Very common cold

I have a cold again. I am told that mothers with small kids tend to get sick more often. Ash usually contracts the flu from his playmates in school. He came with one on Friday last and had a temperature till yesterday. So Monday I took both kids to the doctor. Mira has a perennial cough and cold since the rains began in November.
I come from a family prone to allergies. My brother's sneezing bouts are legendary. Mine has got better in recent years though I have never been able to ward off any flu bug that crossed my path.
The School?
We are still in a dilemma about Ash's school admission. The montessori wants well-behaved, toilet-trained children, who bring only dry snacks to eat. Faith is building a new campus outside the city and collects a building fund of Rs.3000 this coming year. They might continue to collect funds for that in the years to come. Most schools collect a donation/capitation fee, anywhere between 10000 and 25000 when a ward is admitted in school. But if Ash is to change school at Class I he will have to pay again in the new school. And anyway, Faith's new school will be out of bounds for us.
Or else we will have to wait for next year's KG admissions. Many parents recommend that kids start school at 4 years though in India 3+ continues to be the norm for joining kindergarten.
http://www.hindu.com/2007/01/30/stories/2007013016560300.htm

Blogger in the bath

A blogger is like a bathroom singer - performing from the shadows. I am both - a blogger and a bathroom singer. Less of the latter of late - there are too many things to worry about that life is no longer a song... more of a wail! Inspite of it, the bath and the closet (not the Indian one) continues to be a place where u can unwind... err not just literally. Arrange you thoughts and make a list of things to do and ruminate over things done.
The kids no longer enjoy their bath - Ash howls throughout because he cant have his dad bathing him. Mira, because she cant mess with the water and the soap.
Talking of kids and water, a relative's 2-year-old grandchild drowned in a bucket of water just last week. A bucket kept to collect rainwater. It has increased my paranoia.
"Children can drown in less than 2 inches of water, so children should never be left unsupervised in or near any amount of water." - warns many baby websites.
p.s. Babycentre India has been launched.

Un'fare' revision

As usual, I reached the auto stand a little before the clock struck 12 - a la Cinderella.
"Hurry, get me to my office in 15 minutes sharp. I am already late." I didnt tell him that his auto would turn into a pumpkin and he into a rat if he failed.
"And does the new fares apply from today? Do I pay less or the same?" The autos from the stand near my house exacted a fixed fare from me for the daily commute.
"Uh uh, madam. It remains the same."
"What about the meter?" The goverment/RTO had instructed the public to pay only meter charges and that too, only electronic meters which cant be tampered with. The passengers could lodge a complaint with the Transport office on such-and-such numbers against erring autowallahs. The basic fare (for a minimum of 2 km) had been hiked from Rs. 7 to Rs.14 and Rs. 6 for every additional km, since yesterday.
"The meter is not meant for autos hired from stands, but only those u hire at random on the road." I didnt understand his logic.
"Traffic... ma'am. It is justn ot feasible to use meters in this kind of traffic. Even the drivers who take u on a meter ride, would ask you to alight and find you own way if they see a traffic jam. Think of the petrol burnt." I didnt tell him that Bangalore and Delhi faced traffic jams, but autos were much more reasonable and meter-driven.
I changed tack. "How much profit do you make a day?"
"Without meter I can make at least Rs. 300. With meter, less than half that amount. I have to give the marwadi who rents the auto to me Rs. 140 a day. What will I have left then?" he lamented.
Fair enough if autorickshaws in Chennai doesnt heed the fare revision and continue to fleece the hapless public.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/01/12/stories/2007011202590900.htm

Vande mataram!

India celebrates another Republic day with a grand parade in the capital. And the guest of honour this year is President Putin of Russia, India's age-old friend (though of late the country is trying to cosy up to the US).

It happens to be a 'working holiday' for us - being a busy week at work, we have to work but we get paid overtime. Long live the republic!

