The Grip

Has your loved one ever held your hand tight? I mean, like, very tight? Not the romantic tight, but the fear-of-letting-you-loose tight. Well, my husband is an expert at it.

I still remember the first time it happened with K.  We were enjoying a lovely Parisian evening, strolling down Champs Elysees, hand in hand, reminiscing the one year of our married lives that had gone by. I glanced across the road and my eyes fell on two huge, shiny golden letters atop a massive building, intertwined with each other, just like our hands – LV.

He followed my gaze and in what seemed to be a natural reflex, gripped my hand tight. After a few tense, silent moments, I said, “You should know me better than that. I would never spend my life savings on a silly brown bag, with some dead Frenchman’s initials embossed on some poor dead animal’s skin.” The grip eased, heart beats returned to normal, but he still held my hand. As a precautionary measure, I was not allowed to cross the road to even look at the Louis Vuitton showroom. All I could manage to negotiate was a photo from across the street.

As time went by, K learned that I am not the quintessential woman shopper. He is fairly confident that I will not spend irrationally on high value luxury goods / accessories, and by virtue of my abstinence, I do manage to make him spend on the occasional puppy-dog-eyed-sympathy goodie. He takes the word precaution very seriously though. “The Grip” is still very much a part of our lives, every time I walk past shoes and bags.

But all of us have our weaknesses, don’t we? There is this certain thing that I go absolutely ballistic and berserk about. It gives me such a high, I go weak in my knees and I almost pass out with all the adrenalin that rushes through my body. I run from counter to counter like some deranged woman, and my eyes almost pop out with all the darting around. It is… wait for it…. Stationery. Yes – notebooks, pens, paints, brushes, canvass, handmade paper, colours, glitter and all that jazz. So every time I walk into Landmark or even the corner road stationery shop / fancy store, “The Grip” returns, and how! I have never taken him to Hindustan Traders (more on that in a separate post), lest I would probably lose functionality of my hands with his iron hold!

So I have a pile of good looking notebooks, pens et al in my house, of all shapes and sizes and in all colours. K complains about how I never use them, but it breaks my heart to write on something so pretty. He thinks I am crazy, so after much taunting and prodding, I have started putting them to use. One is my contacts book (most contacts are on my phone), another one is my recipe book (not that I cook a huge variety, coz K is the most boring “eater” I have known), another one is my accounts book (you can only imagine how regularly I update that!), another one is my things to do book (I also have Workflowy on my phone ;) and another one is my travelogue (the only book that has considerable writing in it!)

The good part is, K has his weakness too – electronics. By electronics, I mean the whole range. Be it something as small as a circuit board and couple of diodes, or something fancy like a big fat camera or a swanky TV. He hyperventilates when he goes to Ritchie street or Croma or even Reliance Digital for heaven’s sake! So I return the favour by holding his hand tight. Of course, my hands are way too tiny compared to his, so I put my nails to good use. 

K has turned our house into some kind of an electronics lab. As it is, we live in a pigeon hole in Maximum City. (I am told it is quite luxurious by local standards, but it will never compare to the heavenly abodes of Singaara Chennai). To add to it, we have wires running across the living room, lights flickering from black boxes littered around the place. It makes my house look like a space ship in the middle of the night. To add to the sci-fi effect, he constantly embarks on these projects, where he keeps punching in some code or the other – he is making a media server out of our computer or he is turning a mobile phone into a baby monitor amongst other things. Well, I am happy he is putting his engineering degree to good use!

So when he complains about my stationery filling up our tables, I simply glance at all the wires and boxes littered on top of the shoe rack!

It is a good thing that both of us have our weaknesses. We have mutually agreed to have a live and let live policy. We do not accompany each other to our shopping Mecca’s. That way, I can wallow around in Hindustan Traders and the likes without him breathing down my neck and he can bask in the electronics glory in Ritchie Street without me tugging at his shirt every two minutes.

There is so much more to write about our shopping patterns, but more on that later. For now, all I want to tell K is – This is what I did last week :D

Of the cruel, bad and ugly

My daughter has just started babbling.  She loves looking at pictures in story books and speaking with them. Although she doesn’t really understand what I read out to her, it scares me to think of the day that she will actually learn and comprehend this stuff.

Look at all the popular stories for children – Snow White, Rapunzel, The Ugly Duckling, Three Little Pigs et al. All of them are centered around a wicked stepmother, a jealous queen or worse still, concepts of ugly and bad!

Why would I want to drill into her that looking beautiful is even a virtue? I will someday have to explain to her what it means to look ugly. She will probably think that people feeling jealous or being cruel is acceptable, because her childhood stories revolved around these emotions. Of course, in all these stories, the good guy wins at the end of the day, but my point is – why even tell children the negative things to begin with?

I know, the sad fact is that she will anyway grow up to understand and probably use these terms in some context or the other, but I hate to be the one teaching her this. It feels like I am killing her innocence, it just feels so… wrong.

I would rather have her confuse a wolf with a wolverine, or even better, think that the wolf is a smoking hot picture of Hugh Jackman than a big bad guy who goes around blowing down pigs houses.  So instead of looking at a story book today, we read the latest issue of Lonely Planet.  :) 

But hope is not lost, because I found this wonderful publishing house based in Chennai – Tulika. Check out their stuff, it really is heartwarming and oh-so-Indian!  http://www.tulikabooks.com/. Can’t wait to go an ransack their store! 

Middle School Love

My fondest childhood memories revolve around middle / high school, where I made friends for life and found love.

Yes, love. Undying and pure. Love for the English language and everything wonderful associated with it. News, diary, book reviews, ERCs! What initially seemed to be a silly homework ritual gradually took over my life. I fell in love with the language; I fell in love with writing. I had found my space.

I would eagerly await your comments on the assignments I submitted to you. To me, it meant the world when you had a few nice words to say about my efforts. Rani Ma’m, do you know, I still have a midterm test note book from class VI? It was a test that I almost scored a centum on in English!!! What I hold dear to my heart is the page long comment you had written along with it.  

I felt that same rush of emotion when I saw your comment on my blog a few weeks back. That is what prompted me to write this post.

During my engineering days, I decided to run the mad, mad GRE rat race like all my batch mates, knowing fully well that I was never cut out for an MS. Looking back at it now,  I don’t regret it one bit. Only because I loved learning the word list of Baron’s cover to cover!

Till today, I write. Helluva lot! (Please excuse the slang J )I write when I am elated and oh, I definitely write when I am sad / angry. I document my travel, I write about issues that make me think. I write on paper, I write on my phone, computer, a tablet, I write in my head, just about anywhere. I write them long, short, as poetry, just about anything. Writing is what helps me maintain some semblance of sanity when things go awry. It gives my life invaluable perspective. Don’t judge me by the number of entries on my blog. I consciously choose not to publish everything that I write J    

So today, it is only befitting to thank you for making me fall in love. Fall in love with everything nice – books, ink pens, reading and writing. Thank you for gently nudging me into developing opinions and supporting me to voice them in a manner that is acceptable socially. Thank you for inspiring me and instilling that sense of awe for the language.

People say my newborn daughter looks nothing like me. But I sure do hope that she has inherited this love. For, she will not be fortunate enough to study under a person as wonderful as you.