The Single Festival-Single Day Policy

As a child, the immense number of festivals celebrated in India used to be a source of deep excitement and joy. I'm not just talking about the large ones, like Diwali or Gokulashtami or Navaratri, but even the relatively smaller ones- Rama Navami, Ganesh Chaturthi, Shivaratri etc (these "smaller" ones may be the bigger ones for other people, not just in other parts of India, but really, even within our own family and these have also changed with times). Basiclaly though, my childhood memories of festivals are basically linked to the different types of foods and sweets the extended family would make, under the iron thumb of my Ajji.

My Ajji, like the General of an army, would plan out the menu for each festival weeks in advance, communicate with her troops (daughters and daughter in law), get everyone organized, get everyTHING organized (including additional stoves, fuel, boxes for storage, plans for how much to give which neighbour in addition to the family itself, in addition to the actual ingredients themselves), and the preparations for the bhakshanams would begin a few days in advance. The whole household would re- align towards the kitchen and its frenzy.

In my young adulthood, this would irritate me- I needed the house to stay aligned to my needs as a professional- lunch boxes, tiffins etc to continue as they were without any interruption (yes,yes, I have never made any secret of my self-absorption). I would haphazardly offer my help, especially in the cleaning, but the actual cooking would be off-limits, due to Ajji's strictness about madi and lack of samashrayanam etc. This is the reason none of us grandkids who grew up in the same house ever learned to cook and went into the wide world blissfully unaware of the burdens of cooking.

As a full fledged adult, with more than a decade of living and working in India, handling both natal and marital home expectations of festivals and their samskaramas, I have over time developed this policy:
a) I will only focus on one festival a year, and that too, only for one day. Not for me the 3 days of Diwali, or the 9 of Rama Navami or the 10 of Navaratri. For this one festival, I will do all, most, many some of the things my mom and Ajji used to do: clean the house, get rid of the old stuff, plan the food, make the food, and get the altar ready.
b) I refuse to give anybody any bhakshanams that I have made...are you kidding? I can make maybe one portion of a sweet and a karam somehow. If I have to give, then it's a separate plan and in that case, I will cut down on the things that I can make for the kids. It's either the kids or the others and I can only pick one.
c) This single festival changes from year to year, depending on how I feel. For instance, two years ago, it was Ugadi. Last year it was Gokulashtami. This year, it's been Diwali (Nov 8, Naraka Chaturthi, to be exact. No Dhanteras, Bali Padyami stuff for me, thanks).
d) For all other festivals, either go to a temple, or pray to the sun from your home. God is everywhere after all and isn't particularly waiting for your specific prasadam to bless you.
e) For those persistent fellows who either ask you why you aren't celebrating something or invite you to their houses for archana-kumkuma, either smile mysteriously, or claim you aren't celebrating it this year (truth) or that you have your periods (it's not a lie- unlike what conservatives think, periods are not a single defining event, they are a process and a cycle... and therefore there is no beginning or end. Also, periods have to come in use SOMEtime: they always end up ruining a woman's plans, so one might as well reap some benefits. And anyway, who the hell is going to check? The days when an elderly woman of the house would keep count of all the women's cycles are over and hurray for that).So take that time and spend it sleeping. Perimenopause or menopause may mess up your night time sleep, but it does make you sleepy at other times, so why not take that nap in the middle of the day?

After the implementation of this policy into practice, I can happily claim these benefits: - No festival fatigue - None of the sheer exhaustion that overcomes the average Indian woman between August to Nov every year - Only excitement over the next year's festival season. In contrast, the average Indian woman, by the end of November, is in a catatonic state and will burst into tears thinking of next year and the year after that... and the year after that.

Shankaracharya says, there is no difference between God and you (and me). So why should we differentiate between Gods? The same prasadam that you make for Diwali for Rama (or Krishna, I can never tell who), is the same offering for Ganesha and Shiva and Parvathi and Lakshmi and everyone else.

Now, you may say, Varsha, your kids won't have the same memories of festivals or carry the same rituals over to their adulthoods. True... then again, my memories of festivals aren't my parents'. I do not carry these rituals over even after being exposed to them. But, I accept that this is a valid point. BUt it's not my particular goal. Your mileage, as the saying goes, may of course vary.

The Mirena Miracle

I have had a Mirena for about 11 years now. And I didn't realize how much I owe to it until very recently.

I used to have terrible periods as a child, teen and young woman: every possible periods-horror story you can think of, I have had it- cycles that lasted over 25 days, immense cramps, major clots that would gush out of me with a torrent of blood, staining everything in its path including the jumbo pads, layers of undies, clothes and sweaters worn in an attempt towards discretion.

