On NOT being candid!

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
 Its loveliness increases; it will never
      Pass into nothingness;.....                      

                                                                        ---- John Keats                                        

 I often see people yawn at the very mention of poetry and I don’t blame them if they haven’t read the soulful melody that is the poetry of John Keats. The ‘thing of beauty’ that I am referring to, is a beautiful picture that sits atop my mantelpiece. Shot in the breathtakingly beautiful, fantastic locale of Gulmarg (Kashmir, India). Snow-capped mountains and trees in the backdrop, standing cheek-to-cheek with my husband, this picture’s ‘loveliness increases’ each time I look at it. It is beautiful not because how we look in it, this is not a self-aggrandizing web-log. It is about a moment in my life that is permanently 'captured'.

This photo of which I so fondly speak was shot by a total stranger for a paltry price. In fact, we had to be coerced into taking it in the first place! The place was abuzz with tourists, all keen to find a secluded, picture-perfect spot to go into their dream album. In pursuit of this elusive spot we had to shovel the knee-deep snow, so as to get that perfect backdrop.

The moment was posed for and shot in a hurry. Yet when I look at it, I conveniently forget the painstaking journey, the bargaining, the vendors trying to take advantage of my ‘tourist’ tag. I can remember it as (and only as) a blissful, exotic and dream-like adventure!

So how does this seemingly tedious feat turn into the renderings of Keats? When does the charade translate into reality? What is it about our memory that blows-up an ordinary polaroid into something surreal, into ‘something else’?

I think it is our innate desire to preserve ourselves. To have a ‘moment’ that may or may not exist actually, but stands in front of us in the form of a visual representation of everything we want it to be. And the wonderful way in which our memory works, editing the unwanted and inconvenient details, slowly but surely, the’moment’ in this very picture is as real as the next thing you see!

Is this what they call ‘looking at life with rose-tinted glasses’? Maybe. And what is the harm? The next time you take a picture, give it your best shot. It may not be candid but if you can remain 25 forever, I think the ‘tinted glasses’ are a great bargain ;)

----Urooj Fathima

A Housewife

Yes, you heard me! I did not say a 'stay at home' wife or mom or a 'homemaker'. As long as you play the part of a wife and/or mother you are going to be a 'home maker' whether or not you have a 'job'. So, why this need to sugarcoat and make it technically correct? Why is it so offensive if someone refers to a woman as 'just a housewife'? The answer is right there! To me the word 'just' is offensive and not 'housewife'.

This blog is not about women and unemployment. And I am definitely not saying nor suggesting that once a woman is married she should stick to the four corners of the house. A thundering NO! This is about one's decision to stick to a particular job role unabashedly and unapologetically! In fact, if the man and woman know what they are doing I dont see why a man cannot bake the bread while the woman  earns the dough!

Why should you squirm and feel inferior just because your priorities are different? I think true freedom is when you can actually do what you want. Is it not what we ultimately aspire for? Hats off to the women who bring home the bacon and help the kids with their projects too!  But being on a payroll should not be the sole yardstick for someone's worth and dependency. A woman may not have a fixed monthly income but that does not mean she is without work. Her path is not an 'easy way out'.


Speaking of women who are a part of the daily grind called 'employment', are they having (not to forget earning) their cake and eating it too? If you think they are guilt-free, you are way off! For many of them it means now there two places with no appreciation!

Being a wife and/or a mom is a full time job in itself and often a thankless one at that!
If 'homemakers' feel inadequate with their choice, 'career women' carry the iniquity of guilt. Guilt of 'not being there', of 'missing out' and what not. And if there are exceptions to these rules, some women who are actually comfortable if not content with their choice, the otherwise unhelpful relatives and peers are right there to remind them of the same!

Often, women work long hours both inside and outside the house. They neglect themselves completely, lose their health, interests and even identities, all in the quest of the elusive approval. Bending over backwards to appease someone is a norm among women across cultures and yet it is rarely requited with recognition, forget about the much deserved appreciation! Whatever they do they are expected to do some more. This pursuit of pleasing is endless.

We all have one life where our actions count so let us just live! To every woman (and man too) I just want to say, go out and do everything that gives meaning to your life. Family is a sanctuary of love, solace and comfort. Don't make it an impediment, it never is! Do your part and help others do theirs. Give yourself a break! After all, you are doing a 'job' with so many risks, hazards and demands. You are worthy of commendation and certainly not shame.


Urooj Fathima
- A relocated, fat, grownup, proud housewife ;)

A Grown Up

The golden time, the good ol' days, a carefree world, unlimited fun...No, I am not talking about a sequel to the many prequels of 'Golmaal'... I am talking about childhood. Ah! to think of a world in which we are always taken care of... No bills or deadlines, no EMIs and for sure no heart-breaks, where the biggest worry in life is who is going to pounce on the last piece of candy at home...All this and more constitute the proverbial ‘age of innocence’. It seems like 'just yesterday’. A fond place in the golden casket of the memory lane. Where time was still but we were not.

