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Saturday 31 December 2016

Happy New Year, Is It Here Already?



Every year on the 31st of December, the old year leaves us gasping for more and the new-year commences upon us with no significant alterations. It’s just a date on the calendar, a time on the clock. We shake our heads and our bodies with dizzying fervour and spasmodic jerks on dance floors, hoping for it to wake us up from our slumber, so that we can kick start the new-year like never before. But all that kicking on the floor wears us out invariably. We wake up the next day with a hangover. So January 1 is officially when we take rest, worn out from the effort to usher in an all new beginning

Alternatively we could just sleep in the sheets and wake up the next day, without bothering whether last morning was any different from the morning of January 1. Go about with life just like a grasshopper, from a blade of grass to another, least bothered about the time of the day or the day of the year. 

Either way, January 1 is just another day. But one that the world welcomes and celebrates. Shoe bite or not, we cha-cha-cha, salsa, slither and shake on our stilettos and boots. Grace or no grace, we rock with the music- pale or groovy does not matter. But that is just community activity. I wonder why, at the last second of the year, we raise our hands up and yell Happy New Year. I was happy the previous moment too! This time around, I actually dazed out and became passive for a few seconds. I could not do the shouting. I did recover from the trance and wished new-year to many. But the paleness of my wish was unmistakable. I realise I am on a vehicle that has only just begun to hum and rev up... I could not really register the pause! I have only recently launched on a new path professionally, one of working with people and of writing. 

But whatever it be, wishing new-year is an officially appropriate activity during the month of January. Last year sometime in June, missing the fanfare of January, I wished a few people a happy new month and they smiled and wished me back the same, condescendingly. But I am always in celebration mood. Why waste the time, when there is a happy new day every day? 

Here's what went well in the last year:

- I became more positive and assertive,
- I began writing regularly. A passion long ignored,
- I became more grounded as a person, more self-assured,
- My friendships strengthened,
- My family bonding strengthened.

And just when I was beginning to think it couldn't get better, we adopted our pet pup Penny, on the Christmas day. 

It is probably my nature. When I sit to summarise any period of time, I never find a reason to complain. Number one reason why, during my appraisals, when I was working in the traditional set up, I never had valid complaints to bother my Managers with. I am positive to the extent of being uncivilised! Civility is in finding many flaws and trying to correct them all life-long. If you don't see mistakes how will you correct them! But I see possibility in everything. 

Resolutions? Oh I went into the previous year without one, and I am glad I did. Because, how is it possible for us to know on 1st January, how the next 365 days must be spent? This absence of resolution helped me later in the year, in setting up expectations for myself, for things that did not even exist in my life in January last year! 

And am I even past the last year? Oh it is always hard for me to wish Happy New Year. I feel like passing it off for long enough so people forget all about it. I have no desire to summarise the lagging, heart breaks and failures that went along with the successes and happy moments. 

New Year is just an excuse to tell everyone I remembered you all year long. Or else it is just another day in our lives, just another brick on the wall, just another coin in the well and just another gyration of the globe. January 1 is here and it’s a bright sunny morning, yesterday was bright and sunny too.

Thursday 29 December 2016

40 Minutes of Hell, 8 Steps to Saving a Life. #A true Story



It was 5 minutes to 10 when I checked the clock. Wow! I exclaimed to myself, I have the whole morning still in front of me to work! I work from home and on my dining table. Don't laugh at me, because from there I can preside over my house help, make sure my Mother goes to the hospital for the 3 times a week dialysis and also take care of the couriers and sundry other visitors. I give instructions for what will be cooked and at times walk into the kitchen to make sure the recipe is accurately being followed. In short, I am a work at home, home maker cum working mom. And I am skilled in many other home tasks. I have scoured, plastered and painted a room, cleaned spark plugs in a car, repaired a wall that had lost all its plaster-of-paris coating, I am quite tom boyish and would take on any task absolutely. My husband is blessed in short, to have such an uncomplaining wife. Smile! Smile! But I never knew that saving life was to be added in my list of odd jobs.

