Arguing with Manto: A Completely Unrespectable Love Story

 I did not fall in love with Saadat Hasan Manto the respectable way.

You know the respectable way. The one where you speak in solemn tones about “great literary figures,” quote a few important lines, nod gravely about historical context, and treat the author like a marble statue that must never be disturbed.

No.

That is not what happened.

What happened was this: one afternoon I stumbled onto his epitaph.

Not the polite version people often print. The original one. The one where he basically says the greatest short story writer in the world lies buried here and wonders whether God or he is the better storyteller.

I stared at that line.

Then I said out loud, to no one in particular - “Seriously?”

The audacity of it. The absolute nerve. The man wrote his own tombstone like a challenge to the universe.

Naturally I had to go look him up.

So I read the Wikipedia article. Which is usually a terrible way to meet a writer, but it did the job. It told me just enough to realize that this man had lived a life that was part tragedy, part chaos, part sheer stubborn defiance.

Then I started reading his writing.

And very quickly I developed a peculiar relationship with him.

It goes something like this. 

First I read a sentence. Then I stare at the page. Then I say, “You did not just write that.” Then I read the next paragraph. Then I put the book down, rub my face, and say, “Why are you like this?”

Take one of his observations: temples and mosques are both stone. Cows and pigs are both flesh.

I remember reading that and physically shifting on my couch.

“Sit down,” I told the book. “Sit here and explain yourself.”

Because really. What kind of person writes something like that and then calmly moves on as if nothing happened?

The answer, of course, is Manto.

He had this infuriating habit of stripping things down to their bare physical reality and leaving the reader to deal with the consequences. Sacred building? Stone. Religious taboo? Flesh. Human hypocrisy? Apparently his favorite sport.

And then came the parts about Gandhi.

Now this is where I nearly fell off the couch.

Because most writers treat Gandhi the way museums treat ancient porcelain—handle with extreme care, place behind glass, speak in reverent tones.

Not Manto.

Manto looked at Gandhi the way a very sharp child looks at an emperor who is clearly missing half his clothes.

He would describe Gandhi’s moral seriousness and then, with perfect calm, poke at the absurdities around it. The public adoration. The political theatre. The way entire crowds behaved as if sainthood had become a national policy.

Reading those passages felt like discovering an unexpected accomplice.

I remember literally saying out loud -- “Wait… you noticed that too?”

It felt almost conspiratorial. 

And of course he did it in that uniquely Manto way—never with dull lectures, always with those quiet, devastating little observations that leave you laughing and uncomfortable at the same time.

At one point I actually imagined the two of us meeting Gandhi together. Manto would say something deadpan and outrageous. I would immediately burst into completely inappropriate laughter. Everyone in the room would look scandalized. Gandhi would probably sigh deeply and ask both of us to leave the ashram.

And we would walk out still laughing like unruly schoolchildren.

That is the effect Manto has.

You start reading him expecting literature. Instead you end up in a long argument with a very clever ghost.

Because the same man will suddenly notice something like a line of graffiti in a train compartment:

Even birds sit as couples on electric wires.
But the seat beside me is empty.
Does no one love me?

When I read that I actually stopped breathing for a moment.

Then I said, very quietly, “Oh you poor fool.”

That is the thing about him. Beneath the sarcasm, the provocation, the outrageous sentences, there is this enormous sensitivity to human loneliness.

He saw it everywhere.

Another time he wrote about walking past a crematorium in Bombay and noticing smoke rising in the air. Right in front of the wall was a film poster for a movie called Zindagi—Life.

I laughed.

Then immediately covered my mouth and said, “No. You made that up. Tell me that didn’t actually happen.”

Because with Manto the world itself starts sounding like satire.

So yes, I argue with him. I roll my eyes at him. I occasionally want to throw a pillow at his head and say, “You did not have to write that, you absolute menace.”

But somewhere along the way something else happened too.

I began to feel an absurd amount of affection for him.

Not the distant admiration one has for a “great writer,” but the sort of feeling you have for a brilliant, damaged friend who keeps saying outrageous things at the tea table.

You read about the poverty, the trials, the alcoholism, the humiliations he endured, and suddenly the sharp-tongued provocateur becomes a very tired human being trying to survive a world that rarely showed him much kindness.

And that is the moment when the irritation turns into something softer.

You stop wanting to argue with him.

You start wanting to sit beside him.

These days he sits at my desk.

Not as a shrine—he would have hated that idea—but simply as a photograph in a frame, watching while I work. Sometimes I catch myself glancing up at him as if he might comment on what I just wrote. Occasionally I even tell him, “Don’t start. I know exactly what you’re thinking. But please don’t say that.” It is a very strange arrangement: a dead writer hanging around a modern desk, quietly provoking arguments, eye-rolls, and the occasional apology for laughing at the wrong moment.

If I ever had to picture him now, though, this is how I see it.

His grave somewhere quiet. The stone bearing that outrageous epitaph.

And there he is, not lying beneath it like a respectable corpse, but sitting casually on the gravestone as if it were a park bench.

Lighting a cigarette.

Looking out at the human race with that familiar half-amused, half-exasperated expression.

Shaking his head.

And at that point I would walk over, drop onto the stone beside him, and say something like: “Listen, you moron. Why did you have to say half the things you said?”

He would probably shrug and take a drag of his cigarette.

And then we would start talking.

And once that conversation begins, it never quite ends.

Colours of my Heart

 It is a standing joke among my old friends that every two weeks I develop a “latest crush.” This started back in my college days, and they were mostly harmless infatuations. I suppose I never quite outgrew the habit. The only difference now is that instead of cricketers or movie stars, the objects of my fascination are politicians, tech leaders, or people of that sort. It’s less “OMG look at him!” and more “I deeply admire this person.”

Faiz entered my life in a strange and unexpected way. He is, so far, the only poet suggested to me by AI—

by ChatGPT, no less—and I remember thinking, why not give it a try? I bought a translated copy of his poems, Colours of My Heart (selected poems translated by Baran Farooqi), and it felt like stepping into another world entirely.

After a few days of reading, staring into space, sighing, shaking my head, and repeating the cycle, I decided to read the poems in Romanized Urdu. Conveniently, the second part of the book offered exactly that. This led to even more staring into deep space, the realization that dusk has many more dimensions than I had ever allowed it, and the sudden understanding that old stone structures can, in fact, speak. (Yes, I am whimsical. The world knows.)

Then came the third phase: why not just learn Urdu?

So I am.

My goal is to read Naqsh-e-Fariyadi in the original Urdu script. Along the way, I’ve found myself painting old structures and pairing them with Faiz’s lines, writing friends’ names in Nastaliq script, and enthusiastically informing family and unsuspecting acquaintances about my newest obsession. At this point, I am fully aware that I have fallen into a deep, unapologetic hole of Persian and Urdu culture—and I am not trying very hard to climb out.

Somewhere along the way, this reading turned into making.

I began painting a series alongside Faiz’s poems—not to illustrate them, but to sit with them. Five large canvases, each anchored in a single word or line: Tanhai, Maghrib, Paas Raho, Tasleem, Nargis. Lanterns left lit. Terraces at dusk. Moonless nights. Morning light that does not soften anything, only clarifies it. Courtyards with still water and flowers that do not explain themselves. These were not narratives, and they were not characters. They were states.