School saga

I took Ash to the Monti lady yesterday late in the evening. V had instructed me to ask a few questions such as who runs it, whether it is a Trust etc.
I had to wait a bit as she runs a Centre for child development there in the evenings, where children with learning disabilities, autism, ADHD and so on come for therapy. A note book of a Class 1 girl lay on the diwan beside me - I glanced through it and found an exercise with short sentences - mostly with wrong spellings. Maybe the kid had a learning problem. I saw a couple of kids coming out, who seemed pretty normal to me and who were treated with a lot of loving attention by therapists; their mothers however looked irritated and weary.
It turned out that the girl-director of the place was a Malloo. She was a speech therapist but she has a montessori teacher to run the school; more teachers would be hired, she said. With Ash trying to fiddle with my handbag I could only half listen to what she said. Anyway, looking at his antics she said he would have to be brought for an hours's trial next Monday. Since kids in a mont are expected to be involved in an activity on their own with the teacher just faciliating their learning, she wanted to check if Ash could be trusted to do that. I have a feeling he wont qaulify - he is too fidgety and would want to grab the stuff in his neighbour's hand.
Maybe I should just forget this and get back to Faith.

A Tamil feast

The reception was good, at least the food part. The medley included dosa-chutney, nan and side dishes, veg. pulav, jade-green mint rice, coconut rice, curd rice, sambar rice, a sickeningly-sweet sweet called poli, and ice cream with gulab jamun. The wedding was, I guess, a day earlier, Monday being an auspicious day. Apparently tuesdays and saturdays are not suitable for auspicious functions. A reception shouldnt be a problem, though - especially as the father of the bride was a commie. Though for many Indian comrades, religion is not the opium that Marx said it was.

The bride was all smiles - she wore a blue designer sari (the kind with lots of beadwork and stuff on georgette, like in the pic here), deviating from the Tamil trend of wearing heavy kanchipuram silks with massive gold zari borders. All the women around had a kanchipuram draped over their selves and a minimum of 3 gold chains on their necks.

Got a lift home - reached at 9 p.m.

This madhouse of mine

My home has become an inn where I rest my wearied body at the end of the day and my family fellow inmates. I hardly find time to cuddle my lil daughter, who is about to go to sleep when I reach home. The rest of my waking hours are spent battling/discplining my hyperactive son along with my dear ol' hubby.
The computer made its entry home yesterday. It has 17" Samsung LCD monitor among other paraphernalia. I hardly had time to explore it though I did manage to get a DVD (Open Season) and nursery rhymes CDs for Ash.
My school hunt has progressed to a new Mont in my locality called Different Strokes. V had located the ad in the paper and asked me to check. I quite liked the lady-in-charge, who seemed friendly and send me a couple of SMSs to egg me on. So I had a peek at the place on my way to work. They seems to have all the necessary stuff - from bamboo mats to chapati rollers, hopefully they will teach him a bit of alphabets and stuff in the process.
If i manage to convince V ( he is still wary of the fancy system and their fancier fees - 3000 adm fees and 3750 per term), I can put Ash there by beginning of next month. V thinks Ash doesnt need to learn to clean cobwebs or mop floors and he wants some solid ROTE learning - he insists on sending him to Faith Int'l.
Our present plan for Ash is to shift him to a Kendriya Vidyalaya in Class 1. A colleague has promised to help with KV admission which is almost like IIT admission, I learn. For one, it is meant for children of people in the Defence services, Central govt. staff and other transferable job people. Their fees is pretty low by city standards and the icing on the cake is that they give free education for single girl children.
I know we have too great expectations for our lil 3-yr-old but I guess it is natural for parents to have such high hopes about their children. Today, my dad makes fun of our ambitions for Ash and Mira but there was a time when he wanted me and my bro to become IAS officers!
I will sign off as I have a wedding reception to attend.

