are treated as just child producing machines and Betty’s amazing struggle to survive amidst these conditions and to get freedom for herself and her 4 year old daughter.

I had read a book earlier on similar lines: Princess by Jean Sasson, which was the true story of a Saudi Arabian princess and her secret life behind the veil. But “Princess” was narrated by the Saudi Arabian princess secretly to the British author Sasson who did not dare mention the real name of the princess fearing the orthodox patriarchal family that she belonged to in the Muslim kingdom. The book was written under a pseudo name. What sets “Not Without my daughter” different from this is the fact that, it is not in a third person narration unlike the former. Betty Mahmoody is a fearless American woman who takes the risk of narrating her own heart rending story after all the trauma she has had to go through and probably that’s why she makes a special place in your heart as you flip through the pages.

The perseverance and determination of Betty is commendable. I do not know how many would have the courage to go as far as she did, fighting against all the odds. Betty’s story is bound to send shivers down your spine. You love a man unconditionally and trust him blindly and he ruthlessly traps you in his alien country, thousands of kilometers away from your home, against all your wishes. A mother is left yearning to see her sons whom she left behind in her home country coz she was going for just a 2 weeks holiday to Iran and a desperate daughter wants to meet her ailing father one last time before he says a good bye forever. It can happen to anyone and that is probably the reason why you can connect so well with Betty’s misery and her plight.

I do not want to give out any more spoilers. The narration pace has been beautifully maintained throughout the book as it has been co-authored by William Hoffer who is a successful writer himself. Reading the book is almost like watching a movie, with no dull moments. This is a must read to get a different perspective on the life of women in Islamic nations through the eyes of a foreigner woman.

Why is the grass greener on the other side?

Does this happen only to me?

That once you have got what you felt you always wanted, you suddenly lose all the excitement that had surrounded it…You get bored and you start pondering why you even struggled all this while to get it… You just lose all the enthusiasm and your supposedly “ideal” world becomes your worst nightmare. That you start missing your life before the “thing” had happened to you and you start wondering- Did I lose something precious in my pursuit for something better?

Isn’t it strange, how your mind loves playing games with your heart sometimes….?

The Wedding Invitation

I joined MIT, Manipal for MTech in Computer Science and Engineering in July 2007. Manipal is just 5 and half hours from Goa by train & 8 hours by road.The pathetic state of the roads & the fact that you have to travel all the way to Udupi bus-stand (some 4-5 kms) from the hostel to catch the bus at 10 pm, the 4'o clock train from Udupi Railway Station was the obvious choice of travel to Goa. I had no prior experience of traveling alone by trains, but my parents assured me that there was no need to worry. It was a short journey and I had to just get into the train at the Udupi Railway Station,go find my seat, sit there quietly (Read: No Talking to co-passengers i.e. strangers) & my parents would come & pick me up once I reached Margao railway station. When they narrated the entire thing to me, it sounded pretty simple. So I bought myself a sleeper class ticket of Matsyagandha Super Fast Express and I managed to travel all by myself to Margao from Udupi.

I was so proud of myself. I felt like I had won some kind of a battle. So I got over-confident & thought- "Why pay twice the amount for a sleeper ticket when I can travel in half the price in a general compartment for five and half hours?” So the next time I had to travel to Goa, I made up my mind- I was going to travel general class!

For those of my readers who do not know, general compartment of a train has NO reservations. So it would save me one extra trip to the Udupi Railway station to buy a sleeper ticket. General Class seats are purely on first come first server basis. As soon as the train arrived on the platform, there was quite a chaos, people pushing each other to get into the train. It was scary at first but they say-When you are in Rome, do what the Romans do. I joined the league & somehow managed to push through & get into the train. Once in the train, I did not have to look too far for company. I found another girl who was traveling to Honnavar & even though I did not know her, I had noticed her in the mess. It did not take us long to start a conversation & we got so engrossed in our talks, that we did not realize how fast time flew by & we reached Honnavar. She got down & now my real challenge started.

I was left all alone in the berth. I consoled myself. Two and half hours more, time will fly just like that. I pulled out my ipod, plugged the ear-phones in and staring out at the lovely countryside, I was soon lost in my thoughts. I was drowned into Brian Adam's sound of the guitar when I thought I heard someone's voice. I opened my eyes and saw that the sometime back empty berth now had an occupant.