The paintings do not tell Faiz’s poems. They answer them. Sometimes they argue back. Sometimes they simply stay silent in the right way. Over time, it felt less like inspiration and more like conversation—across languages, across decades, across histories that neither of us fully owns.

                                                                                    I should say this clearly --

I am not a novice when it comes to poetry. I have a high bar. You cannot write sloppy lines and call them blank verse and expect me to be charitable. I have read deeply in Bengali and English, and a little in French. I know what care looks like on the page.

What I realized, however, is that I had not read serious poetry in languages outside that small orbit. And then came Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

He swept me off my feet not with ornament or excess, but with his strange, uncompromising ideas of love—love that simply is. Love that does not explain itself, does not apologize, does not ask to be returned in equal measure. It exists. It endures history. It survives prisons, partitions, disappointments, and altered selves.

You can read that love as devotion to a person, or to a country, or to something larger and harder to name—much like the way Rabindranath Tagore dissolves the boundary between the beloved and the divine. Faiz leaves that choice to you.

For me, his love settles among old stone ruins, oil lamps lit at dusk, and thoughts that turn inward. It belongs to spaces that remember more than they speak.

My paintings converse with his lines over time and space. That, I have come to believe, is the best kind of conversation.

No resolution.
No conclusion.
Just presence—held carefully, and then let be.

Navigation, Not Victory

 

For a long time, mountaineering was my metaphor for life.

Climb, slip, climb again. Acclimatize. Wait out storms. Accept that sometimes the most courageous decision is to turn back. Mountains teach humility quickly. They teach patience even faster. They show you—viscerally—that progress is never linear, and resilience is not bravado but the ability to pause without panic.

I thought that was the whole lesson.

But lately, another metaphor has been quietly overtaking it: navigation.

Mountains give you a snapshot of life. Navigation gives you the continuum.

On a mountain, the challenge is vertical. You see the peak. You measure gain and loss. You know when you are up, when you are down, when you are stalled by weather. The feedback is immediate. Brutally honest.

On the ocean, it’s different.

There are no visible milestones. No summit to point at and say, “There.” Some days the wind fills your sails effortlessly and you move as if the world is conspiring in your favor. Other days there is nothing—no wind, no forward motion, just heat, stillness, and the slow drain of uncertainty. The doldrums are not dramatic. They are quiet. That’s what makes them dangerous.

And yet, navigation assumes this will happen.

Traditional navigators never expected favorable winds all the time. They expected variability. They expected misalignment. They expected nights when the stars vanished behind clouds and days when progress could only be felt, not measured.

What mattered was not speed.
What mattered was orientation.

There’s a saying attributed to Mau, the great Micronesian navigator: one who knows the stars would never get lost. It’s often quoted romantically, but it’s far more practical than poetic.

Knowing the stars doesn’t mean staring at them constantly. It means holding a direction internally. It means understanding that even when the canoe is pushed sideways by wind or current, you keep the nose aligned. You correct. You compensate. You don’t confuse drift with failure.

Life feels a lot like that.

Sometimes things line up. Career, family, health, timing—all moving together, cleanly. Other times, nothing responds. Effort produces no visible outcome. You’re not sinking, but you’re not moving either. This is where people panic. They abandon their course because motion has stalled.

Navigation teaches something subtler: stillness is not the same as being lost.

If you know where you’re headed—really know it, not as a wish but as a direction—you don’t need constant confirmation. You make small corrections. You wait when waiting is required. You move when movement becomes possible again.

Mountains teach endurance.
Navigation teaches trust.

Trust that progress doesn’t always announce itself.
Trust that course-correction matters more than speed.
Trust that losing sight of landmarks doesn’t mean losing direction.

And maybe that’s the deeper meaning behind “never getting lost.” It’s not about always knowing where you are. It’s about knowing who you are aligned with, what you are steering toward, and refusing to mistake temporary drift for permanent failure.

The stars don’t rush you.
The ocean doesn’t explain itself.
Neither guarantees ease.

But if you learn how to orient—to keep the nose of your life pointed toward what matters, adjusting gently, persistently—you don’t actually need certainty.

You just need alignment.

And that, it turns out, is enough to keep going.

---

The Sky That Remembered Me - Polynesian Navigation and an Ancient Familiarity

Hawaiʻi has a way of lowering your shoulders before you even realize they were tense.

Coconut trees sway without urgency. The afternoons are warm and unbothered, even in December. Plumeria and hibiscus bloom with the quiet confidence of things that know they belong exactly where they are. There is nothing performative about it. The air smells faintly sweet, faintly saline, like memory.

And then there is the sky.

Not the northern sky I am used to—the one filtered through tall firs and pines, glimpsed in fragments between branches, stars peeking through like shy guests. That sky always feels a little distant, a little observational. This one does not.

Here, the sky opens fully to the ocean. No obstructions. No apology.

Before dawn, standing on a balcony facing the Pacific, I watched Orion—familiar, unmistakable—tilt and sink, star by star, until he disappeared into the water itself. Not fading. Setting. As if the ocean were an equal participant in the choreography. Sirius burned low and bright. Castor and Pollux stood steady, watching. The stars did not feel foreign or exotic. They felt… remembered.

That was the moment something subtle but irreversible shifted.

Polynesian navigation is often described as an ancient maritime skill. That description is technically accurate and profoundly incomplete.

What the navigators of the Pacific developed was not just a method of crossing vast distances of open ocean without instruments. It was an entire way of being oriented in a moving world. They memorized the rising and setting points of stars along the horizon—star houses, not coordinates. They read swells that originated thousands of miles away, invisible causes made legible through pattern and feel. They watched clouds for reflections of land beyond sight. Birds, wind shifts, water color, even the behavior of fish became information.

Nothing was accidental. Nothing was mystical guesswork.

The canoe itself embodied the same philosophy. Lashed together, not nailed—flexible, repairable, responsive. Designed to move with the ocean, not resist it. Strength came from accommodation, not rigidity.

This was not “primitive navigation.” It was precision without domination.

Modern language struggles with this because we are trained to separate astronomy from life, navigation from ethics, engineering from philosophy. Polynesian wayfinding refuses those divisions. The sky is not a backdrop; it is a teacher. The ocean is not an obstacle; it is a collaborator. Knowledge lives in bodies and memory, not just diagrams.

Standing there, watching Orion disappear into the Pacific, I realized why this felt less like learning and more like recognition.

I am Indian. My culture, too, encoded astronomy in story, time in recurrence, and ethics in situational judgment rather than rigid rules. The Mahabharata is not anchored to “once upon a time” but to skies that looked a certain way. Nakshatras were not decorations; they were clocks, seasons, orientation. Knowledge survived because it was lived, spoken, remembered—until colonial systems dismissed it as myth and replaced it with someone else’s certainty.

Seeing Polynesian navigation up close did not feel foreign. It felt like meeting a cousin across an ocean.

What struck me most was this: navigation here was never about conquest. There is no language of “overcoming” the Pacific. Only language of listening, timing, respect, return. The goal was not arrival at all costs, but continuity—of people, of knowledge, of relationship.

