Things you thought you were done with

Today our pastimes don’t include watching cartoons on TV, playing with neighborhood kids or playing flash cards with your sibling. These seem like a light year away. But when all of us are spending time in coffee shops or virtual hang outs or playing fruit ninja and angry birds on our smartphones, let’s take some time to relive the joys of being carefree. Of being a child.

          Do we still remember watching Pokémon on cartoon network at 8.30 every morning, and buying countless packets of Cheetos just to retrieve the tazos from inside them? Those glow-in-the-dark tattoo stickers that came along with your bubblegum? Scuttling to find unread copies of Famous Five or Secret Seven or Mallory Towers or The Babysitter’s Club during library period in school? Those were the days when, after homework, the evenings were spent with the neighborhood kids, playing self-made versions of games...land or water, red letter, asking “crocodile crocodile which color do you want?” and then shrieking when you couldn't find the color!

      The golden days when we frequented the local fair and had a go at everything from ring throw to dashing cars to the giant ferry wheel to buying spindly colorful balloons and promptly losing them on the way home! When parks did not mean canoodling couples but meant playing ball and spinning on the merry-go-around till you collapsed on the grass, dizzy and giggling. When the world cup could mean either cricket or Quidditch. When walks with your friends sucking on Pepsi colas of different flavors or cycling was ‘hanging out’, and not only drives, movies and trips to malls.

            When Friendship Day loomed and all of a sudden your hand was too short and bands piled their way to your elbow…birthdays meant chocolates in school and inviting your friends home in the evening…When we sat in front of laptops or PCs not facebooking or surfing the net, but playing Tetris, Aladdin or Prince. When family get-togethers were anticipated also for games of monopoly and cards.

        When summer vacations meant swimming, badminton, cycle races and eating aamras till you gained 5 kgs, and wasn't a prep leave for the upcoming examination or a lull before the next assignment. When you didn't feel stupid licking away at large colorful candy and thought exploding pops on your tongue were awesome!

            God I miss those days. I miss the lack of worries. But above all, I miss the quality we all had in us back then-we didn't care if we looked or seemed stupid. Everybody was the same. The cool kids, the nerds. In fact, there wasn't anything like being nerdy. How much could a 3rd grader study, after all!!! Groupism, politics, being diplomatic was unheard of. We were what we were.

         Maybe we can’t (and shouldn't  resort to pasting fake tattoos and buying cotton candy all the time. But we sure as hell can take a leaf out of the pages of the ‘childhood us’ to be more spontaneous, genuine and carefree. Try to look through the rosy tinted glasses of a child. If we do that, contentment isn't that far.

              

Being the progeny of a gynecologist

I don’t know how many of you can relate to this. Most of those who have doctors as parents will sympathize. But all those who have gynaecologists as parents will definitely shed a tear of empathy.

                  My mother is a gynecologist and obstetrician. They are the two meanest branches of medicine, dealing with the complaints of the female reproductive system and yes, childbirth. Hell is real.

       I have often asked her time and again why she picked this particular branch. Her reply never changes- “because I liked it at the time”. How can anyone “like” looking at vaginas, per vaginal examinations, episiotomies and cries of women in labor is beyond me. Nevertheless she started her private practice and I discovered many aspects about this branch that I never knew.

1)   Insomnia is a prerequisite.

If you even remotely need your daily dose of sleep, this is a no-go, my friend. For an OBGY practitioner, sleep is an unheard of treat which he/she only gets on Sundays, and that too, if they are lucky. Untimely deliveries, checking up on the mother post-op, the sheer long duration of deliveries will keep you up. Either you develop insomnia or call Edward to turn you into a vampire. No other choice.

2)   Holiday? What’s that?

          

There is nothing like “time-off”. In the world of sudden labor pains and premature deliveries and missed periods that has put the patient in a perpetual state of hysteria, there can be and won’t be spontaneous family trips or attending weddings and such frivolous business. These ladies have been visiting you since 9 months. Are you going to bail on them on their “special” day? Hell no.

3)   Vulgarity.

           

Now if you intend to familiarize yourself with menstrual cycles, vaginal spotting and cervical scrapings, you need to know there’s nothing vulgar about asking a woman to strip (obviously in the clinic, what are you, a pervert??!) Being resilient to putrid odors and panicky hysterical patients is a necessity. The husband is already agitated. Don’t make it worse.