It was a man in his late twenties. He gave me a faint smile when I looked at him. I didn't like that. There was no-one else in the berth besides the two of us. I did not find the thought very comforting of having to share the entire berth with a stranger for two and half hours. I decided to ignore this man and pumped up my ipod volume. But my new co-passenger wasn't going to let me enjoy my music in peace. He started a conversation.

Thanks to my loud voice, he had been hearing the entire conversation between me and the other girl and when I was just beginning to relax that he must have not understood most of it (since we were conversing in Konkani), he told me he was a Konkani from Manipal. I was embarrassed and angry. But I couldn't do much about it anyways and I thought, now that he had already known so much about me, it wouldn't be such a bad idea after all to talk to him! So there, our conversation took off.

He had been an alumnus of MIT for his bachelors so we talked about all the things which had changed at the campus since the time he had left and I had joined. We spoke about Manipal, the town, the student life here. It was fun. I was enjoying talking to this stranger. While talking to him, I realized he was carrying quite a bit of luggage, including an expensive laptop. Now, General Compartment of a train isn't really the best option if you are traveling long distance. All this while I had assumed he was traveling to Goa or some nearby destination. He told me, he was traveling to Mumbai from Udupi which was an overnight journey. He hadn't managed to get the sleeper ticket and since this trip was urgent, he had no choice but to travel in general class. I was curious and thought to myself-What could be so important that he took the risk and the pains to travel in a general compartment to Mumbai for 14 hours? As if he read my mind- "I'm going to meet a girl in Mumbai.” he said.

That was actually the point I got interested in the conversation. I didn't know this guy enough to ask personal questions but I can be really shameless at times and this was one of those moments. Luckily for me, my co-passenger didn't seem to mind my inquisitive nature and he started talking. I guess he was also getting bored during the journey and badly wanted company. The exchanging of photographs was done, he had liked the girl. The matching of horoscopes was also done. The horoscopes matched perfectly. Now the only thing that was remaining was to meet the girl and to approve her. He looked very anxious as he spoke. "I'll be married within 2 months if everything goes well," he said. I assured him not to worry and that if it was in his destiny he would end up with this girl. My friends say I'm pretty good at giving advice and gyaan and this was probably one of those moments coz I saw my co-passenger listen keenly to everything I was telling him. We spoke for a long time and with good company, time always flies. I didn't realize when the train reached Margao station. We exchanged email addresses and as I was just getting off the train, he said-"I'm going to send you my wedding card if everything works out and since the wedding is going to be in Manipal, you will have to come." I nodded my head, little did I know I would have to keep this promise very soon.

I got back to Manipal in a day or two and got busy with all the chores of student life. I completely forgot about this "Train" friend of mine. This was until I found an email in my mailbox. It was from him. He had met the gal in Mumbai, liked her and now they were getting married. The wedding was planned in Manipal, his hometown and he had sent out the invitation to me as promised. I was touched by his action and quickly responded back with a "Thank You" note but at the same time I knew I wasn’t going to attend this wedding ceremony-“What if this man doesn’t recognize me? It would be so embarrassing! After all, we had just met once in a train.” However, to my bad luck, my Train friend kept insisting email after email that I come for the wedding and that he would be really disappointed if I did not show up. Finally, after realizing that I was exhausted with all the plausible excuses under the Sun, I said a yes.

The next big thing was who to take. I had never attended a South Indian wedding before so I decided to take one of my South Indian roomies along, just so that she could help me out with the customs to be followed at the ceremony. At the prospects of escaping the mess food, she agreed instantly.

It was a Saturday afternoon; we had no classes during that time. We got dressed in some of our best attires, I got a nice bouquet of flowers for the couple and there we were, on our way to the venue. We reached the venue in no time. Manipal being a small place sans traffic. The place was over-crowded. I thought as if the entire village had been invited. Maneuvering our way through the crowd, we somehow managed to reach the stage to greet the couple. I was still framing my dialogues in my mind, just in case he did not recognize me when to my surprise, the moment he saw me, he didn’t just recognize me but he greeted me with a big wide smile. He also introduced me to his wife as “The Train friend”. It seems he had already told her how we had met and his wife told me how happy she was to see me at their reception. I gave an uncomfortable smile. The photographer asked us to pose for a picture with the newly weds and we promptly did. We wished the couple “Happy Married life” and escaped quietly to the lunch section.

