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Glitter n glue

Each time one enters the kids’ room it’s like launching off on an adventure. One never knows what one might find there. Yesterday I entered and found my chappals stuck to the ground.. Naisha!.. I sighed.
She’s been on the cut/paste spree for quite sometime. She cuts up just about anything she can find. Umpteen times a day she comes to me with a “Mama may I cut this?” Yes I’m grateful she remembers to ask. And I always, always give it my full attention because it can be just about anything from a fresh newspaper straight off the doorstep to the electricity bill or the doctor’s prescription.
So much for the cutting.. the sticking is worse.. She uses fevicol and roams around the house with sticky fingers… I got her a glue stick.. and things were fine till Hrit entered the picture. Like a typical disruptive brother he promptly twisted the entire thing out and trampled it to a messy sticky death. Naisha of course threw a fit and went back to the fevicol… and I stepped right into it. I was ever so glad my parents had hammered the ‘always wear your chappals habit’.
Think positive I told myself before I could get worked up… at least the mess is confined to their room. Then Naisha took to glitter. Anyone who has ever had any experience with glitter knows how stubborn it is.. It JUST DOESN’T GO. I innocently gave Naisha a go ahead for the glitter-glue combination. It’s been three days since they made their glitter paintings.
Hrit’s glitter kite..

.. and Naisha’s shiny flower
Since then it has traveled well out of their room and is all over the house and all over us too. Despite the baths and the cleaning it still shows up at unexpected places  as a sudden sparkle… on the tissue box, in Hrit’s hair, on my cheek, on my chappals, on the screen of my laptop, on my maid’s hands and of course all over Naisha.
A shining reminder of think before you allow.
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Notes from a journalist turned blogger

Writers who are journalists turned bloggers have to take on some special issues… if you’re one you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you’ve been on the desk for a while the situation is even weirder. The thing is while at the desk you carefully cultivate a writing etiquette and slowly it becomes a reflex deeply rooted in your brain.. while blogging it’s just a pain in all the wrong places.
Compulsive obsessive word count disorder
Yes this is the first one.. the urge to check word count every few words.(92) I still have the itch to do it (100)…. and I have to continuously remind myself.. this is not a newspaper.. this is MY blog and I can fill it up with thousands of words of whatever I like.
Cap it
THEN there’s the thing about ‘first word in all caps’. Don’t ask how many times I’ve had to go back to a post and remove that ‘all capitals’ from the first word. Oh and there are so many other style elements… go away all of you… I’m a free woman …I’m a blogger for godsake!
Break it up
That’s what the editor told us.. if your piece is too long break it up.. and so the fixation with subheads. I simply can’t get away from the image of a reader frowning in distaste at a long page of unbroken prose. Being an avid reader of novels I lurve unending pages of prose.. but then reading and writing seem to be locked in two different zones of my brain.
PICTURE CREDIT: PIXABAY

Picture this

No article, features article specially, is ever complete without a picture. Don’t ask how many long hours I’ve spent surfing in-house photo libraries, Google images and a host of other sites looking for the perfect picture. For the blog of course it doesn’t matter. Yet if I don’t have one in my camera, I still fall back on Google images. Without a picture the piece seems so… incomplete. (BTW if you Google ‘journalist’ you just get images of the electronic-media.. had to search under ‘writer’ to get this one.)
And last of all.. the dreaded Media Net
If you’ve worked for a paper, specially the leader of them all, you know immediately what this is.. the bane of our existence at the desk. God forbid you mention a brand.. any brand in your write up.. or you let it slip past your editing .. you get a congratulatory call all the way from Delhi. “Why did you ‘promote’ that brand?” You write about a restaurant you can’t mention the name.. you can write about a disc.. but no name… you write about shops, resorts, watches and jewellery but.. no mentioning names without permission. Oh it takes plenty of practice and hours and hours of dressing downs (putting it mildly) to get it right. And finally when I did get it right, I quit.
On my blog.. Gawd I so love the freedom of it all.. not only can you name the brands you can even provide links to them.. Yay. Yet each time I do it… I get a guilty twinge.. a pang of conscience, part of which is still behind my work desk at FC Road.
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Girl power

I had always been under the impression that my girl was a girly girl but O boy Naisha gave me some surprise. She got into a fist fight with a boy… an older boy… and gave as good as she got.. if reliable sources are to be believed.  I confirmed and reconfirmed. “Naisha got into a fight? Naisha??”