4)   Family dinners are all about cases.

I have lost count of the number of times when I have been eating biryani while mom gave detailed information about her “patient of the day”. Either these are really stupid or irritating patients who have driven my mother up the wall or some medically interesting cases my mother loved. Ectopic pregnancies, bipartite uterus, superfoetation, criminal abortions, I have heard them all. This is all dinner-table talk. There does simply no “don’t talk about meconium while having your food!” It’s not dirty, it’s medical.

5) You will get “the talk” every week.

            

Whenever my mother gets a case of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease or “ingenious ways of you-know-what that landed the perpetrator with severe injuries you-know-where”, I know she is going to fix me with a beady stare and say the words I dread -“We need to have a talk”. What follows is always a well rehearsed speech on how much she loves me, how she will be there to “handle any problem”, how the opposite sex is composed of “highly irresponsible individuals who will run away and take no responsibility in case “it happens” and  how “you are too small to have to handle all that, if that happens”.

           I've even managed not to shrivel up with embarrassment at this one.

   

        But having said this, girls are lucky, for they won’t have to explain that “PMS” is a recognized medical condition, and so is post partum depression. There will be nothing you can’t talk about, and little you can embarrass them about. They perform a Herculean task, sacrificing their sleep and family lives for getting life into this world, and quite literally.

             And after having seen how hard they work, they deserve the highest respect. Mothers hire nannies and don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night for their own babies. My mother does that for someone else’s baby.

Chick flicks-a guilty pleasure

First of all, this isn't an article only for girls. In fact, it will probably tell guys why girls everywhere watch these kind of movies. Why sleepovers include a CD of The Ugly Truth, and why we prefer The Devil Wears Prada to Star Trek.

      They are meaningless, they are fun. And most importantly, they always show the girl in a good light. She is this pretty girl with a golden heart; except that life just isn't fair to her. It hands her the perfect guy and takes him away, only for her to realize he wasn't perfect after all, and that the guy she had friend zoned years ago was!

          This is directed especially to all the girls, who have at some point or the other in their lives, sat on a couch with crispies or ice cream, to watch movies that make them feel good about themselves. That make them feel hopeful about life. Yes, this is the widely explored genre of chick flicks…whose very soul is the quintessential sweet protagonist with heart issues, who lives ‘happily ever after’.

            Like all other girls (well, most of them anyway) I started my dose of chick flicks with the Anne Hathaway starrer ‘The Princess Diaries’. The story of a dorky teenager who yearns to be ‘invisible’ who finds herself the princess of a faraway country and her love in her best friend’s brother, it had me feeling all warm and happy. What followed was a truckload of movies with similar endings, i.e. happy. 27 dresses, The Nanny Diaries,50 First Dates The Proposal, Alex & Emma, just to name a few.

          What really had me hooked to these movies was the obvious lack of tragedy and how the girls just somehow seemed to always turn their lives right by the end. Emma quit as Alex’s typist because she thought he loved somebody else, and what followed was Alex changing the story’s ending to be with her! When Sandra Bullock thought she would be deported and had lost her love too, Ryan Reynolds (hunky to death Ryan Reynolds, I meant) did not let her go. When Rebecca Bloomwood went into gigantic debt, her prince-charming saved her. Even if they lost a job, fought with their parents, went bankrupt, suffered a heart-break, lost a friend. Whatever happened, they always got perfect bliss. Now isn't that just amazingly optimistic and encouraging??? Some people read self help books. They write questions to agony aunts in newspapers. Well my counselor are these movies.

     Skeptics might argue that they are highly misleading. They are highly repetitive. Guys often say that these movies set impossible standards for chivalry and love. They paint a larger-than-life picture. True that.

      But the thing to be understood is that girls are not supposed to act on the lines of the movies. They shouldn't set their standards for love, for friendship according to these movies. Now that would be absurd, taking it a bit too far. These pick-me-ups come with a statutory warning! (the warning includes: not applying them literally to your own life, not expecting guys in real life to be like, say Patrick Dempsey for instance, not comparing yourself to Katherine Heigl or Anne Hathaway in what might set of a body dysmorphic disorder and definitely not discussing chick flicks in front of the opposite sex!)