In a world that increasingly pretends stability exists if we engineer hard enough, this feels quietly radical.

Perhaps that is why the sky here felt so familiar. Not because I had seen these stars before—but because I had seen this way of knowing before. A way that does not try to pin the universe down, but learns how to move within it without losing itself.

Orion setting into the Pacific was not just beautiful. It was instructive.

It reminded me that navigation is not about knowing exactly where you are.
It is about knowing how to remain oriented when certainty disappears.

And that, it turns out, is not just an ancient maritime skill.
It is a way of living.

On opening a new chapter of my life

It looks like I have not blogged in just over a year, and in my defense there is a big reason for it. I just became a mom. For all those who know me in person also know what a journey I went through to come to this. I posted about my miscarriage before, and there is a whole blog about my infertility and IVF treatments. On the final day (i.e. labor day) I went through a new set of trials because even after going through labor, getting an epidural, I still had to get an emergency c-section because the baby had her umbilical cord wrapped twice round her neck! Anyway, I already knew what a fiesty fighter she is, so she emerged victorious, proving that her name Oindri, meaning thunder aptly suits her.

So now I embarked on this mom-journey. I figured out that feeding and changing diapers can suddenly take up the whole day. I mean, so far, I knew that people have to sacrifice some sleep and that people have to change diapers, but I am failing to calculate how the mere mechanical job of changing diapers can take up so much time! And feeding... by the time she completes one feed, surprisingly, it seems within ten minutes it is time for her next feed! The math is somehow not adding up and I am pretty certain that I am sitting in that nursing chair in her room for around sixteen hours each day.

What does it feel to be a mom? It is still unbelievable. I mean, yes, really, unbelievable! I was just filling up her passport application form, and to fill in my name as the "mother", or seeing my name on her birth certificate as the mother makes my head spin. Like something is wrong there? Are they sure about it? 

Being a mom is an ethereal experience. I am sure the hormones are to blame for part of it, but I am feeling like Nature (or science, because she is an IVF baby) has entrusted in me this huge responsibility of trusting an entire human being in my care. It isn't just sacrificing sleep and waking up several times at night _(those who know me also know how much I love to sleep and that earthquakes or terrible heat, or the fright of an exam have never caused any sleeplessness in me)_, neither is the thought that she is dependent on me for almost everything now, it is the fact that I need to lead my life in a way that inspires her. In order to bring her up right, I need to do the right things in my life. That thought is the one which is challenging me. She would learn everything from me, she would look up to me for advice, watch how I am behaving in difficult times. I can't yell at her when angry and then expect her to stay calm when faced with a difficult situation. I can't sit on the couch all day and then tell her she needs to go play outside. Will it be difficult? Sometimes yes, but since I am already thinking about it, I guess when it comes to really parenting (I mean, she is a little older) then I will be prepared.

So far, she is an amazingly easygoing person with no whining and no fussiness. She went on her first weekend trip to Mt. Rainier and was just perfect. I hope that personality of her will remain along with the sublime strength in her, which has been already apparent in her journey from an embryo to a baby girl!

Kauai Humane Society

With Scout

You surely know how one can check out books from a library, but did you know that you can check out dogs? I call it borrowing some love. 

Kauai is a beautiful island, with unspoiled nature, great hikes through lush green forests, the mighty Pacific Ocean, and it is also home to the Kauai Humane Society. They let you take a dog out on a day-trip to beaches or parks. You need to return them by 5, that's it. When I first heard about it from my co-worker, I thought that was a great idea, so this time when we were in Kauai, we went to see what it is about.

For people who have dogs at home, they know how much those dogs are missed when we are on vacation. To let these people play with dogs for a day greatly makes the vacation a whole lot better. And what does it do for the dogs? They get socialized, a skill very important for them to help get adopted. They also get to come out of their little places and play outside. If they go out on a day trip, they wear their "adopt me" jackets which means other people get to meet them too. And who knows who may have a place in their hearts for which dog? It is of no surprise that a lot of the Humane Society dogs get adopted by visitors.

Scout and Magnolia playing

We got to play with Scout on the first day we were there. Scout is a 9 month old airedale who came to the shelter as a stray. He left front foot was fractured and it healed by itself, but the bone didn't set properly. So she has a funny stride, but that doesn't let her slow down. When we took her out to the yard, first she just ran around, a little shy to come to us. Then within like 5 minutes she came to me when called and soon after sat on my lap. 

The second day we found Scout with her roomie Magnolia. Magnolia is a three-pawed 7-month old pup but she was jumping real high. Scout recognized us from our last visit and while all the other dogs were barking excitedly, Scout gently wagged her tail. That day we took both Scout and Magnolia out to the yard. They chased each other and played a good game of tug-of-war. It was so nice to see some happy doggie time there. This is what happy and healthy dogs do.

It is difficult to not adopt anyone from there, especially when they look up with the trusty, dark brown eyes. As we already have a full house, so it will not be a good idea to get some more. But it is also true that love is the thing that you can give and still have a lot more to give to others. So I'd say that I left a part of me there with Scout, Magnolia, and the rest of them, and also brought back with me a lot of love and trust that they gave me. 

"Mocha'r ghonto" - thoughts on cooking banana florets

I have posted a few times about food in my blog here, but I am not going to post any recipes because I don't want to make this anywhere close to a food blog. I have seen how contents of food blogs are copied from one blog to another, actually word to word, but both (or multiple) authors claiming that her recipe is handed down in her family through generations!! 

Anyway, I have found a lot of joy in re-creating traditional Bengali foods in my kitchen far-away from the rivers and paddy fields of Bengal. There are certain dishes, though, which can be called, in simple language, "advanced". It is like learning the butterfly stroke after you are comfortable with the other three swimming strokes. This week I handled the thing called "mocha". Don't confuse with the coffee stuff, this is what we call banana flowers in Bengali. And heck yes, they are edible.

A whole mocha

This is how a raw whole mocha looks like. The flowers are concealed within layers of purplish firm and smooth skin. As you separate the layers, the florets will be seen. This is the hardest part of cooking this thing. The florets can't just be separated and chopped, they need to be cleaned and sorted individually, by hand. 

Rows of florets

Every floret has one stamen and one small covering along with the petals. That stamen and the covering are not edible. I was wondering who first came up with this. Maybe they cooked it and it tasted bad? Or it was too hard and they couldn't chew or swallow it? Who knows the original reason now? But this method of cleaning and sorting has been passed down through generations in the Bengali kitchens from mother to daughter (or mother-in-law to daughter-in-law). Nowadays we also have YouTube to our rescue.

Before starting the process, we need to rub a little oil on our hands so that the juice doesn't stick or stain them. Traditionally it has always been mustard oil that is used for this purpose, so I chose that. Also, we need to keep a big bowl of turmeric water handy. Once the florets are cleaned and chopped, they are soaked in turmeric water overnight. A little salt is also added to that.

See the big bowl of turmeric water to my left and the small bowl of golden mustard oil to the right.

After an overnight soak, the next morning the whole thing is boiled for like 10-15 minutes before it is ready to be cooked. Generally the other ingredients needed are - lightly fried potato cubes, bengal gram (that is also soaked overnight and boiled later), grated coconut, ghee, daler bori*, and general spices like cumin, dried red chillies, and bright green or red chillies for garnishing. 