The day began with going to school, meeting up with friends, continued with finishing the dreaded homework which was often a permission slip to go out and play!

To top this, were the diligent ‘rules’ set by our parents and if we belonged to the era of joint families, the entire brigade of ‘grown-ups’. The immutable laws included the time to wake up, set number of hours for homework, play, friends, T.V. and even sleep! Phew! At the age of 5, I didn’t know that this is going to be the cycle of my life for the next 10 years! And here I am, still reminiscing  this time and calling it the most convivial time of my life! If I am successful, you are too!

Why does this seemingly agonizing time, full of rules and regulations seem so desirable and easy? Do we hate our adult lives? Nah!  Is it the helplessness of not being able to go back in time and do all those things we think we should have? Was it the fun in breaking and sneaking past those rules? Maybe. As kids all we wanted was the love minus the punishments that we definitely got and how! We wanted to be 'independent’. Remember the 'Dhara’ advertisement in which the adorable kid is angry with everyone at home and is at the train station ready to 'leave the house’?

Back then, we had it all figured out. 'I want to become a doctor, lawyer, teacher, etc., get married and maybe have kids’. We didn’t think ‘what after that’. And I think now is the time to do that. We crossed the bridge, made it to the ‘other side’. We wanted to grow up and here we are. Time to start after the middle. Time for us to make the rules for the kids in our lives, which they will break! I think this is what is called ‘the circle of life’?

All the kids I see today are smart, intelligent, zealous and more. At the age of 6 they can teach you a few moves of chess! I think we were still learning spellings back then. All I want to tell them (and their over-competitive parents) is, just be kids for a while. Leave the laptops for the grown-ups and enjoy the sun! Get your feet dirty and your have mom go nuts over the same. Don’t let your ‘smart’ overshadow your ‘sweet’. Don’t be in a hurry to zoom past to the ‘age of experience’. Revel in the ‘age of innocence’ for a while. A little secret of life, growing up is inevitable! hush-hush ;)

Urooj Fathima

Fat

What is the single most obsession we have today? Cricket? IPL? money? The proverbial question: what do women and today, even men want? Who are the new haves and have nots? 

The answer is simple. Just take a look at the ad in the T.V where wearing a designer suit will make you the C.E.O of a company, where using a particular brand of soap will make you more beautiful than ever. What do all these have in common? The obsession to look good at all times in all situations. Ever seen a 'fat' person in these ads? A resounding no! Even the junk-food joints' commercials have skinny people gobbling away.

Its obvious, we all want to have that hour-glass figure on which we can flaunt the designer labels, turn heads and make everyone go ‘wow’! Then we have 'it'! Now what if a poor soul, yes I don’t mean just the girls, does not have a hot body? The answer is easy. You are the 'butt' of all jokes.

I am one of them. No, not someone with a fancy disease or syndrome or even gay (coming out never seemed so cool). I am fat! Period. Where ever I go this reckless obsession to ‘look good’ is unfathomable and unrelenting. I cannot go shopping without feeling sorry for myself, I meet someone after ages and all I can think of is how this person is going to react at my appearance. I make a wise remark on something and I know that somehow my weight will make its way in the middle of the conversation. In fact, since my weight gain (yes, now I am talking like I have a contagious, incurable disease) I cannot have a conversation with anyone that is not weighed down by my weight.

How can I forget all the aunties, uncles, ‘well wishers’ who are all so wise and full of unsolicited advise on how I can get back in shape and conquer the world! Everyone, you may or may not know their last name (many cases not even their first!) is there to put me out of my misery. The most seemingly incompetent person assumes the mantle of a doctor/ nutritionist/ dietitian and what not. ‘Drink this ‘magic potion’ in the morning’, ‘don’t do that in the afternoon’, ‘avoid this’ and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said ‘cut-off that limb’ altogether as a 'tip’ to lose weight.

When people tell me I am fat. I don’t and cant and more than anything, dont want to deny that I am fat. I am not in denial! So what? I absolutely despise and cannot understand why they all seem to think that I am unaware of it till that moment. God! do they carry on. Seems like they cannot stop to save their very life. It goes from ‘you are fat’ to ‘exactly’ how fat! What better than concluding it with a parathian shot, 'you don’t look as good as you did before!'

But the irony of this is, these very same experts never complimented me on my looks or told me how healthy I was ‘before’!

No, this blog is not about how I gained the weight, what all I am doing (or not doing) to lose weight. I am not going to hide behind the versatile excuse of 'hormonal imbalance’. Its about how my life changed.