    No, all we girls do is watch them when we are sad, to lift are mood; watch them when we are happy-to lift our mood even further. Chick flicks are like chocolate-you feel fabulous after watching them, but you can’t keep on having them all the time, they’ll make you sick.

    So this guilty pleasure acts like an occasional medicine for us, a reminder of how perfect our lives can be, if we want them to.

For the technologically challenged,like yours truly

Hello my fellow retards!!! The world has slipped effortlessly into the abyss of technology…where five year olds have figured out how to work an iPod…where my 16 year old cousin works with a gigantic Korg Kronos,whose name and exact function I wasn't aware of till he bought it. And whilst most of us are keeping pace with this gadget craze, I beg to differ. In fact, I beg to be excluded, without a derisive snort or a “you don’t know this???”

            Yes, I am technologically challenged, for want of a better word. I know the basics of a mobile phone; I know how to make PowerPoint presentations. Hell, I figured out how to post this article on the blog, didn't I??? But no, I’m not equipped to deal with Movie maker Picasa,photofunia and all the new softwares that basically let you snip, color,polish and whip out pictures,documentaries,edited songs and animations. I suck at such stuff. So this article is dedicated to all those, like me, who are blissfully unaware of all that we are unaware of!

                Most of my friends know gadgets like the back of their hand. They throw words like ‘wireless fidelity’, ‘IPv4’ and ‘proxy settings’ like they were ‘thank you’ and ‘ssup?’  I am sorry, but I do not speak gadget. I wish they had a subtitle to every technological term used, for illiterates like me, who could decipher what such terms meant. With all the new gizmos coming up, it is really difficult to know the difference between iPhone 4S and 5, and why android and java differ, and why computers are just so evil. Just recently my sister bought a Dell laptop, whose display conked off within 6 months of purchase. A frantic visit to the Dell store informed her that the entire new batch of Dell laptops was faulty and would be giving this exact problem. Gadgets, gadgets, gadgets.

            Everyday I vow to learn a new and useful fact about technology, so that I can sound intelligent whenever someone asks my opinion on the same. I use Google as my secret weapon to find out stuff that is considered ‘general knowledge’. How else am I supposed to know and compare the prices of the various models of blackberry? The new and improved iPad? The apps that android offers? The reasons why Nokia lumia is over hyped and why the debate about whether apple is better or Samsung never ends???

            I often find myself bearing the consequences of being technologically backward when I buy a new gadget, like a laptop. The series of questions that follow make me feel like I’m a nasty girl who murdered a harmless old couple next door for money.

What’s the model? Oh well, that’s easy, I think.

Memory? Easy peasy.

Windows edition? Xp or 7 or vista? I think it was windows 7…but then again…

Hang on, the worst isn't over yet.

Then comes the “operating system? How many bits is it?”

“Which connection have you set up?? Dial up or bsnl or VPN or ad hoc???”

 I think I will just drop the wretched laptop into the sea.

           People who are gadget freaks, at peace with their play stations and tablets, look down upon us and think “When did this happen to them?” They find it astounding that a peer from their very own generation has difficulty grasping the intricacies of Photoshop and LAN. But our parents feel comforted, knowing that their sons and daughters don’t look down upon them as “technologically handicapped”. Hell, my mother and I figured out many apps and softwares together! What was atrocious for many became amusing for us.

           Then again, I know many successful people, who make up for what they lack in the virtual world, by their knowledge in the real one. Many doctors who are gods in the O.T., and can’t figure out the difference between a jpeg file and a pdf one. Many writers, who are extremely well versed with MS Word, but ask them about creating a website, and they will blanch. Many lawyers who don’t know what twitter exactly is. We don’t need to be gizmo addicts to keep pace with the world. What we need is an open mind and plenty of imagination.

      I encounter many handicapped souls like me everyday, who are mocked by their lack of understanding about TCP/IP and encryption type and access point. No matter what, we all will survive, provided we learn to laugh at ourselves. There is nothing to be embarrassed about. Man wasn't born with technology. He invented it. Granted, these inventions are extremely useful. Granted, they make life fun and add novelty to simple tasks. Get acquainted with these inventions to the best of your abilities, but don’t forget that the best communications will still be verbal, the best visuals will still be those existent and the best friends will still be those in body and flesh, not virtual!

          Till next time, my fellow sluggers!!!