School of Faith

I happened to visit a school called Faith International Academy yesterday. It seems to be run by born-again Xians of Tamil origin but to do justice to its international tag, it has one Mr.Hopper of UK as its chairman. My former landlady's grandson is doing his pre-KG there, and his mom (a born-again Catholic) testified that the school had done the kid a lot of good - he started talking well and that too, in English.
Run in an old house, the school prospectus claims that it has pre-KG to Class VIII. From what i saw, a hall was divided into sections to accomodate various classes but I couldnt for the life of me figure out how they could have 11 classrooms (pre-KG, LKG, UKG, then Classes I to VIII) in that small place. The old lady in charge of admission assured me that in June, they would shift to a new proper campus of their own nearby, God willing. (She didnt mention a hefty donation like most other schools here, where the norm is anywhere between 10,000 and 25000, but the fee structure seems to be include a building fund of 3000 a year) The school follows the CBSE syllabus and has a branch in Perungudi, in Chennai's IT corridor.
A school van should be able to help Ash commute, though he would have to leave home at 8 am and return by 1 pm. The classes are from 9-12 noon. Right now, he wakes up only at 8 or later!
V wants to put him in pre-school there rightaway and register for LKG in the coming academic year.
What I am worried is if we will be able to shift him to a big, more established school later, say in Class I. The chances of getting admission to a school other than in LKG is almost nil in Chennai, say informed sources.

Art Buchwald and us

My brother forwarded me something today, with the note, 'Do you remember this from our childhood?'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6276123.stm
Dunno whether you were all all Art Buchwald fans, but his columns used to appear in the Sunday Edition of the Hindu when I was growing up. My dad's instruction used to be: Read it so that you learn to write in simple English.
At the age of 9, his English was far from simple for me and most of his satire escaped me anyway. However, I would still plod on. I think my sister fared better as she would giggle every couple of weeks while reading it. A bit like that old Indian line about Bantoo Singh laughing on Thursday over a joke he heard on Monday, I occasionally laugh at his stuff that I read 20 years back.
cheers, RK

Childfree

A colleague of mine who has been married for 18 years tells me that she has no children. In fact, she says, she opted to be child-free as children mean commitment. Very true. There are times when I envy her - she has time for everything. She has a huge collection of books, of which she keeps a catalogue and lends out to people. A lending library without a fee.
V thinks I have all kinds of strange women colleagues - spinsters, divorcees, childless ones, eggless ones - and he is worried they will be a bad influence on me. He is still in the process of opening up to the big world outside small-town Kerala. I say small-town Kerala as the State is like a small village with people with small-town mentality like the proverbial frog-in-the-well.
A state where 100% literacy doesnt mean being 100% education.

Well, coming back to kids there are times when mine drive me insane. Ash is becoming increasingly stubborn and difficult. He likes to poke his head/hands into everything and raises a tantrum when you close the door behind him. By the time I find my way out of the house each day, my head is numb - ditto when I hit bed.
Mira is getting smarter - she ducks/sits when Ash come behind her to push her down and bites him just like that. I wont be long before Ash is completely at the receiving end.

Ritchie Street

I just had my first feel of Ritchie Street, Chennai's crowded electronics capital. Apparently it is the second biggest market for electronics goods in India. "Currently, Chennai is the second largest electronics market after Delhi. The 1,300 shops in Ritchie street and Narasingapuram, located in the heart of the city, does a business of around Rs 65 crores per day."

It is 10 years since I started working in Mount Road, but I have never had the urge to explore RS's narrow, congested streets. With V out of action and expecting me to check out assembled and branded computers at a shop in the street, I ventured gingerly to my destination. (The fact is that V is bored at home and wants to remain connected to the rest of the world over the Net.)