The dish has a huge prep work but as all the ingredients are pre-cooked, the actual cooking process is quite easy and fast. It needs a little water to boil all the stuff together and a quick stirring for few minutes. Finally, you can add a teaspoon of ghee for flavor, garnish with some more grated coconut and add a few green or red chilis to make it look good! The best thing is you can serve the dish on one of the purple skins of the mocha itself. 

The finished product!

*PS: Daler bori is a conical shaped thing made out of lentil paste that is dried in the Sun. Dal means lentil. Once dried, those are deep fried till crispy and ground up to add a little extra crunch to this vegetable dish.

Kolkata Metro incident and a retrospective of our culture

Talk to a random Bengali bhadrolok (gentleman) for over five minutes and he will remind you why Kolkata is still considered as the cultural capital of India. You'll hear about Rabindranath, Satyajit Ray, the role of Bengalis in the Indian freedom struggle and will also get a dose of left-liberalism. So when that city shows its ugly side, the shame we feel is twofold. The recent incident at the Kolkata Metro (subway/tube) is one such.

A young couple in their mid-twenties were beaten up by a group of older men because they were "standing too close to each other". Some people said they were hugging, some other witnesses, however, mentioned that the young man kept his hand on his female friend's shoulder trying to shield her from the crowd. That enraged the frustrated older men and just shouting "get a room" or "go to a club" was not enough, so they decided to be the moral police and beat them up.

"Do not express your affection, express your perversion instead" - my friend said it looks like this is the mantra in India now. In a society where rape has become a news that people just skim through, kind of like mass shootings in the US, I think we need to spend some thoughts about how we are bringing up our society, what are we expecting from people?

Kolkata used to boast of the humanity. We heard of foiled kidnap attempts because of local slum dwellers chasing away the kidnappers, we saw an abandoned baby being rescued by local people from a street side dustbin and then numerous families showing interest to adopt her. We knew girls are safe in public, maybe that's the reason I still prefer to take a bus, or metro over a cab while in Kolkata even now. But it is not the same anymore.

Our society on one hand is very progressive, but on the other hand, medieval mentalities still exist. A guy and a girl, if seen in public, are assumed to be a couple. And that means the girl's character is compromised. Parents of girls still proudly say, "my daughter doesn't have a boyfriend" or that "my daughter is so shy, she can't talk to boys properly". But in most of these cases, those girls have relationships that their parents don't know of. I still fail to understand why a healthy relationship is looked down upon. Isn't it normal for a healthy 20-something to physically feel attracted to someone else? But one cannot make out in their house, because you live with your parents and of course the parents should not know. Then the whole thing is done on the sly. You can't even tell your doctor if you are sexually active, because he will tell your parents and judge you. If that is your old family physician, then you'll get a scolding and a lecture at once. Guys are ashamed to buy condoms. Even if they do, they'd have to buy it from stores which are not in their neighborhood. What results from that? Unhealthy relationships and dangerous decisions! 

Coming back to the point of "my daughter doesn't have a boyfriend", parents still take responsibilities for getting their kids married, and arranged marriages still happen. If you send your daughter to a girls' school, then a girls' college, restrict who she can talk to, ask 10,000 questions if a guy calls her and have the whole neighborhood be on watch to see who she is talking to, then how would she ever find a guy she may like? And then she has no idea what to expect in a relationship. Neither would her husband, if he never had a girlfriend or a close friend who is a girl. I can't emphasize enough the reasons of having co-ed schools only. It teaches kids to grow up normally, it opens different perspectives. Now when I look back at my teenage days I see how well brought up were my guy friends in school. We never had to hide the fact that we have got periods when we were with them. We felt safe when they walked us home. No wonder now I see them as great husbands, and some as fathers also. 

In today's world we cannot and should not keep boys and girls separated. It is unhealthy to think of a girl's purity or character, or what. Girls and boys both need to know each other and work together towards a better society, a balanced society devoid of gender roles. The elders should support that, or if they can't then they should just step aside. Their time is over, with their frustration, old narrow mindset, they need to just leave and let the new generation step up.

Learning to Let Go

Earlier this week, on Monday, my beloved feisty firebrand cat, May Kitty crossed the Rainbow Bridge. This is so far my first real encounter with death of a beloved soul. It is true I have seen my grandfather moments after he passed away, but to be honest May Kitty's death has impacted me much more than that. It has even touched me more than my own miscarriage.

I was wondering what is it about a pet's death that affect us so much. I think it is because how ever old they may get, since we take care of them as our kids, we never really sense that age. To us, they still remain our little kids. May was almost 16, which mean more than 80 in human years. So we should really say that she had quite a long life. Her chronic kidney ailment was under treatment but that is what finally gave in. She withdrew from the world on Saturday, but we still tried to get her back. After 2 days of fight at the ICU when she did not respond to any antibiotic or even human dosage of pain killers, we decided to bring her home and let her go in peace. At the hospital however, they said that she wouldn't even make the trip home. Then we decided amidst loads and loads of tears that we have no right to prolong her suffering just because of our selfish needs. We decided to let her go. Lying down on my lap, like she did every evening, she breathed her last. I saw that it was in peace.

It felt like my heart was shattered in pieces. For days afterwards, I literally had this heavy feeling in my chest. That pain is physical. On top of that, with the hormone injections doing their work, I thought I would be a teary mess for days. But I did not. I chose to celebrate life over death.

First of all, in Hindu philosophy, we believe in the immortality of the soul. The soul is such that can't be burned by fire, torn by swords, or blown away by the wind. It is always at peace. So I know May's soul, which theoretically has no bearing with May's mortal body is free now. She left her mortal body like we change from an old set of clothes. We decided to cremate her and scatter her ashes in an apple orchard because we did not want to hold on to the remains of her mortal body through a burial or even keeping the ashes. We need to let her go.

Secondly, we have our other two fur babies to care for. They knew that May has gone and they were depressed. So we kept our normal routine around them and also play with them, be in a good mood so that they pick up on the positivity. It is difficult, but we had to do that.

Thirdly, we also believe in reincarnation. I was telling Arnab that May was in a hurry to leave because she has to be present when my ova are fertilized. She has to come back as my human child :) Who knows, maybe the one who went over the Rainbow Bridge will come back as my Rainbow Baby!

Cricket Club

Not too long ago, in July, I wrote an article about girls who play cricket. I mentioned that it is a topic very close to my heart. Twenty years back, when I was in my early teens, I desperately wanted to play cricket. I don't understand how or why no one in my family ever paid any heed to it, or that why they didn't even buy me a cricket bat, (I have the same dilemma about chess, nobody ever bought me a chess set) even though I got lots of thoughtful gifts quite a few times a year from my close knit extended family. Anyway, after I finished college and came to the US, I basically gave up all my hopes of ever playing cricket. Nobody cares about cricket here, I assumed.

But, thanks to globalization, I saw changes.

the first one was watching cricket World Cup at home in 2011 and also at work! The Software Industry is full of expat Indians, and with them they brought cricket over to the Western Hemisphere. The second big thing was the All Stars match in 2015 where the "boys we grew up with", namely Sachin, Rahul, Wasim, Steve, Shane, Kalu, Murali, Jonty, Shoaib, etc etc came all the way to play here. At the Dodgers Stadium where we saw a blending of cricket and baseball, it opened a new horizon. We bought a cricket bat here and I anticipated a new era of playing cricket in the US.