“Yes mama,’ said Hrit, the reliable source, adding quickly, ‘but I didn’t do anything. ‘ So much for big brother support.
I queried further, “What were you doing when they were fighting,” I was saying ‘Don’t fight, don’t fight.” But they didn’t listen,” said he. Hrit seemed immensely pleased with himself. This sure was a first. Hrit telling about Naisha’s fight — normally it’s the other way round.
Of course I told Naisha that was a naughty thing to do. She was duly repentant and soon enough was back to being a ‘good girl’.  Come evening the kids met and the apologies were made. She gave him a sorry ‘sweet’, he shared his chalk with her. Before long the two were playing together again. Fight over.
Kiddie fights are so uncomplicated.. no hard feelings, no cold wars, no sulking..
I couldn’t really decide whether I was truly disturbed by the incident. Strange.. I mean had it been my son I would have been really really upset. Not so with the daughter. I was part relieved she could give it back.
The big question again.. how do you want your kids to handle a fight.. come home crying or send someone home crying.  Tough one.  For now I’m sticking with what a counselor told me once – ALL FIGHTING IS BAD. So NO giving it back.. tell an adult. If no adult is around.. find one and tell.
As they grow older the logic’s becoming tough to explain.. .
How can all fighting be bad?
Ram was God.. he fought, didn’t he?
So did Krishna and Hanuman (Hrit’s current idol).
Bad logon ko toh maar sakte hain na, mama?
Whew.. help someone!
BTW my Facebook friends were quite amused by Naisha’s militant behavior and gave her a unanimous thumbs up…
Tulika Singh Naisha got into a fist fight with a boy a year older… Hrit gave a blow by blow account.. role reversal.
Dhanlakshmi Naidu and Ankita Singh like this.
Hemisha Marolia D’Silva cute site it must have been! Girl power!
Nisha Kapur I can’t believe it . heheheheh . nice good going .
Kumar Shakti Shekhar Thakur trait! 🙂
Nidhi Mehrotra lol…
Neha Singh WOW!….TOOO GOOD:)…BRAAVO NAISHA……GOOD GOING GIRL :)))
Neeraj Singh well she made it clear that don’t mess with thakurain…..go girl
Huma Khwaja proud of u Naisha..keep it up
Tulika Singh Hey bhagwan is there no one who supports a non-violent India? @Shakti, Neeraj.. Thakurs do NOT generally bash up people — luk at Sunil, me.
Neeraj Singh i just said it in a funny way…..
Nupur Shankar I happened to witness a scuffle between a boy and a girl in Rithvik’s school the other day. Another girl, who was obviously supporting the girl, suggested to her friend to “kiss and hug the boy!” which would have definitely resulted in the boy just running for his life 😉

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In defense of NO

I was watching a programme on parenting the other day. There was this daddy who seemed quite hands on. “So you think one shouldn’t say ‘no’ too frequently to the kids?” asked the pretty compere. “I think one should completely remove the word ‘no’ from one’s dictionary,” he emphasized. “Kids learn primarily by observation. Too much supervision and saying ‘no’ all the time isn’t healthy,” said he.
No saying no? I imagined Hrit wielding his gada unchecked hammering the walls, the sofa, the bed and occasionally Naisha.. and then Naisha with her scissors and glue stick cutting up and pasting whatever she could lay her hands on…bills, clothes, books, her hair…. No no not possible I thought.
But then I have this problem of constantly evaluating myself and wondering if I’m doing the right thing with my kids. Self doubt is always waiting in the wings. Am I a very inflexible mother? I wondered. 
Well I thought I must at least give the dad’s theory a chance. Then Naisha asked if she could do water colours. It was evening, I was tired, the maid had left for the day and we just had about half an hour before I took them down to play. Besides I had promised myself half hour of writing before we went down. And so ‘No’ was my instinct. “Yes,” I said as I thought of the dad on the telly.
I laid out the newspapers, brought out the colours, paper, paintbrushes and water in the balcony. I left the two of them peacefully mixing colours. Great, I thought, it works. I got out my laptop keeping my promise with myself. As I immersed myself in my writing I was conscious of Hrit going in and out of the balcony and happy laughter. “I should have done this before,” I thought vaguely.

