Author: Tulika

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For that first crush

He wasn’t the hottest star around. He hadn’t been seen in a film for years. He wasn’t in news either. Yet Shammi Kapoors’s passing away last week filled me with immense sadness. He was our first crush, my sister’s and mine.
The Kapoor Khandan must have intrigued every Bollywood Buff back in the 70s but for us it was just Shammi all the way. Our grand affair was fuelled by the new arrival of the television. How we waited for those Chitrahars when he would come on dancing, clapping, teasing, romancing… all with equal elan.
We’d sit glued to the telly soaking up each expression of his eyes, each inflection of his voice, each wave of his body, each shake of his head. Could anyone have done a better A a aa jaa, or his ever famous Yahoo? He certainly had the Kapoor sense of rhythm. If those were his high points he could also do a meltingly soulful Deewana mujhsa nahin or Ehsaan tera hoga mujh par. We remembered to breathe only when the camera moved away from his closeups.
We stocked up cassettes of his songs.. “Mohammed Rafi sings for Shammi Kapoor Vol 1, 2, 3… ” We knew them all by heart.
I fought many battles for him. Each time there was a Kishore Kumar versus Mohammed Rafi debate I stood up for Rafi not realising then that it was primarily because he was the voice of Shammi Kapoor. We had these huge struggles with our grandmother who was also a television freak but didn’t seem too fond of Shammi’s juvenile act. “One day he’ll break his back while dancing,” she’d comment wryly. However I suspect she wasn’t untouched by his charm as we’d often find her smiling at his antics… juvenile though they were.

My sister and I spent long hours debating the song Tareef Karoon Kya Uski where the song ends with Shammi falling into the water with a splash. Even now she is convinced that was spontaneous.. not a planned act at all.

 But then spontaneity was his charm. Spontaneity and an ability to laugh at himself. Tell me how many actors can look utterly, heartbreakingly handsome even while making a complete idiot of themselves? Well Shammi could do just that. There he was singing Subhan Allah Haseen Chehra in a burkha. Or wearing a weird contraption with the most ridiculous pom pom cap in the song Tumse Achha Kaun Hai or strutting around with a supposedly angry pout while Saira Banu sang Kashmir Ki Kali in Junglee. He could have you in splits even while mesmerising you with his green brown eyes. Those green eyes, squiggly eyebrows, broad shoulders, his trademark bracelet they were all just so Shammi.
He’ll be missed. Sorely.
Really… tumse achchha kaun hai?
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Polish your vocabulary

I found this really cool new parenting vocab on the Cambridge Online Dictionary. Check out which ones fit you.
The helicoptering parent: That’s a parent who continuously hovers over the child.
I try not be this one and have learnt to let the kids be after plenty of practice.
The lawnmower parent: The lawnmower parent is obsessive, smoothing the way ahead for their offspring, doing all that they can to ensure that the future is without obstacles and inconveniences (and in doing so, maybe removing the challenges and setbacks that build character?).
Too lazy to be this one.
Free-range parenting, a relaxed, hand’s off approach in which the child is given the freedom to make more of their own decisions and choices.
This one I try to be… but fail many times… I don’t think I can handle too much freedom for the kids at five years of age.
The hugger mum: puts the infant at the centre of her world, and everything else on hold. She revels in physical closeness – often sleeping with the child – and refuses to impose routine but rather goes with the flow.
Well I like the ‘hugging’ bit but I’m a totally routine person.

The scheduler mum: regulates naps and meals with military efficiency, making the baby fit her regulated world.

… guilty of being this one.
The fleximum: treads the golden path between these two extremes. A paragon of sense and moderation, the fleximum imposes a degree of routine, but is able to relax that routine when the situation requires it.
I would like to think I’m the fleximum but I tend to be the scheduler mum. I’m a bit like the hugger mum too because I love physical closeness with my kids and they do sleep with me still. Though I hope to see them sleeping in ‘their’ room by next year. Hope.
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The Husband