Fast forward to end of 2017. Many things are going on in my life right now and all of them are pretty stressful. I did not want to add another stressor to it. But a few days back I saw a post on our neighborhood web page saying "Play Cricket". There has been a talk of opening our local cricket club (again, thanks to expat Indians) and the person who thought about it has been asking people to join. I immediately sent a note asking if women can join too. He said that I can't joint he team, but I can play/practice with them. So be it! My most handy male ally, aka Arnab joined the team and I found my way in. Initially I was not added to the Whatsapp group but like a friend of mine says, I don't have the problem of ever feeling neglected because I don't let people neglect me. I asked this guy specifically to add me to the group. I attended the first match yesterday, the first ever of the club, played miserably, because I have not played in years and lost my reflexes, but I captained the winning team and kept wicket for the first time in my life!

The ball has started rolling, and I have found my ground. If I did not take this chance, I would never be able to tell my future daughter that she can be whatever she wants to. Also, I owed it to myself, to make sure that I can fulfill my dream. I don't have to worry about "if I were a boy" or "if only our society let us play". Now the control is in my hand. I don't have to ask anyone to buy me a bat, nor do I have to worry about upcoming exams. Yes, so far I am the only girl in this club, because sometimes we don't have an option but to be the first :) Hopefully, I will be able to inspire a few more in my lifetime.

Some serious batting practice is coming up soon!!

PS: Marry wisely, because a good partner can not just enrich your daily life, but also immensely help in making your dreams come true! 

A glass of eggnog

It is Friday, pretty cold even for the middle of November. We have fallen back from daylight savings, so in Seattle with the perpetually overcast skies, it seems to get dark at 2:30 in the afternoon. I came back home on a day like this and as I was going over my machine learning course, I poured myself a glass of eggnog for comfort. As I sprinkled some cinnamon powder and took a sip, the creamy sweetness filling me with goodness, I wondered from when did I start associating eggnog with this kind of comfort? I did not grow up relating eggnog to Christmas, or winter. The first time I had eggnog ten years back, I wanted to spit it out. It smelled disgusting, and the flavor of raw eggs in them brought me close to throwing up. The same happened with apple cider. Some of my other Indian friends and I were looking for places to spit it out and we finally emptied the cups down the drinking water fountain in our department.

I found telling a friend whose house we generally go for Thanksgiving, that I like it being dark and gloomy as we gather round the turkey. If it was sunny and warm outside it would be so incongruous. What happened in the time during the last ten years which has brought such changes in me? Things that I had no idea about are now normal facets of my life.

I think it is because I let myself absorb new things, and that I love talking to people, ask them details about how they spent the summer holidays, what are their memories of Christmas, and slowly get myself acquainted with the new culture, or cultures because as everyone knows, the US is a salad bowl of cultures around the world.

On the other hand, here's the chance to share mine. Last month, for the first time, I hosted a "Bijoya Sammelani" or get together after the Bengali festival of Durga Pujo. The fun part was other than one friend (just him, not his wife) was Bengali. The others were not Indians. They came to this gathering, asked a lot of questions about Durga Pujo, how we celebrate it, what we eat, how are we supposed to behave, and they ate all Bengali food. They even picked out bones of the treacherous fish ilish. There were fun conversations around, no gossiping, no uncomfortable jokes, just a lot of laughter over good food and good company.

It feels nothing different when you compare one day to the other, but when you look back a few years, you see stuff changing. The more new things we learn, the more new things we open our hearts and homes to, we just pave the way for a more enriched life.

On Machine Learning and my realizations thereof

I promised to myself that this will not become a technical blog, so I am not going to talk about the details of machine learning. Just to let people know the backstory, Artificial Intelligence is a subject that interests me and there was a time when I planned a career in academics and thought that is the subject I would pursue. But then things turned out differently and I went towards a career in software. However, Coursera has shown me time and again, that if I want to learn something, the Universe would help me do so. I took courses in Physics from there too. This year after listening to Dr. Fei-Fei Li's keynote speech at the Grace Hopper Conference, I decided to start studying machine learning. The course I found is from Dr. Andrew Ng and without any exaggeration it is so far the toughest course I have ever taken, physically or virtually!

The first week was overwhelming. After a whole day at work, in the evening I started the course and I felt like my brain would just explode. Without any fluff, he dived straight into math. Algebra had never been my strong point so I gasped when I saw a lot of linear algebra sitting there. And it just wasn't algebra. Literally all the math I had learned, including geometry, co-ordinate geometry (also 3D), trigonometry, and even probability and statistics are being used everyday in a matter of fact way. One thing I must admit, even though I did not realize it when I learned these in high school, I actually did spend a lot of time practicing these. My parents would still say I should have spent some more time studying, but now I know these stuff has got firmly etched in my brain somewhere that even though the surface may accumulate some "dust" over the years, they would not be forgotten. It has become like muscle memory :)

The second part of the problem is programming. Thing with math and programming both is unless you get it right, it won't work. You can yell at yourself, or at the code (or math) but it still won't work. (Cursing in Bengali doesn't help either, I have tried.) So when I had to solve equations and put them in MATLAB (a language I barely ever touched in undergrad, and then never after) I was initially in terrible shape. For a few days I just scratched my head and tried to remember why exactly I decided to take this course. But there is one thing I did not do. I did not give up. This is an unpaid online course which just takes one click to give up. I told myself if I cannot do anything by Sunday, then I will stop taking this class, but until then I will try. That Sunday morning, I had cold hands and I was frantically going over the mentor's notes to understand the problems. Slowly things got better, programs compiled, they showed expected values. Then I ran test cases on them. Those gave right answers as well. Then I submitted my work, and as science is supposed to work, I got full points!

Nobody saw my happy dance for five straight minutes after that!

From the next week, things got better. I understood approximately how much time I need to allot for the programming assignments. I also decided to tackle the problems each day rather than keeping everything for the end of the week.

There has been another realization about the thing called impostor syndrome. As the society we grew up in is silent about achievements but vocal towards failures, we have been conditioned into thinking that failures are our direct responsibilities. Like, as students, if we did poorly on a test it was because we didn't study enough. But if we did well, it was received with a "that's ok, try to do better next time". So we still generally undermine ourselves. As this course is tough and it is from Stanford, to be honest, I initially felt very stupid. Then I felt that maybe the problems are not very tough, it is just taking me time to figure it out. Finally after submitting them, I looked at the Github repos of some mentors and saw that their solutions are less optimized than mine (it would take more time to run their programs than mine) and that they have not used the concepts like vectorization which was taught in class. That made me realize that I actually got the concepts, and I know better than some others! Being able to work in MATLAB also boosted my confidence that we don't really have to learn a new language now, we just need to learn the syntax.

Difficult challenges are a treat to the logical brain! Need to start reading about Neural Networks now... happy learning :) 

10!

