Familiar

Few long months ago I left the familiar behind.
The streets and the people,
everything that I belonged to
and that belonged to me...

These months taught me that real joys in life aren't those which
we race after but those which we miss en route!
A shared cup of tea, a game of scrabble, an evening walk
and those familiar smiles...

Ordeals made my mind tougher and then began the consolation.
Weaving a new spirit into the gloom
and joy into the new spirit.
To carry me on...

Newness faded away, excitement died down and ennui crept in.
The new suddenly felt familiar again and the old,
archived to a distance memory,
to flip thru on a lazy Sunday afternoon...

The Road Not Taken - by Robert Frost

This is one of my all time favourite poems that always inspires me in trying times. Life is about the choices we make. Those choices, will change what lies ahead of us. An overtly simple thought but one that leaves a lasting impact on my mind. It's simple words, unique rhyme scheme and soulful underlying meaning make it a wonderfully endearing poem.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.


Our move to Singapore has made me associate more closely to this poem and I know, we too, one day ages and ages hence will look back and say, "and that has made all the difference."

Images

*Stoic gazes
Of *droning regularity
Mirror images
Like peas in a pod

Doing the daily trek
Immersed in
Lush fields of a
*Technological wonderland

Impeccably
Dressed to die for
Real sight for sore eyes
Yet! Indistinguishable!

Evading eyes looking
Through fading,
Merging and receding
Images...of me


*Stoic- unemotional, showing patience and endurance
*Droning- monotonous, routine
*Technological wonderland- their land of Iphones

Boredom - by Satyajit Mone (August 2012)

I proudly present, the first ever poem composed by Satyajit. The poem echoes and resonates our mutual feelings of longing and resultant boredom that has crawled in during our time away from each other. Indeed, separation from your lover does make a poet of you... ;) Well done my love!


Boring Days Boring Nights

Nothing to do but need to stay tight

I tell my wandering mind to stay calm
Destiny will soon fulfill what's written on my palm

Life has suddenly become void
Guess it’s time to listen to floyd

Empty mind is a devil's workshop, they say
It’s time to remain focused right away

Missing family is a dreadful thing
It’s as bad as a Scorpio’s sting

Hope this journey ends soon
So that I can see the Singapore monsoon

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."- Marcel Proust

Not hopeless!

I swore on a certain day in my life, never to make that mistake again
But here I am on my own again, as promises are made only in pain
To be forgotten on that happy day, when life seems simple
When you have good luck and cheer, that causes you to dimple.

I suffer and so does he, not sure how we agreed this to be
Also suffers the tiny love, with mute grumbles, maybe?
Their desolation can only be greater than mine,
Outwardly, holding brave front, within, seeking intervention divine.

Prayers so hollow, anger, aggravation, so mighty that can swallow
Our innate inability to be content, leading us to a bottomless shallow!
Our Twin faiths and gods yet to no avail, cries rising with rising cadence
Still, amid this zany wrath, love strengthens our resolve immense.

I count the seconds of this world’s mammoth contraption
To unearth the imminent, the future, the prediction
I chase an ever receding horizon, not hopelessly, but with a hammer and a nail
To pin it down on the spot I choose, when refreshed happy days will unveil!

Yoyo's growing up...

As a baby, my boy has been very strong, supportive and loving all along. A real 'Chota Bheem' indeed! He may also be the only baby on this planet who may have commuted about 90,000 road kms within less than a year when we did the daily commute together to Abu Dhabi while living in Discovery Gardens (Zen). Waking up at 6 am, enjoying the drive and co-cooing, oohing, aahing all along the road in the carseat and his mama by his side who tried hard (in vain)to squeeze in short naps during the tiring commute, with poor Baba at the wheel 6 days a week. After the day's events and all of us being out of home for a straight 12-13 hours (6am - 7pm), tired to the core, the work did not end. In fact, it only began!

One of the main activity upon returning home, apart from taking care of Yoyo, playing, bathing, feeding, eating, taking turns to have a bath, catching up with each other while Baby TV came to our rescue, was the religious, rigourous washing and sterilizing of Yoyo's dozen bottles(in no exaggeration- babysitting ones plus the bottles we needed for feeding him at home at night). For this I give complete credit to Satya as he did not skip this routine of driving and washing even for a single day!

With no time on hand to manage a sick baby, we struggled to ensure that he did not fall sick or at least as less as possible. Hence, as a paranoid set of parents we gave Yohaan's babysitter a clean set of 6-8 bottles everyday. A clean one for each time he had to be fed the 30-60-90-120 ml that he needed as he grew older. With added months the number of bottles went down, then the commute for him went down from a 120kms to a 1-2 kms just few lanes away after one year on the road and eventually just to a lift ride away.(as we had moved into a new home in DG in the same building as the babysitter, what a joy that was!, until it lasted that is...)