Got lost in the medley of buildings but finally found my way to a tiny shop with a friendly lanky chap trying to speak simultanteously on two phones. He convinced me that he was giving me the best of everything - 17" LG LCD monitor, Sony DVD writer, Speakers by Creativ, Web cam from Zebtronics, etc. etc. I am not very computer-hardware savvy, so I just nodded and trusted his quotation. I got him to jot down the individual pricing which came to a little less than Rs. 35000. As I found my way out, there were half a dozen men waiting in line.

Belated Pongal greetings

Yesterday was the Tamil harvest festival, Pongal. Pongal is a 3-day festival. "The first day, Bhogi, on the eve of Pongal, is celebrated by destroying old clothes and materials by setting them on fire to mark the end of the old and the emergence of the new Thai.
The second day is the main day which falls on the first day of the Tamil month Thai. The third day, Maattu Pongal, is for the purpose of offering thanks to cattle, as they provide milk and are used to plough lands. The final day is also called Kaanum Pongal when people throng beaches and parks. Sugarcane and elaborate kolams are synonymous with the festival."

Sat at home except for a brief trip with V's cousin and Ash to Fisho'Fish from where we buy fish. Bought mackerel, anchovy and kingfish.
THE weekend got a bit hectic with guests. V's brother and family came on Saturday noon and left Sunday after lunch. We also had V's cousin Viji (who survived a near-fatal accident last year)and family visiting us on Saturday night. He has come for treatment at CMC Vellore. Last Jan, he had been knocked down by a tipper lorry, which dragged him and his bike some 15 m before stopping. It had run over much of his right leg. His recovery has been nothing short of a miracle since even doctors at Tvm Medical College had no hope when he was brought in. It might take him nearly 3 years of treatment - ortho, urology and so on - before he can lead an independent life. One has to admire his spirit and resilience that has seen him through the worst part.

Maid Moon

I have not had time to write about the new maid specimen I got during my Xmas leave. Her name is Chandrika (moon) but we have nicknamed her Chinchumol owing to her likeness to a maid in a comedy TV serial.
A Thrissur native, she is still in the process of learning central Kerala cooking. Apparently, they make fish curry with coconut milk only, while our traditional fish curry is red-hot, tempered by a special fish tamarind.
She is a bit of a dumbo who does nothing more than she is told, which is not advisable when you are looking after 2 active toddlers. You have to use ur wits to fend them. But she can be put in the paavam category though I have taken a dislike to her - mainly because she eats only food hot from the stove and I end up eating the leftovers. She says food from the fridge upsets her stomach.
The agency has also not been transparent in its dealings as it has quoted her a salary figure greater than what they had told us to pay. They now say that the rate is higher for outside Kerala postings. They have also told her that she just needs to look after one child and 'help a bit' in the kitchen! At this rate they can get away with murder.
Each time I get a new maid I feel the earlier one was better. Meanwhile the earlier one has expressed a desire to come back as she is missing Mira. I am in a dilemma as she was never keen on looking after Ash. But she had filled in the slot of a mother figure at our home and never wasted anything either.
I will keep this one on a trial basis and think about bringing back the old one after a while. At least one has to get the commission's worth out of the maid and her agency.

This is crazy!

We just got some terrible news! Ash has a week's Pongal leave and we will have to manage him the whole of next week. The playschool reopens only on 22nd. It is only those 3 hours daily when he is away that we regain our sanity. We could also rely on the school to make him eat his breakfast - so of late we had got bold enough to pack him 3 idlis/dosas/bread slices.

The school just had a one week leave for xmas-new year.

Our office has gifted us women employees Tussar silk saris and the men 2 dhotis for Pongal. I got a "cow-dung green" sari. Last year's canary yellow Tussar still remains unopened. I have promptly given it to mom as she will make better use of it than me.

Mom is leaving on Sunday night.

I am reading Roald Dahl's Going Solo - about his days in East Africa. A colleague had lent a few books so that V can kill time. So I have Dahl's Boy and Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red. But since V is busy coordinating with his office staff and minding the kids, the newspaper itself takes up his reading time.

p.s. The latest casualties at home include the kitchen half door (brought down by Mira), Ash's pen sketch on the wall in the hall, and a broken glass pane (while batting with a ladle).