It’s been almost five years since I started this blog yet I’ve barely mentioned The Husband. Oh he’s been there all along… leaving wet towels on the bed, making shoe marks on freshly mopped floors, lounging endlessly before the television, getting onto my nerves yet somehow sorting out my life by his mere presence. He’s the one who pampers Naisha silly, banters with Hrit till he’s stamping in frustration, telling them stories of planets and volcanoes with the occasional prince and princess thrown in for Naisha’s benefit.
Well it’s his birthday today and it’s time he got his due. So here’s the story of how The Husband came to be christened ‘The Husband’ on Obsessivemom.
The blog, started off as a first person account from the twins’ point of view.. it was my perception of their perception of the world… complicated? I thought so too. By the time the kids were in their second year I gave up. Besides it is MY blog isn’t it? I deserved to have my say.. of course it’s another matter that it was still all about the twins, if not by them. At least the real obsessivemom got a voice.
The first thing I gave thought to, was the christening of the family. I was of course OM. I decided to let Hrit, Naisha keep their names. Before they were born we’d spent hours trying out all kinds of girl-girl, boy-boy, boy-girl combinations and all had come to naught at the time of the actual naming because we decided on something totally different. There was no way I was going through all that again.. so Hrit Naisha would be Hrit Naisha.
The husband was a different story. I wondered what to call him. The obvious option was of course DH, dear husband… but that sounded a bit corny to me… besides I knew it would come out sounding sarcastic if I was not in the best of moods, which was often back when kids were small and maids were scarce. So DH was ruled out.
I stumbled upon another one OA, other adult. Hmmm interesting.. except that involved the presence of at least two adults and I doubted if even one existed in our family.
Or there was BF, best friend. Sweet, I thought. The only problem was.. coming from an all girls’ school to me a BF was someone who sat next to you in class, or shared her tiffin with you, or watched your backside while you were picking up forbidden amlas from the school grounds, above all she was a SHE. Much later, as I entered my teens, BF changed meaning as well as sex turning into ‘Boyfriend’ which was really too juvenile to call the husband.
Then I thought of The Guy.. well he was The Guy in my life alright.. ummm but it sounded too impersonal .. no that was not quite right.
This was proving to be tough. I then considered Significant Other.. yes this was it.. the perfect fit. He certainly was my ‘significant other’. So there.. Id’ found a name for him. And then I looked at the acronym SO….what? Oops such a no no.
And so he remained simply The Husband or The Daddy. Nothing flowery, nothing mushy… direct, to the point, unpretentious.. .. just like him.
Besides, Shakespeare did say “That which we call a rose… DH, OA, BF… really what’s in a name? He’d remain the same – chronic workaholic, absentminded forgetter of birthdays, thunderous snorer. We’ve been together now for a decade and a half only because, despite it all, he let’s me be me.
Happy birthday Husband.
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Love and understanding

Love and understanding really are different things. Consider for instance what most men feel for their women. Love her he sure does, but understand her.. now that’s a struggle. And that’s quite how I feel for technology. I love technology.. I love the things it can do, the value it adds to my life, the happiness it brings… yet it’s ways remain a mystery. Fascinating, delightful and completely mysterious… that’s what technology is to me.
Each time I take a tiny step and manage to unravel a bit of it, a miracle unfolds.
A few days back by a happy accident I managed to plug in my pen drive to my television. (Oh alright.. The Husband did it after I’d had my fill of struggle). However, much as I fought, I couldn’t open the music files I wanted to. Frustrated, I dumped the remote on the sofa where the kids were engaged in a lively scuffle. As one of them landed bang on the remote a menu flashed on the screen. I grabbed it, tuned in and then boom.. I had all my favourite tracks playing away happily.
When it comes to technology I have always found myself struggling. There was the time when my Walkman refused to play. I took it to the repair shop only to find the batteries were upside down. That would have been dismissed as an oversight if I hadn’t done it two times in a row. Hit and trial worked a long time for me till my smart sibling told me there was a plus and a minus that one was supposed to watch out for. I still sometimes wonder, though,  why the signs must be hidden deep down inside.
Then there are cellphones. Each time I get a new one (which is pretty frequent what with the kids around) I have a fight on hand. When my trusted Nokia gave way a few months back, The Husband decided to upgrade me to a BlackBerry. What a pain that was, still is. The kids must have made umpteen calls to my friend ‘Aditi’ (because she was the first on the contact list) till the same smart sibling got herself a BB and told me how to lock the keypad. Oh now don’t tell me to read the manual.. it’s full of complicated diagrams and arrows with heavy jargon thrown in for good measure.
Isn’t it a wonder then that I’ve been on Blogger for so long? I’ve laboured around plenty in the dark world of backlinks and permalinks, labels, gadgets, templates…. Once I happened to click on the ‘Edit HTML’ option and then wondered for days where my editing menu had gone. I idly posted the query on Google Help and lo and behold I got an almost immediate reply. Someone actually figured out my error. Unbelievable, isn’t it? I never thought there were people sitting there waiting to help you out. Then there was the time I deleted a post and reposted it. At least two of my blogger friends knew I did that through some tracking system. Pretty unnerving to say the least. It’s like there are people sitting in my computer watching every thing I do.

By the way, in case I’ve given the impression of being computer illiterate let me clarify I’m not. I’ve been working on computers for over two and a half decades. Along with my editorial tasks at the newspaper I designed pages too and managed a fairly decent job. In fact I was better than most others, baring the designers of course. But put me on MSWord 2007 and I’m lost. The problem is with the new stuff.. and where there’s technology there’s always new stuff around.
Cookies, plugins, HTML, Java Script.. It’s like Greek and Latin. Sometimes I think I should seriously learn computers but which is the course I should be looking at???
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