I have an advantage of the proverbial ‘before’ and ‘after’ that is associated with fat people and mine is reversed. In my case, ‘before’ was when I was NOT fat and after is, well, you know what. As a kid and most of my adult life I was what people would then tease me as ‘skinny’. So did I have the best life possible? Yes and I continue to do so (by God’s Grace). But was it because I was thin? Not really. Being hardworking, focusing on being good at studies, my work, making friends, caring for and loving my family and just going about life with all my flaws and finesse, which is not very different from who I am today. At that time I didn’t think that I was the ‘chosen one’. I didn’t realize I was in the chic first class. Weight gain, lo and behold! I was bumped out of the elite and into the ‘cattle class’.

Even the disabled are called ‘differently able’, but once you are fat every offensive reference in the dictionary is ‘just a joke’ and you are 'over-sensitive’ if you feel bad and the jokes just wont stop if you play-along! Probably, they are all thinking that feelings are lost behind your enormous weight.

So what is my point? Am I cribbing and complaining? Maybe. What I really want is the next time you meet me, talk to me about everything including my weight but just stop before you do the honours of pin-pointing the exact number of kilos I have gained and exactly where. (Somehow they all seem to obsess over the ‘exactness’). Because, as hard as it is for you to believe, I know! I don’t want your pity and 'awws' and 'ouches' simply because I am not suffering from a disease. Hell, when Aishwarya Rai, whose praises the world wouldn’t stop singing at one point, is in the eye of a storm for weight gain (forget about her heroic delivery of a baby girl at 37 years of age!) what chance to do ordinary girls stand?

As for me (and everyone like me), don’t carry my weight for me because I don’t know about losing those pounds but boy! do I know about jutting a fist... That’s a weight you don’t want to be weighed down under!

Urooj Fathima

Relocated

Having lived in a particular place for over 28 years , I think I will call it my roots....so when time came for me to shoot out of these roots, I was um-mm excited! It was going to be adventurous, thrilling and ‘new’ in every sense of the term! After-all, how often do we get a chance to completely ‘start over’ in life? Is it something we want? dread?  easy? or for that matter worth it?Will I find this new place livable without any shred of my ‘previous’ life? what about family....can I begin a life without them? All this and more was on my mind... but the general tone was that of excitement. 

I had never lived away from home. never traveled outside India and it was my dream to live in an amazing, astounding, developed yet quaint place. Ireland is just that! I was ecstatic that me and hubby were relocating here. I couldn’t  have asked for more....

Ireland is beautiful....that is the first adjective that comes to mind. Its green, cold, wet, pollution-free (relatively) with great infrastructure. Living here was easy.

Coming from Bangalore, if I knew one thing like the back of my hand , it is the perturbing ‘T’ word ...‘traffic’. No, I don’t mean just the serpentine line of vehicles. For a Bangalorean, it means bikes and cars and buses and of course the jay-walkers, cutting you short and swearing at you because you inconvenience them by just being there on the road. It means incessant honking even before the red light turns amber, forget about it going green! Smoke, noise, and how can I ever forget the entourage of a single minister that uses the arterial road at the peak hour bringing the burgeoning  traffic to a grinding halt. Living in India made me used to a certain way of life that involved running from pillar to post to get the smallest of tasks like getting my damaged tablet replaced.

Naturally, I found Dublin organized. It was like the entire city is a ‘no-honking’ zone.Yes, it is a part of the ‘developed’ world, but that is not what makes it so ‘easy-to-live’. There is a sense of coming to a halt here. No, I don’t mean stagnant.... I mean relaxed and laid back.

This is exactly what me and especially my husband  needed, a break from time itself! Here the clock does not run your life. There is no hurry to gobble up your second morsel even before your tongue has tasted the first.

So, is Dublin an answer to what all humans are looking for? No. Like every place on  earth it has its own set of challenges. Sometimes the ‘relaxed’ borders on lazy and even inconvenient! Try shopping after 7:00 in the evening and you will know what I am talking about. And of course, ‘the great Indian palate’... well, there is hardly any restaurant here that will satisfy that!

What about the dreaded ‘R’ word....When the whole world is doing it, is Dublin an exception to racism? Unfortunately, no. Being a foreigner here has its repercussions. Is it Right? No. But does it happen anyway? Yes! However, it does not impede our lives and that is what makes life good here.

People here love life. Complete strangers saying 'hello' on the street, complimenting me on my bike, complaining about the cold was completely alien to me. I don’t know how they work but I know for a fact that they party real hard here. Come here on a dry and sunny day and you can see celebration and jubilant spirit in the air! Then again, it could be the sun or the extra pint of Guinness that lifts the ‘spirit’. After all its the Irish we are talking about!

Urooj Fathima