By the time I was 18, I basically could do no physical activities whatsoever- anything even slightly robust would bring on the dreaded bleeding. I once carried my niece on my lap for a few hours in a car while we were going somewhere, and knew, a couple of hours into the drive, that just that pressure against my uterus had started the bleeding again. I was anemic, had no muscles, couldn't be left alone because once the bleeding started, I couldn't do much (my mother accompanied me to my undergrad- she basically moved herself from Mumbai where my dad was, rented a house and refused to let me attend hostel, where there were 12 toilets for 200 girls.... my inability to stay in a hostel was a huge source of embarrassment for me and resentment against my mom throughout my college years), bunked several days of school and college, experienced severe and constant pain in legs, unending bloating etc etc. This was despite several cycles of hormone treatment.

I see these same symptoms in my daughter and I feel terrible for her. But I think treatments have improved over the years and I hope that she doesn't get affected by this too much (more than she already has, I mean).

Anyway, long story short- after my first kid was born, in my late twenties, I basically didn't have a period for more than a year. And when it restarted, it magically reset itself. For the first time, I had periods like any normal woman would: 4-5 days, a bit of pain and tiredness, but nothing like what it had been before.

And by the time my second was born, I was basically done with the whole reproduction thing. I had absolutely no desire to experience periods ever again. Started the Mirena, renewed it after 5 years and then we come to present day.

I had thought I had another year on the Mirena, but apparently I had gotten my dates wrong- I was off by an entire year. So, a few months ago, when I got my periods after nearly 11 years of blissful period-free life, I was a bit surprised, but didn't attribute it to the dwindling efficacy of the Mirena. It took me two months to figure it out: two months where my normal life slowly ground to a halt- I was bleeding every day again, couldn't go running (or walking or anything else) without bleeding, couldn't have a bathroom break without a little blood clot popping out, felt immensely tired and experienced a constant dull ache throughout my lower body all the time.

Finally went to the Gyn on Sat, told her the story, realized that the Mirena had actually expired several months ago (yikes!) and promptly got it replaced.

Fast forward three days: I went for my first run in a long time this morning. My energy levels are so high that I am still wide awake- more than 18 hours after waking up and having a full day of meetings and running around. No pain, no blood, no fatigue.

If this option had been there when I was in my teens or twenties, how might my life have been?

I might have been so much fitter! Still, better late than never!

No matter what, I need to ensure that D doesn't suffer and doesn't plan her entire life by what her menstrual cycles will allow.

Most of us think of medicines or fancy types of surgery or treatment when we think of medical miracles. For me, it is this IUD that has given me a life that I didn't even appreciate fully until it suddenly disappeared. My gratitude for it, and for the fact that it was so easily available and accessible to me to renew immediately, has no limits.

Nostalgic Pune

Which is a title a hundred times better than "Drowning in Tears Pune" which is what I probably could have called any blog I might have written during my first visit to Pune in 2018 after leaving it nearly 3 decades before.

In 2018, I had won my first grant. I had written it while my dad was in the hospital, pitched it a few days after he died, pitched it again a few days after my mom died and got word of the approval while waiting in the bank submitting his and her death certificates. As part of the "Welcome to the grant family!" process that large grant funders do for their awardees, they requested me to come to Pune for a day-long thing. I landed at the airport and decided to take advantage of the couple of hours in the early morning that I had, found a bus that took me to Aundh, where my mom and I lived after my dad got transferred to Mumbai, and tracked down that house. But I was an emotional mess and I couldn't handle the fact that they weren't around for me to call and let them know all the old places I could recognize in Pune and sobbed throughout the bus ride and the walk to the house. Received a lot of stares, but there are advantages to wearing glasses- you can hide your tears more easily than not.

But it is 2026. I am no longer that weepy mess. And I am back here in Pune for a 3 day conference. Which just so happens to be in a campus very close to that same Aundh house, so I decided that this time, I would try to track down the very first house that the 3 of us ever lived in in Pune. I could recall the names Shivajinagar and Model Colony, but try as I could, the rest of the address was a total blank. No recollection of the apartment name, or the road, but had full and intense clarity on how the road used to look, the sparrows that would chirrup, the green of the trees, the space in front where Appa first taught me how to ride a bike, and play badminton, and made me skip so I could become stronger; the little garden at the back where Amma helped me bury a sparrow and then her chicks after the former was killed flying into our hall fan and the latter starved to death (yeah, grim!), where we would pluck pomogranites and jamuns, where she found "thizhanellu" plant when I had jaundice, and the garage where the apartment ppl would keep a Ganapathi and sing songs during Ganesh Chaturthi. That house. But what was it called? Where was it?

