Random reads

It’s wonderful being a random reader in the age of WhatsApp and twitter and insta. You get to read all 50 shades of a story and are free to ignore all of them or post your own emotional rant against each one of them. And then strangers love your post or spew venom in broken grammar and badly contracted spellings. 

That’s when it gets too much and you decide you are better off keeping your thoughts to myself and getting off the grid. So now I check Facebook only to wish 'Happy Birthday' to people whom I am not on casual calling terms, scroll a little more if I have time, read posts only from a handful of people and log out. I am off twitter. And I check Insta only to see what the kids are up to.

I am still on a couple of WhatsApp groups to stay connected with the neighbourhood-and have learned to tune out the motivational quotes and good morning wishes, but the random reader in me still reads through articles on Dr Campbells vegan diet just as casually as those on high protein Paleo recipes and Intermittent fasting. My weight goes up and down a few hundred grams every week without implementing any of them.

There are articles on saying ‘no’ to children, and those telling you to set them free. Travel accounts of complete strangers and warnings about strange men posing as Indane gas agents who will hypnotize you if you open the door. But all of these, I read only on a Friday, when I have a few hours in the evening to lounge on the sofa but am too tired to find something to watch.

There is just one group which I never ignore. No, not my best friends, or family, or the one with my boss in it; the maid group. The one in which we ask, “Has anyone seen K today” and another replies “Yes, she has come. Working in A101 now.” And the day is made!

I guess it is the same for everybody.
Who has time to read other people’s blogs no matter how much we want to read? Maybe I should start sharing the links on the apartment women’s group instead. That's the one where most people seem to have the time to post, if not read.

Born Bookworms

One of my favorite dreams as a kid was one in which I get locked up in a book shop.

On regular visits, I would specially get a thrill out of reading one at the shop, while selecting the ones to buy.

So what if I don’t have the time these days?

This is what a trip to a bookstore with my children looks like:

Gosh-I wonder what else gets stored and transferred through our DNA!

A Mills & Boon reading Mom

I’ve got mail

In fact I've got sixteen Mills and Boon ebooks painstakingly forwarded, one by one, at close to midnight.

Thanks Poonam. For the pile of cheesy romances which the wise scoff at, the lofty won’t even touch with a barge pole and the “educated” types would sniff at in disgust; you read those: those tacky, cheesy, paperbacks!!??

Oh yes, I do.

I love the templatized predictability of these sometimes simpering, sometimes steamy romances, the exotic locales, the cuisine, and the haute couture; the fluttering heroine who finally finds her vertebral column; the ill-mannered, arrogant, alpha hero coming down to his knees on page 186; the familiar twists and the gallons of shed and unshed tears; the lost and found themes; the escapism and the promises of eternal love.

I love them just as I loved the fairy stories of years ago.

So like a true MB reader, I forwarded the books immediately to some more women like me, who like reading so called "crap" and aren’t coy about saying so.

Why have I posted this on my Mom Blog? Because Moms also read crap, even the ones in their thrities and with two kids, Moms who should be knowing better than lapping up teenage-stuff...

Dedicated to alchemistpoonam