In-laws inbound!

V's parents are coming tomorrow from India and will be staying with us for a month! Oh, and the exclamation mark at the end of the previous sentence wasn't meant to convey exasperation. More like nervous anticipation.
Actually, to be fair, V's parents aren't bad at all. Although I lived with them for less than a week after we got married last year, I talk to them pretty regularly on the phone and they seem genuinely nice, affectionate and keen to make me a part of the family; rather than merely finding ways to coexist. Plus, there's the fact that V is so much like me. To the extent that we are shaped by our upbringing, his parents and mine must have a lot in common.
So, why the nervousness, you ask. Hmmm... it's something akin to the way you feel before an exam that you are well-prepared for. You are pretty sure you'll do fine, but it is still an exam! Years of social conditioning is now lending me with a similar feeling - they are still my in-laws! Plus, there is also the fact that talking to someone on the phone and living with them are two vastly different things. In a lot of respects they are still strangers with living habits, likes and dislikes which are sure to be different than mine. It's like getting a new room-mate!
On the bright-side though, I always did well on an exam I was well-prepared for and I have had many more good room-mates than bad.
Oh, and I'll get all that yummy food for a month! Aaloo-paranthas for breakfast on a weekday? Mmmm... divine!

Course correction?

It started with not having anything blog-worthy. And then I was lazy. But soon, my blogging-self was having something of an existential crisis - why am I blogging? Is it merely because it's the thing to do these days? If that, will I stop once the novelty factor (or whatever) wears off ...the way it did with posting facebook status messages? etc. etc.
Honestly, I still do not know what I am hoping to achieve by blogging. In fact, it's more like I do not even know if I am hoping to achieve anything.
Reading through my past few posts though, it seems that I have been treating this blogging thing as some kind of popularity contest - trying so, SO hard to be funny, indulging in exaggeration and hyperbole, sacrificing the thought for the punchline... ugh! And here I was thinking that I had grown up and left behind the insecurities of my school and college days!
But let me not draw you into the murky waters that I should be wading into only with my shrink. To cut a long story short then, here are the things we know about 15 post-old me:
- Tends to ramble
- Tries desperately to fit in by trying desperately to be funny.
I have no idea if I will stop doing any of the above right away. For all you know, I might just default to inane chatter of assorted irrelevance in my next post. But in the fact that even these 15 random posts may have held a mirror to my soul and helped me look beyond the fluff of a confident smile and an assured walk, I have a feeling that blogging may have achieved something already. What do you think?

There is them, and then there is me

Now that I stay at home full-time and have become a total blog-junkie, I often wonder about people who manage to blog everyday. Every Single Day! And some of them have been at it for years now. How do they manage to do it? And does it not take away from the joy of blogging, making it a chore that needs to be taken care of everyday? Or is it that I have gotten it all wrong and these folks blog everyday because they enjoy it so much? In which case, blogging leads to something akin to an 'exercise high', a concept which I anyway have trouble wrapping my mind around.
I have even greater trouble understanding how daily-bloggers manage to be that and still lead normal lives. My point is that if you know in advance that you are going to blog about something (in the case of a daily-blogger, it has to be something from their day), then it'd be really hard to not let your reaction to / experience of that particular thing get coloured by this fact. Of course, it's possible that I again have it all wrong and the act of blogging might actually make people less passive - will I observe a sunset more keenly if I know that I have to describe how beautiful it was on my blog? Although, this still remains an example of when an experience might get altered because of the subject's blogging self.
And then of course, there are some people who will sometimes blog about anything, just in order to get it done for that day. I wonder if that is what I am doing right now?

Bringing up upbringing

Since the time I decided to marry V and knew that I'd be moving to America, I have maintained that I want to move back to India because, more than anything else, I do not want to bring my kids up over here. I do not know what factors in my subconscious make me think of India as a better place to raise children. Consciously, my decision was based on my yearning to keep my children close to their roots.
And then, last weekend happened. As I mentioned 2 posts ago, V's boss and his family came over for dinner. Now, these guys are expatriate Indians - the couple moved here some 15-odd years ago and their kids (ages 12, 10 and 6) were born and raised here. The amazing thing is, looking at those kids, you can barely tell - they speak accent-less Hindi, which incidentally is not stilted due to a limited vocabulary; the younger ones address the older ones as didi (both the older ones are girls); they eat their food, including rice, with their fingers and not forks; they brought their palms together and did a Sai-Pranam before starting dinner. What is even more amazing is that all of this was completely effortless - these were not kids brought up by overbearing parents who had disciplined the crap out of them. They were smart, funny, spontaneous; and very very rooted, more so than a lot of kids I know back in India.
It's been almost a week now since they visited and I still haven't stopped marveling about that family. During this time, I have wondered that maybe it was because it is no longer that tough to hold on to your Indian-ness, especially in these parts of America. I have also considered the possibility that maybe it's the sheltered lives those kids have had so far that the questions of identity are yet to raise their hydra-head. Or maybe, just maybe, those guys were the lucky few who actually do own the map to good parenting.
Fotunately, I still have a long way to go before parenthood happens. Hopefully, by then, I will have more wisdom and a magic wand.