Then in a massive stroke of luck, I found Vaibhav Sweets on the map! Vaibhav Sweets! The place outside which I would stand every day for my school bus and where I first discovered that male and female sparrows look different! Surely it couldn't be the same! But Google pics assured me that it was- the same bright red lights, the same fonts. So I found my way to Vaibhav Sweets and then to the apartment.

The slums opposite the apartment no longer exist, although it is still clearly a lower socioeconomic neighborhood than the earlier part of the road. Sheetal Apartments (I do NOT recall it being Sheeldutt Apts, frankly...) looks a bit tired. Maybe its charms were invisble to me in the fading twilight and yellow street lamps. The wooden board inside with all the names of the owners is the same that hung there in the 1990s with the exact same names... did nobody sell their unit or move out, or has that wooden board become so much a part of the collective consciousness that nobody has thought to replace or update it? Surely there must have been deaths, weddings, births and movements of families... The garden inside has been paved over - no more pomogranate or jamun or thizhanellus from there. I was too jittery to wait for someone to come and ask me what I was doing there, nor did I feel that, if asked, I could conceivably tell people the reason why I came all the way just to see it again.

I then went on the road that led to my Marathi tuition teacher- a big part of my life in that era. For three years, from the time we moved to Pune, I went to Smita aunty's house nearly every single day trying to learn a new language from scratch so that I could survive school and Puneri life, where everyone spoke (and still speaks) only Marathi. Smita aunty, as a newly wed, had come to live with her husband and his elderly mother in a small house with a very large garden and an outbuilding that served as her husband's printing shop. He would print business cards and the like, and set them out to dry one by one before packing them up neatly in little boxes. That outbuilding used to be a place of magic for me- the walk through damp earth and little tiles laid out in a path, the smell of ink, the stacks of empty cards waiting like so much possibility, and then, after being inked, shipped off to all sorts of places in the city and into unknown hands across the globe. Their sight would fill me with yearning- I desperately wanted to work in a place like that. I felt that there could be no higher purpose than being able to print whatever you wanted in your own home. Smita was a lab tech and a painter. She ran biochemistry tests in a hospital called Ratna Memorial, where my mom, a few years later, had a pretty major surgery to remove a tennis ball-sized lump from the side of her spine, the visible sign of her struggle with bone TB. I wonder if Smita recognized my mom's name when her blood tube must have showed up at her lab for pre-op and post-op tests. Never thought about asking her this at the time, of course. Smita's mother-in-law was a Marathi-version of my grandmother. Widowed at an early age, conservative, would wash her own clothes and set them out to dry by hoisting them on a high clothesline inside the house and when dry, would use a stick to move them down to a clean area, untouched by human hands so that it would remain "pure", fluent in multiple languages and possessed of an acerbic sort of humour. She was an avid gardener and it was there in her beautiful, tree-laden, damp garden that I first saw lemons growing on a shrub and have longed to grow in my home ever since (now I have a lemon shrub, but it is, alas, only filled with thorns and has stubbornly refused to fruit, despite using my Ajji's trick of threatening to cut it) I used to feel very close to the elderly lady, of whose name I have no recollection now. I don't recall the husband's name either, for all the hours I spent in their house.

The small house with the large garden no longer exists- it seems to have been converted into a set of flats. But what was astonishing to me was that behind the flat was a garden with an outbuilding! Did Smita and her husband decide to hold on to that space after all? And if so, why? Did he still work out of that space? When did the elderly lady pass away and how?

I wasn't prepared to stick around and ask questions, especially because I don't know any names. How would I even ask and whom would I ask...but more importantly, what would I do with any of this information? It's so random, and kind of pointless, no? It's not like I want to get back in touch with any of them. Is merely satisfying one's curiosity enough to go through the trouble of finding someone to talk to and rehashing all the old times?

Anyway, two points of intrigue: there used to be a small boy, a 6 year old, who had lost his father in a road traffic accident (even in those days!) on the highway between Pune and Mumbai. His father had been a dentist, I think. This kid used to come in my school bus and lived fairly close to Smita's house. The entrance to the road leading to Smita's house now has a large sign board that says Kale Dentistry.... I wonder if it is this kid!