Getting back to where I began. At 10:00 a.m. I had just made a call that had not been picked up. I was planning to leave a message so the person would call me back. My mother's care giver shouted from the balcony, "Aunty, Aunty!" Her voice getting louder and more anxious. We ran! My full time maid, the cleaning maid and I. I reached first, to find my mother having a seizure, her mouth open on one side, crooked, her face hardened, she had no consciousness, her body stiffening. I thought it was a heart attack. We immediately put her flat on the floor. Just last evening I was in an exhibition and a girl had fainted, my colleague, a Retired Navy commander had done exactly that to revive her, serendipity! My mother’s tongue rolled out and she bit it, blood trickled out of the tongue. I opened her mouth and pushed the tongue in. Her eyes were wide open and rolled up. Her lips blue. The maids began to cry. I took courage and remembered the Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation process (CPR). Heave, heave heave, at the chest and blow in through the mouth. I had forgotten the exact method, but I kept pressing the chest and blowing into her mouth. 

Call the Ambulance! I thought. I could not operate the smart phone, my hands were wet and shaky. I had 3 house helps at home, all 3 had no idea what to do. I sent one to get a neighbour, who would take charge of the phone. The sun shone down at us at the balcony, where my mother lay unconscious. I prayed, as I resuscitated her, that she may not die like this. Two of the maids rubbed her hands and legs frantically. I had no hope, there was no pulse that I could detect. There was just a limp body which we kept resuscitating and massaging hopelessly. I finally called the ambulance, the first number, I was put on hold. The next number, I had luck, the ambulance started from the hospital. I calculated 45 minutes in rush hour traffic. I realised I was not making any progress with my mother. I called a Doctor friend from another city and took his help to learn the right technique to resuscitate. I called my husband, but he would take time to come. A neighbour was still needed. One of them had shut her door in some sort of urban fear of death and dying!

Finally a neighbour called, we had plans to meet that day, she was just checking if I was available, I asked her to come, and she came almost instantly. It was she who took charge of the phone from that moment on, coordinating with the ambulance, my husband, the maids and my doctor friend's instructions. She also tried to find a doctor in the apartment. With her around, many thanks to her presence, I put my entire attention to my mother's resuscitation.

Nobody can give or take a life. God made it such that only he knows when a person will cross the threshold of life into death. We are just mediums. And on that day I was going to be his medium to save my mother. I saw a faint twitch of an eyelid and I knew she was alive. Then a finger just barely moved and I knew she was trying to get back, and then slowly, laboriously, she became more and more present and I knew it was working. Heave! heave! heave! blow in, I kept doing it till she got up. And then the doctor friend called again, he kept calling me to check the progress, bless the good soul, he advised for us to get some sugar syrup, she might be hypoglycaemic (extremely low blood sugar level, it is really dangerous for diabetics). We made half a cup of sugar syrup and started spooning it into my mother’s mouth. By this time the ambulance arrived. 40 minutes after the ordeal began. She drank half of the syrup by the time the paramedics were in my house. 

The 40 minutes of hell had ended, I got up from the balcony exhausted, my knees would give way but I kept standing, I had yet more to do. I was walking in a trance. A state of shock I could not easily snap out of. I just kept up with the task at hand. I realised I had just brought back my Mother to life. A person who was ailing for almost 3 years now. Someone who was praying to God to not live. Who am I to take that decision on behalf of God? I feared relapse, I feared the worse. I went in the ambulance holding my mother's hand all the while, giving her hope. She hung by a thin line, hope mixed with fear and exhaustion. At the hospital Emergency Unit, the doctors took her over, informed me their course of action, a routine procedure, and handed me the slip to get my mother admitted to the ICU. I just held the slip and sat outside the emergency ward, waiting for my husband to come. I knew everything could wait for now. I could depend on him now. My husband arrived surprisingly quickly and took charge of her admission process. As we sat down to have tea after the admission I realised I had an unsteady gait, I could not hold myself together anymore. We rested long enough so I could be back on my feet.