On this day in 2007 I boarded a Lufthansa flight to come all across the Globe with two suitcases and a backpack. I had just enough money to sustain myself for one semester, and no experience on how to thrive in a foreign land where I practically knew no one. As you can tell, I spent a terrible birthday that year, and a very homesick Indian Independence Day. Alone at my dorm, I had asked myself "what am I doing here? Why did I come here?" when I didn't know what to eat, had to roam around the campus looking for a job, or didn't understand what the professor was saying in his heavy southern accent. Life was not easy. Now I look back and wonder what gave me, and hundreds of international students like me, the strength to continue. Perhaps because we have a habit of not giving up, or that we have been hardened by the extremely competitive academic situation in our home countries. Anyway, I survived.

And I survived happily.

My world, which was limited to an oversized family, some close friends and relatives, and mainly the Souther part of Calcutta suddenly exploded and encompassed people from all over the world. I realized what it meant to be a "people person" and to have leadership skills. By the next year, I had three celebrations for my birthday, including a midnight party, and on that Independence Day, I was the Secretary of the Association of Indian Students and I led everyone to sing the National Anthem.

At the completion of 10 years I am looking back and connecting the dots. What did I learn? What did I experience? I am getting amazed at what I found out.

The main thing I learned is independence. How to live alone. How to manage studies, work, grocery shopping, cleaning the place, file taxes, do everything a human being needs to do in order to live a decent life.

The second thing I learned is to appreciate people. In general I love being with people, but the different kinds of people I meet, I am realizing that we don't have to agree to everything to be friends. Even if I don't agree with some of their ideas, I found that they are basically good people. And at the end that is all that matters.

It is great to be exposed to new cultures, new foods, new places, new activities. Of the foods that top my most-favorite list, most of them are not stuff that I ate 10 years back. Activities like camping, hiking, or kayaking were almost unknown to me in India. On the other hand, my American friends now know the results of cricket matches that India plays, they hear bits and pieces about Indian politics, and we discuss international news. Having pets is another great experience for me which would be difficult in India (having three of them would be very difficult).

Travels to many places of the world has also been possible because of my wonderful husband. Not sure how this would have worked out in India, because I don't know if we would have met if we lived there :)

Simple joys like having my vegetable garden, walking with friends at downtown park, taking a comfortable bus ride to work, are things that I love too.

On top of everything, I'd say that fact that I can express myself, that I can be just what I am without trying to "fit in" to any expected role is what makes me feel this is truly "the land of the free".

PS: This is how I celebrated my "10th year in the country" with my international friends :) Yes, there were two celebrations!

Our girls

Like everything in life, writing takes practice. One of our famous Bengali movie directors, Ritwik Ghatak, once said that you need practice even to think. I agree with it. I have not been blogging for a few months, and then figured out that I need to get back to it. Probably because a lot of thoughts were bubbling inside me, and also because I need to keep up my practice.

Today I will write about something very close to my heart - girls who play cricket. Yesterday we watched a nail biting Women's World Cup final with India finally submitting to England at the "home of cricket". It was disappointing, very much so, losing by only 9 runs. A lack of experience showed, not enough maturity too, probably. The girls lost, yes. But I saw a different perspective too.

Cricket has been so far the first thing to show me gender inequality. As a teenager, I yearned to play cricket (I still do), but it wasn't really possible formally. I did not see girls at the cricket coaching institutes, in school too girls were not interested in cricket. Even our sports teachers did not show much interest in teaching the girls how to play cricket, or rather any sport as such. Also, like I have mentioned many times before, academics were of the utmost and only priority. The boys could at least spend some time outside, as girls that was also not much possible. I remember having diary entries where I mentioned how my life would have been if I were a boy. Luckily, gender identity was not a thing at that time in India, so being a tomboy was ok. Something amusing maybe, to others, but nothing to be worried about. Anyway, I missed my chance at playing cricket. An elderly uncle once mentioned if I could try to play at least club level cricket. But with my school leaving and engineering entrance exam round the corner, I did not have the guts to justify the need for playing to my parents. I had to be content with playing in the neighborhood a little, some more in school and college, that too if the boys let me play with them. Maybe if I knew the things I know now, about letting someone be, or if I had the capacity to reason, I would have done something different.

Here's my article for those girls who have to swim against the current. Those ones with scraped knees, grass stained clothes, and cropped disheveled hair. Those girls who are just "one of the boys". they have to play with the boys because other girls won't want to play such rough and tumble games. They don't care how they look as long as they are comfortable. I saw some of them in the Indian team over the last few weeks. The young ones, still in their early twenties, who are representing their countries. They had to challenge a lot of long standing rules. Coming from working class families in the suburbs, I wonder how strong their will is to succeed. They were not coached to make them cricketers, most of them were "sent to play" with their brothers because it would give them something to do. One used to play with the neighborhood boys before she was spotted for the local team.

Compared to the teams of England, Australia, or New Zealand, our girls don't have a strong background. They have to fight poverty, lack of infrastructure, lack of coaching to finally make it to the World Cup. And it is not just India, but the rest of the sub-continent too. Many of them have to fight religious orders too, besides the idea of "but you are a girl".

From the World Cup final at Eden Gardens twenty years back, when nobody really cared about women's cricket to yesterday when the whole country (and Indians abroad) was glued to their TV sets, these girls have come a long way. Yes, the win would have been historical, but even in defeat they have started a new era of inspiring young girls to pick up the willow and leather. Hopefully, cricket coaching centers would accept girls now, and no teenager would have to write "I could have played cricket if I were a boy" because the girls team would be a great place to belong.

At work

I like busy people. At around 9, when a particular bus from Seattle comes to Bellevue Transit Center and a bunch of people cross the street to get to work they radiate some kind of positivity. The same when they grab a cup of coffee from the local Starbucks, the baristas working like bees, or when at lunch people go out to eat with their co-workers, the whole place hums with a sense of purpose, of belonging.

Being an ENFJ, I love people and I get energy by being with people. Coming to work has its own set of positivity for me. To say that I love working would be an understatement. I am one of those people who feel charged after a relaxing weekend to get to work on Mondays. It is not that I don't like weekends, but I love Mondays as well, because I have things to look forward to, challenges to meet, problems to solve and people I love spending time with.

Other than providing an income, and giving a practical way to use the knowledge I acquired from school, there are a lot of things I learned about myself at work. I found out that I have leadership skills. Throughout my entire life in India I have been told to hold back. I was getting into too much trouble, I had (well, I still have) strong opinions and airing them was not a smart thing. Here. I am encouraged to speak up. I am learning how to lead properly, that is utilize the natural tendency but to sharpen that as well. I have understood that my level of enthusiasm is above the national average, and instead of yelling at others for their lack of energy, I am learning how to get people to feel more interested and take part in activities.

Problem solving, especially in the STEM field is a.. how do I put it... it is probably the only thing which can give you something close to superpowers! In the software world, we mainly deal with things intangible. You can see a computer, but you can't feel the lines of code that does most of the work. We see the life in those lines of code, and get unnecessarily attached to them. Just the idea of someone using tab versus spacebar can cause religious wars in the software industry. We are a bunch of crazy people, but we love our weirdness. NOTE: not all software engineers are introverts.