Today, it feels like we are light years away from those days though this was our routine all the way from Yoyo's birth up to his 3rd birthday. As he grew older, the needs for washing bottles reduced more significantly than other needs and I am now very close to breaking free from using bottles totally, as last night was the first night when Yoyo agreed to have milk from a glass instead of his bottle. He absolutely adores milk and until last night he has had a ritualistic method for drinking it from his bottle with his favourite orange blanket in his hand.

It took a bit of threatening, cajoling and finally bribing to get him to agree to drink and to finish the same milk that he refused to drink whenever it was presented outside of the bottle. As mundane as this may sound to some, I consider this a significant achievement in Yoyo's growth and mine as a mother. I'm proudly progressing as a mother who is first diaper free and now bottle free!! Yay, its time to celebrate indeed!

Though, sadly, it reflects that my Yoyo in not a baby anymore and is growing up fast...

Small Gestures!

My new life has imprisoned me in yet another mundane and routine activity, that is the daily ride on the bus.

Each morning I take the bus no. 106 from right outside my house to Orchard Street, right outside my office. It is a relatively effortless, stressfree, quiet, peaceful, freezing cold (hate ACs) and sometimes boring hour each way! On the positive side, this gives me the time I deserve during the day to devote to my passion for reading which was almost non-existent in the last few years, as I was doing the driving myself between Abu Dhabi an Dubai.

Due to the way my starting points are positioned I am always guaranteed a seat within one or two stops of my boarding the bus if not immediately. Yesterday, I was running less than 10 mins late but had missed one of the long buses and got into a regular size bus with a lot of other of my daily co-passengers who also seemed to have missed the earlier bus. I would blame it on the fact that it was a rainy morning and people walking outdoors with umbrellas in their hands tends to walk slowly, carefully and painfully in the way of the others trying to make a dash towards the buses they can see flying past them.

Since it was exceptionally crowded due to the circumstances, my chances at a seat were reduced until the next main metro station stop called Clementi but I was standing right next to a person who appeared to be packing up her Iphone headphones into her bag and preparing to alight. Sensing that she would get off soon, I tapped the shoulder of an elderly lady (I wouldn't call her old, somewhat similar age or a bit younger than our mothers) to point to the seat for her to take. She had a crepe bandage on her forearm, like the one we tie when we have sprained an ankle and I had noticed it when we boarded the bus together. This simple gesture of mine of giving up a seat, that was not even mine, but could have been mine, brought such immense joy and relief to this lady and seemed to have reassured her faith in the kindness that is capable only to the human heart. She thanked me and waited to be seated. As luck would have it, just after our little exchange of smiles the person sitting next to the one alighting also woke up to realise its his stop and got up. So this elderly lady and I sat down next to each other. She explained to me that she was in an accident with a taxi and her arm was broken and operated on with screws placed inside and its recovering very slowly. She got off about 20 mins later and thanked me profusely again, blessed me, graciously addessing me as "my dear" and we wished each other a good day!

As I said, I take this bus everyday and have an hour to survive in it so I am usually intent on keeping a seat when I get one. As you can imagine, its not easy and no fun at all reading a book while being pushed foward and backward with everytime the bus driver applies his brakes (which is very often, mind you, on the crowded, busy morning streets). However, I am now determined to giving up my seat to any old person I see next time, as the pains of standing for a few stops is insignificant in comparison to the joy I instilled, the smiles we exhchanged and the blessing I recieved for such a small action!

Yoyo's first day at school!

Today, 23rd July 2012, is yoyo's first day at school. This will be an easy date for me to remember as its Tracy's birthday. It's also the first or second time in more than 10 years that I have not been with Tracy on her birthday! But, oh well, let me not digress!


We've been preparing Yohaan that he will be going to school and he had visited his school once during the admission process. St Joseph's School has an amazing campus with the front porch area as a day care and the rear as entrance to the classes for Pre-nursery, nursery, KG1 and KG2 levels. Several activities like play, toys, assembly room, dining hall to eat breakfast, music room where they introduce the kids to music and instruments, and other art and craft activities mainly for his age. His class is called St Anne's (incidentally as my school!) and his teacher's name is Ms. Jacqueline Tan. The entrance lobby has a couple of fish ponds and looking at the sizes of the fish, one can easily guess that 'feeding the fish' may be one of the breaktime fun activities for all the kids! Anyway, they did look pretty well fed!