And the second: there used to be a slightly smirky, "cool" kid calle Gaurav Mulchandani- again, living somewhere on or around that road. And there is now a sweet shop (almost exactly opp Vaibhav Sweets) called Mulchand Sweets! Did Smirky Gaurav get into the sweets business? So many points of eyebrow-raising worth!

These are the things I wish I could speak to my parents about. Who else would get any of this adventure? My mom would have totally gotten my need to revisit, we would have gossiped nicely ont the phone and she would have been a fellow detective on my path to discovering the old apartment complex. I think she would have also probably had the courage to go speak to some of the people.

My dad would have remembered names and faces and stories- it wouldn't have been half-baked knowledge like mine. He would have known exactly where I had to go and how. And would have encouraged me to find my way to my old school too.

Being an only child has its pros and cons. But I think the loneliest bits about being one is the fact that once your parents are no longer around, you don't have anyone to share your childhood memories with. And childhood memories are intense and vibrant and matter a lot.

Learning my kids anew

I assumed, before RK left for Australia, that my life here in Blr would be just the same as ever: me and the kids doing our own things, me supporting them when they asked, packing them food and hanging around. I hadn't really given it much thought.

Adolescence, in many ways I'm realising, is like very early childhood- the kids grow so fast that you blink and you miss it.

What I hadn't anticipated was that if I didn't put in some effort, we were at risk of becoming three rather detached roommates and nothing more. It struck me recently that it had been a few days since I had a proper conversation with Ani, for instance, and that the sum of our interactions was limited to mundane practicalities- money for the bus, wishing each other a good day, texts about the house key etc.

While Durga still seeks me out to tell me about her day or share gossip (or tea,as she calls it) or company to go window-shopping, Ani's interests and mine appear to diverge so much that these long spaces occur without even my realising it.

Then there are feelings of loneliness - I miss RK and the laughter and fights we have. I miss how naturally the household comes together when he is around. But I always assumed it was a me- problem, that I had to resolve this within myself.

Then there are the fights that Durga and I are having- she's at the phase where everything I do is wrong, boring and lame. Her greatest pleasure is to make fun of me about everything, especially to other family members. Which is entertaining, no doubt, but can sting.

Today, after reading "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" I decided I needed to spend time with both the kids. I called them out of their rooms, and said we needed to hang out together. Conversation was initially a bit stilted until the topic of weekday lunches came about at which point, it was a lot of laughter and teasing by the kids about my cooking. After that, it was fairly smooth sailing. I excused myself when it turned to "Summer I Turned Pretty" which Durga likes, I loathe and Ani finds so hilariously bad (he claims) that he and his college friends watch it together and text about how bad it is (or they could be gushing about it, who knows!).

Now I go to bed feeling happier than I have been these past few days. I was walling myself up thinking I had to figure out how to navigate all this stuff by myself. Maybe the answer is as simple as reaching out to the people who matter the most and creating occasions for us to come together. Memorable family interactions don't just have to happen when all 4 of us are together; maybe we can create routines for us three as well and not feel like we are just in a holding pattern until RK returns. Maybe I could embrace this opportunity to not feel like I am just a placeholder for the double-parental unit.

The Killing of the Shrew

A tiny shrew entered my bedroom today.

Random rodents keep entering our house. We are the only house on the whole street who have a tree and space for the Earth around the tree. We also compost around the tree. And to cap it all off, our dog Perry likes us to keep the door open so she can keep running out and barking at various things. Needless to say, lizards, rats, mice and on one memorable occasion, a squirrel have come in. It's especially bad after harvesting the mangoes- the smell of mangoes in the verandah room is heavenly and serves as a beacon to many many creatures in addition to humans.

I can handle lizards and feel reasonably comfortable guiding them out. I am intensely scared of rats and mice. Once a rat entered our house, climbed the stairs (!) and entered Ani's room upstairs, hung out there all day, emerged in the night and jumped on his bed and bit him on its way elsewhere. We had to go to the emergency room for tetatus shots at 3am. Our househelp Shanthi is very brave and if I have sequestered the rodential intruder in the verandah or the room attached to it, she strides in and pushes them out.

If Perry gets a scent of any of these rodents, she kills them. So, Perry is like a brahmastra- you only bring her in as a last resort and you can expect destruction. Bedroom rat, for example- instant death.