19 years ago at the midnight of 6th December, 1997, my dad had succumbed to a heart attack. I have no idea if I could have revived him, I was asleep when he passed away. I have carried a guilt since that time. As my mother lay limp, I begged God to not do it again. 

Here are a few tips you need to know when a person is having a seizure:

- Do not get nervous, you are the only life saver at that moment. Doctors and paramedics come in later.
- Make the person lie down flat on the floor and lift the mouth upward, lift up the legs by putting pillows under the legs. Do not use a pillow below the head under any circumstances. You have to open up the trachea (the wind pipe, connecting to the lung), if the head is raised the trachea gets blocked.
- Don't let the tongue roll out. Put a spoon in the mouth so the tongue stays in the mouth. I kept opening and pushing the tongue back in place.
- With your palms, one on top of the other, push the sternum (Chest), at the middle, hard. I feared I might damage the rib, the doctors say that even if you did, the person would still be saved, but I would suggest to be mindful of the pressure. 
- Press the chest three times and then open the mouth and blow in air covering the patient’s mouth fully in yours. Blow in hard.
- Under no circumstances make the person sit or attempt to take her to hospital in your car. Those minutes can be used successfully by administering CPR.
- Remember it is important that oxygen is being supplied to the patient, else the patient may end up getting paralysed. Therefore the blowing in of air mouth to mouth is done. 
- Once the patient is conscious enough, administer sugar syrup to the patient, 3 spoons of sugar and a pinch of salt in half a cup of water. 

CPR is an exhausting process, sweat dripped from my forehead, my arms buckled. As for the patient, CPR leaves her in immense pain. There are excruciating muscle pains on the chest area, which last as long as three months. Recovery is a painful process. CPR cannot be administered very frequently to a person. 

Life is beautiful. Inexplicable and complex. Painful yet addictive. I am addicted to life and so is everyone else. And that is one addiction we could live with!


Saturday 24 December 2016

Do you really know what you are breathing in? But you do care don't you?



My husband, in his college days stayed in a hostel that was in a historical building in Delhi. Weathered and time tested though it was, it also was damp and quite unequipped for the modern day pollutants. I am talking about the early nineties, the pre "Inconvenient Truth" days. When Al Gore had not yet proved to the world how we are killing ourselves by polluting the planet. The days when Euro I, II and III standards of pollution control were still novel ideas in India, finally adopted only in the year 2000; the days when avoiding air pollution was not even seen as anything even worth talking about on our country; the days when asthma and bronchitis were not incidental to urban lives. Those were the days when lung diseases were just beginning to show signs of visiting our young population. Constant sneezing was the way it came to me. And to my husband unfortunately, it came as a full blown bronchitis at a very young age. He took a toll on his health and had to be rescued from the hostel by his dad in one occasion, in very poor health. He recovered and returned to his hostel, rejuvenated after a month's rest. But risk of frequent bronchial attack became his constant companion and bronchial attacks a frequent visitor.

The air that we breathe in today's post "Inconvenient Truth" planet is quite significantly polluted and now we know it. The urban sky is red in the night, on the horizon. Stars look faint and far apart. We drive air-conditioned cars with the windows rolled up to avoid the fumes from vehicles that crowd the streets, cantankerously chasing and honking at each other with unknown urgency and unimaginable quest. Probably the only fresh air we can breathe are what we take in, in our short vacations into bucolic surroundings of far flung resorts, set within verdant forests, with sparkling streams and ponds. The rest of our days are spent in reminiscing those pristine experiences.

