Happy International Women's Day!!

Happy International Women's Day to everyone!!  While we continue to #EmbraceEquity and promote inclusiveness,  let us also work on strengthening ourselves by enriching our minds with knowledge, with which comes empowerment and supporting and lifting our fellow women versus breaking and hurting one another, in all aspects of our life. 

Introspection can change the world!!

We were fortunate to visit NASA recently and learned a lot about our Aeronautics and Space Program. Here's a fun fact -

As of March 2023, 72 women have flown in space. Of these, 44 have worked on the International Space Station as long-duration expedition crewmembers, as visitors on space shuttle assembly flights, or as space flight participants on short-duration missions.

#internationwomensday #iwd2023 #nasa #stem

The Jackfruit Tree - Sharing is Caring!!

Nature gives abundantly and its gifts flow to everyone irrespective of status, race, religion even species. Such is the case of a jackfruit tree that stands loftily in the compound adjacent to where my mother lives.

In spring, the tree blossoms and in a few months by July, its fruits are ripe and ready to be devoured. Whoever has eaten jackfruit know that it offers a raw deal. Above the mushy fruits is a thick shell that is rough and sticky and hard to break. Nature has its own devices too, in terms of inherent intelligence of beings as well as the tools they have to conquer what they need to survive.

The monkeys here are behind the ravens in evolutionary sense. They jump around the tree trying to get to relish the fruit but to no avail. Meanwhile, the crows come and pierce them and take the first offering. The monkeys follow by eating from the holes pierced by the crows. Some of them fall on the ground when overripe and the monkeys keep waiting for it and come and gobble them. The story doesn’t end here.

One sunny afternoon, my mother was watching the theatrical performance of the crows and the monkeys from her window, when the air was permeated by the shrill call of a vendor who goes from home to home sharpening knives.  He was treading the path under the tree and was in clear view of my mother. However, he was himself completely unaware of her presence.

He had probably not got a chance to eat lunch that day for whatever reason. Maybe he was too busy with business or maybe he was trying to break the buck to buy something to eat. Whatever the case, his eyes fell on the jackfruits that were on the ground. He looked around to see if anybody was watching. On feeling comfortable that he was the lonesome human there with just the crows and monkeys around, he quickly picked up pieces of the fruits and gulped them.

After fulfilling his appetite thus, he rang out his usual shrill call to sharpen knives and carried on with his pursuit of business.

The Weaves of Time!!

When I was a little child, my mother had a few nice mekhela sadors that she would alternate wearing to weddings. One was a shade of purple and another was the most beautiful resplendent peacock blue, she had got during my eldest Mama's wedding. Sometimes I would wear them while playing with dolls, pretending to be grown-up. Later, she added few more to her collection, purchased from one of her friends Medhi aunty, who used to bring them from Sualkuchi and cater to everyone in Shillong. I believe it was common for middle class India at that time to not have too much of anything and still be very happy.

I didn't have too many myself, when I moved to the US, apart from the few from my wedding. I never felt the need to get more, since I didn't wear them much. But once we got here, we got sucked into a social whirlpool and it spun out a rainbow of shades of mekhela sadors, adorned by the beautiful ladies, I now call friends. Since then my closet has grown by a few mekhela sadors, every year. 

The two things that inspire me the most about the attire, is that the beautiful Assamese ladies embrace and adorn it full throttle. Whenever I visit Guwahati, I am thoroughly impressed by women just going about their daily business, fluttering beautiful weaves. There is no giving up on mekhela sador for any other attire!!! The second and even more important one is that the weavers and designers keep coming up with innovations in color, design, fabric and style, always keeping it interesting.

Here are two recent trends. In the first picture, I am wearing a pastel lavender mekhela sador with rose gold copper guna, in contrast to yellow gold guna used traditionally and in the second picture I am wearing a pistachio mekhela sador in tone-on-tone metallic guna and oh how I love them!!!❤️

Anupamaa

My blog has suffered much worse from the lack of content during the pandemic, than mainstream media. So I have decided to revive it by posting more frequently. 

In the height of the dearth of content, one by one we got hooked to an Indian soap named Anupamaa on Hotstar, starting with me. Anupamaa,the protagonist in the series, is a housewife taking care of the entire family, while neglecting herself. Despite her efforts, she is mistreated by almost everyone she takes care of, from her mother-in-law to her husband and even her own kids.