Today I wasn't sure what had entered, but the squeaking sounded like a rat. Durga shut the bedroom door so the rodent couldn't escape. All my clothes cupboard doors had been open and I was dreading going there tomorrow morning to see rat-shit everywhere on my clothes. It was really stressful and I felt very out of control. In fact, while I have managed reasonably well without RK these past few months, this was one of the times I desperately missed him. He would have understood my utter reluctance to enter the room or deal with this problem by myself and would have done something about it (as he has before). He would have made a nice joke, turned it into a learning lesson for the kids.... basically, he would have handled it really well. Unlike me. This is what I did:

I dithered a good bit, messaged some loud messages on Whatsapp to RK and then we let Perry into the room. We could tell that Perry had caught the scent and then on the other side of the door, heard several very loud shrieks and then silence. I gently opened the door and caught sight of a much smaller grey body than I was expecting.

I yelled to the kids (kids are even more scared than I am... I asked Ani to help since he's the man of the house now and had to listen to Durga retorting about patriarchy and Ani informing me that I was the adult here) and then they peeked in and Durga said, I think it's a shrew.

Look at it... it's so cute... it is supposed to feed on insects, worms and spiders. No wonder it was hanging out in my garden. Why, oh why, did it have to come inside the house?

I am swamped with guilt. Also nausea. I wish to God I had done something different.

Panel Discussions

What is the point of a panel discussion? It's like an anthology- it gives you a teaser, a brain worm, or provides enough intrigue for you to search out the author/speaker and learn more about their work.

In a lot of conferences, talks and symposia today, I find that either:

a) the organisers didn't want to seem like they are playing favorites.
b) They are absolutely playing favorites and want everyone to know it (and the fact that they are all a little circle of friends)
c) the topic is so complex or polarising that the organisers would like to aggressively moderate the speakers and the audience.

When should a panel discussion format be used?

a) When the topic is sufficiently novel for a vast majority of the audience b) When you want to offer mid-level professionals a chance to speak about their work (sort of like a "watch this space" prelude to hopefully more impactful work) c) When there are so many opposing sides that you don't want to give any particular side too much time or space (in a dream world. In reality, there will always be one side that figures out how to rig the system so that their POV gets prime time) d) When you want to introduce a piece of work or even a particular emerging field- a book, a highly relevant article, some aspect of computer security or immune cells or road building materials etc. e) When there are broad nuances that the organizers or speakers want to highlight but these are not too technical or detailed for most people to miss.

When should a panel discussion format NOT be used?

a) When the topic is sufficiently personal to everyone- even if they don't know the nitty gritties of it, they all have experience of it. In such a case, it's far better to either have an extended the Q & A session, or even better, have a series of short talks by the panelists with a Q & A at the end of each session and ideally, also provide Q & A time at the end of all talks. Otherwise, the entire panel risks being dismissed for being underwhelming, not actually understanding the nuances of the topic, or the personal lived experience of individuals, or worse. If people are coming to a venue specifically for a session- why design it for a miniscule 1h or 90m? By the time the intros are done (don't even get me started on panel discussions that have an inauguration first... why??!) and the initial mildly funny opening remarks are over, you have already lost 20 minutes. Then invariably the first speaker takes up way too much time and the last speaker has to speak very fast to cover all their key points. And then the organizers claim they will take "only two questions please, in the interests of time". Can there be a more irritating format?

b) When the audience knows the topic... one can claim that in today's age of complexity, nobody knows every perspective. Ok, fair point. But when the audience are those you have invited specifically because of their experience or interest in something or the other, why would you then assume they don't have a depth of understanding to catch up fairly fast? Then of course, EVERYone has opinions that they would like to share. A well-planned panel discussion format might actually work pretty fine here, but nothing irritates or frustrates people as when they either haven't been allowed to dig deeper into something or share something of importance to them.

Graduating from some Tropes

In the history of romance novels, a wildly successful trope that has lasted for several decades is the one with the well-meaning but generally incompetent heroine. There are several excuses- she's having a bad day; she's nervous, distracted, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, bored etc. So she leaves important documents on the train, drops her handbag, forgets her wallet and her phone and her charger and her car keys (like, seriously... what exactly did she remember to take in her large handbag?). She has no freaking clue how to be patient, how to maybe think a little bit before shooting her mouth off in public, how to be a bit attuned to the general vibes in a place... so she says stupid things which are overheard by the wrong people and then she has to run around apologizing to them and so on and so forth. You get the pic. Anyway, I am now done with this trope. I have decided, no more books with the dumb heroine.. If I need to teach you to be a bit careful about your stuff, lady, then I don't need to be reading about your lovelife- it has nothing to offer me. I wonder if I will, as I age, start shedding annoying tropes. Maybe when I am a wise old eighty year old, I will only be reading very specific books- maybe they will be competent, older women who can take care of themselves. Maybe it will be about couples who can communicate honestly without mumming up