Being his first time at school, we briefed him several times that he needs to tell his teacher "susu or chichi" and she will take him to the bathroom. We then had to change the word "teacher" to "miss" as he couldn’t say teacher and kept mixing it up with "cheater". ;0) Now, we wouldn't want him to call his teacher that, would we! Finally, looking cute as ever in his new uniform which is a white t-shirt with purple shorts and white socks, Baba went to drop him to school. At the end of the first day when I came home from work, he greeted me in his usual gobbled mix of words pouring out with information about the day. He also wanted to say something else and new and had a big grin on his face aware that he was about to say something funny. Finally he held my hand and asked me to say, "mama say, teacher susu, teacher chichi.. poopoo!!" Yes, the first thing he learnt in school was an addition to his vocab "poo poo!"

We all burst into laughter and we went on and on laughing for the next ten minutes (he shares my trait of laughing endlessly on the same joke!!)as he kept repeating his newly learnt phrase with growing confidence in each attempt! I throughly enjoyed his first day at school and I'm sure he did too!.

“Surreal banking”

As far as I can remember, opening an account, in India or UAE where I have lived, has been a several step process that needs time, contacts, meeting bank reps, several documents and a couple of visits to the bank to say the least. And of course, the additional visits to your HR department asking them to certify that you are employed in that very office, country and city by a letter signed by only a bank authorized signatory who may or may not be in the office at the time. Once the tedious submission process is thru, the wait begins along with frantic walks to the reception to check if there is any mail for you with an ATM card and then again a second mail with your secret pin number! Despite this long-drawn process, there is still no guarantee that you will have all the correct information and that you will not need to call your bank for corrections.

However, fortunately, things seem to be at a completely different level on this side of the world. This week I received my Employment pass on the 18^th of July (just three days after fingerprinting process) and I went straight to the bank with my passport and my EP. Twenty minutes later I walked out of that bank with my account opened and my ATM card (with an accurately spelt name) and an enabled pin in my hand. hmmm. this summarizes my experience but does not justify the brilliance of the experience, so, I need to elaborate what I would describe as the most surreal banking experience of my life!!

We walked into the door of what looked like a hi-fi lounge bar with red lights and modern décor with 4-5 kiosks of ATM looking screens followed by a sit out area on the right with a low serpentine shaped sofa with giant and brightly colored pillows with a big red heart on each with a mammoth touch screen TV just behind the sofa which also served as a partition of the space to create a room behind it. Two pretty young Chinese girls wearing identical pretty black dresses with thin red belts and high heels popped out from the left, walking towards us to offer help. We followed one of them to her desk asking her to open an account. Now, her desk was not just an ordinary desk! It was a 50inch flat screen monitor laid out in between her and us. I handed over my EP and passport. No forms, no photograph sticking business, completely paper free. After a clear brief from her about the types of accounts, types of charges and general rules she got busy with her setting it up for me. Of course, as I was doing this for the first time I naively asked her when I would get my ATM card. To my surprise, I got an answer that I would get it the same day! Very impressed, I asked her what time she would like me to come back and get it. Now it was her turn to be surprised and she looked at me, very amused indeed, and said that I would get it, “NOW-today” along with the ATM and internet banking pins. Both Satya and I looked at each other with pouting lips and raised eyebrows, in awe of the amazing speed and professionalism we were witnessing for the first times in our lives!

Well done Singapore and DBS in providing this wonderful customer experience, I thoroughly enjoyed it! I am now prepared to be further amazed by this amazing place...

We will weather this storm...

When I moved to UAE, I had nothing except the dreams of doing something new and starting a new life with Satya. I had no responsibilities and also no assets. Completely free from any limits or boundaries but with several pressures and and endless list of actions; of achieving success, securing a job, getting married, getting a house, car, and starting a family. But I was free and I had the choice to do all or none of things from the wish list.

 

My move to Singapore, however, was very different. I had everything we had dreamed of and which we had struggled so hard to achieve, in Dubai. A lovely home, cars, my family, friends, a support system, a career, growth and overall stability. Yet, we chose to move! It's very true that we are free until we get imprisoned by the choices we make!

 

Coming to Singapore may be the best decision or our lives or the worst, that only time can tell, but by making this choice, we are now imprisoned in a situation where we long for the familiar and are afraid of the new. Hopefully, our perseverance will bring this new reality closer to our heart and relegate our past reality to a comfort corner of our mind.

 

It's only a week or should I say, already a week, since I came to Singapore and although many of the intial doubts are cleared, many new ones have emerged!

 

Well, life is in the living, right! And we will weather this storm...

15/7/2012