I started writing this post long ago, almost 6 months back but with my busy life, never got a chance to complete it and it just remained an incomplete article in my Google Docs. Last weekend, as I was relaxing at home in the evening, I got a call from the same train friend. It has been almost 2 years since we have met/talked/emailed but he still had my number. He just called to say that he had moved to Bangalore now with his family-wife and a 1 month old baby boy. “We should meet some day”, he said.

As I hung up, I was lost in the ocean of my thoughts. We meet so many people everyday and there are strange connections happening all the time and some of these connections go a long way for some strange ones like me, to write this blog post!

Cheers to the Wedding Invitation!

Crossroads

You want to take the left,but it is a path less traversed, it is going to be a very long frustrating ride,everyone warns you but you still want to do it...coz... at the end of the road lies the thing you have always wanted in your life!
You see the majority of the crowd going straight and you want to go straight too coz basically you want to take the safer way out, by aping others. But deep down inside you very well know this path is NOT meant for you!
If you take the right, you will reach the destination quicker. You ask your inner soul...Is this what I truly want? And the answer is....NO!
You are frustrated, confused and desperate.You want to turn and go back to square one and start afresh... but you have already walked so far ahead, it is just too late now.

How many times do we face crossroads like these...when we are just left thinking,which path should we take? Which path would take us through the journey called LIFE and make it the most memorable journey of our lives???

Har ghar kuch kehta hai...

I have always had a fascination for old things. History used to be my favorite subject in school. My secret ambition was to become an archaeologist. Appreciating ancient architecture still remains a passion. I lose myself completely when I visit an old church or a historical monument. But my all time favorites remain the lovely Goan Catholic ancestral villas which represent a unique blend of the two cultures: the East and the West. The Portuguese left Goa in the 1960s but till date, the 450 years of colonial rule is clearly reflected through these homes. Probably another reason for my affinity towards these ancestral villas is coz I was born and brought up in one of these ancestral homes too.

My home has had a very interesting history. It seems a brother and a sister bought the plots back in the beginning of the 20^th century and decided to build two mansions side by side, so they could live next to each other.The brother built our home and the sister built the house next to ours. Technically speaking, the two houses were exact replicas of each other. Due to the colonial rule in Goa,a large number of Goan residents had moved to Portugal in the quest of well-paying jobs. After Goa got liberated and became a part of the Indian Union, these immigrants did not wish to come back. So they started selling off their ancestral properties in Goa. The brother who had built our home was also one of them.His family was to leave Goa and settle in Portugal forever so he put up his house for sale. This was sometime in 1970s when my grand-dad was also looking for a big home to accommodate his large family.He came across this offer and it was too good to let go and that's how the brother's house became our home!

People often wonder, what is it that makes these ancestral Goan villas so unique from the other houses? According to me it is their grandeur-the large French Windows, the tall doors and the high ceiling.As you enter a typical ancestral villa, you are drifted into the past. These villas were built spacious with large halls coz during those days,weddings, ceremonies and other important family gatherings used to be held in the house itself.Even after he bought our home, my grand-dad had to spend considerable time and money in making a lot of modifications to convert some of these dance halls into bedrooms. I still remember the reaction I used to get back in school when any of my classmates would discover about my home.Their eyes would widen with excitement and I would have to answer the same question umpteenth time-"How does it feel to live in such a huge, old house? You are so damn lucky!"

Over the years, as much as we have loved and boasted about our home, there have been others who have appreciated it as much. First there was a professor from Goa College of Architecture who was doing his PhD and his thesis consisted of exploring all the ancestral homes in Borda. Borda is that part of Margao which houses maximum number of Catholic ancestral villas. So naturally, he was at our doorstep , asking us the permission to let him look around and we were most happy to let him in. He came in with his professional cameras, clicking every door frame and window and jotting down the dimensions and other details and all the family members were wondering what he was finding so interesting in those old walls. He later had an exhibition where he showcased all those photographs and we realized how beautiful every frame looked. We remembered the good ol' saying then -Only a connoisseur knows the true taste of his wine!

Another one of our home's admirer had a very strange story. On one lazy Sunday morning, we had a visitor. He was a European man, in his early thirties. He said our home had belonged to his grand-father, that is of course before his grand-father sold it off to my grand-dad and moved forever to Portugal.His father was born in our home and he had spent the first few years of his life in the Borda neighborhood. Now, his father was on the death-bed and as his last wish, he had sent his son to Goa, all the way from Portugal to get pictures and memories of his old home, the church in which he was baptized, the chapel which he visited every Sunday for mass. Our visitor had a small piece of paper, given to him by his ailing dad which had a vague map of our neighborhood, with all the intricate details such as where he could get the best choris-paav (a Catholic delicacy made from Pork sausages) in the area. Mamma and I were a little apprehensive of letting a stranger, that too a foreigner inside our home but I don't know what it was about him, we felt he was genuine and we asked him in.

