Author: Tulika

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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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I WATCHED A MOVIE…

.. in the theatre, last Sunday. That’s a huge reason to rejoice because the last time I was there was almost two years back  and before that it was in 2006. That’s a bad bad average for someone who loves films and worse for someone who loves the whole theatre experience…
To begin with there’s the
– The big screen
– The great sound system
– The caramel popcorn
Plus
– The maid doesn’t bother you
– The doorbell doesn’t ring
– You don’t have to yell at the kids to ‘Keep it down’
– Or dodge the ball as it lands on you while they play bat-ball
– Or handle The Husband who just wants ‘a cup of tea please’

 

It’s just you, the popcorn and the film.. bliss.

Of course occasionally you find yourself reaching out for the remote that’s not there but that’s about the only hitch.
The Husband gallantly volunteered to take care of the kids while I went off with the SIL. Needless to say I totally completely loved the film .. oh did I forget to mention the name?.. it was Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. The whole idea of the film is so not me but so what-I-would-love-to-be… I mean what fun it would be to go off with a bunch of friends to do things you would never actually do on your own.
That was fun. Hope we can do it again soon.
In other developments, last Sunday was also the day the kids got their Taekwando green belts. There was much excitement and they were pretty thrilled with themselves. Despite the tiny thing that N is, she did better at the exam according to the instructor’s feed back. So much for H’s macho act.
This weekend was given over to food. We went out for a great Chinese dinner and then I ‘helped’ the kids finish their chocolate mousse.. thus did I desert my diet. And now is the time I start dreading that weighing machine as I ready for the gym. Mondays, I tell you, are the worst days of all.
Edited to add: The verdict at the gym: 800 gms up. Too stiff a punishment for one night of revelry, isn’t it? It’s back to work now.
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Samosa Queen

That would be me. There was a time when the only samosa queen I could have imagined myself as, would have been the kind who outdid everyone at eating samosas. However, now that I am a grown up respectable SAHM-to-twins kind of a person, the said epithet has many more dimensions.
In fact, since I’ve had the twins there are times I find myself doing things I could never have seen myself doing… it’s a kind of surreal, out of body experience.. when I look at myself and think ‘Is that really me?’
And so it was when I found myself surfing the Net for a recipe to make samosas. The kids had something called National Day which meant they had to dress up in Indian clothes and carry and an Indian snack and I was instructed to send samosas. They are just not for the readymade ones. I looked for frozen stuff too but gave up when everyone said they had too many preservatives. Google it was then who came to my rescue.
Of course I knew the basics having eaten millions of them. The filling was easy enough – I added some beans and peas to beef up the health quotient of the potatoes. U Tube taught me how to do the dough here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x17wnChUfY . Then it was simple.. roll small rotis, cut in half, make a cone, fill, seal, fry on slow heat. Pretty doable, I thought.
However, the first one I put in, puffed up like a blooming flower in fast forward and spilt out its entire contents… so did the second and third. I think I hadn’t sealed them properly. After that, the fourth, fifth, sixth.. in fact almost all, fried to perfection. Was I thrilled! The kids loved them… at least Hrit did. Naisha barely tolerates food so if she ate even one at school I am happy.

That’s how the samosas turned out..



THE BAD ONES..



… AND THE GOOD ONES
And that’s how the kids turned out
One of the rare times when they posed perfectly…

.. and then brotherly affection took over.

Points of note: 1. Naisha has her breakfast tucked away in the corner of her mouth
2. Hrit wore that smiley to even things out because he had no accessories like Naisha who had bangles and hair clips

It would seem that ”God helps those who persevere” holds true in the kitchen too, not just in the gym.

While on the gym.. that’s the reason I’ve been a bit laid back on blog posts. I’ve been in exercise mode these past few months. I try to squeeze in short walks when I can, along with the gym and am happy to see some progress. However I still don’t fit into the top which I once could, six months back… so I’m not sure I can call it progress.. I need to reach the base point before I can start talking about actual ‘weight loss’. Sigh!
Oh one happy thing.. a new entrant in the gym asked me if I was married.. Heh heh heh… how’s that for a compliment! Or maybe she thought I was an sulky old spinster. Humph!
Anyway, what with heavy duty cooking and exercising this past week’s been pretty adventurous. I also splashed hot oil on my arm and am currently sporting some awesome blister/boils. I’ll spare you guys the pictures only if I get enough sympathy comments.
PS: I caught myself spraying the loo with my favourite deo. I was just glad I wasn’t spraying room freshener on me. Senility?
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Have you ‘bin’ a good girl?

The twins are five and are still not reading. And so these days I’m sitting down with them going over myriad lists of words.. ‘at’ words, ‘et’ words, ‘in’ words and on and on. Each time they recognise a word they get all excited and try to form sentences with rather interesting results. Sample this..

‘in’ words with Naisha

Bin – I’ve ‘bin’ a good girl

Fin – like in Dol’fin’?
Sin – Yes I know this… Naisha ‘Sin’
While on the English language.. this one’s my favourite… In Hrit’s words.. I’m the ‘pickuping’ man… but only when he finds time from ‘cleanuping’ his room.
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