There is a comfort in knowing that in science there is the concept of absolute truth. What I mean is, like when you add two and two, the answer would always be four. Similarly, if your friend has guessed a random number between 1 and 100, and you want to find out what is it, math tells us you only need (at most) 7 tries. And that is true! If you do it right, you won't go beyond 7 tries. That's what binary search is about. If you need more tries, you can be absolutely certain that you are doing it wrong. There have been times when my code didn't run as expected and I started cursing it, or pulling my hair. However much I may do either of those, it does't help because the computer, unluckily is a non-thinking, non-feeling weird thing. It doesn't care. Of course I found out there is stuff I missed, or wrote wrong. Once that is fixed, the code runs. There is no gray area in between!

I need to conclude this article with the people part. Arnab once asked me if I go to work to work or to have a social life because he only heard plans for coffee, lunch, or walks. It is true, because socializing is a big part of my existence and my friends at work help that. We have almost a dozen people to eat lunch with, they are all crazy in their own ways. If you see us then, you'd think we are a bunch of high school or college kids who know each other for many many years. They are those people who know my deepest evil wishes, on whose white sofa I can totally put my dirty feet on, and they can also tell me to my face that I need to stop wasting money.

It is very clear that I have found the right place where I belong.

My kind of meditation

Nowadays meditation is well known in the world, both in the east and west. People do yoga and meditation a lot. There are even apps for guided meditation (some of them are really well). Meditation is definitely a very good thing to calm our minds, get rid of anxiety and bad thoughts, but it is not easy for me. I have tried it, and I am still trying it, but I have to put a lot of effort in just sitting still. Introspection doesn't come to me easily, I get distracted and charmed by the whole wide world around me that is filled with sights, sounds, smells, and of course people!

I have found my calm place in the water of the swimming pool. That is a place where I am mostly alone in my swim lane, and there is just water and me. With my swim cap covering my ears, and my glasses taken off to wear goggles, I am actually cut off from the entire world around me. Its just my arms and legs moving in a rhythm, and my head turning for breaths in a cyclical motion. The gentle lapping of water beside me, the bubbles in front of me, and the surface of the water as I see from below surround me in a world of calm. There is nothing I can do about anything in the world at that time, other than just swim. The black line below is a constant reminder of discipline and balance. You can actually translate that to a life lesson too.

Swimming has amazing health benefits, we all know that. It is the only one exercise that works on all our muscles at the same time, especially the hard to work on - core. It is immensely helpful for cardio, and our lungs. For kids who are still growing, it helps in bone development. I have been forever known to be a scrawny thing that eats very little (especially here in the US where portion sizes almost match my weight), but recently my appetite has increased and it has been catching the attention of people. "You want that too along with your lunch?" I have had friends ask me.

I knew about these physical benefits, but it is the mental ones have amazed me more. Just like they say in guided meditation, that with every exhale let the bad thoughts go away and with every inhale let the good thoughts come in, the same happens in swimming. You can imagine the cool water washing off all your anxieties and worries that you exhale, and with each inhale you get a fresh breath of life. Once you are in water, you don't have to really think of anything other that getting enough air. You can't see anyone else, and nobody can see you. Everyone looks weird in their swim caps and goggles, so looks don't matter there anyway. The stretch of blue-green water in front consists only of the good vibes that envelop us.

Floppy

People talk about Karma a lot these days, it has entered regular conversation, but I have actually seen good Karma in action once. That is when I got Floppy.

As a six-year-old girl I should say I was pretty well behaved. When I came to San Fransisco to visit my uncle and aunt in mid 1991, my dad specifically told me not to buy too many stuffed animals because I had quite a lot of them at home. Now, I doubt if I would have listened to that, but as a well behaved six year old, I did. There were tons of them around me at Disneyland, Sea World, The Universal Studios, they all had their fair share of stuffed animals being sold as souvenirs. I could have asked for them and I believe, if I was polite, I would be given a few too. But I didn't. I even remember picking up a penguin that had rolled off the rack and putting it back in its right place. It was not a minor temptation, because in the early 90s, stuffed animals were not found in abundance in India, and the good ones were very, very expensive.

That is when Karma watched me and decided to reward my good behavior. One day before we were coming back to India, my uncle's friends came and they brought a big stuffed animal for me. That was Floppy. He is one of the biggest stuffed animals I have got. Something like a cross between a teddy and a rabbit, he has the chubbiest face, big ears, and big feet. To say that I adore him would be an understatement. He is like my brother.

He has been beside me, quite literally for almost all moments of my life. He has held my hand with his fat paws when I was in school and my academics were not very pleasant. He has been patiently waiting when I left for the US, and then came back again to take him with me. He has stayed up at night when I was sick. Now, he is there when Arnab goes on business trips. He also keeps me company if I have to work till late night anytime.

Those fat paws and big ears give me a sense of assurance that Floppy is there with me through all good and bad days.

The Privileged Ones

It was just a normal day for me today. Getting up in the morning, breakfast, work, meetings, pizza lunch, little shopping, coming back home, dinner, and now lounging before going to bed. There was one good part about today, I had my yearly merit increase/bonus pay meeting with my manager, and like all the other years, I am very happy about it. On this Women's Day, I choose to be grateful because even though this was just a normal day for me, this still shows how privileged I am. This day without any extraordinary events is still a great deal fantastic to many, many, girls around this world.

Why?

When I woke up, I was given coffee by Arnab (not for Women's Day, he does it always). Even to this day, Indian women are told to serve tea to everyone in their in-laws house. I don't do that at my in-laws house either. I get served breakfast like every other person in the house, my sister-in-law takes care of that.
I had bacon for breakfast. Yes I was born in a Hindu household, but no one has ever put any restrictions on what I eat because of any religious reasons. I can eat what I want as long as it is not bad for my health.
I go to work, and I love it. I have been brought up to realize that I am good at studies and I should have a stable profession. I was pushed hard to complete my higher education and I am happy that I kept my parents wishes. They "wished" it only because they knew my potential and limitations. They didn't really tell me I can be whatever I want to. When I wanted to be a scientist, my father pointed out the problems, but he also explained how Computer Science would be a better profession for me. Fortunately, it has been so far. As USA is still struggling with a very minor percentage of girls in STEM majors, I am thankful about how my sister and I were brought up, and so were many of my girl friends back home.
At meetings I don't have to struggle to make my voice heard. I work in a team with very few women (if there are very few girls in STEM majors, software engineers won't pop out from deep space) but our ideas are given importance, our voices are heard, and we feel comfortable to "sit at the table" as Sheryl Sandberg says. I am encouraged to use the whiteboard and think aloud. I collaborate with my peers and love sharing ideas.
I have guy friends and I love them! No, Arnab doesn't have set rules for me about who can be my friends. Unlike many irritating men whose bloated male egos get hurt when their wives have male friends, I am fortunate enough to have a man who doesn't care about which gender my friends fall in to. He laughs when he hears our funny antics as I tell him what jokes we said at lunch time, or some hilarious compilation of out of context statements that is a signature thing in my friends group.
I don't have to ask for Arnab's permission to go shopping, but I love to go out with him. Actually I don't even buy my own clothes without him. Many women dread to tell their husbands that they bought something either because they overspend, or because their husbands control how much they should spend. Having a relationship where you are hiding an expense from your spouse can't be a healthy one. I don't fall into that category.
Dinner can't be enjoyed well if you don't eat together. We cook together, prep food together, and eat together. It is our own little family ritual. Today Arnab prepped dinner. I did the cleanup afterwards. A marriage is a team work, and we choose to follow that. I don't have to toil with cooking everyday because my husband would only eat fresh cooked food. My in-laws don't instruct me on what to cook for my husband. He is a grown up man, if he wants something that bad, he can cook that himself.
Lounging before bed. That is my me-time and nobody bothers me for that.
That is when I can sit, unwind, and retrospect on my day, and on my life. Even though I say that I am fortunate, I think there are certain things that I actually chose for myself. Yes, I was fortunate that my parents brought me up like this, but choosing a life parter has been a deliberate decision on my part. I could have been unwise, but I didn't. I gave this a lot of thought, as much was possible by my 24 year old brain, and I chose the right person. I was empowered to do that, for sure. I didn't have an arranged marriage, so I had to do all the thinking. Choosing my job is also a deliberate effort. I could choose to stay at home. I could choose to step back and not be so involved at work. There was no reason to step up to be the President of our Toastmaster club. But I did those. I did those to enhance my life. I did those to prove to myself and to many many generations of girls after me that a woman's life doesn't revolve only round her family. A woman has all the power to make her own world as charming as she wants to.
When my manager congratulated me today on one more "solid year" and discussed with me what technical details to put in my goals for the coming year, he was not encouraging only one employee, he was encouraging a woman to pursue her dreams and love it! The merit increase I got is not to make me feel smug, it is an honor to receive it for something I love doing. It isn't just for me either, it is for those men and women who paved the way before us, who showed us, time and again that a woman's place is not just in the home, it is in the whole wide world. 

