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.

Photographic Memories

As I wrote before, Mr Google hijacked an entire evening by forcing me to sift through photos.

It was however an interesting exercise. I flipped through multiple folders, smiling at some memories, laughing out loud at others and cringing at some.

The years before we all had mobile cameras were so much better. I had one-tenth the numbers of photos to go through. And I am not even talking of roll cameras here-where each photo would be carefully composed before clicking, and people would decide what to click depending on how many clicks they had left on the roll.

We were much more trigger happy with the digital camera-but even those were thoughtfully clicked. 

I remember positioning my camera with the 10 second timer to click myself while travelling on my own. At the bottom of the hill, an old lady stopped to chat “Oh You are that girl who was clicking photos of herself!” 

I thought of that complete stranger from another country as I flipped through a few hundred selfies (no, not exaggerating) that the girls had dumped in the folders when they changed their phones. Selfies when they were dressed to go out, at their shabbiest, rolling eyes, sticking out tongues, making faces, sticking on snap-chat ears…phew. Those were supposed to be fun!

Of course I didn’t have the heart to delete them all, it just took a few hours to select and delete a whole lot of them. All road-trip shots of the sun and the sky, clouds, coconut trees, roadside tea stalls and temples just had to go. Deleting beaches and sunsets was tougher, but those of monuments was easy-we could always google them.

What I retained were the ones with people-the kids and their school days, stage shows, dance classes, birthday parties, fun outings and even the random ones clicked sitting in the lazy afternoon sun. I guess those are the moments that matter when we really need to choose.

Those and the travel photos. Google will make my do a further clean-up soon. I need to curate and save those memories before that!

Continuing the Star Wars

Mr. Murphy continued his war.

I wrote a post and realized I could not connect to the internet. Not even to the mobile hotspot. The Windows Troubleshooter told me that the network adapter is experiencing hardware issues. And like all talking machines, it refused to answer my “Why on earth? It was all fine when I logged out last evening? How can you do this? What do I do now…” I guess AI still has some way to go...

I tried switching off and on the laptop-the only thing I know about troubleshooting a device. Then I dug out a ten-year-old network cable and started posting. Thank God for some good old things!

I guess it will back to pen and paper if the universe continues its conspiracy. I may not get to post in time-or maybe I’ll take a picture of my notebook and upload. Thank God for some smart new hacks!

So now that I have won a few battles with time and technology, if not the war, here is what I realized. Sometimes it is more fun when the going gets tough. Battles lead to victories and winning these small ones and getting back to what matters most gives a different level of satisfaction and confidence.

Dare I start with some bigger battles ahead?

Make something of the book-bank idea? Find time to talk to people, go out and see what others are doing? Or would that be taking on too much in the months I have to complete dead boring assignments for my masters and a project on fire at office.

Should I stick to the smaller, achievable targets or risk it all for something that may not even be viable?

(The photo is from my daughter's pinup board-I guess I have my answer)

Talking to the universe

I often think irrationally, act impulsively and write crazy stuff-but being a product of our times, I also need logic. Hence, I find it difficult to believe in the concept of the universe listening to us, reacting to what we say and steering us in a certain direction.

Empirical evidence says otherwise.

I have felt the universe conspiring against my resolutions, testing me or just laughing at me every time I make big promises-be it about exercise, or doing certain tasks and especially writing. The universe as governed by Murphy’s laws more than Newton’s.

For a long time, it was the children and their priorities. Yesterday it was Mr. Google (yeah, he is very much a person permeating ether haunting our very existence). He told me to clear up my drive and that he had started deleting my photos arranged meticulously into folders since the last 10 years.

I spent the entire evening moving the folders back to the laptop-the last laptop had crashed and hence I had started trusting google-and this what he does to me. Or maybe it’s just the universe. It took five hours to move out 4% of the data. 

And that was the writing time of the day, twice over.

On other days, it is my own list of tasks-all of them become urgent, important the moment my laptop switches on. I remember I had to call the pest-control guy and run the washing machine in time for the clothes to dry and order groceries and…. I have started keeping a pen and paper handy for jotting down all the memory bursts that popup when I am supposed to write.

It has been an interesting experience-I remembered what happened on this day 21 years ago when we did not have Facebook memory notifications.

Coming back to Mr Google’s sabotage, the exercise made me re-look at memories from 2008 onwards (yeah, I am that ancient) and the travel experiences and how those pictures can be wiped out by technology unless we catalog

and share them over and over again.

That and a comment by Priya who discovered a travel blog I had started and dropped out of a decade ago.

Is that the universe talking?

A day in a life of Mom (with Computer savvy kids)

To anyone who finds the learning useful…

When the kids are not fighting over computer time and you know that something is very wrong, and you switch on the PC to find the screen looking like this…

One option is as Aurora suggested-just hang the monitor upside down and continue working.


For the ones who prefer more “in-the-box” solutions, just move the mouse left to right and top to bottom to figure out how exactly you need to move it to reach the right point when the screen is reversed (it’s quite easy one you get the hang of it).


Right click on the screen and scroll (with the mouse in reverse) till you get this menu.

And select the degree of rotation-depending on what your kid managed to do.

It’s simple isn’t it? Especially if you’ve had a couple of times to practice.


How on earth did they do it in the first place?


No point in asking unless you are prepared for an endless stream of:


But I did nothing…
She must have..
No I didn’t even go near it…
And I didn’t even look at it….
Oh! She is such a….


And if you are a mean Mom like me, you’d wait for one whole day before you let them know the screen is upright again!