Patasala

Yesterday I checked out a Montessori school called patasala with a lower case 'p' ( a sanskrit word meaning centre of learning). I had passed that route on many occasions and knew it had to be good going by the name itself - anyone who had the sense to call it that must be a creative person. The golden nameplate looked a bit elitist though, and I knew it had to be expensive.
I saw lil girls with brooms and mops in hand, and pails of water, and a boy cleaning cobwebs. While some learnt to draw, paint or build blocks, some practised writing. Each seemed to be involved in a different activity - each kid let to do things of his own liking.
I checked with a colleague who knew the person who runs it. She said it was very good. http://www.hinduonnet.com/2000/11/20/stories/13200375.htm
I was asked to come again with my ward, so today I went with mom and Ash. After a long wait we met the person in charge of admissions. She said that there were no vacancies for his age group and that he was a bit overaged - the kid has to start montessori education at 2 1/2 or earlier. Since the last term has already started it seems a waste of money enrolling him now. There is an admission fee of Rs.5000, a term fee of 4000 and a fee of 3500 for equipments every year. But he would be too old to join in the next academic year when he would be 3+. They dont take children over 3 yrs. And kids have to be fully toilet trained.
Another admission seeker said her elder son had gone to a different montesssori school but this one was supposed to be better. She wanted to put her second kid here. OF course she said there is a problem when the child is shifted to a traditional school where learning is less fun and more a burden.
I have to check out some other schools. I didnt want him to join a matriculation school where children are driven too hard. A montessori would have suited his temperament.

A Florence Nightingale in the making

Well, things have become more orderly now. My role as a home nurse to V is getting less challenging - I am learning but more importantly, he is learning to do things on his own. He can get out of bed without me holding his operated leg, and walk around with the help of a walker. The physio has taught him to visit the loo without skidding.
There has been an influx of visitors and phone calls. Even the church has been very supportive. The priests visited him at hospital and home and a few parishioners, some not known to us too, called to enquire about his health.
The accident has in one way been a blessing in disguise - it is giving him the much-needed rest after all these years of work-related tension. He now has more time to read, supervise the kids' welfare and brush up his artistic skills.
Ash understands that V has hurt his leg - the first few days after he came came, he kept pulling everyone's clothes to check if they had hurt their legs too. Mira has become extremely naughty this past one week - she can move around faster on her legs now, which means she doesnt care to eat and is emulating Ash.

2007... Bad start

V met with an accident on December 28 on his way home for lunch. His scooter collided with a bike that came in the wrong direction. In his effort to prevent a head injury (he was not wearing a helmet), his hip took the impact of the fall. The neck of his femur bone (near hip and thigh) was fractured and got dislocated. Luckily for him, two of his colleagues and an acquaintance saw him and rushed him to hosp. Though the doctor first said he might be operated on by 9 pm since the op had to be done in 24 hrs, it was done the next day at 8 am (after various tests, while we pondered about the need to shift to him to a more reputed hosp _ in the end we decided it was best not to shift him and hope for the best) and lasted 3 hrs.
Was discharged from hosp on Sunday noon. The main doctor said they have managed to do an 85% job ... rest in god's hands, he said, as blood vessels need to get revived. He will be on bed rest for 2 months and out of work. In 6 weeks, the bone should set ... right now the physiotherapist comes everyday to help him walk with a walker, the ortho comes every 3 days to do the wound dressing. Right now, I help him with all his personal needs - he has become the third kid I have to look after.
V's friend stayed at the hosp during night and me during day (since the kids couldnt be left alone at home during night). His father and my mom are here right now to help us cope,
Otherwise, things are going haywire at home with 2 kids to manage and an inefficent new servant. With Mira having another round of fever and Ash at his naughtiest worst, I have never had it this tough.