For the lifelong love of learning...

... how to cook.

There is a Bengali story by Syed Mujtaba Ali, where one of the characters mention that if you are not interested in trying food from a different country, then you are not open to learn about a new culture/religion. It is true that your home food would always be your go-to comfort food, but the more you open yourself to world cuisine, not only would your tastebuds thank you, but your horizon would increase.

Even though I have started cooking French food, and a little bit East Asian
food, major cuisine areas like Mexican or Italian were still only limited to restaurant eating. Blue Apron has changed that for me (and Arnab, naturally).

I knew of Blue Apron for a few months before I decided to give them a try. We take fish, chicken, and vegetarian food from them and for the last month it feels like in our kitchen, we have traveled the entire world! I had no idea that pasta can taste so amazing, nor than African peanut sauce is a heavenly thing. I did not know that it would be possible to eat Thai food for lunch and Italian food for dinner the same day! We have reduced eating out by a lot, and the best part is that no food is wasted.


They send us the ingredients, carefully portioned out. So if I need a tablespoon of sake, I won't have to buy one full bottle. Similarly, if I had to find that myself, I wouldn't even know where to get the African spice blend. I did not know what a Meyer lemon is, or what kind of fish is Barramundi! But now, thanks to Blue Apron, I have cooked them and ate them. There is another great thing that happened. We are happily eating salads and our vegetable intake has increased a lot! I used to hate romaine lettuce, but with the unusual salad dressings I am making, even romaine is tasting great! I think the main thing is so much variety, it is not letting us get bored.

When the output is great, naturally the interest level also soar. Especially because I love cooking. A kitchen with beautiful prep bowls, a recipe holder, and wooden spoons have been my dream from a long time. It gives me good vibes, if that is a way to explain it. There is a great joy in cooking, making food from scratch, and then looking at the finished product with pride. And when that is food that I have not even seen or heard of before, like say, cannelloni pasta, then it is even better!

Blue Apron is named so because chefs wear blue aprons when they learn to cook. I bought this apron from the site so that it reminds me every time I cook, that I am always learning something new, and to keep my mind open, to stay humble, and to learn from my mistakes.

Let the girls grow free

Indian parents have different parenting style for boys and girls. As they rightly mention in the 2016 movie Pink, girls have peculiar standards to adhere to, where the length of their skirt, or the time they come home defines their character. So does having guy friends, or free mixing. Recently, I read a news article about a college in India which has made me wonder how we are trying to bring up our girls.

Indian colleges have come to news many times for following stereotypical gender roles. At IIT Kharagpur, one of my friends was told to not go out wearing shorts. Boys were not allowed to come even to the reception area of girls' hostels. In our college, we have never been able to go to the boys' mess, even for working on projects together. That is why, I didn't get a chance to work on our load runner and step climber robots as they were being built at the boys' mess. These are still lower on the rank of weirdness. One of my friends from a different part of India said that in the college shuttle, boys and girls were kept segregated. In the recent news I found that even in college canteens (cafeterias) boys and girls are told to sit apart. No touching, hugging your classmates are allowed and basically any kind of interaction between the two genders is being discouraged.

This is not normal.

In the human world, one has to invariably come in contact with people, and in most cases they would not belong to your gender. People need to be taught to mix freely with everyone so that "the other gender" is not looked as an alien being, and interaction with them becomes normal. As I changed from an all girls' school to a co-ed school around my teenage years, I saw this difference very well. Those girls who grew up with boys had no inhibition talking about periods or other girl topics with the boys. The boys also were a lot more understanding and now I find the majority of them to be much more accommodative and supportive of their spouses. That is because they have been exposed to girls as their playmates, classmates, friends, from a very early age.

In our society, when a girl is in her late-teens or early twenties, she is considered "good" if she does not have a boyfriend. Having a boyfriend still indicates she is too modernized. Having multiple boyfriends means she had questionable character. Parents still feel proud to say, "my daughter is pretty shy around boys." I feel that is a problem they should try to fix rather than being proud about it. If your daughter is shy around half the world population, that is a very serious concern. How would she interact with her colleagues later? Or her future male manager?

I don't understand how girls and boys who have led segregated lives manage to work on their marriages. Again, having an arranged marriage means you are an obedient child, where you have put full trust in your parents. I have a coworker, who very proudly said that he didn't even see his wife before the day of his engagement. Another girl saw her future husband at the airport on the day of her engagement. I asked her if she would be able to back out of the match had she disliked that guy. She said no, because she was utterly terrified of disobeying her father. These people get married, have kids, and mostly stay married forever because the girls know they have to compromise. Gender roles are strictly observed, and these days the girls do both household work and outside work.

Parents need to understand that controlling your kids lives by archaic rules are actually devastating. You are not letting them grow properly. If a girl always have to worry about what the society would say, then she is wasting her energy in trying to fit in, rather than trying to be herself. Mixing with boys is a necessary thing, and the earlier the exposure happens, the better. Let them know that boys don't come from Mars, they are just regular human beings with emotions. I have seen many cases where boys behave in utterly funny ways - from my friends in junior high, to my friends at work. They still don't know the right way to load a dishwasher, the toilet seat stays up, tables are wiped wrong, and they laugh at our sense of fashion. But that is the fun part of sharing this world with them. They are intermingled in our lives as fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, friends, neighbors, teammates, or colleagues. The more we mingle with them normally, the more they would also learn about us, our feelings and our emotions. That way we would be able to create an interdependence where both genders can be empowered.