 After a while, done with my piece I went out in the balcony and this is what I saw.

Bliss
All the paints had been mixed together into one black muddle. Glasses of water had been poured to make a small black lake. The newspaper which was supposed to keep the paint off the floor had long since given way and lay in a soggy mess. The hands, feet, clothes hadn’t escaped the black either.
If I could have found the TV dad I would have dunked his head in the black pool. No luck, though. I let go the kids with the mandatory telling off… no losing my head.. pat on the back for that.
Then came the cleaning up. I rushed them to the bathroom and followed them wiping their tiny black footprints all the way. I told them to clean themselves while I cleared up the balcony. When I got back to the bathroom I was welcomed with another black mess – the washbasin, the soap, even the pot…
The idea of going down was given up in favour of a big tub bath. This is called having your cake and eating it too – first enjoy a mess-up and then have fun at the bath.
Bring on the foam
Learnings from the exercise:
1. Keep your Yeses close but your Nos closer.
2. Hands on dads are still just dads!
3. Everything you watch on the telly might not work for you.
4. Listen to everyone but follow your instincts.
5. Have faith in yourself. (Repeat 50 times)
While on ‘No’ I have to add that ‘No’ is certainly not all bad. All my life I’ve read books like ‘Don’t say Yes when you want to say No’. I’ve always found it extremely tough to say No even to strangers or to people who don’t really matter to me. Yes I have, though Hrit Naisha might not believe it. In contrast it comes a bit too easily to them. (Finish your milk: NO, Put down your gada: NO, Switch off the television: NO). It’s tough on me yet I hope they retain their ability to say No when they grow up, rather than turning into people pleasers.
Hrit Naisha if you’re listening.. always remember a ‘No’ clear and strong, will keep you away from a lot of harm. It rhymes too. Yay!
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If you have a daughter…

… you must learn to
1. Make friends with the colour pink.
2. Drink endless cups of make believe tea and attend many many imaginary parties.
3. Thank her effusively when she does your hair or polishes your nails (even if you look like a clown) and learn to set it right surreptitiously.
4. Buy shiny over the top accessories which you would have earlier dismissed as ‘cheap’ or ‘loud’.
5. Mind your manners for the little lady will remember everything you ever taught her and will sharply point out your slip ups.
6. Make friends with Barbies.
7. Never ever discard things like bits of ribbon, pieces of shiny wrapping paper, old rakhis, mismatched bangles, broken buttons, smooth stones…. No this is not rubbish.. this is ‘treasure’.
8. Stop reasoning with your husband over issues that concern her.. she has him completely wrapped around her little finger (need to fall back upon the cliché because it says it all).
9. Bear with her mega tantrums (oh yes she’s not all angel) and then comfort her when her overactive conscience sends her on a ‘I know I’ve been a very bad girl mama’ trip.
10. Dance. She loves it and expects mama to show her the moves.
11. Explain the intricacies of makeup. She needs to know why aunty has blue colour on her eyes.
12. Wait for your turn at your own dressing table.
13. Handle the waterworks.. she already knows the power of tears.. specially when the daddy is around (refer 8)
14. Enjoy being pampered… she’s a born mama and will mother her mother too.
15. Define what you feel as you watch her growing up – pride, awe, gratitude, happiness or just overwhelming love.
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