Someone might offer that their homes are the haven for clean air too! Are you sure about that? It has been proven that indoor air is just as much at risk of being polluted as the outdoors and at times even more. Some of the contributors of it are:

- Pesticides, and we all use some of it in our homes, to fight against cockroaches, ants and mosquitoes
- Tobacco Smoke, if someone smokes in the house
- Pollen and molds, sometimes they just accumulate themselves in the hard to reach areas
- Hazardous building material, such are asbestos, formaldehyde and lead
- Gases such as carbon monoxide and excess carbon dioxide

Homes are vulnerable to all of this. Besides, regardless of the quality of ventilation in the house, our bed rooms in winter nights can still become stuffy and suffocating, unsafe to breathe in. I remember waking up in the middle of many of those winter nights, when I  pulled open the french door of my bedroom because, I could not sleep in the stuffy air circulating inside the closed insulated room, my sleep disturbed and sometimes even completely interrupted.

I am familiar with indoor pollution because all of us in my family have some breathing related issue and I frequently vacuum the mattress and head board cushion in the bedrooms and sofa cushions in the living room, to get rid of dust mites. But my tryst with stuffy air has so far been unresolved with stuffy indoor air taking the better of both me and my lovely precious dreams. So I was quite relieved to hear that Eureka Forbes has come up with this interesting gadget called Dr. Aeroguard, which purifies the indoor air. I found this piece of news reassuring and a chance for me to get undisturbed sleep. It is worth a try!

And as I end this piece I find myself sniffing like the terrier dog for pollutants inside my house. Wait a minute, you can't smell them they are colourless, odourless and tasteless, just like the ordinary air we breathe.

Monday 19 December 2016

Whatsapp, Facebook, Dopamine and Addiction



Off late there has been a disturbing change in my household. I find it almost impossible to keep my home clean to the standards I have myself set for my house. I thought I was probably a little stressed about the many things that are going on in my life, but when has life been without its occurrences? I wondered what has gone wrong with my housekeeping skills! Unnecessary things lie around in house, without being removed for days. Dumped items to be cleaned later, with no sign of 'later' at sight. I was really concerned about this change in me and I wondered how I was going to get myself back in order. 

And then I discovered the reason. Eureka! Unimaginable but true, the answer lay in what we consider our lifeline and a revolutionary means of instant communication! Yes, I am referring to Whatsapp and its older brother Facebook. Both siblings have a way of binding you to their allure and charm for hours, filling in the time you would otherwise use for productivity, creativity and mundane activity. Oh well later!

My daughter began calling me 'Whatsapp Mamma' and my husband at times would get mercurial with my Whatsapp-centric-attention to him. But I was just not getting it! I was not getting it because, I have built a network of strong friendships and relationships owing specifically to Whatsappp. Facebook has not bothered me much, I don’t share a lot on FB. But Whatsapp just swept me off my feet. I would Whatsapp with multiple groups all the time. Some even professional groups. Some of these friends, whom I had not met in two decades, are my support system now. Some of my professional contacts have helped me immensely, merely because we are in touch, all thanks to Whatsapp. 

So I had a justification to immerse more and more into the Whatsapp world. I began developing attention deficit. My mind would always be divided. And therefore I began avoiding tasks. All sorts of tasks by the way: legal work, bank work, doctor’s visit, cooking something new, reading the book I bought last week, month or even year, cleaning the house, all of it! I was just putting them off, till they became a chronic problem! Owing to the objection from my daughter and husband, I curtailed too much use of Whatsapp in their presence. But all my 'me time' was still being absorbed with Whatsapp.

I never had time to catch up with pending work. I ignored things lying around in the house because, there was a world inside my phone that drew me into it, where physical world did not matter. If I had been breaking bit by bit into bytes, as I focussed on the phone all day long, by today, I would be just a few gigabytes, tucked away somewhere in the cyberspace, all my other possibilities dissolved in this self-effacing and self-glorifying activity all at once.