The story is about her battle and struggle to find herself and her happiness. The first of these being starting a dance school, a passion she had long given up. 

New episodes were loaded at 9pm ET and we kept checking for it and religiously watched it all together as family for one and a half years, when there was nothing of much else to do, until this summer, when we canceled the Hulu-Hotstar subscription. The series was also going a little too far in the story line like all long-running soaps. But while we watch it pushed forth several female centric areas, such as remarriage of older divorced women in India. Rupali Ganguly of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai fame, played a great role enacting the protagonist. Here is my enactment of her most famous dialog in the series. :-)

Survive, Thrive, Don't Languish!

‘You can cut me up all you want, but I will still grow even more lush’. That is the motto of a plant.  

I don’t know if it is a part of growing older, but plants seem to be influencing me over anything else these days. Last year, when we were in the heat of the pandemic, in my effort to share some positivity, I had written about how we should learn to be resilient like plants. They can be limp one moment and opulent the next, after we give them some water. 

 

Who had expected at that time, that this year would be even worse? A back-breaking mockery of our resilience. It has broken us emotionally, mentally, impacted jobs, careers, education, finances, not even to mention the millions of lives lost globally. An irreversible blotch. 

But do we have a choice, other than to persist and survive and even thrive when all this is over. The New York Times attributed the work ‘languishing’ to how everyone is feeling now. But I would say that in our minds, let us take a lesson from the plants and not give up our hopes to thrive.

Last summer, I had a big brawl with my husband because he almost mowed my favorite rose bush down completely. He never liked it much since it was growing skimpy and it was his first effort to get rid of it completely, not taking it out all at once to not offend me even more. Come spring, the bush just grew as verdant as can be and radiated out a hundred flowers. Much to my bewilderment and his complacency, that he did the right thing.

 

More recently, in another amazing instance, I cut off the leafless stems of my age-old money plant, to see if I could generate some new plants out of them. I put them in a vase of water and didn’t pay much attention to the original pot. In two months, the original plant was screaming leaves at me, almost mocking me :-). The cut-off stems had also grown roots, which I planted in a hanging pot.     

The plant gave me a lesson that no matter which end I cut, it would grow what it needed. The base plant grew new leaves and shoots, while the other end grew new roots. It consolidated in me a lesson and a conviction to never let go. I hope these stories will inspire you too.

 

Survive now and thrive when the circumstances allow and as best as you can, erase the languishing!!

 

The Bridges Of Lancaster County

Wanderlust found a unique way of fulfilling itself this year, right here in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania. Lancaster is the home of the Amish, a conservative Christian community that arrived in the 1720s from Europe, to avoid religious persecution. Their presence has helped this area retain its pastoral ambience, owing to their adherence to a mode of living sans the use of modern amenities. Just about an hour away from where we live, it is an easily accessible drive and this year, it has often featured in our escapades from isolation at home.The county has twenty-eight covered bridges and the highlight of our trips was a passionate hunt for one bridge after another, with several conquered. These covered bridges were built around 150 years back and the reason for such construction was to protect the wood from the vagaries of weather, combined with preventing the horses from getting spooked while crossing the brooks and rivulets and jumping right into them. They were also called 'kissing bridges', as in the olden days, lovers took a moment to kiss in the privacy they afforded, while crossing them. Take a look below and if you live in the area, visiting these bridges, can be a fun activity for you too.

Resilience and You!

Have you seen a plant withering for lack of water? I am sure you have. What happens after some time when you water it? It springs back to life. That is resilience. The ability to spring back into our normal healthy, positive self, no matter what we endure, in the course of our existence.

Resilience is one of the foremost qualities that we need to imbibe in ourselves, so we can make forward-looking strides in our life’s journey and thus be positive and spread positivity around us. It has become even so much more relevant, in the current circumstances, with the pandemic taking its toll on every aspect of our life, social, economic and most importantly our physical, emotional and mental health. Humanity is suffering from a collective fatigue.

During the pandemic, I have been seeking to find what activities could be done, whilst socially distancing from others. Among several things, we visited a lavender farm in Milton, Delaware with beautiful fragrant flowers, that refreshed our minds. Here is a glimpse of it with a humble request that each of you seek out ways in which, you can feed your soul with positive experiences, until we overcome this calamity, with a firm belief that all this will be over and move to our distant memory soon.