He was clicking photographs of each and every thing he could see as he walked around. His original family altar was replaced with a mini-temple by my grand-dad to accommodate all our deities. The master bedroom of the house, which used to be his grand-dad's bedroom had become my grand-dad's bedroom and after my grand-dad passed away, I had become its new owner. It is the largest room in the house and also the most beautiful one with 3 doors and 2 huge French windows. During those days, furniture used to be custom made for individual rooms. The original owners of the house had the carpenters build a grand master bed from scratch inside the bedroom itself. The resulting bed became so grand that it couldn't be moved out of the room in one piece when the owners sold the house so my grand-dad had to ultimately buy the house along with this piece of furniture! When we narrated this story to our visitor, he was touched. This was a bed not just passed through the generations of my family but it was passed through the generations of both our families.

We finished touring the house and sat on the couch, he got busy sipping his kokam sarbat, another Goan delicacy he could go back and tell his family in Portugal about. He was extremely happy he had collected enough pictures to make his ailing father happy.It occurred to me then, that the two of us were connected in the strangest possible manner-our house. He was the grand-son of this house just like I was the grand-daughter. A house is not just a bunch of walls with a roof on the top,every house is special and every house has a story to tell. Har ghar kuch kehta hai....

Har ghar chup chaap se yeh kehta hai ki andar usmein kaun rehta hai?
Chhat bataati hai... ...yeh kiska aasmaan hai.
Rang kehte hain kiska yeh jahaan hai.
Kamron mein kiski kalpana jhalakti hai?
Is farsh par nange pair kiske bacche chalte hain?
Kaun chun chunke ise pyaar se sajaata hai?
Kaun is makaan mein apna ghar basaata hai...
Har ghar chup chaap se yeh kehta hai... ki andar usmein kaun rehta hai?

Cleaning up my closet

It was one of those lazy Saturday evenings. I didn't have any particular thing to do for the day. After waking up at 11 in the afternoon & having a breakfast at 12:30 followed by lunch at 4pm, you can pretty much imagine how my day was going. It is one of these kind of days when I log in to Orkut. Orkut is a great time pass. You can flip through your friend's photo albums, check out their testimonials & scrapbooks. You don't realize how time flies in doing such completely irrelevant activities but you still enjoy them so much.

Flipping through a friends' profile, I came across a profile of someone whom I knew once upon a time, someone who used to be good friends with me once upon a time, and today when I just fumbled upon this profile in my friend's friend circle, it felt so strange. The distance between us had grown so much that now I was even hesitating to send a friend request! I felt as if a lifetime had passed by & we were complete strangers to each other now.

I was angry with myself. I still missed the beautiful bond I once shared with this person. I do not know what our differences were which got us so apart. But things were ended on such an abrupt note that I realized there was still a part of me which was yearning for that friendship! There was still something that was eating me from within. I wanted to get back and re-live all those memories, leaving aside our individual egos. Someone had to do it. I have always believed that life is too short to waste living with such grudges so I decided to take the first step to sorting things out.

I picked up the phone. Called up the common friend. She herself was surprised to hear from me after such a long time. I had gotten so busy with my life that keeping in touch was a thing of the past. After our initial exchange of "how have you been", "hows work","lets meet up sometime", I finally came to the point.
"Do you have ...'s number or email address?". She was surprised but then she also knew I would not have called her without some motive.
She promptly passed the number to me. I thanked her and hanged up.

I picked up the phone and dialed the number. The phone started ringing and my heart started beating harder with every ring. I was still speculating how this person would reciprocate.What should be my opening line? Would ... recognize my voice after all these years? There were a million questions in my mind and the phone was still ringing.

Tring...Tring....Tring...

"Hey, don't you have office today? Its already 9 am!"
"What are you staring at me for?Get up, you lazy bum!"
I opened my eyes and suddenly realized that the phone wasn't ringing but my alarm clock was.It was 9 am on a Monday morning and I was still in bed and my room-mate was shouting at me from the other end of the room.

Oh Gosh, the whole thing was a dream after all.I was disappointed.
And it just occurred to me that I didn't manage to clean up my closet after all :-(!