Self-effacing because, I preferred to be immersed in just a devise, rather than face real people. Self-glorifying because I was spending time getting appreciations and likes and smilies on my messages, posts and achievements, with increasing multitude of narcissism. Experts say that, this activity, of constantly seeking appreciation by way of likes and appreciations, secretes a hormone called Dopamine in our body. And can you tell me what other things cause the secretion of dopamine? Any guesses? Well let me tell you and brace yourself. Dopamine is secreted by excess use of drugs, alcohol and cigarette. “Oh my God,” I said to myself yesterday, “I have become a drunkard! A drug addict! A smoker! What have I done,” I said, as I watched this amazing you-tube video by Simon Sinek on 'Millennials in the Workspace' a must watch, take my word for it! 

So I began noticing my activities from last evening on. Here are some instances, does it sound familiar to you:

-         I look up at the house, say, "why is it dirty," go back to reading messages on Whatsapp. Can’t focus on Whatsapp either, I open the Facebook, check the updates, go back to Whatsapp.

-         I switch on a you-tube video but have too little inclination to listen intently, so I flip and read Whatsapp messages in-between.

-         I wake up in the morning and after brushing and before I fix tiffin for my daughter, I peek into the Whatsapp. After I get her ready, I drop her and while coming home, I catch up on Whatsapp.

-         I sit down for 30 minutes, just to catch up on Whatsapp in the morning.

-         I look for something in the house, I become impatient, but no worries, Whatsapp brings me back to inaction in no time.

Like the sloth, I lounge on one corner of the house, me and Whatsapp! The dopamine has got me and messed with me long enough, I vow today! I now need a plan to check Whatsapp without disruption. “I am no drug addict material, dopamine will not run my life” I remind myself as I clean my home today!

Some ideas to improve the phone usage habbit:

Simon Sinek suggests- 
- do not carry your phone when spending time with friends and family
- In a meeting never carry the phone. Chat with colleagues when waiting for a meeting to begin to build networks and associations, rather than being distracted by the phone. “It is very rude,” he says, “to have your phone on the table, face up or face down, when in a meeting!”

Some suggestions from me-
- When checking a message on phone, stick to the task at hand, do not open personal messages during work hours. 
- Overcome the need for checking smilies and likes on your posts. Spend that time in making another smiley-worthy-creation. 

Have your wine, but not too much lest you become a drunkard. Connect on Whatsapp but do watch out.


Whatsapp is irreplaceable, unavoidable and undeletable! It is, trust me. My school friend in Canada, is hosting a radio show in New York city and her friends, all of us, in India, are messaging song requests on Whatsapp, which she plays real-time and even announces the name of the requester. Long live Whatsapp! 

Friday 16 December 2016

Hate is easy, what about love?

I learnt how to hate before I ever learnt to love,
Once I learnt to hate, I did not need any love,
Hate is easy, it makes you so special, so perfect,
It is love that makes you doubt and wish for a change
It is love that makes you see all your faults, and hide your face,
It is love that makes you wish for more,
More subtlety, more calmness, more empathy, more depth.
More kindness, more keenness, more stealth.
More quiet, more composure and more life to live
Love makes you yearn and yearn and yearn.

And deep down somewhere there is this ego of ours,
That seeps into our dreams, our thoughts and more,
That makes us want to be larger than life itself,
That fears, that is scared and that yearns for control,
That is restless, that desires unreasonable and that beguiles our soul,
That just wants and wants never gives never loses,
That feels like best is the only post that exists for the self,
That prods us to be unforgiving, uncaring, un-kind
That gives us a tool, a tool for dearth.

Hate is easy, you become perfect in a flash,
Hate is really easy, you don't even have to see too far,
You have seen it all and you need not care,
Hate drives you with such adroit hand,
You need not worry when you hate,
All you need is to condemn,
All you need is to complain,
All you need is to curse,
And then you are perfect,
At-least in your own eyes.
Why would you care what faults others see in you?
You can easily hate all the critics away.
You can easily hate all your friends and foes away,
You can easily hate all the love away,
You can easily hate all the life away,
And when it is all gone, all sucked away,
You can easily hate, hate, and hate
Lifeless, soulless, listless.

What about love, Love is difficult you know.
But love is Life, love is truth and love is our only hope.